>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made a dozen light years away from earth on a spaceship that carried a mission to save the human race from a dying sun.

On this ship, one man woke up to find that he was the last living member of the crew, and he had no memory of why he was there in the first place.

So begins the hottest movie in the country, Project Hail Mary, a story that touches many genres.

Science fiction.

There's comedy, action, even a buddy flick in there.

Only this time the two buddies include one human and one Iridian.

This past weekend, I took the most fitting date I could think of to see Project Hail Mary at the Little astrophysicist Adam Frank.

Adam is the author of The Little Book of Aliens.

He's had a lot to say about how Hollywood depicts space missions, and could we learn anything from Project Hail Mary, I wondered, did they get the science right?

Is it possible that our sun could go cold in the future?

And would he rather live on earth or Irid?

Last week, Vice President JD Vance reignited a conversation about aliens when the vice president said he was going to get to the bottom of the alien files.

He just hadn't had time yet.

Well, let's get to the bottom of something.

Anyway, with astrophysicist Adam Frank.

Dr.

Frank is is an author.

He's the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester.

Well, now you're a movie critic.

Welcome to the program.

>> Well, finally, check that box off.

>> If you're watching on YouTube, I'm going to give my review and I'll do it in the style of Rocky.

Two thumbs up and I got my thumbs down here.

Poor Rocky couldn't figure out the alien.

Couldn't figure out thumbs up or down.

Or maybe he couldn't do it.

>> He just couldn't do it.

His hand, like whatever his his digits were, digits aligned that way.

>> Yeah.

He tried to do thumbs up, thumbs down.

Two for me.

I loved it.

So let's start with this.

>> Two for me too.

It was great.

>> Two down.

>> Thumbs up, two down up.

>> Up thumbs.

Yeah.

And what we're not going to do for the audience this hour is if you haven't seen Project Hail Mary, this isn't going to be a conversation of two people talking about a movie you've never seen.

And I'm going to bore you to death.

We're going to talk about some of what I think are the really interesting themes from the movie, why the movie is working so well, and some of the application in real life.

We're going to talk about aliens.

The vice president had a lot to say about aliens on a recent podcast.

apparently JD Vance says he's obsessed with aliens and he wants to get to the bottom, even wants to go to area 51.

So we'll talk about, we'll talk about all that more.

And there's a new, there's a documentary out there that I told Adam I would try to watch.

>> Because I watched it recently.

>> You watched the whole.

>> Hour of 45, the whole.

>> Of the disclosure doc.

Now, Steven Spielberg's going to have a movie coming out called Disclosure Day, in which an alien race sort of is revealed to the human population.

And what does the word why disclosure as that's the one thing.

>> That because that's where the focus on.

Now.

So I think the right the movie's called age of Disclosure, the documentary, sorry, the documentary.

>> Age of.

>> Disclosure, age of disclosure.

And, you know, it made a lot of news among the people who care about it.

And, you know, I was like, everyone's like, you got to watch this.

You got to watch this because it shows the truth.

So the whole idea about aliens, about disclosure, because really what it's about is that the government knows, the government knows and has known.

And that's what all these hearings are about.

And yeah, we'll get to this, but I so I finally watched it with a good friend Rafe Martin, who's also my, my teacher, my Zen teacher.

and yeah.

Wow.

I was like, okay, so we, we'll talk about it.

We'll, we'll get there.

>> Were you enjoying any legal recreational marijuana when you watched?

>> No.

>> That might have helped.

>> Didn't need to, but I was just like, I just couldn't believe I just couldn't.

Wow.

You know, they took it and they cranked it up to like 40.

You know what I mean?

The the thing goes to ten.

And they.

>> Were they cranked it.

40.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we'll talk about that coming up here.

Let's start with a Project Hail Mary, which is the number one movie in the country.

It may win a bunch of people.

Everybody, even the critics love it.

There's a few who don't.

the criticism, if there is any that I've read is like, this was too pat.

It was too fan pleasing.

You know, everything you know was about pleasing the audience and giving you too much of an easy good thing.

And Ryan Gosling and.

>> Oh, that's terrible.

Let's never do that in a movie.

Let's only make people uncomfortable and sad.

Yeah, well.

>> I mean, but there were parts of the movie that were plenty uncomfortable and even sad for me.

I was surprised at how emotionally attached I got to the alien.

I mean, I cannot believe how well they created an alien whose name ends up being Rocky.

Ryan Gosling's character, Ryland Gray, scientist Ryan Ryland Grace names the alien Rocky because he's a. He looks like a rocky form.

>> He's a rock, but.

>> He's kind of like a spider rock.

I mean, he moves like a spider.

He's got these limbs and he can move pretty fast.

but yeah, he's rocky and you get.

I got attached to him.

>> Yeah.

Yeah, I did very, very well done in that, in that sort of sense of there's a way in which it's a buddy movie.

>> It is a buddy movie.

>> One of them is a sentient stone.

>> So I want to listen to a clip from the movie.

And in this clip that we're about to hear is Ryan Gosling's character, Ryland Grace.

After meeting this alien, what a dozen light years from earth way.

>> Somewhere.

>> Around there.

Something like that.

Way out in space, and they figure out that they're on the same mission.

So for for the earth, the sun is going cold.

Something is, is kind of killing the sun.

And he's out on a mission to try to figure out what might save it.

And he finds Rocky, this alien who's on his own ship, much cooler, bigger ship.

And Rocky's there for the same reason.

So they have to try to get to know each other.

Rocky's verbalization sounds kind of like a cat purring, which you'll hear, but they use technology to give voice to Rocky, and they've got to find the actual voice for the alien.

So this is a pretty funny clip where they're trying to find the right voice that fits Rocky.

Let's listen.

>> What?

>> Try this.

>> Why is the school teacher in space question.

No.

Don't like that voice.

>> Can't unhear it really.

>> Let's try this.

>> Oh, no.

No no need, no.

>> Need to even continue.

Nope.

>> Why is a school teacher in space?

What's so funny?

>> Question why is a school teacher in space?

I mean, it has charm, but no.

>> Why is a school teacher in space?

>> Why is a school teacher in space?

>> That's not bad.

>> I like.

>> All right.

And an answer to your question.

I have no idea what I'm doing in space.

I don't remember.

>> There you go.

So they found the voice for Rocky.

>> It's very funny with the scary name, the sexy one.

He's like, not even going.

>> Yeah, no, no.

but there's a there's a lot of comedy.

There's a lot of lightness.

And I want to start with this, a lot of the depiction of aliens in film, in fiction has been the aliens to fear.

And we pretty quickly find out here that Rocky is a fellow traveler.

Yeah.

He's not something to fear.

In fact, he's going to be an ally because he's just doing what we're trying to do.

Save your star, save your son.

And why is it that that's unusual?

Why is the fearsome alien more common, do you think?

>> I think because it sells better, right?

I mean, you know, always why are 90% of the movies horror thriller?

You know, I mean, there is a there's a market for buddy comedies, but it's not the largest market in movies.

So the depiction of aliens, I think on some level is just, you know, this is what sells.

It's scary.

But I think also what you're also seeing is the mapping of the unknown of, you know, with that, that their life somewhere else.

I think there's certainly, you know, if we wanted to get all Jungian or something, we're mapping certain fears we have about the deep unknown onto other kinds of life.

But as you point out, like we have, there's absolutely no reason to lean one way or the other.

And, and in fact, really when you, you know, that idea that like, oh, aliens are scary, they're here to, you know, to take over or whatever, all you're really doing is just projecting human psychology and human history onto, you know, these, onto the possibilities of extraterrestrial life when really the mind, who knows what alien minds might be like.

They may be totally unfathomable to us.

>> Well, you know, certainly I understand the idea of the law of the jungle that kill or be killed.

And there's a reasonable fear that people smarter than me have said we should not be broadcasting radio signals into deep space.

We should not be putting our hand up and waving like we're here, you know, because anybody who could come find us could probably kill us.

And do we want to take that risk?

I understand that, but I also feel like there's a pretty good chance that anybody we bump into has a similar sensibility about, you know, understanding if there are technological civilization, how hard it is to become one, and the value of preserving that and the value of peace.

Maybe I'm just a romantic.

>> Wow, dude, you got to wear that toga.

I got to put that toga on.

And, like, all those those Star Trek things where the advanced civilization.

>> But why not, though?

>> I mean, I guess there's just as much a chance that an advanced civilization would look at us as kind of the anthill like, inconsequential, like we could wipe them out, but but we're not really interested.

They're a lower life form.

But maybe it would be like Rocky.

>> I think all of these things are projecting our own particular, not only our own history, but also like very much our own very specific culture, which is, you know, sort of 20th century scientific from Europe, from, you know, if you were to ask an indigenous culture about other forms of life, they may have a much different sort of story about the relationship of you know, species to each other.

Right?

Certainly most indigenous cultures saw themselves as sort of brothers and sisters of the bear of the so, you know, I think it's one particular story and even that story about evolution that evolution is, is, you know, dog eat dog, that's actually only part of the story.

Cooperation.

And that's actually we've learned from people like Lynn Margulis, one of the founders of Gaia theory, brilliant biologist who changed understanding of evolutionary biology by recognizing that like cooperation is just as important.

So I think, you know, there's so much of this narrative about what alien life would be like that is very particular to one particular story of one particular culture at one particular time.

But I do think, you know, having thought about this professionally, I think it's if anything's likely, it's that we just don't even understand each other, that they're just, you know, the evolutionary lineage of, of creatures that that had nothing to do with us grew up in an entirely different kind of planet, you know, may just we may be living in completely different worlds.

So rather than them being evil and having, you know, these sort of like human projected evil qualities of they just want to take over or whatever or turn us into goo.

or that they're angels.

I think it's more likely that, that we're just barely, we were not really going to be understanding each other at all.

And that's why my favorite alien contact movie is arrival, where there really is this amazing.

I mean, in the end, we're able to communicate, but there really is this amazing cognitive dissonance between us and the, the heptapods.

I think they're called because they're literally, they're time.

They're experiencing time in an entirely different way.

>> Talking to Adam Frank astrophysicist, author of The Little Book of Aliens, among other works, and he's our guest talking about Project Hail Mary and related themes here.

So what we'll do now is we're going to talk a little bit about the science of it.

Then we're going to kind of broaden out.

But I know you well, I, I don't want to speak for you.

My sense is that you enjoy at least trying to figure out when you're watching, whether it's Project Hail Mary, whether it's the expanse, whatever.

Are they doing okay on the science?

Is it plausible enough to like the lay public will believe anything, right?

But you higher bar here.

So how'd they do on the science of Project Hail Mary.

>> I well, first let me say I don't really care.

You don't care?

No, no, in general, I don't care.

It's science fiction.

All you have to build for me with science fiction is a coherent set of rules.

Okay.

>> So I have some rules.

>> Have some.

They don't have to be rules.

>> Or the existing rules.

>> Right?

Right.

I mean, I'm perfectly fine if people want to bend things or create other kinds.

It's like, you know, in a universe with magic or something like, you know, Lord of the rings, you just have to have universe building.

for nerds like me, whether it's fantasy or science fiction, I'm a science fiction guy.

It's just about, you know, you've, you've laid out what the universe's rules are and now you don't break them because that sort of sets a constraint for the story.

>> My issue with the Star Wars Rise of Skywalker, worst movie ever.

>> Worst movie.

>> Ever was like they broke the rules.

Now Palpatine the Emperor is back because you're so lazy you couldn't figure out your own.

A new plot here and invalidating a previous movie.

A huge moment of a previous movie.

And by the way, also breaking the rules of the universe that you created.

>> Right?

Right.

And that's Star Wars, the main.

I love Star Wars, but those main movies after the third movie, because, you know, I'm 63 the, the, the next six I thought were just terrible.

But how have the stuff that's happened on Disney and Rogue One?

>> I like Rogue One.

>> Yeah.

And they feel really some of the stuff on Disney, especially the animated shows, have really filled things in, you know?

And then of course there's Andor, right?

Have you seen Andor?

You've got to see.

>> My son loves it.

>> Andor is it's entirely it's it's on a different world, but it really fills in the political universe.

>> So that's interesting.

But bottom line is you can you can bend as, as an astrophysicist yourself, the rules in fiction don't have to line up with the rules that we have.

In reality, as long as the rules that are created are consistently adhered to.

>> Right.

But I do absolutely get excited, you know when the physics is real.

So for example, the expanse, you know, my, we've been here, we've talked about this a bunch.

My, what I would consider to be the greatest television science fiction show ever made better than Star Trek.

there is a scene in it because, you know, everything's, it takes place in the, in the solar system a couple hundred years from now.

And just like in in Project Hail Mary, they get the whole idea of gravity, right?

Like in space, if your rocket engines are off, you know, there's no gravity, there's no, you know, you don't get you're not pushed against the floor.

if the thing isn't rotating, right.

So there's this centripetal force, you don't get pushed against the floor.

You know, if, if neither of those happening, you just float weightless.

And there's a scene in the expanse where the detective is on a rotating space station and he pours a drink and the drink, the whiskey comes out and it does a spiral, which is what, you know.

I mean, it didn't exactly happen that way, but the Coriolis force would actually create the force that to happen.

And I was just like.

>> So number one, like cool visual number two, like scientifically correct.

>> I was literally jumping up and down on the couch.

My wife was like, oh, wow, you're a nerd.

But but so, you know, the great thing about Project Hail Mary is that, I mean, all the science, pretty much they nail it.

They really get it.

All right.

All the mechanics, the time travel, how long it takes to get out there and back.

You know what happens in terms of how the spaceships are going to meet each other when there's gravity, when there's not gravity, it's all they really, really do a great job.

And the book, of course, that is Andy Weir's schtick, just like with The Martian and Artemis, and it's always very scientifically accurate.

>> Yeah, and a movie that was two hours and 40 minutes long, even a two hour and 40 minute movie had to really cut down on a lot of the science because they had a story to tell.

Yeah.

So everything I've read and I've not read the book indicates that the movie is much less technical than the book was.

>> Absolutely.

You know, the The Martian is a great example of a movie where they they held to what Andy wanted to do.

Right.

The whole thing is, is Matt Damon sciencing the blank out of the problem?

He says that he says, I'm going to have to science the blank out of this problem.

And you just see him solve one problem after another.

That's what the movie's about, where this one had a little bit of this, but really it was much more the broader story and the relation.

This was about the relationship between Ryan Gosling and Rocky.

>> So when he meets Rocky, an alien from a planet called arid, and he meets an alien who doesn't breathe the same way and has different needs.

And so they have to figure out how to be in physical space together.

Yeah.

So on his ship, Rocky's got to be in his own sort of sealed ball, which becomes like this little hamster wheel thing.

That's quite cute.

Very funny.

It's very funny.

Especially when he gets on the ship for the first time.

And he's very excited to see how humans do it.

And he keeps going.

Very messy, very messy.

>> And Ryan Gosling, I didn't have time to clean, you know?

Come on.

>> but that in general, assuming we ever make contact, that's going to be an issue, right?

I mean, so that's quote, unquote accurate.

>> I guess.

>> Yeah.

Could be, I mean, you know, the conditions under which life forms on another planet.

There's a variety of possibilities.

whether you're oxygen breathing or not, there's ways you might want to argue why oxygen is important, why oxygen?

I'm just doing this.

I'm teaching astrobiology right now and I'm going through this with my class.

Like will life be carbon based?

Will it be oxygen breathing?

There's reason.

Will it use water?

There are good reasons to say, yeah, life's got to like go through the periodic table and say, oh, I'm going to use this.

I'm going to use that.

There's reasons why all that might be possible, but nature is way more creative than we are.

So the possibility that that, you know, this, these creatures Rocky lives on much hotter, like way hotter and breathe.

I forgot exactly what what Rocky breathes what the.

What the, you know, chemical chemistry of his breathing apparatus is.

But it's not oxygen.

So, you know, there's no way that a human being would be able to survive in rocky ship without a spacesuit.

There's no way that Rocky can survive on an earth ship without an enclosure.

So.

>> And they are very clever at figuring out, as movie makers, how to still have them together and communicating while honoring the science that says, realistically, they couldn't just hang out in the same.

>> Room, right?

>> Right.

And that's what's so great.

You know, when you see the beautiful thing about seeing the science honored is the sense that what happens is the science becomes if you do it well, the science becomes a character in the story.

Like you saw this with The Expanse a lot of times where like, there's this one space battle that happens where, you know, they all lock in, they, you know, get into their seats, put on their their, their restraints, but then a tool case open falls open.

And then as the ship is doing all these maneuvers, these tools are flying from one side of the.

And that becomes like super dangerous.

So the physics of momentum conservation becomes a character.

And just like here, their inability to be in the same space, in the same way becomes a character, you know, becomes an obstacle, becomes part of the narrative of the story.

>> Now, let's peel back a little bit.

This all starts when the sun is kind of dying or cooling, right?

Something is attacking the sun or cooling the sun.

And I want you to tell me a little bit about whether that is just a fun Andy Weir piece of science fiction, or if there's anything that could actually cool our sun to the point of causing extinction.

>> Yeah, that is a fun Andy Weir piece of.

>> Because there's not a bacteria.

>> That's going to.

>> Attack no bacteria floating around in space.

So, you know, the idea in the book is that there's this thing they call the astrophage, which is this like space floating bacteria that, you know, will land on a star and begin to consume the photons from the star.

And then that ends up kind of blanketing, blanketing the star and shutting down the or, you know dropping the total light output.

And they see that this is not just happening on earth.

It's happening to all the stars around them, which is, you know, including Rocky Star, which is Houthis.

And then they see that there's one star it's not happening to, and that's why they got to go there and figure out what's.

>> So that's why he bumps into Rocky.

They're there for the same reason.

>> They're there for.

>> The same reason.

>> What is the star?

That's what's happening at the star that it can resist this infection.

Right.

But the infection you think no that's.

>> No there's no I mean it's a great idea.

And even in the book they treat the you know, he does a pretty good job of sort of working its way through what this thing is.

But that is complete science fiction.

And you know, like there's nothing that's not based in anything.

>> There's a book spoiler that I'm going to give away here that is does not exist in the movie.

And I didn't read the book, but I've read enough to know about this part of the plot.

When you've talked about climate change in the past, I, I still think there are very few people who talk about climate change the way you do.

I think that you have tapped into what has divided people socially and politically on the issue, and how to bridge that.

One of the things you said long ago now, long ago, eight years ago, ten years ago.

>> I remember.

>> That was that it's amazing that we're causing climate change, that it is an actual human achievement.

Yeah.

Because we figured out how to power our lives and grow our cities and civilization, but oops, in doing so, we are causing this external effect.

That's going to be a problem if we don't deal with it.

And that's something to admire or be amazed at, and then also be adults about, and then try to fix as opposed to like, we are the disease of the planet, like we are the bacteria.

and so one of the things we've talked about is what happens, like what, what's the approach that says, here's the adult way to solve this?

Well, in the movie, you've got massive cooling happening for a different reason, but there's the same kind of debates about like, who do you tell?

Like, who do the authorities, what do they do about it?

What are they allowed to do?

And in the book, the woman what's her name?

I can't remember.

Yeah.

She's a German woman and she's leading this team.

She takes matters into her own hands and they end up nuking Antarctica.

If I understand that correctly.

>> So yes, I don't.

>> Because they're trying to do something to create more heat radiation, combat the cooling.

She ends up going to jail because she becomes this rogue activist who's desperate to ward it off.

I've a strap is the name of the character.

Thank you.

Producer Megan Mack.

and in the movie she is, you know, similarly determined to the point where she's willing to tell Ryan Gosling's character, you're going on this mission, you don't have an option.

Yeah.

And we have a team.

We have a team of people in dark suits who are about to surround you and put a needle in your neck.

but I'm curious to know if you think the book or even the movie depicts the desperation that's going to come if we don't do something about this kind of an issue.

>> like what?

Well, I mean, because this was like 20 or 30 years and everybody's going to die.

Like this was really.

>> Right in this situation in Project Hail Mary it's a 30 year timeline to lose at least a quarter to half of the Earth's population.

>> Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, I mean, I think that, right.

I'm trying to remember that it's been a while since I read the book, but I think the book dealt a little bit more with what was happening on earth.

Whereas yeah, pretty much after you leave the earth on the spaceship with Ryan Gosling, then you don't really hear much.

>> You're in a space buddy movie.

>> You're in space buddy movie.

And so there's only like towards the end, there's just kind of one scene of her.

>> Like, what's happening?

>> What's yeah, what happens back on.

But pretty much you've left the earth, you know, when it comes to climate change, you know, what I think is going to happen?

Because we are, we're, we, we are blowing past 1.5 degrees.

It's pretty remarkable.

I'm working with some people on just sort of thinking about what this means.

so I think, you know, we're going to see what happens when the planet, you know, again, I think the important thing is it's not going to be an apocalypse.

It's not going to be mad Max.

It's going to be very difficult.

>> Or it's not going to be a singular event that you can watch outside your window one time.

No.

Which, by the way, I think is what makes it kind of harder to sell some people on it.

>> That's what the problem is, right?

But, you know, it'll be one thing after another.

This is my feeling is that climate change, we're going to be living on another planet the next hundred years.

I think we've talked about this before.

AM I kind of feeling is the next 100 years are going to be difficult, right?

there's a famous book by Barbara Tuchman about the 13th century, I think it's called Through a Distant Mirror.

>> Through a distant mirror.

>> Yeah, through a distant mirror.

>> And the tumultuous I've got it at home.

It's great.

It's about the way.

>> In the introduction, I couldn't find it again.

But she says it was a difficult time for humanity.

That 100 years.

>> State the obvious.

>> Yeah, because it was the Black Plague.

It was the Hundred Years War.

It was.

And I kind of feel like that's what we're about to go through.

Like we, we, you know, for whatever reason, our evolutionary psychology did not allow us, you know, to we knew this was happening and we couldn't organize ourselves.

And, you know, part of this story is greed, you know, of the people who just didn't want to lose the cash that it would have involved because other people are going to make money, you know, like, you know, you see what's happening with China.

China is investing fully in you know.

>> Clean energy.

>> Clean energy, and they're going to reap the benefits because we pulled back.

but either way, it's, you know, we didn't make the change in time, but it's not, there will still be people here in 100 years.

There will still be young people trying to build lives.

And but it's going to be difficult.

But the important thing to remember is that, you know, that dark.

The 13th century, the tumultuous 13th century was why serfdom ended.

Right?

That was the end of feudalism.

It's where the Renaissance could never have happened without the 13th century.

So, you know, it's possible that we're going to be forced, like at some point it's going to become so obvious that climate change is happening that even the the people who are like right now, you know, filling my, my stream on Twitter with just like the most ridiculous.

I was on a show where I was arguing about climate change and they're kind of, it's kind of a wackadoodle show.

And so like right now, my Twitter feed is hilarious.

that even those people are going to be forced to be like, oh, okay, I guess it's happening.

And then we'll do something about it, but we'll be living on another planet by that time.

And so that's, that will be the challenge is figuring out what I mean.

Another planet mean this planet, a different version of this planet.

>> We're going to be living on another planet metaphorically.

>> Metaphorically.

>> But we are not going to successfully pack our bags and take the next Spirit Airlines flight to Alpha Centauri.

>> Yeah.

No, no, no, I mean this planet.

This planet will.

>> This is what we got.

>> Yeah.

It's going to be a different, you know, the earth.

There's been a lot of different versions of the earth over billions of years.

I mean, you know, we're not going to be living.

It's not going to be a glaciated planet.

>> It's not going to be like everything is boiled.

>> Yeah, everything.

It's not the oceans aren't going to be boiling.

But you know, there could be some I mean, certainly the it's going to be different enough that people everywhere are going to have to deal with the difference.

>> Okay.

So that's a that's a good way to kind of start this conversation.

And when we come back from our only break, we're talking to astrophysicist Adam Frank about Project Hail Mary and related themes.

We're going to listen to what Vice President JD Vance said about aliens recently.

I felt your eyes roll.

I could feel it.

>> Did you feel my also my sigh.

Oh, okay.

Here we go.

>> I've never felt an eye roll before.

I could feel it physically.

We're going to.

Let's listen to the vice President when we come back, and we're going to work through more of these scientific themes here with Adam Frank on Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson Thursday on our next Connections, nonviolence in a very violent age in Rochester.

The nonviolent movement is led in many ways by the Gandhi Institute.

And we're going to talk to the team about how they see the nonviolent movement, the nonviolence movement, really, how are nonviolent ideas spreading, or are they not in an age of war?

We'll talk about it.

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>> Org., this is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson for our listeners on Finger Lakes Public Radio WEOS 89 five.

All throughout the Finger Lakes.

If you want to meet Adam Frank and attend a little event next week, it's eight days from now.

Thursday, April 9th, and that's happening at 330 in the afternoon.

Adam is presenting at Cornell and you are presenting biosignatures and Technosignatures.

Why the search for life must not make distinctions.

>> Yeah.

So this is actually the Edwin Salpeter lecture.

And Edwin Salpeter was one of the greatest astronomers of the, of the 20th century.

So it's a huge honor to be asked to give this.

And it's a scientific, technical talk.

Like I'm, you know, this is a, this will be a full on sort of like, here's the science.

But yeah, I'm arguing, you know, my group, I've been the principal investigator for the last six years, seven years of the first NASA grant to study technosignatures technosignatures, meaning signatures of technological civilizations, technological life on other planets.

And we've made a huge amount of progress.

I mean, you know, our job was to sort of think about what you could do.

We haven't done any searches yet.

that will come in time because the telescopes that we need to do it probably are not yet built.

They will be built in the next ten, 20, 30 years.

but so yeah, that's what I'm going to be talking about how the, it's time, the giggle factor that was associated with thinking scientifically, thinking about life, particularly technological life on other planets.

It's time to let that go because it just doesn't make any sense.

>> It doesn't make any sense to giggle about the possibility.

>> Yeah.

And that because we can look now, we can literally look.

And for the last 30 years, NASA has had a big astrobiology program where they've put a lot of funding into looking for biosignatures, signatures of, of you know, biospheres, forests, microbial environments, but somehow still, because of UFOs, as we're going to talk about, because of UFOs, the idea of looking steady, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was always kind of like, you know, people would raise their eyes, scientists would raise their eyebrows when you talked about SETI.

And that's when SETI is now Technosignatures.

That's the name I use because it makes much more sense.

and yeah, just the idea is that now that kind of whatever giggle factor there was about technological civilizations looking for them just, you know, now we're, it doesn't make any sense to distinguish the two.

>> We can look now, but we can still look within our own galaxy or outside our own galaxy.

>> It's really within our I mean, it's within our galaxy and in particular our telescopes.

We're going to be looking within the nearest few hundred light years.

We probably couldn't see the signatures much further than that.

So we're really looking kind of in our neighborhood.

>> Yeah.

And so when it comes to the possibility of life, I remember the work that you did to show us that there are 10,000,000,000 trillion, at least that we know about, likely 10,000,000,000 trillion earth like possible planets out there.

It's not rare for an earth like planet, a rocky planet with water to be in a position for a sun to develop life.

However it happens, right?

There are 10,000,000,000 trillion.

It's hard to get your head around in the.

>> Universe.

>> In the universe, but that's that's enough that you go, should we have multiple in our galaxy?

Then if there's going to be technological life, or is it possible that it's one per galaxy or one per every thousand galaxies?

>> Yeah.

Well, I mean, so there's 400 billion stars in the galaxy, one out of and you can, you know, one out of every five of those has a planet in the habitable zone.

So.

>> But how many galaxies are there?

>> Well, no, I'm just talking about in our own galaxy.

>> I know how many galaxies.

>> That's the thing.

There's like almost infinite number.

There's like ten to the 21 galaxies.

That's how we ended up with this incredible number of ten to the 22, which is 10,000,000,000 trillion.

We got ten.

>> All I'm saying is we are looking now better than ever.

Right.

But we're still in a small neighborhood.

>> And we're still lots of thing.

We can't look through the whole galaxy.

So.

So in order for us to find life, it has to, you know, especially find civilizations.

It has to be common enough that we could look through the neighborhood and have it be.

So there's still, you know, people always want to say, oh my God, the numbers, there are so many stars.

There has to be life out there.

Yeah, that may be true, but it doesn't mean that there's any nearby us or in particular technological civilizations.

It doesn't mean that there's one or that are exist right now.

Because, you know, civilizations don't last forever, right?

If they only if a civilization, if the average lifetime of a civilization was 100,000 years, which is a long time, how long we've been a technological civilization for 200 years.

And the future is a little looking a little dicey.

So 100,000 years would be unbelievable compared to what we have in terms of duration.

And if that were true, that would actually mean that it would be pretty hard to find one because you just wouldn't overlap in time.

>> Because it's so short, so.

>> Short.

Billions of year.

The galaxy's been around for 10 billion years.

You have to be looking at the right time where that 100,000 hour time scale and the other, you know, our being alive and the other civilization being alive has to overlap.

>> Okay, so the reason I asked you to explain that, though, is to keep trying to help us see the scale.

Yeah.

How difficult it is to get our head around time and space and distance.

Yeah.

How difficult it would be to ever come into contact with another technological civilization, despite the fact that there might be countless in the universe or even in our galaxy.

>> Right?

And that's the thing.

The universe is so big that even that number, 10,000,000,000 trillion, doesn't take into account just how big the the galaxy is, how how big the distance between stars are.

Even like your next door neighbor in terms of stars is so far away that if you were traveling with the fastest thing we've ever, ever traveled, that we've ever put into space, which was like these, the Voyager probe, it would take 100,000 years to get there.

That is like the next your next door neighbor.

>> It's wild.

One of the guys from, of all things Barstool Sports Uncle Chops, he does, he does almost daily interesting knowledge questions just to expose how most of his colleagues are not very.

>> Smart.

>> And he recently his question on the office and he said, you're walking at three miles per hour and you can walk straight to the moon.

How long does it take you to get there?

Yeah.

And they're all like, like, probably like at least a week.

It's like five days.

You know, you're like, whoa, yeah, it's.

>> What was the actual answer?

It's got to be it's a Y.

>> No, it's like nine years to the moon.

>> To the moon.

>> Like, like right next door.

>> You can't get any closer than.

>> Nine years.

Yeah.

If we're walking to the moon.

>> Right?

>> And that's as close as you get.

>> Right?

And if you're traveling at 36,000 miles an hour, which is sort of the, I believe that's the speed of like the Voyager space probes.

Yeah, it's 100,000 years.

Actually.

It's probably more like probably of order 400,000 years to get to the nearest star.

So, you know, the distances between the stars are so vast that, you know, when we're coming to aliens visiting earth, those distances, you got to take that into account.

And you can't just wave your hands and say, oh, they've invented warp drive because there really is no such thing as a warp drive.

Like, yeah, maybe.

But also, on the other hand, maybe not.

So you can't just, you know, you got to take the, the distances and the physics seriously.

>> So it's going to be hard for aliens to ever get here.

And yet there is a cohort of people who believe that we are a society that is suppressing systematically across different governmental administrations, systematically suppressing.

For those on YouTube, go ahead and do the face you just did again, what was that like?

Oh, no.

>> Like I got a lot.

>> There's a huge conspiracy.

So JD Vance was on Benny Johnson's podcast.

I watched So you Don't Have to.

And he brings up aliens and Vice President Vance had this to say.

>> I've still got three more years as vice president.

I will get to the bottom of the UFO files.

>> Okay.

Have you have you peaked?

Have you done a peek?

Have I what?

Have you done a peek?

I mean, like, you know, so I actually haven't, I have not Independence Day.

You know, I have, I have.

>> I have not been able to spend enough time on this to really understand it, but I'm going to trust me.

I'm obsessed with this.

I've already had a couple of times where I'm like, all right, we're going to area 51.

We're going out to New Mexico.

We're going to sort of get to the bottom of this.

And then the timing of the trip just didn't work out.

But trust me, anybody who's curious about this, I'm more curious than anybody.

And I've got three years of the very, very tippy top of the classification.

I'm going to get to the bottom.

>> Of it.

Okay, so you haven't been to area 51 yet?

Not yet.

Not yet.

Say they keep the UFOs in Ohio.

You know.

Yeah.

>> Hangar 18, hangar 18.

>> Right.

>> I've heard that as well, but I don't know.

I haven't looked into it yet.

>> Okay.

All right, all right.

Well, we're waiting for it.

We saw aliens.

We saw aliens.gov.

>> I don't think they're I don't think they're aliens.

I think they're demons anyway.

But that's a longer discussion.

>> Yeah, that would be a longer distance like sure.

Yeah.

Let's.

Okay.

It's not a giant government conspiracy with every government in the world hiding the existence of multiple crash spaceships.

No, no, no, it's demons.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

>> Problem solved.

Well, Donald Trump, Donald Trump is known to to be very close to the vest.

He doesn't really kind of fly off.

>> No.

Exactly.

So.

Right.

Thank God.

>> Having been president for four years and then being out of the White House, he probably would have told you everything, wouldn't wouldn't have told you everything.

>> Oh, I have a theory.

>> If there was something to.

>> Tell you.

Yeah.

Okay.

Actually, can I can I tell my theory?

I hope this.

Yeah, I might be politically incorrect here.

You're looking.

Just in the way I'm going to frame this.

>> Okay.

>> Okay, so there's this thing in this show.

They're in the, the the what is it?

The age of disclosure.

>> There's the documentary.

>> The documentary, there's this, you know, I mean, we can talk about what's going on, but basically there is this idea that all of these Air Force guys have been seeing spaceships, you know, going after, you know, there's these multi crash spaceships happening all the time, right?

All the time.

There's crash spaceships and all around the world, people rush.

All these different governments rush to get the crash spaceships because they're going to reverse engineer the spaceships and everything.

So apparently there's been like, you know, there's a lot of people involved who've seen crash spaceships, you know, and they're all like military guys.

And I was just thinking that if you're a military guy and you're just like some, you know, lieutenant or something, if there was some pretty girl you were interested in, don't you think you would have, like, maybe like pocketed something and been like, hey.

>> Check it out.

>> Check it out.

Like, so it's the pretty girl theory.

So like you could put this in whatever gender form you want, but it just seems to me that like, like it's the idea of how, how likely is it that all this has happened and no one's ever talked about.

>> It, everybody's in on it.

Nobody ever leaks, right?

Governments change, right?

New administrations come in.

>> And it's all over the world.

It's not just the Chinese are doing this, but they're all they all.

No, no, that's that's why I call it the pretty girl theory.

You modify it however you want, but that like somebody, some guy would be like, oh, just picking up like a little piece and telling the girl that he, you know, at a present, like, look, I got a piece of an alien.

Nobody would ever do that.

>> President Trump went to Mar-a-Lago after Biden won, and he brought Iranian war plans and documents just to show off to Mar-a-Lago guests.

>> Right, right.

So he.

>> Wouldn't have brought the alien.

>> Docs, right.

>> That would have been like cooler for them.

I was like, whoa.

>> It just it's I mean, it stretches.

So this is about this documentary where it really stretches.

It's the story that it starts off with this stuff.

You usually heard that, you know, the government, there's been all these sightings and that there's the Navy pilots who see things.

And so it starts off in this road that I'm like, you know, I'm all for disclosure.

I have to say that I am all for disclosure.

If the government knows anything, if we've got really good data.

>> Put it out.

>> There, put it out there.

So let's do it.

But the problem with the show is after a while it just starts there.

And, you know, even even the stuff they're showing as supposedly evidence, these videos, you know, I have all kinds of complaints about it.

Some of those videos have shown they've show are already debunked.

We already know that those videos are, you know, not are explainable.

But then, you know, after the first 20 minutes, half an hour, 40, they just start cranking it up.

And so then you learn about the legacy program and the legacy program.

Is this like the super dark, deep levels of the government, which they have a nice, you know, diagram for the CIA is controlling along with the Air Force and the Department of Energy with private contractors.

That's the and the legacy program is what's keeping our heroes from revealing what's really going on.

So now you've got this very X-Files kind of dark, dark layers of the government.

and yeah, and then it just gets they crank it even up further than that where like, yeah, these government contractors, again, a whole new layer of people who have never, ever 70, you know, 70 years, nobody's ever like, you know leaked anything.

The government contractors have been reverse engineering.

That's why everybody, everybody wants to reverse engineer what you've learned about these spacecraft.

And these spacecraft are crashing all the time.

I mean, like, here's an interesting thing.

How many of our spaceships things have gone into space in the moon have with people on them have crashed?

Two.

Right.

We've got two.

There was the two challenger disasters.

The other one happened on earth was a test.

Apollo one.

So like, our spaceships don't crash all the time.

And apparently these things which can like go at Mach 4000 and turn on a dime, these things like, yeah, they're crashing every week, right?

So it's just the stories just get weirder and weirder.

And then finally, there are these two scientists, scientists and quote whose name I don't remember.

and they're like, well, we've explained how it is because there are these bubbles of warped space time that are using, you know, negative energy.

And I'm like, no, that's not even a thing.

Like you're not, you're just moving your mouth and sounds are coming out.

That's not physics.

So it's just the show is just so amazing on how it just doubles down and then doubles down again.

And like, if 1/1000 of this stuff were to be true, it would, you know, be the most amazing science fiction film you've ever saw.

>> Okay, so that's the disclosure age of Disclosure documentary.

Now, Steven Spielberg's got a movie coming out called Disclosure Day.

Right now it's going to be it's fiction.

Are you annoyed by that?

Do you think it's going to spur more conspiracism?

>> Yeah, it will, you know.

I mean, this is the problem.

I mean, listen, Steven Spielberg is a great movie maker.

He's been interested in this from the beginning, right?

I mean, you know, what was his second big movie or third big movie was.

>> Close encounters.

>> Close encounters.

Right.

So you know, he's always had an interest in this.

And so, you know, I'm not particularly bummed out that he's making a movie on this because it's a movie, but yeah, it's going to feed into it.

I mean, what I really worry about with all of this is, you know, it's actually gotten there's a lot of politics happening.

There's a lot of kind of like science denial that that is actually attached to all of this.

And it feeds into a lot of you look at the communities because again, I want like, if there's anything out there, show it to me.

Like I'm all for disclosure, but actually what my feeling is, is that we're never going to get, we're never going to see a spaceship.

We're never going to see a alien body.

It's just going to be government document after government document that any other.

>> Government innuendo.

>> Yeah.

And that's yeah, they are making these unbelievable claims.

I mean like these insane claims in the show.

And there's never any piece of actual evidence.

It's always I saw or I know a guy who saw and it's like, come on, you can't make claims like that and expect me to believe them when you can't even show me like, come on, just one piece of metal that you could like, show, bring to a bunch of government laboratories so that we could all agree.

That's all I'm asking for is just show me the spaceship.

That's all.

And I will be right there.

But this unending, you know, innuendo.

And then people say, well, why?

Why would these government guys lie?

for all kinds of reasons.

And the thing that nobody tells you is that for every government person who's like, hey, spaceships being hidden in garages.

You can find 100 government guys.

Like that's crazy.

We always told, we said, that guy's crazy.

We tried to say, you know, the the head of the Pentagon's current program for UFOs actually said Sean Kirkpatrick said, you know, when he met these guys, he was like, these people are like, they're off the deep end.

They should have their, their credentials revoked.

Their, you know, their.

security clearance, security clearance revoked because these guys don't listen to reason.

They're just, they're like, it's demons.

And, you know, these, these are people who are not rational actors anymore.

And I'm not saying everybody's like that, but I just want, I want people to know that there are lots of people in the government, in the intelligence who, because this has been around forever since the 50s, this idea that, you know, there's UFOs and there's always been a cadre of people in the government who believed this.

And now it's a circular conversation going 70 for 70 years.

>> So let me get some feedback from the audience here.

first of all, Alex wants to know, have you Adam Frank been to area 51?

>> I have been to area 51.

I was part of a documentary that was doing stuff on, on Netflix and they took us.

We didn't get into area 51, but I was right up at the, in the middle of the barren desert, the guard, you know, the guard tower or whatever, we took us right up there.

>> Written a book.

>> About., right?

>> Like, say, like a little book of.

>> Oh, a little book of aliens about that.

Yeah.

Right.

So I've never actually been to area 50.

I mean, I've never been inside, of course, because you can nobody, you know, you're not allowed in the area 51.

>> But the vice president's implying that, well, he, he really wants to go.

He's just been very busy, but like, he'll get there eventually.

Oh, and then he'll get to the bottom.

>> I've just been too busy to find out that the world is populated by demons.

And the government's known about it for 70 years.

But I got really important stuff to do.

Yeah, okay.

>> Gary on YouTube.

what about the number of physicists who tell us that interstellar travel is not possible?

Not that there are technological hurdles that prohibit it.

>> You know, I'm actually one of those.

I mean, at least I have a question.

I'm actually literally before this, I was writing some stuff about this that, you know, let's say there is no warp drive.

Like as of right now, there is no coherent idea about what a warp drive is.

There's been some really interesting work on it.

I will say.

but as of right now, it is still just science fiction.

So let's say that's not possible.

Then what it means is, is that, you know, if you're traveling even at 0.999 light speed, then relativity effects will kick in such that this is the term that I came up with cultural decoherence, right?

If it takes if you're traveling, if you're the star is 100 light years away, right?

So if you're traveling very, if you're traveling at light speed, it would take 100 years to get there.

And 100 years back, that's 200 years.

So the, you know, your civilization at home has, you know, you're completely disconnected from them.

But here's the thing, if you are traveling at 0.99, light speed, relativistic effects kick in for you.

It's only been 22 years.

So you go back, it's you go back, you know, you're in a diplomatic mission.

You go you do the diplomatic mission, you come back, you're 22 years older.

Earth is 200 years older.

There's just a disconnect.

Like nobody.

You can't have an inter if you don't have warp drive.

It'd be hard to imagine an interstellar civilization.

>> So Patrick says you you gotta have warp speed and you got to bend space time.

Patrick says, right, can you can we do that?

>> Well, Einstein's relativity says we can bend space time, but there's no way that we know to build a warp drive that we just don't know how to like.

That's it's not clear that that's physical.

You know, you can find solutions.

You can, you know, you can manipulate, you can put in like this fake term into Einstein's general theory of relativity and get what's called the metric.

The, an Uber drive, you know, but it requires this thing called negative energy, which doesn't exist.

So it's.

>> I don't know, I've seen Spaceballs, ludicrous speed.

>> Ludicrous speed.

That's a great dark helmet.

>> The big dark helmet.

Linda says what the movie got wrong.

He says, although Ryan Gosling's beard grew long, his mustache did not.

This was shown during the first part of the movie.

His mustache grew to basically a normal trimmed mustache length.

Well, listen, you got an A-list sex symbol as your lead.

That's going to be the one place where you break the silence.

>> Oh, there you go.

>> You keep him looking.

>> Yeah.

>> Well.

>> What about his fingernails?

He should have had, like, Mandarin fingernails, right?

With his fingernails would keep growing.

>> Yeah, I would think so.

>> Good.

Good catch, though, Linda.

Observant listener.

>> Very, very observant.

Very good there.

Linda.

And oh, there's.

Oh, one more.

did Adam Frank see Begonia the movie Begonia?

No.

So apparently, is there an alien connection to Begonia?

I don't want to give a spoiler away here.

I thought that was just Emma Stone being sort of, I I'm not going to give it.

I don't know, the movie.

I think it's an Emma Stone movie.

It was nominated for best Picture.

Okay, I don't know.

And there may be an alien connection.

>> You know, can I just also suggest a movie called passengers?

Passengers.

Passengers, which was a Chris.

Chris.

Oh, what's his name?

from community.

Pratt.

Chris Pratt it's an early.

Chris Pratt and it is, it's really great.

And it sort of went under the radar.

People didn't like it for reasons, but it is also very it's completely scientifically accurate.

Spin gravity, you know, long duration travels between stars.

I highly recommend that movie to people.

>> All right.

Passengers and Joel's got a correction for us.

>> Okay.

>> Barbara Tuchman it was it's called the calamitous 14th century.

And the actual quote in the book was it was a bad time for humanity.

And like one of the ultimate understatements in literature.

>> So yeah, I like that.

It's like it was it was a bad time.

So we may, I think, you know, we may have a challenging time ahead of us.

>> What gives you these days?

Does anything give you optimism?

>> you know, time that, you know, reminding us ourselves that we are just players in a long drama.

We have our role to play, but that history is long, you know, geologic history is long.

Human history is long.

We're not the first people to see difficult times.

And you know, if you have to face difficult times, that's just what happens.

And so face it with courage and compassion and do the right thing.

>> Well, last 45 seconds or so.

You were pretty active in the 1980s, the Anti-nuke movement, weren't you?

You know, so there was a lot of concern in the 80s that thermonuclear war was going to be the end of all of us.

And there was there were a lot of people who marched, who demonstrated, who advocated, and they were pretty successful.

>> They were.

>> Does does now feel more fractured, or do you think that that a similar result could happen on different issues?

>> I think there's just what's happening is, is that the old systems are falling apart, which happens in human history, right?

The things that we just sort of assumed, you know, were to be taken forward, they're falling apart.

That happens periodically.

We're in the midst of them.

That's turbulent and chaotic.

And, you know, but, but it also presents, I don't want it.

I certainly I'm ready to retire.

I just want to hang out and play video games.

but there's also always opportunities that occur just like the, the, the 14th century things happened that allowed actually great flourishing of human humanity.

So we just have to play our roles and be compassionate.

>> One critique of the AI situation is what problem is it?

Solving?

A lot of tech is invented to solve problems.

We need to travel faster.

We need to cover more ground.

We need to be safer.

We need to build better homes and more insulated homes.

What problem is merging with machines?

Solving for the human.

>> Race, being able to fire everybody?

>> Oh that's right, the problem of the human workforce.

>> Yeah.

That's really what.

>> The there's one.

>> Yeah.

That's a whole other discussion to have about AI.

Yeah, yeah.

Because it's also I've been using it a lot.

It's an amazing technology.

It is amazing.

But the way it's being deployed and the hype around it, you know, we deserve we have a right.

We as citizens to say how we want this technology deployed.

>> Come back, talk to us.

That's Adam Frank astrophysicist.

Thanks for being with us.

We're back with you tomorrow on member supported public media.

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