From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made on a distant planet 120 light years away.

For now, the planet is known as K2 18 B, and something is happening there.

Or at least something was happening there 120 years ago.

Earth time.

I think I'm not always good at understanding space math.

We'll get to that coming up.

Here's the story.

Scientists who are searching for signs of life have found some on this planet.

Scientists have detected biosignature years, or at least in the atmosphere of the planet.

Here's how the New York Times put it.

Quote.

The search for life beyond Earth has led scientists to explore many suggestive mysteries, from plumes of methane and Mars to clouds of gas on Venus.

But as far as we can tell, Earth's inhabitants remain alone in the cosmos.

But now, a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life.

Not in our solar system, but on a massive planet known as K2 18 B that orbits a star 120 light years from Earth.

A repeated analysis of the exoplanet's atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that, on Earth has only one known source.

Living organisms.

End quote.

Now, what kind of living organisms?

So far, there's no evidence that it's the kind that play Wordle or spend too much money on frothy Starbucks drinks.

One of the authors of the study put it this way.

Quote.

It is in no one's interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life.

End quote.

And yet, in the same interview, he went on to say that his best guess is that K2 18 B is covered with a warm ocean brimming with life.

The research team called it a revolutionary moment, the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.

Now, science is a tough crowd.

Make a big claim and your colleagues will try to poke holes in it.

That's what makes science so rigorous and so great.

Steven Schmitt, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University, told The Times.

It's not nothing.

It's a hint, but we cannot conclude it is habitable yet.

Astrophysicist Adam Frank shares the same skepticism.

He wrote in The Spectator that these findings are not all that momentous yet.

But he notes something about it that is momentous.

For centuries, all we had were hunches.

Are we alone?

Is anyone else out there?

Is this thing on?

Well, now, Frank notes that for the first time, we're debating a specific biosignature claim on a specific planet that we can observe.

If you listen to connections enough, you know what I think it is?

Aliens.

But I figured we should consult the expert on this one.

Adam Frank, author and Helen F and Fred H. Gowan, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester.

Doctor Frank is the author of The Little Book of Aliens, and he is the author of the forthcoming Every Man's Universe newsletter.

Welcome back to the program.

It's a pleasure.

It's aliens.

Right?

How many times have you been on this show in the last decade?

We're like, we got it.

It's aliens.

Is this the one?

Aliens?

so how to frame this, right.

Because as I wrote in that article for The Spectator, like, there is something truly exciting about this, but it's not the result because the result itself does not come up to the standards in science.

And we can talk about what that is.

We we just we have formalizing that the standards by which we judge like, oh, that is not noise.

That is an actual factual signal.

That is not just some randomness, you know, random light particles bouncing around.

and the funny thing, of course, was I was soon as this came out, you know, I started a conversation with my colleagues and friends who are all astrobiologists, many of them much more, all of them much smarter than me.

And they were just they were, you know, skewering this result.

And, the researcher as well, I mean, which is good, you know, because that's what you want.

But they had like a thousand reasons why this was not a biosignature.

But that's great.

That's exactly what should happen.

and we can go to the, you know, what their objections were.

But what matters is that this was, you know, a reputable researcher who is a, you know, he's a really good researcher.

It was a, absolutely, top of the line instrument, the James Webb Space Telescope.

And so this was like, this is what it's going to look like.

It's going to take us, you know, finding life in the universe.

It's going to take us a while.

But this is what the process actually looks like.

So I don't think this one even comes close to rising to the standards of yes, we found life.

but it is sort of like, wow, we're we're actually here now.

We're actually going to start this argument.

We're going to have data, you know, to start the argument.

You're the worst I know.

You know, scientists just are such buzz kills.

wow.

in many ways, the conversation this hour is going to be on why it has to be this rigorous and what we can learn from that.

But let me just back up and ask you to explain a little bit more about what you wrote in your piece for The Spectator, titled, what a guess.

That's probably not your headline.

Is that your headline?

No.

Yeah.

That's a big headline.

That's a good time.

That's good.

Sometimes that's bad.

That's a good one.

But when you point out the momentous part of this to you, at least, I mean, obviously it will be very momentous if we get more rock solid data.

And every one of your colleagues who saying, well, it's probably not that because this or it's not X because Y.

And if you if they can beat all of those holes and solidify this, then it becomes a much bigger deal.

But I want you to talk a little bit about this idea that for centuries, all we've really been able to do is, you know, be Fermi gazing up at the sky, going like, where is everybody?

Yeah.

And we don't really know.

We have no way of knowing.

And we're starting to get more ways of knowing or trying to know.

That's the revolution that I want people to understand is that, you know, so, what was it, a Saturday night?

I slept on my deck, you know, I just went out there and because it was, you know, it was a clear sky.

And I was just looking up at the stars.

It was cold, wasn't it?

I had my sleeping bag.

I was like, ready because I'm a, you know, my backpackers went out there with my car on my comfortable, you know, whatever.

couch out on the, but whatever.

I was looking at the night sky, and, you know, the night sky has always had that mystery.

Especially you can get out away from star, you know, from City Lights, and you just like everybody's always looked at and been like, what are those?

You know?

And the question of are we alone?

Are we the only place in all those stars that where life is foreign?

It's always occurred to people like from the beginning.

So, you know, the first place you can actually see in history people arguing about this is the, the ancient Greeks, the Hellenistic Greeks.

Right.

So Aristotle writes that, you know, Earth is unique.

There's no place other than Earth.

There's no all those lights in the sky, you know, forget about it there.

You know, nothing.

Nothing's going on there.

And then you had someone like Democritus, who came about 100 years later, who's like, no, every one of those stars in the sky is a sun.

They're all have planets orbiting them.

And you know what?

They all have life on them.

So, you know, that's 2500 years ago.

And every generation you see people arguing about this.

Sometimes the argument heated up like, what's Giordano Bruno?

Where they burned him at the stake for, you know, one of the reasons he was, you know, the heresy he was, accused of was about his views.

He was saying that, yeah, every the planets, every star has planets on.

They're all inhabited.

So you see this going back and forth for 2500 years.

But it was all opinion was like, bro, you know, it was just like, dude, look at all the stars.

There's got to be life up there.

And the other guy got no life is like really rare.

And there was nothing.

It was just a bunch of conjecture.

That's all you got.

That's all you got for so long.

And you know, when I was a graduate student in the 80s and early 90s, one of the reasons I didn't go into wasn't even called astrobiology then, was that there was nothing to do.

There was no science to be done.

And then everything changed.

And now we're at the point where, like, oh, a guy using the best telescope we have has found a signal in the right place.

You expect the signal might to be that, you know, this is this is what it's gonna look like.

This is what the process looks like.

Imagine what Bruno and what Democritus would say if they were alive to see this today.

I think Bruno would be like, could you put the fire out?

Hey, no water here.

Because, you know, I was right.

Thank you very much.

it's a little late now for Bruno.

Sorry, dude.

Water.

but.

Yeah, right.

For them to see, like.

Wow, we finally got to the point where we're going to have we're going to have, like, the the process can finally work.

The scientific process.

And that's why the thing, you know, we really have everybody just has to like chill.

It's going to take a long time.

You don't get to answer a question that you've had for 2500 years, like in a day.

It's literally this is going to take decades to work out and we can go through the whole process.

But like, you just have to sit tight because, you know, we don't have cell phones because somebody just overnight was like, oh yeah, I'll just throw together some pieces of, you know, metal here.

And look, I got a cell phone that was 150 years of science that led to your cell phone.

So it's going to be the same thing with this, the most important philosophical, religious, scientific question ever asked.

Oh, well, I'm not a scientist, so my standards are lower.

So I think it is aliens.

But I do enjoy I do enjoy learning about this process.

So let's talk about what a biosignature is.

Let's start there.

Yeah.

Give me a definition of term there.

What's a biosignature okay, so a biosignature.

So let's actually to step way back.

How will we even think we're going to find life.

Right.

You know, so this planet K2 18 B you're right.

Somebody should name it like Bob's planet or something.

But this planet, is 120 light years away.

We're not visiting it any time soon.

Right?

You know, we have no idea how to travel across the stars.

So the only way we can tell anything about it is by observing the light that comes from it through a telescope.

So what that means is that what we need is we need to be able to look at the planet and look at its light.

And then what we do is like detectives, we sort of like, you know, put the light, the light that's coming from the planet.

We, you know, we put it in the chair and we like, interrogate it, you know, and we break it apart and we look for like, signatures or actually fingerprints.

It's literally spectral fingerprints in the colors that we see coming from the, the planet and every element, you know, hydrogen, silicon, every molecule of carbon dioxide, etc., has a special spectral fingerprint, only emits or absorbs light with certain colors.

That's it.

Which is a God's gift to us.

For scientists.

So what we're doing is we're looking at the light that's coming from that planet.

We're putting it through what we call a spectrograph or breaking it apart.

And we can check all the colors and we can looking for places where some of the colors have been eaten, supposedly by chemicals in the atmosphere that absorbed some of the light.

So that's how we can tell, like, oh, there's carbon dioxide in that atmosphere.

Oh, there's you know, hydrogen, molecular hydrogen in that atmosphere.

So what we're looking for are molecules that would only be in the atmosphere because life put them there.

Right.

That's what we mean by a biosignature.

We're going to look at this planet.

We're going to look at its atmosphere.

And we're going to see all these compounds, most of which don't come from life.

And then we're going to see hopefully something that only life could be put there.

And now that there's a whole process there about what do you mean, only life could put it there.

But let's take oxygen for example.

So oxygen is kind of like the the gold standard on a certain level because on Earth it's amazing.

Right?

When life was formed on Earth, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere like none.

And then about 1 billion or 2 billion years later, microbes invented a new kind of photosynthesis.

And part of that process was to break water molecules apart, use the hydrogen atom to make a sugar food.

And then they farted out the oxygen.

And so over there were so much, you know, so many of these microbes have in this party that the atmosphere started to fill up with oxygen until we finally got to where we are today, 21% oxygen in the atmosphere.

It's only there because a life if life went away tomorrow, if planet, if the Earth sterilized tomorrow, that oxygen would be gone.

You know, it wouldn't take very long for it to all react up with the rocks.

So if we're looking at a planet and we see oxygen in its atmosphere, that is a good bet.

That would be a biosignature here.

Now, there's lots of caveats, and we got to talk about those caveats.

But oxygen in an atmosphere would be an example of like, oh, that's a signature of there being life on that planet.

Is that what they're claiming with K2 18?

B no, what they're claiming with K2 18 is a different kind of biosignature, which in some sense is almost more exciting.

It's dimethyl sulfide, which is don't ask me actually there die.

So there's two of something, I guess there's a methyl group, whatever that is.

but it's a compound that on Earth is only produced by phytoplankton by by photosynthetic stuff in the sea.

And there's so much of this stuff in the sea that actually, you know, Earth's atmosphere is has a, you know, has a reasonable concentration.

It's low, but would be detectable of, of dimethyl sulfide.

And what, Martu claimed was that they had found a this the color is the spectral fingerprint of dimethyl sulfide.

So that's why he's saying it's their conclusion is a very slow down.

They're agreeing with that, but they're saying that this points that it is possible that there is an ocean brimming with life.

Yeah.

So that's a whole other thing.

If we want to go down that road, this plant, it's not just the dimethyl sulfide, it's this planet, this guy, this is they have and they've been at the forefront of this, of what would be like an entirely new class of habitable planet, one we don't have in our solar system.

So in art.

So can we just talk about that for a minute?

Well, yeah.

I thought from what I'm reading, it's much larger than Earth.

Yes, but watery.

Kind of like Earth.

But are you saying no?

Well, yes and no.

Okay.

So let's go into it.

So on Earth, in our solar system, there is Earth with one Earth mass, and then there's nothing in terms of mass up until you get to Uranus and Neptune, which are like 14, 17 Earth masses.

There's no planets in our solar system in between and masses.

It turns out the most common kind of planet in the entire universe is stuff in between.

They're either super Earths, which are at the lower range, and what we call sub Neptune's, where it's the higher range K to 18 B is what I would call a sub Neptune.

It is a world that's eight times Earth's mass.

It should be, you know.

So is it like a Uranus or Neptune which are ice giants?

They got like a big hydrogen atmosphere and then it's just kind of like ice and slush all the way down till they get a rocky core.

Like it's not a place for life.

But there's it was hypothesized that this the K to 18 B was part of a new class of planet we call high C in world hydrogen ocean.

I see and and the idea is you've got a hydrogen atmosphere, you know, thick hydrogen atmosphere.

But below that, hydrogen is a great greenhouse gas.

Hydrogen.

Molecular hydrogen below that is an ocean that's 700 miles deep.

So, for reference, the Marianas Trench is about six miles.

That's the deepest place in Earth's ocean.

So this ocean is, you know, ten times deeper.

It's.

And the forget there's no land on this.

When your ocean is 700 miles deep, you don't have any continents poking above it.

This is an entirely different kind of world that just is like, And the coolest thing was in the first paper last year, they published the first paper where they showed that the spectral signatures they were getting were what they expected from models, for it being a high C in world.

So they found they found methane and they found carbon dioxide, and they didn't find ammonia.

And that's exactly what you'd expect if this was a world with a hydrogen atmosphere and a giant, giant liquid ocean.

So that's exciting.

That is so exciting.

It's exciting because it's entirely new class of planet that could have life.

Like, look, anywhere there's water, we think like, well, it could happen because we think water is important.

So this is like an entirely new kind of planet.

You don't just have to think about Earthlike worlds, you know, with their nice little continents and little oceans.

Now suddenly, here's an entirely new class of world that that will have liquid water that could had life on it, a waterworld, a waterworld, Kevin Costner.

That movie wasn't so bad.

Yes, he has a terrible film.

Eat your heart out, Kevin Costner.

We got a real Waterworld on your hands.

So when you are in touch, then with your colleagues in the science world who are looking at this going now, you know, there they are finding things that don't add up.

Yes.

Or they think don't add up.

Right.

Like what?

What are the holes that they're poking?

Okay, so let's just as I always like to say, whether we're talking about aliens or we're talking about climate change, you know, scientists are really mean to each other, right?

As they should be like, so if you want to come out and say something spectacular like, I found aliens or the Earth is changing because human beings are doing something, you can expect that your colleagues are going to score you or you.

They're going to break you over the coals.

Just a, sidebar.

Sidebar.

I did an interview one time with Adam Riess, who won the Nobel Prize when he was a graduate student, for discovering that the universe was accelerating.

This was like in 1999.

And I asked him, I said, you know, that night when you were at the telescope and you suddenly realized like, oh my God, I've got this data.

And it it shows the exact opposite of what everyone said.

Were you like, I'm going to win the Nobel Prize?

He was like, no, I'm terrified because, you know, you're going to be pilloried, right?

You look like a buffoon.

He's going to have to stand in front of the smartest people in the universe who, you know, who know are on earth, who know everything about everything.

And they're going to, like, rip him to shreds.

so, when I talked with my friends about, you know, and we were going back and forth, they had lots of.

Well, here's the main thing, right?

Scientists, we have a, we have a standard for understanding whether whether a signal is actually a signal, like how, you know, there's always noise, right?

There's always fluctuations.

How do you know whether a signal is, you know, is you've gotten so clear a signal that it's definitely not noise.

So we call this this is based on Sigma okay.

What do we call the what is it, a one sigma result, a two sigma result of three sigma four.

The standard is a five sigma, which I always forget because I'm not a probability guy, but I think it's like 1 in 1,000,000.

Like it's a one if you if you have a, a, five sigma result that says that this thing is, is that it's standing above the noise so much, it's so clear that it would be like a 1 in 1,000,000 chance that you were wrong, that this was actually just randomly, you know, showed up like that.

So everybody who knows statistics better than I, you can call in and say like, damn, dude, how could you not know that?

Whatever.

So Five Sigma is the gold standard.

This result in their first paper last year they were like at One Sigma, and they very clearly said like, hey look, we see some wiggles at dimethyl sulfide, but we're not saying anything.

this time they've gone to a different part of the spectra.

They're looking at a different regime of colors, and this one's at five.

I'm not sorry.

I'm sorry.

This one's at three, three, three sigma.

Now, the world is full of three sigma results that went away when you got more data.

That's why it's that.

So that's the main thing.

Like, look, this is, this is barely at Three Sigma.

my colleagues were like, they don't even think it's a three Sigma.

They think that they were optimistic about their evaluation of the.

So, you know, lots and lots of times and lots of different kinds of science.

Three sigma results.

Once you get more data, they go away most of the time actually they go away.

So you don't want to get too excited about that.

And then they were like, look, wait a minute.

If this is really dimethyl sulfide, then that means there's dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere.

And like, you know, light from the star should be hitting it and breaking it apart, which means you should see these other x, y and z chemicals.

Like, those didn't show up in the spectra.

So they had this long list of, you know, other kinds of thing, which is great.

This is exactly what we should do.

So, so in general, they were not impressed.

And you are sympathetic to their critique.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think those were good critiques.

Those were good critiques.

And that's exactly how the process works.

And that's why when we finally announce something, you can bet you know that it's going to be, you know, it'll be and there'll always be controversy, right?

There will always be some controversy.

But what will happen is when we get a result that's at Five Sigma, then there's this whole other process that kicks in, which is, you know, validating, making sure other people have to do the observation.

But if you really got a five sigma result, then everybody would be like, oh my God.

But then you have to figure out, like, is this really a biosignature?

Is there really no way to make, dimethyl sulfide, for example?

Naturally, you know, without life.

So, you know, it's always going to be an ongoing process.

The likelihood in your mind is right now we got a cool planet.

It's it's probably not brimming with life, or at least it's probably noise that we're seeing.

Do we do we at least know that it is a water world?

So, I think the evidence that it's a water world is much better than there's any evidence of life.

I think that, you know, I mean, again, some of my colleagues are, you know, because this is what this is.

I love science so much.

Like they publish those papers on the high sea in world.

And then other people published other papers like, yeah, you know, they looked at now we've got like maybe 8 or 9 candidates that are high sea in worlds and then this is what you want to have happen.

Other people stepped in, said, no, no, no, no, no.

You know, here's the other ways you could be fooled.

So let me give you an example of why this is so important.

So in my work, I think a lot about biospheres and everything.

And you may have heard of the idea of the wood wide web, the idea that forests are alive like fire.

There's a green mind like that.

Forests have the ability to communicate.

The trees communicate with each other through the, the fungal networks.

So you should think of a forest as being like a termite mound.

It's a collective, you know?

So I got a lot of press.

I love trees, can share resources, right?

Yeah.

Right.

So I love this idea.

I want this idea to be true.

But, you know, those are the ideas you should be most suspicious of because you want them to be true.

Briefly, some people have begun to push back on it and be like, no.

Yeah.

And I'm like, Thank God, thank God.

Somebody pushing back on it because I don't want to be fooled.

Right.

This is the whole point of science.

I don't want to believe something.

And especially because I want it to be true.

Then go down the primrose path.

So great people are now beating on it.

And then we'll see eventually where it goes.

And this is why, especially in this world, that where we are right now, where expertise and science is just getting hammered on men, you will pay a price.

If you give up this method, you know, because then there's nothing to believe.

You have no way of knowing whether anything is true or not.

So at least in its domain, the rigor, the nastiness, the sort of like, oh, wait a minute, you know, of science.

That's why we live in the world.

We do.

We have to do this, these miracles of, you know, of science and can you correct my math if I was wrong at the at the start, I mentioned that this planet K2 18 B is 120 light years away.

So I think it was 124.

Okay.

Is that what it is?

124 that's what I read 124 light years away.

It's one, two, three.

I don't need you to be pedantic.

I'm a professor, right?

But me.

But I paid to be pedantic.

Yeah.

That is.

That's right here.

Professional pedant.

124 light years away.

Now, for a moment, let's assume this is an actual biosignature and that there's life in these oceans.

Was I correct to say that what we are seeing then is not what's happening right now?

Earth time?

What we have would be if we could verify the biosignature evidence that at least in our time, 124 years ago, there was life there.

We don't necessarily know exactly what's happening right today.

Earth time.

Is that correct?

It's exactly right.

Yeah.

The light left K2 18 B around 1900.

Okay.

Our time.

Yeah.

So 1901.

Sorry.

Sure.

Oh.

Missed your pardon.

Gotcha.

So, so if the light left in 1901.

And if there's anything that's moving quickly, we know evolution doesn't happen very quickly.

So, probably at least an Earth year.

There's probably not much change, but who knows?

Who knows.

And the point is, we are getting data that by our standards, is more than a century old.

That's very interesting to me that is it's very cool.

And, you know, if we were looking at an event, you would be able to see if we were looking at the other side of the galaxy.

The galaxy is about 100,000 light years, you know, so you'd be seeing stuff from 100,000.

Our own galaxy is about 100,000 light years across here.

How big is this universe?

Universe?

That's just our galaxy.

The nearest galaxy is Andromeda.

I think that's like 700 million.

Every.

Every time I talk to you about the size of the universe, I feel like Ted Lasso when he was like, how many countries are in this country, man?

Like, I'm.

It's just massive.

Yeah, it's not 700 million.

It's 700.

I got it.

I'm not going to hold you to.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I'm just like I'm blanking today.

It's me.

This is me getting.

It's hard to get your head around the side, but.

Andromeda.

Andromeda is the nearest galaxy.

And, you know, and again, it's like I'm.

I'm more maybe on the order of a million light years away.

And but then, you know, there's literally almost uncountable galaxies.

Alpha Centauri is in our galaxy.

Our Alpha Centauri is the nearest star.

And it's about, it's about, one four, three, four.

It's four light years.

Yeah, it's about one point something parsecs.

It's about four light years away.

Okay.

And but it's in our galaxy.

It's in our galaxy is 120 light years away.

Kind of close in our neighborhood.

It's it's in the neighborhood.

It's on your block.

That's how big the galaxy is, right?

And how dense would start.

There are 400 billion stars in the galaxy.

So across 100,000 light years.

So basically not in the universe.

By the way, the galaxy, this is the galaxy.

And every galaxy has 100 billion stars and there's uncountable galaxies.

I mean, you know, this is why I got to tell you, folks, no matter what happens in the world, I know the world's a mess, but astronomy helps, right?

It just puts things in perspective.

Like you just, you know, things can be terrible.

But just remember, it's a big universe with a lot of stories and our story is just one of them.

So for me, it's just I find that a little bit comforting.

You know, I think that's very comforting.

I love that idea.

we're talking to Adam Frank, who is the Helen F and Fred H. Gowan professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester.

He's the author of a number of books, including The Little Book of Aliens and their forthcoming newsletter, The Everyman's Universe Newsletter.

What's that, by the way?

every man's universe is going to be basically, you know, I'm going to it's a newsletter.

So that's the new format that which the great thing about newsletters is, is really people are like, what is that?

It's like, well, you know, it's like blog 2.0.

But really what it is is you're being freed from the platforms.

Like, I don't have to go to like X, which I don't really want to use anymore, you know?

And I just don't like social media very much.

Basically, you know, you if you subscribe, you get, you know, my writing, I'll probably do something each week, maybe a couple things, thoughts on all kinds of things.

and it will, like I said, a couple times a week, come to your, to your email box, and I want to know what what are the things I'm interested I'm interested in life, in the universe.

I'm interested in the human future.

I'm interested in climate change.

I'm interested a lot of pop culture.

I play a huge amount of video games get.

I love Andor, I'm just watching Andor.

So a lot of, you know, it's a lot of nerdcore as well as, you know, stuff about the science, the politics around science.

You know, like I said, the human future.

Where are we going, etc.

I have a lot of really good questions from our listeners.

And on the other side of our only break, what we'll do is we'll put them to Adam Frank, who is one of our favorite semi-regular guests here.

We love talking about science, deep space tech at biosignatures, and the like with Adam, the search for life, although he's thrown a wet blanket on this one.

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This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson if you're just joining us, wherever you are, however you are accessing your public media, we're talking about, some pretty serious headlines from about a month ago, that, you know, if you missed it, I know there's a lot going on in the world.

You might have missed the news that we found aliens.

We hope we didn't find aliens, but 120 light years away, there is a planet, known for the moment as K 218 b, and it's in our, universal neighborhood, so to speak.

It's not that far away.

And, it is emitting what researchers, are saying could be a biosignature an indication that life could be on that planet, producing and interacting in ways that create the chemical signatures that are detectable through our modern technology.

That tells us there's something beyond just rock here.

There's something beyond just typical planet ness, but there's life of some kind.

Now, scientists, across the scientific community have said, you know, not so fast.

Let's try to poke some holes in it.

But that's, that's going to take some time.

And it's pretty exciting to start looking at a specific claim in a specific place in the universe to say, I think that may be life very specific, not, you know, what if it's let's look here, let's study here.

So they're going to keep studying really interesting and exciting stuff as Adam Frank, our guests, astrophysicist Adam Frank is here as he has explained, this looks like a, Hi.

What's I see in world and hydrogen ocean world.

A hydrogen ocean world.

A big, big water world where there's, you know, it's bigger than Earth.

But it would be really interesting if this were correct.

So they're going to study this, and we're talking about the process.

And I have a lot of good questions.

And let's work through some of them now.

So Alex sent a note asking is there a difference between biosignatures and techno signatures.

yes and no.

Right.

So a biosignature is evidence that there's a biosphere there that there's enough life vibrant enough that it's pumping enough chemicals out, that you can see there, you can see them from across, you know, interstellar distances.

A techno signature is is indication that there's a techno sphere there.

We have a type.

We have a young techno sphere, right.

Techno sphere is all of the industrial, you know, processes all the machinery.

It's the satellites.

It's everything that a, intelligent, technological species produces.

And what's amazing, and this is what climate change is all about, you know, once you, your techno sphere becomes powerful enough, just like a biosphere, it starts to change.

The planet starts to actually change how the planet functions, and it actually change what's visible.

So a techno signature would be something like chlorofluorocarbons.

Like we we've emitted enough chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere that we.

This is a paper that we did we showed this that you could be able be able to see it across interstellar distances, even from as much as 100 light years away.

So techno signatures and there's a whole list of techno signatures.

I'm the principal investigator on the first NASA grant to ever look for atmospheric techno signatures.

and the thing is, so they're different because you think it's it's, it's intelligent life.

But really, what does it matter?

Intelligent life.

Not intelligent life.

It's just all life changing its planet.

And that's the important part.

it's like light pollution and, you know, in deep space, I mean, like, that would be, you know, actually, City Lights, you know, Thomas Beatty did a great paper that showed that actually City lights, if you're a you know, if you're if your cities are big enough, you would actually be able to detect artificial illumination on a planet.

Okay.

So that's the techno picture, Alex.

Great question, but great question, great question.

And when we talk signatures, we're talking about planets that may have life and are showing you somehow.

So biology, technology, whatever the case may be, one of the reasons, that Adam Frank and his colleagues are going to look at this new claim with a lot of skepticism.

Right out of the gate is there's a lot of history of optimistic claims or big claims or maybe claims that end up being, you know, there was a bug on the on the lens of the camera.

And that was the story almost ten years ago with Tabby's star.

Tabitha Boyajian was a postdoc at Yale, and her team was looking at the light, coming from many different stars.

And this one, I think, was 1200 light years away, if I remember.

I'm not sure, something like that.

So not again in the universe.

Still close, still very close.

1200 light years is still the neighborhood.

Yeah, like maybe it's across the street, but what what they saw was the light would dim around the star in big ways.

So you'd get light, and then all of a sudden, for X amount of time, it would 80% of the light would be gone.

So it's like something is blocking the light.

But it it's consistently doing that at intervals is whatever's blocking the light rotating around this star, which is what made people think, oh my gosh, we found a Dyson sphere, which is like this idea that a super technological civilization more than words with friends and Wordle, but like super technological that wants to travel from star to star or planet to planet would need to harvest the energy of its main star.

And so you build this big, big array of technology around this thing, and it, and it sucks the energy out of the star.

That's very technological.

Correct term.

And, and it rotates around people like, well, that's it.

Look, it's like it's this Dyson sphere.

And that's why the light is dimming.

And as I recall, it turned out to be space dust.

Space dust.

But, you know, again, this was that was really a, Tabitha star.

A brilliant star was, was a real milestone because what happened is they saw this, you know, and it was like it was just didn't make sense.

You were getting actually was a regular, like blip.

It would go out and then people would go out again.

And then in a way that it definitely was unlike any it wasn't a planet for sure, which is very regular, you know, orbits very regularly.

And what happened was, is that they they wrote a paper on it and, you know, they said, what could this be?

And they made a long list of astronomical things.

And at the end they said, well, it could be a techno signature, you know, and no, you know, like, well, okay.

Sure.

Like nobody wants it like that's crazy.

You can't put that in the paper.

You know, that's nuts.

No one's allowed to say that.

It really broke the taboo about talking about because they didn't say we think it's this.

No, no, they they said in the world of possibilities.

Yep.

On that list.

Yeah.

If this thing, if a if a Dyson sphere exists and even if it's like a decayed shell of it and a civilization swarm, they call it a day.

Dyson swarm.

Lots of.

Yeah, lots of giant orbiting.

Yeah.

So if a Dyson swarm exists, it might manifest like this.

Right.

And so we're going to put this on the list of possibilities.

The media picks it up like whoa, it's aliens I know everywhere.

The alien megastructures I sure did.

Yeah I did, I did that, and, you know, and then science did its job.

Yeah.

And so it was again, it was a buzzkill, but it was really interesting to watch that process.

That's why I really want people like it's what we're talking here is like 20 or 30 years like before.

We're really at a point where we can in 30 years or so, like, so the next what's going to replace the the idea is the habitable worlds Observatory, the this is going to be a giant telescope whose main job who's designed like from optimized to find life on other planets.

So that's probably 20 or 30 years away, though we have to say I'm a little bit afraid that we're never going to build it.

The Chinese are going to build it, but that's another story.

Let's get back to that in sense.

Yeah, because somebody's going to build it, somebody's builder, somebody's going to build it.

I'm we have so many calls and emails, Adam, that I'm like overwhelmed now.

So so I don't want to interrupt, you know, interrupt me.

I just want to get back to at the end because a whole other conversation with Adam is coming in the weeks to come, right about where science is right now.

I'm sorry.

Where is it again?

okay.

Okay, we'll get back to that.

My mike in Rochester.

Hi, Mike.

Go ahead.

Hi.

How are you?

Very good.

I don't want to throw a wet blanket on this discussion or anything because it's very exciting to me, but I think, most people have to.

It'd be nice if people have the perspective.

It's not just how close they are in space, but in time.

I mean, our civilization is just a little blip in time, and we're seeing, you know, so everything's out of phase and you wonder, you know, you're going to catch you're going to catch a civilization that's blipping at the same time as us that, you know, adds another layer, to the difficulty anyway.

Yeah.

I'm, I know that point is on the money.

That's what Frank Drake was, was asking about that when then when Adam Frank updated the Drake equation.

It's like we're not just looking for a neighbor that's technological.

Like us right now.

It's like, has it ever existed?

Yeah, because it would be kind of hard to line it up.

Yeah, that's the thing.

No, it's a great point that you make.

It's time and again.

But that's for civilizations, right.

Because the thing is about the Earth's biosphere has been around for 3.5 billion years.

So biospheres last a long time.

We know that from our one example, techno spheres, it's anybody's guess.

Like the way we're getting now, I don't know.

But, you know, you would you literally would need techno spheres to last millions, hundreds of millions of years for there really to be a significant overlap in time.

So it's a great point.

You bring it up for techno spheres or techno signatures.

Yeah.

Thank you Mike.

I mean, when I think about the timescale just it almost breaks your brain how unlikely it would be to line up two technological civilizations in proximity enough to notice and communicate with each other in the universe, although who knows?

I mean, there's bigger things than my brain can handle in terms of the possibilities, and that's what they're working on.

So thank you, Mike.

Great stuff.

Halle and Danville on the phone next.

Hello?

Hello.

Go ahead.

Thanks for taking my call.

first I want to get out there that I'm a big supporter of WXXI in the U.S and I'm a sustainer of both.

Thank you.

And especially in these uncertain times, which is related to the science that is, as, background in science myself.

I know projects can't be started and stopped.

hitter jitter.

So that's another troubling thing about the instability of, our federal system right now.

But getting to the question I had, which is related to, Carl Sagan's book and then the movie contact, where Jodie Foster plays Ellie and magically, she drops through the sphere and she has an experience of, of kind of mentally teleporting when everyone on Earth who watches this thinks nothing happen.

So in other words, the problem of distance and time is so overwhelming.

And I'm a Star Trek Trekkie type dude, but I know it.

Sorry.

It starts going back.

you can't just overcome with some super ultra warp drive distances.

So, aren't we kind of stuck with, wondering forever about, aliens?

That's the question.

Yeah.

I mean, hell, I'm going to let Adam respond.

Although I will remind Adam Frank that on a past program, I asked you what what's one of the hardest things for you to kind of reconcile in your science brain that we may never get an answer to?

And you said it was the question of life elsewhere.

We may never, Well, yeah.

I mean, it depends on sort of whether or not they're like, let's say we just keep looking and we never find a biosignature.

Does that mean there's no life anywhere?

No, because not like we're seeing the whole universe.

Exactly.

So, you know, but what we will find, that's what I mean.

About 50 years or so after, like, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, we'll start to be able to put limits on how often they are.

Right.

Either there's life everywhere.

And again, I want people to sort of put away intelligent life.

Forget the like the, you know, the triangle shaped aliens finding a microbe, you know, or a biosphere made only of microbes would be the most significant scientific, philosophical, religious discovery in the history of humanity.

It doesn't need to be aliens that you can talk to.

Life is so weird.

It is so different from anything else in the universe that finding one other example of life in the universe would mean that that we're not alone.

We're not, we're not.

I mean by life that we're not the only we're not a one off.

We're not a cosmic accident.

That life is something that the universe does and does everywhere.

And because life creates, you have no idea how far it's gone.

Yeah.

And I think there are times where even I fall into the trap of going, well, what if it's just microbes?

No.

Microbes are awesome and do not dis microbes.

And it would just again, it's this idea that like because life is creative, it's the only true creative force in the universe like stars do.

Exactly what stars I can predict any star.

What's going to happen to it?

Not in detail, but it's overall lifetime.

You know, if you get my my standard joke, if you give me a cell and ask what's going to happen?

And then in 3 billion years, I would never say a giant, you know, rabbit that could punch you in the face.

I eat a kangaroo.

Like evolution is open ended.

It is creative.

So just finding one other place where life has formed means that it's probably happened all over the place.

And then where and what?

What is it done?

How far is it gone?

You know, thank you very much.

So let me just work as fast as I can through other questions that have come in.

Matthew on YouTube.

a couple questions from him.

Does K2 18 B orbit a giant star?

no.

It orbits a dwarf star.

It's actually orbiting an M dwarf star, which is like the most common.

It's you know, people are always like, oh, the sun, a carbon star.

It's not actually, the sun is relatively rare.

The most common kind of star is about a half the sun's mass.

And these are what we call red dwarfs.

So they're very different kinds of stars.

And the planets that orbit them also are going to have will be very different.

So yeah this is and our foot because there's so many of them.

And that's really where our focus is going to be on for the next few decades is on these m dwarf stars.

and that's some people are like, that's a bad idea, but whatever.

That's where we're going.

Matthew had wondered if K2 18 B is a super-Earth or a sub Jovian planet.

We think it's a high C. Well, it's a sub Neptune, not Jovian, because, you know, Jupiter's huge.

The there's the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and then there's the ice giants Uranus and Neptune.

And they're much smaller there, like I said, around like 17, 14 Earth masses.

So this is K2 18 B sub Neptune.

Okay.

And he's also wondering, about the James Webb Space Telescope.

He says it can look beyond the why he says the universe maybe the galaxy.

But he says, what do you think about this James Webb Space Telescope searching for the aurora on Jupiter's north pole.

Oh yeah.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah.

And how did that.

You can see the aurora.

You can see these storms, these electrical storms happening on other planets with these telescopes.

It's amazing.

Stephen writes in to say, hearing that Adam Frank likes to play video games.

I was wondering if he's ever played No Man's Sky.

I have played No Man's Sky.

I don't like it because it's a little too cartoony about.

It's.

I played for way too long.

I'm embarrassed to say how long I spent in Elite Dangerous, which is a much more in terms of just the physically realistic, galaxy.

So I.

Yes, spent hundreds of hours in L.A.

Dangerous and made it quite far.

Thank you very much.

I was a I was a bounty hunter.

I'm proud of you.

Of repute.

Thank you.

I'm proud of you.

Dallas wants to know about 700 miles of water, which is, again, what K2 18 B may have if some of the observations or the analysis is correct, he says at that depth, the water becomes ice.

Fire pressure.

Is it cold?

Is it like warm ice?

Do you think our planet's core is molten iron in a plasma state?

Does the Glasberg cycles trend mean increasing auroras?

I don't, he's losing me.

Yeah.

Losing you.

That's a lot of questions.

No, no, I understand, I can't answer them all.

Let's just focus on the the oceans.

And it is true.

700 miles is so deep that the bottom of the ocean is going to be this ice mix.

Also call Earth rates, which is a whole other.

We don't really.

I mean, that's why it's challenging to know whether planets like this could have life, because on Earth you really need, the, the, deeps, the thermal vents, the deep sea vents where, like, you know, magma is coming up through the rock.

and that provides heat and chemicals to get life on the sea bottom working at 700 miles.

It may be that that's impossible.

You can't really be in contact with the rock.

So, you know, we've spent a lot of time thinking for Technosignatures whether you could get a technological civilization in a pure ocean world, but just even whether or not you could get life on a pure ocean world is also open for you.

I literally was like, oh, it's a pure ocean world.

It's going to be like, Max, Dolphins.

Who cares?

Again, terrible way to think of it, right?

Terrible.

Well, we just don't know.

I mean, it's possible, right?

It's fine.

But that would not be a disappointment to you at all.

No, no, I would I would love Max.

Dolphins.

I mean, like like dolphins at best, you know, like it's not going to be like.

Oh well no I think by Max Dolphins.

Oh, I thought you meant like maximize.

Like, you know, like robo brains and get.

All right.

That's where I was going with Max dolphin.

Yeah.

I didn't know what you meant.

Why are you mad at Max?

Yeah, yeah, at best, that would still be amazing.

It would be amazing.

Yeah.

Patrick says, what should we think of a world where there is a Dyson sphere orbiting a planet?

Is that a new form of littering?

Yeah, there will be protests against that for sure.

Patrick.

By the way, the Dyson sphere goes around the entire star.

It's not the planet, it's you have to build.

I'm a little skeptical about Dyson Sphere.

It's about anybody, whether anybody builds them.

You know, there's we can talk about that.

But but yeah, it's the whole you have to basically chew up your entire solar system.

Every planet has to go into constructing this thing very hard to do.

big task.

Michael says.

I'm I have a question.

I'm fascinated by the mind boggling fact that we live in this vast, infinite, expanding universe.

I want to learn more about the universe.

I don't know where to begin.

Any suggestions for advice?

well, you know, there's infinite documentaries on.

I would, you know, like, go on to Prime and type in astronomy documentary.

That would be a great place.

There's so many great.

You know, I just look for things that you like.

you can also follow, Everyman's universe, soon to be appearing Maya, because, yeah, I'll be talking about a lot of this stuff, but really, there's there's I mean, you know, there's lots of books, lots of, YouTube has lots of great resources.

David Kipping I love David Kipping stuff.

There's one PBS, it's called PBS's universe.

PBS space time guy from, Cuny does it.

It's awesome.

So yeah.

All right.

Do this one in 30s or less, if you could.

Because there's one other thing I want to ask about.

My colleague Katie says when Adam says scientists are reading the spectrometer data, are they actually doing that with their own eyes, or are I models doing the reading of this now?

No, no no we have I mean it's computer's doing.

It's not I models.

I mean there may be some machine learning and such but it's not a model.

It's basically what happens is you know, the we get we get the data of the raw data from the telescope.

It goes through all kinds of, you know, computer analysis and then you and, you know, but then you actually if you do actually look at it, you actually look at like the spectrum like of is a wiggly line over here.

And then you may do more analysis of that.

But yeah, you do actually look at it and be like, oh, look, there's something right there.

Tom says he would pay for a course taught by you and me.

You can't afford it, Tom.

Very nice.

Wow.

Are we really?

Is that where we're going?

Hey, man, with the way things are going, maybe that's the way everything should be.

Yeah.

You don't want to pay.

Get see it.

I'm sorry.

Commoditize everything.

So in our last minute here, I mentioned that we are going to soon, have a couple more conversations with you.

We talked to your students in the past about what it means to be a scientist.

We're going to keep that series going and we're going to talk about the state of science research in general.

And it's a tough time.

And and I just want you in this last minute to leave with listeners something that you told me before the program, which is that it is by no means guaranteed that a society will be the science leader forever.

And there are some examples to that.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm working on a piece right now, which I hope will be in the Atlantic.

about just exactly the fact it's very difficult to become a global leader in science.

It's very easy to lose it.

And there are lots of examples.

Look, in the 1500s and 1600s, Italy was the world leader in science in 1700s.

Italy was not the world leader in science in 1900.

Germany was the world leader in science.

In 1955.

Germany was not the world leader in science.

And so, you know, a United States has built the most, successful scientific effort ever in the history of the world.

And we are definitely right now putting that on the table.

And there's other countries which are just like sitting there waiting to eat our lunch, looking at big.

They're looking at what we're doing, going like, okay, you know, come on, come on over.

So the brain drain is already beginning.

Okay.

That's an optimistic note.

I'm sorry.

That's what's happening.

Yeah.

That's like, you know, I'm.

Yeah, I'm very I'm kind of astonished, like, why are you breaking something that has led to un, you know, incredible amounts of prosperity and security, like, why are you breaking it like, you know, listen, if you want to sign up for Adam's forthcoming newsletter, which starts maybe sometime next month, the Everyman's universe newsletter.

How do people find that?

probably by going to either my website.

You know, Adam Frank science.com, and they'll be on.

You can sign up for it there because you got to sign up for it.

Good luck with that.

Have fun with it.

Thank you and come back soon I absolutely will.

We always appreciate it.

Adam is the author of many books, The Little Book of Aliens, among them, he is, the Helen F and Fred H. Gowan professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester.

More connections coming up in just a moment.

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