Skip to playerSkip to main content
TV Hub
  • 2 days ago

Category

📺
TV
Transcript
00:00The End
00:30We come from a blue planet light years away
00:44Where everything multiplies at an amazing rate
00:48Out here in the universe buying real estate
00:52Hope we haven't got here too late
00:55We're humans from Earth
00:58We're humans from Earth
01:02You have nothing at all to fear
01:06I think we're gonna like it here
01:08What have you got over there?
01:12We've got something.
01:14It's quite a strong peak.
01:17The signal came shortly after 2 a.m.
01:22There's a Margaret spike there.
01:25Oh, that does look more interesting.
01:28It was just what astronomer David Blair had been searching for.
01:32The signal looked exactly like a message from intelligent life in outer space.
01:37By moving the dish, they pinpointed the signal's origin to a star 26 light years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus.
01:45But before the signal could be verified, it stopped of its own accord.
01:51It never came again.
01:53Is there anyone else out there?
01:57Do we share the universe with other creatures who can look up and wonder and think about, are we here?
02:03Are we unique?
02:05Are we something utterly special in the universe?
02:08Or are we an example of many, many civilizations that have emerged, many, many different life forms?
02:15Wouldn't it be a great adventure to be able to contact those creatures and to learn of their history and ways of life?
02:23500 years after Columbus discovered the new world, 400 years after Copernicus proved the Earth was not the center of the universe,
02:50not the center of the universe and a hundred years since darwin revealed the secrets of evolution
02:58america's space agency nasa has embarked on its most ambitious mission yet a 10-year quest
03:05that could solve the biggest unanswered question of our age are we alone
03:20are we ready to start skyframe the name of the game is seti the search for extraterrestrial
03:34intelligence with a simultaneous launch in california and puerto rico nasa's bold new
03:42mission has catapulted humanity to the threshold of a discovery that if made will shake our sense
03:49of identity more profoundly than any discovery to date
03:56pull one car at the heart of the search is a symbol of our technological sophistication
04:05computer microchips seti engines that can do the trillions of daily calculations the search requires
04:12with powerful portable computers coupled to telescopes at the four corners of planet earth
04:21nasa's marriage of science and silicon will interrogate the stars in the first systematic
04:27effort to eavesdrop on the voices of the heavens i think uh trying to determine if there's other life
04:34in the galaxy is a quest it's a quest humankind has been on since we first looked at the sky and saw
04:40stars and wondered and speculated now we're just developing some tools in the last few decades
04:45to help us carry out that search in a scientific way to see if we can get answers nobody knows how
04:50long it will take for us to learn what is out there
04:53i don't know whether it's going to be me or my granddaughter or my great-granddaughter that succeeds
05:02their generation in this search it really may take a very long time people that work on this project
05:10comprehend how vast the search that we're trying to do is and how much more we're doing that has ever
05:18been possible in the past but yet how much more there might be to do we've reached this fascinating
05:26point in our own evolution where the scientific theory says that there is indeed likely to be life
05:33everywhere in the universe and the engineering theory says now we have reached a time where we know how
05:41to talk to each other across the distances between the stars
05:44but this great attempt at its origins at a time when we had difficulty even communicating amongst
05:52ourselves i think it began in 1942 when we were at war and all the anti-aircraft radars along the
06:02south coast were blotted out by some strange signals which initially were thought to be some
06:07secret weapon some jamming device but it turned out afterwards that it was radio waves coming from the sun
06:13and the exciting thing was that in addition to the sun it was very soon discovered that there were
06:18other exciting objects in the sky they were thought then to be radio stars they were an absolute mystery
06:23but there are other places in the sky where there were localized small sources small angular sized sources
06:28emitting natural radio waves which reached the earth these radio waves were part of the natural
06:37emissions of the universe like light waves they ride the vacuum of space
06:44all these radiations travel at the same speed but radio waves are further down the dial
06:50to catch these elusive cosmic travelers you need a giant net a metal dish called a radio telescope
06:57i sat down one day and calculated just how far could this new telescope detect the strongest signals
07:07we humans were radiating from the earth the answer came out interstellar distances the distances to the
07:13nearest stars and what this said was that we for the first time on earth had the ability to detect
07:20civilizations no more sophisticated than ourselves at the distances which separate the stars and so
07:27it became reasonable to search because for all we knew almost every star was populated
07:40so back in the 1960s not only the ideas of life in the universe but also even ideas about the nature of the planets
07:58were considered not very reputable subjects in science and this is a result of a history that had
08:05occurred long before the stories that there were canals on mars and life on mars all of which turned
08:11out to be overblown and and in fact very bad science as a result people were very skeptical of this subject
08:20and very few in the scientific community thought that we should devote significant resources to it
08:26instead the scientific community was spending serious money on space exploration
08:40one by one the planets gave up their secrets
08:48now we know that they were born in a swirling disk of gas and dust around the early sun
08:52we see similar disks around young stars today perhaps even forming similar planets in similar orbits
09:02with similar chemistries
09:07and if planet earth is a relatively ordinary planet orbiting just one of the billions of stars that make
09:12up our galaxy then the number of similar planets orbiting similar stars will be extraordinary especially when
09:21ours is only one of at least a hundred billion galaxies that our telescopes can see
09:28all we know is that we look out into our own galaxy you see something like
09:32by sampling we haven't seen them all but we've sampled enough to know three or four hundred million
09:38stars whose history and nature is like our sun that means they're long lasting they're stable they have
09:44the right temperatures they don't explode they don't do anything wrong they are all possible
09:50friendly homes for planets sun warmed planets which can develop life that's all we can say
09:56if there are 400 million it's as always seemed to be an absurdity that none of them would be suns except
10:01our own and that but we can't say that's true not at all the logical possibility is there
10:06but the certainty is far from it that's where we make the search
10:08with this logical possibility in mind we sent cosmic greetings cards towards the stars in the 1970s
10:21the pioneer and voyager space probes carried messages telling of our existence on planet earth
10:27just in case any alien civilizations might find them in the far distant future
10:3320 years on and only now are they leaving the solar system so unless we can find a way of traveling
10:42close to the speed of light we're never likely to shake hands or tentacles with our galactic neighbors
10:49ã‚£ never the less some people believe they're all ready here
10:57i wish that they'd been there a little longer that i could communicate with them and just to find
11:11out what it's all about. It just passed over the top of us and the whole area was
11:17just lit up for five or ten seconds.
11:24Although UFOs have been whizzing about in the popular press for 40 years, no
11:29pieces of broken saucer have yet turned up. Scientists still have a hard time
11:35taking them seriously, so do insurance companies.
11:47Last year, NRMA paid an incredible 99.3% of all the car insurance claims we received.
11:57The claims we didn't pay, you wouldn't believe.
12:05So, could extraterrestrials visit us from other stars? Or are they grounded in their solar systems,
12:14victims of limited lifespans and the laws of physics, like us?
12:18If we were to travel at our present spaceship velocities, it would take us thousands of
12:27years to get to the nearest star, something in the order of 40,000 years. Whereas if we
12:32tried to accelerate the process so that we could get there and back in a human lifetime,
12:36then the cost of the energy required goes up astronomically. In fact, we would find ourselves
12:42for a single trip to the nearest neighbor, the star next door, you might say, spending more
12:51than a thousand years of world energy consumption for that one measly little trip.
13:04Forget warp speed. Forget hyperdrive. It seems we could never afford the petrol costs to keep feeding the energy-hungry engines,
13:13even if we did discover a fantastic new propulsion source.
13:18What we've assumed is that there is no sort of super science, that you can't get here by UFOs and things like that.
13:27The only obvious thing seems to be to communicate by radio broadcasting.
13:34And the other assumption then is that they want to find out that they are wanting to explore the galaxy.
13:44And the only way to explore the galaxy is by sending information.
13:48When you're sending or receiving interstellar messages, it pays to think big.
14:06The bigger your radio, the further you can send.
14:11The bigger the web you spin, the more you can catch.
14:15This is Star Station Earth, the world's largest radio telescope, suspended by steel cables over a collapsed limestone bowl near Arecibo in Puerto Rico.
14:34Its vast size, 1,000 feet across, makes it our prime communications link with the stars, now and in the future.
14:45Here in 1974, the first deliberate broadcast from Earth was made.
14:54A three minute long stream of binary information, beamed to M13, a cluster of a million stars in the constellation of Hercules.
15:04Decoded by an intelligent alien, the signal would form a picture like this, giving basic information about where and from whom the message came.
15:17It was a symbolic rather than a serious attempt.
15:27Even at the speed of light, the message will take 25,000 years to reach its destination.
15:32If anyone's home at the time, our phones won't ring in reply for 50,000 years.
15:40The lesson is clear.
15:42If you are impatient, you should listen rather than send.
15:46It is much easier to receive than to send when it comes to radio.
15:53The number of people who have receivers to look at this program, video receivers, is very large compared to the number of transmitters.
15:59That's all you have to see.
16:00Not many people want to build video transmitters in their homes, but everybody wants to have a video receiver.
16:05There's no question the same thing applies in the stars too.
16:08It is much, I won't say it's more blessed, but it's much cheaper to receive than it is to send.
16:15So who's broadcasting?
16:18Probably advanced civilizations looking for us.
16:22Or those careless with their transmissions.
16:25Or those using interplanetary radar.
16:28Perhaps civilizations that have given up waiting for a message and decided to send.
16:33And if we were to receive, would we recognize the message?
16:43Imagine you had been marooned on a desert island since birth, with no contact with the outside world.
16:52One day, a message in a bottle washes up on the beach.
16:56Would you notice the message inside?
16:59Would you even realize what the bottle was?
17:03At least we think we'd recognize a cosmic message in a bottle.
17:09It would be a radio transmission so alien that it had to be artificial.
17:15A narrow pinprick standing out against the general wash of naturally occurring radio waves.
17:20But with trillions of stars to choose from, finding an extraterrestrial signal is a needle in the haystack problem of cosmological proportions.
17:32We have very little in common with those creatures, whoever they are.
17:33But one thing we do have in common, that's the galaxy.
17:46We live in the same galaxy.
17:47Or if it's a neighboring galaxy, we live in a galaxy not too unlike it.
17:49And the galaxy has a physical nature and a structure and a set of motions and a kind of contamination in space, whatever it may be.
17:57And that's what determines the nature of the signal.
17:59When these creatures look up at night, their skies will be lit by stars.
18:08They'll hear the same whispers of the radio universe.
18:11We don't use radio waves because that's our best technology.
18:20And we don't expect them, a more advanced technology, to use radio waves because it's their best technology.
18:26We use radio waves because nature gives us a quiet window at those frequencies.
18:31And if you're talking about sending or receiving signals over these vast interstellar distances, the signals are bound to be weak.
18:42Hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant atom in the universe.
18:47An atom that drifts throughout the heavens, vibrating quietly at a natural frequency of 1420 megahertz.
18:54This is a radio signature as unique as a particular color of light.
19:03In 1959, Philip Morrison proposed that this was the obvious frequency that they would choose.
19:10Their pure alien solo, cutting clearly through the swirling song of hydrogen.
19:14Now the hunt could begin.
19:25With this equipment at Green Bank, West Virginia, Frank Drake began Project OSMA, the world's first radio setty search.
19:35Drake probed the hydrogen frequencies of two nearby sun-like stars.
19:39Though unsuccessful, OSMA was the first of some 60 independent searches around the globe.
19:48A year after the movie E.T. caught the public's imagination, Harvard professor Paul Horowitz was casting a much wider net in a search for a real E.T.
20:01Supported by a donation from Steven Spielberg, Project META pushed silicon technology to its 1983 limit.
20:12It could cover eight million channels simultaneously.
20:16This is the world's biggest garbage can and it's getting very full with signals that are clearly of the wrong kind.
20:23On the other hand, you have to be aware that by looking for a very specific kind of signal, by positing a particular scenario, we're insensitive to other kinds of signals that these extraterrestrials may be sending.
20:36You know, maybe they're slightly nuts and they're not sending the kind of signal that we think they should.
20:40No one was expecting the strange signals that arrived in Cambridge in 1967.
20:52Well, here's some of the signals we picked up.
20:57On the bottom track here, you can see those pulses coming in.
21:01And on the top track, there's time marks, one second intervals.
21:04And so you see, you've got these very regular pulses coming at intervals of about a one and a third seconds.
21:10I mean, it couldn't have been locally generated interference from a spacecraft or something of that kind.
21:14It had to be out there well beyond the solar system.
21:15And at that time, I thought, well, what on earth could it be?
21:18There's no natural object which emits pulses like this.
21:22The only other thing is extraterrestrial intelligence.
21:25And for a while, I really thought that was the simplest explanation.
21:29Although it was a kind of dreamlike feeling that are we picking up aliens?
21:34But nevertheless, it's possible.
21:36And I had to face that possibility.
21:41What Tony Hewish had found was decidedly strange.
21:45But not alien.
21:47Deeper analysis showed it was coming not from a planet, but from a pulsar.
21:52A collapsed star spinning once every second and beaming radiation like a lighthouse.
22:08But SETI researchers have had close encounters.
22:11Big Ear, just a short drive from Columbus, Ohio, in the middle of a golf course.
22:19Home of the world's longest running alien hunt.
22:22It was here in 1977 that one of the most inexplicable signals was received.
22:36It was short and sweet, buried deep in the constant gush of numbers and letters that the Ohio astronomers used to rank the intensity of incoming radio noise.
22:52Each column represents the output from one narrowband receiver.
22:58And if it's just a one or two or three, it's not very exciting.
23:02Well, this signal, as it passed through our antenna, mapped out 6EQUJ5.
23:06Now that U was a stupendously strong signal, stronger than anything we've ever seen before.
23:13And furthermore, it mapped out the antenna pattern perfectly.
23:17So we know it was coming from a long distance away.
23:20Unfortunately, it was only there once.
23:22We saw it for about a minute.
23:24In fact, it turned off while we were watching it.
23:26And we went back there hundreds of times later to look for it, and it was never there.
23:32The person here who was looking at it at the time got so excited that he wrote,
23:37wow, exclamation mark on the computer printout, and hence that name has stuck.
23:41And for those one and a half tantalizing hours in 1990,
23:46it seemed David Blair really might have made first contact.
23:50We saw a small signal, but when we first saw it, it wasn't particularly interesting.
23:58It was interesting enough to be worth going back and having a second look.
24:02When we had a second look, it was still there.
24:04We had a look at it a third time with a much longer integration timer.
24:09It was still there.
24:11I'm inclined to believe that it was a computer problem or something of that sort,
24:15but you never know. There could have been a beacon there that just happened to be on at that time.
24:22Now, twice in my life, I have thought I picked up an unambiguous signal.
24:27And I can tell you, you feel an emotion which can't be described.
24:31It's an entirely new emotion, a motion that combines discovery, ecstasy, elation, all combined.
24:40So I've actually felt the emotion temporarily, unfortunately.
24:46And I can assure you that when the real discovery comes,
24:50not only myself, but many of the people in the world will feel that very special emotion.
24:55Shape and intentions of alien creatures has blossomed with the arrival of feature films and TV.
25:08It's been sort of comforting to see so many upright, two-legged creatures with hands and forward-facing eyes,
25:23speaking perfect English.
25:25Although we know your language, our own methods of communication are mental rather than verbal.
25:30But the appearance of most has been guided by the limitations of latex and the inflexibility of budgets,
25:39rather than by the more powerful, selective forces of evolution.
25:43We have come to visit you in peace and with good will.
25:54Like us, the shape and form of aliens would be governed by the nature of their home planet.
26:01Their evolution would reflect its evolution.
26:05If they walked, they'd probably have limbs and eyes and nervous systems.
26:13But what sort of creature would send us a message?
26:17I think it would be very tempting to think that sitting behind those signals was a creature very like ourselves.
26:25And I think that's just not so at all.
26:28I think that all the accidents, all the different mutations, all the different things that happened with continental drift,
26:35separating populations, keeping them together, all the simple accidents during life on Earth.
26:43All these things would have to happen exactly the same way to make us, and it could not happen.
26:52Even if we reran evolution on this planet, it wouldn't happen the same again.
27:01The particular way life started on Earth still eludes us.
27:06We know it began nearly four billion years ago.
27:10And we know it happened very quickly.
27:15Soon after meteorites stopped bombarding the crusty surface,
27:19micro-organisms appeared in the warm waters of the recently cooled planet.
27:24How could such a biochemical miracle take place?
27:28I took the glass apparatus, filled it up with reduced gases that were thought to be present on the primitive Earth,
27:41boiled the water, turned on the spark, and came back the next morning, and it had turned a yellow-red color.
27:50The solution looked this sort of yellow. It turned brown by the end of the week.
27:56This contained the polymer and the amino acids that were formed in the spark.
28:02With this one simple experiment in 1953, simulating the atmosphere and powerful lightning of the early Earth,
28:13Stanley Miller formed a soup of amino acids, the chemical building blocks of life.
28:19I can believe that all the basic building blocks can be rather readily made.
28:28And in fact, the basic building block of sugar is simply made out of the commonest molecules in the universe.
28:35So all that, that's fine. But the real problem of life is it's ordering how the building blocks are put together.
28:41They're put together into an exceedingly intricate structure, fantastically intricate structure.
28:50Putting these building blocks together in a short space of time is remarkable.
28:56Fred Hoyle believes the only way life arose on Earth is if it came from elsewhere.
29:02If it fell to Earth like a seed from an asteroid or a passing comet.
29:06This may not be as far-fetched as it seems.
29:14It's a gold mine, this little chunk of meteorite which fell on Australia last year.
29:20For the past six months they've been taking it apart and have discovered it contains amino acids, the building blocks of life,
29:28and found them in combinations that seem to prove they were there before this tiny piece of asteroid hit the Earth.
29:34Perhaps life on Earth was the most impossible fluke, never to be repeated in the infinity of space.
29:43But on the balance of evidence, one conclusion emerges.
29:48It will happen elsewhere consistent with environments.
29:53It seems that if it's rapid on the Earth it should be rapid wherever the conditions are the same.
29:58Conditions could have been the same on other planets billions of years before the birth of the Earth,
30:06which is a relative latecomer to the cosmic scene.
30:09The universe could be teeming with life, far more advanced than our own.
30:13Regardless of the head start life might have got elsewhere, for the first time on Earth, there is a technological intelligence reaching for the stars.
30:26For the first time ever we have assembled virtually all the space multi-amisinin
30:54We have assembled virtually all the space professionals from the Earth's space-faring
30:59nations.
31:04Engineering and science have taken us into the frontiers of space, linking us to life
31:09amongst the stars calls for a similar effort.
31:131992 was International Space Year.
31:18It also became the year that NASA launched its massive new search for extraterrestrial
31:23intelligence.
31:26In the first few minutes of our search, we will have covered more astronomical territory
31:33than all 60 previous searches over the past 30 years combined.
31:38So it's millions of times more powerful.
31:44In its hunt for an alien message, this silicon machinery will sift automatically through the
31:50entire 10 billion channels of the microwave window.
31:55Mostly, it will hear the random crackle of the universe, or the annoying chatter of earthly
32:01radio interference.
32:02But what it's programmed to pick out is that one telltale blip of a deliberate signal.
32:16Working out how to find an invisible signal in a sea of noise was the perfect challenge
32:21of different colours.
32:22Blind since birth, his task was to guide the computers to that one message floating in an overwhelming
32:29tide of data.
32:32The software and hardware that I designed is looking for something that is not random noise.
32:40The way you can imagine this is to have an analogy between our radio listening and reading a lot.
32:50The amount that you would read is about one Encyclopedia Britannica per second.
32:55Now, you know, not one crummy volume, but the whole thing.
32:58And you read that every second.
33:00And it's filled with random letters, typically, which are the star noise.
33:04And what you're looking for is that one sentence that says, hi there, we're the extraterrestrial
33:11guys.
33:28This is a NASA mission with a difference.
33:33All done from Earth, but with equipment which can be moved worldwide.
33:40Armed with advanced alien receivers, and a conviction that life is widespread, planet Earth's search
33:47for extraterrestrial intelligence is all systems go.
34:09First destination for the MOBA research facility is the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico and the
34:14Arecibo Observatory.
34:22It's at Arecibo that one half of NASA's new two-part initiative began on October 12, 1992.
34:31This is where the targeted search will home in on stars like the sun, which may have planets
34:37like the Earth.
34:40I think one and two are cable one.
34:45That's what I said.
34:46Three and four.
34:47Three and four are cable two.
34:48That's what I just said.
34:49Here we go.
34:50Red.
34:51Green.
34:52Blue.
34:53And it's dark.
34:54Good.
34:55We have a virtual terminal.
34:56Route file system is good.
34:57FS clean.
34:58Clean.
34:59We're coming up.
35:00All right.
35:01This is good.
35:02From this radio telescope, the largest and most sensitive in the world, those stars nearest
35:11the Earth will be precisely targeted and painstakingly interrogated for broadcasts or for signals leaking
35:19from their planets.
35:21But this targeted approach will only be able to eavesdrop on about 1,000 stars this closely.
35:34To reach beyond those 1,000 stars, NASA is employing a second strategy, an all-sky survey.
35:42This is looking out for stronger signals or deliberate beacons coming from the myriad
35:47stars further away.
35:50Initial deployment is at the Goldstone Deep Space Tracking Facility in the Mojave Desert.
35:56The NASA All-Sky Survey will systematically search the entire sky, both in northern and southern
36:02hemispheres, and sort of make a mosaic of the sky at different frequency bands, searching over tens
36:10of millions of frequencies every second.
36:13Goldstone and Arecibo are only the beginning.
36:21Before the search is out, radio telescopes around the globe will have tried to pluck a
36:26mystery signal from the stars.
36:30We want to go to 8429.6 MHz.
36:35The All-Sky Survey alone will consume over six years of continuous telescope operating
36:41time, a point not lost on critics of the NASA-SETI program, who see waiting for a call from ET
36:48as a frivolous waste of resources.
36:51Right now we're expending something in the order of $10 million a year, and that's going
36:55into salaries.
36:56That's going into developing technology.
36:58It's going into developing educational tools, and it's going into doing very good science.
37:03And I believe what we're doing with that money is investing it in our future.
37:07I think that we are developing future engineers.
37:09We're developing awareness of humankind.
37:13And we're learning something about, we're gaining perspective about what we as human beings, what
37:18is life, what is the role of life in the galaxy in particular, what is our role as human life,
37:23what is our future.
37:24And I think that's what we're studying.
37:28And at some time between now and the year 2001, NASA's scientific odyssey will have answered
37:35these questions.
37:36And we're learning something about how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how and how
38:06So what if we do receive a message?
38:21To begin with, we'll know very little about it.
38:22If we receive it, we will not understand what we're getting.
38:25But we'll have an unmistakable signal, full of structure, full of challenge.
38:29The best people will try to decode it.
38:31And that's easy to do because those who have constructed it will have made it easy to decode.
38:36Otherwise, no point.
38:38This is, as I've tried to say, this is anti-cryptography.
38:41I want to make a message which you who have never got in touch with any symbols of mine,
38:45no key, no clue, nevertheless, you'll be able to read it.
38:49It means I have to fill it full of clues and unmistakable, clever devices to make it readable.
38:53And I think they will have done that.
38:55But it will still take a long time to collect enough message so we can decode it.
38:59It's a gigantic thing we're talking about, getting into a civilization greater than our own,
39:03very surely, older, more elaborate, and so on,
39:06and trying to reach it on one single thin channel of radio
39:10in which we have nothing in common with those people except this radio channel.
39:14Reports are coming in from all over the empire, from all over the world.
39:18The government has not yet issued any statement, but there seems to be no question.
39:21Whatever it is, it's something real.
39:23You'll know. We'll tell you. We'll tell everybody.
39:26And we'll make the data available to anyone who wants to analyze it
39:30because it's really a fundamental principle of this project
39:34that any signal is the property of all humankind.
39:37What'll happen? Short term. Lots of excitement. Incredible excitement.
39:41The greatest news story ever.
39:43The greatest event in the history of mankind.
39:46It'll be on every newspaper, every magazine, everyone's tongue.
39:51The stock market will either go up a lot or go down a lot.
39:54I don't even know which, but it'll be something dramatic.
39:56Every religion on earth will have to scramble to rationalize its previous belief
40:01with something which is now a fact and which was previously speculation.
40:04Whether this becomes the day the earth stands still
40:16or the day it goes into a flat spin
40:19will depend on how well we are prepared to deal with it.
40:24With this in mind, astronomers have prepared a procedure to follow,
40:28a declaration of principles,
40:31which, among other things, calls for the notification
40:34of the United Nations.
40:38After the initial bombshell,
40:40there comes this period in which it recedes into the back pages,
40:42but at the same time it's soaking into people's consciousness.
40:45You can't do anything after that
40:48without somehow being aware that there's those folks up there.
40:51You can't make major decisions about resources on earth,
40:55about fighting wars, about nuclear weapons,
40:58without thinking, you know, we're in charge of this planet,
41:01but we're not the only life.
41:02There's those guys up there, and what about them?
41:06What about them?
41:08They're certainly smart,
41:10but are they peaceful or aggressive?
41:14Should we answer back?
41:15Well, I would respond immediately if I got a signal,
41:22but I'm not the only one whose judgment will be called upon.
41:26I think the problem, the question of responding
41:29will probably have to be argued out interminably,
41:32and will be.
41:34Oh, yes, I think you've got to take the risk.
41:37Humans have always lived dangerously,
41:38and if that happened, it would be a great shot,
41:40and people should have a go at it.
41:42I think I would trust any random form of life
41:46more than I'd trust humans.
41:47You certainly want to wait until you've understood the contents of their message,
41:52and you have something to say back to them.
41:54You just don't go transmitting because you want to shoot your mouth off.
41:58You'll feel really silly about the things you told them,
42:00and even sillier about the things you ask them,
42:03if you haven't gone to the trouble to read your mail first.
42:06But there are a few very eminent scientists
42:15who believe we shouldn't be searching for this interstellar mail.
42:19That contact with a greatly advanced civilization
42:22would be more than human society could cope with.
42:30Some fear more serious implications.
42:33When the first pulsar signals were picked up at Cambridge,
42:37the British astronomer royal, Sir Martin Ryle,
42:40became most concerned.
42:43Well, Martin Ryle was head of the group,
42:45and one of his ideas was that
42:48if my observations should confirm
42:50that it probably was extraterrestrial intelligence,
42:54then we should perhaps forget we'd ever made the measurements
42:57and throw it all away,
42:59because it's really a dangerous situation.
43:02I mean, here we are, a fairly primitive civilization.
43:05If we let the aliens know that we're here
43:08by sending a signal back in some kind,
43:11then, of course, it might be that those aliens
43:13are just looking for this
43:14because they want a relatively uninhabited planet to move into.
43:18And in the history, at least, of our own planet,
43:20primitive peoples being discovered by more advanced ones
43:23usually have a bad time.
43:25And I think Martin Ryle imagined
43:27that perhaps that would happen to us.
43:29It's not nice to be invaded by aliens.
43:31It happened when the Spanish and French
43:50and British colonized North America.
43:53It happened when the British colonized Australia.
43:58It happened when the Spanish and Portuguese
44:00colonized South America.
44:02If any intelligent beings in outer space
44:05ever got these messages,
44:07they would come here and do to us
44:09what the Spanish conquistadors did to Atahualpa,
44:13the Inca emperor,
44:14when Atahualpa told the Spaniards,
44:16there's gold in Cuzco,
44:17and here's how you get to Cuzco,
44:18and here's some guides for the journey.
44:20It was suicidal on the part of Atahualpa.
44:23It's also suicidal on the part of the radio astronomers.
44:27Mr. Chambers, don't get on that ship!
44:30The rest of the book,
44:31to serve men,
44:32it's a cookbook!
44:34People used to feel that the great problem
44:43was being attacked, so to speak,
44:44destroyed or eaten by these beings.
44:46That, I think, is a rather short-sighted point of view
44:48because the physical act of mounting such an expedition,
44:54it's not like attacking across the English Channel
44:56or in the Persian Gulf.
44:57It's far, far more difficult than that.
45:05But if there is the slightest danger,
45:08why take the risk?
45:11We will learn facts of science and technology,
45:14which would otherwise take perhaps hundreds of years
45:16to find by our present approaches.
45:18For example,
45:19is there a practical, beneficial way
45:23to generate energy through controlled nuclear fusion?
45:27At the present time,
45:28we are putting enormous resources into this project
45:30with very little results.
45:32How do you cope with an ever-increasing population?
45:35How do you deal with environmental problems?
45:38How did you manage to solve
45:41what seemed to us insoluble problems
45:43of your technological infancy
45:45to manage to live and thrive
45:49and maintain a technology for a long time?
45:52Because, in fact, unless that happens as the norm,
45:55we won't detect anyone out there.
45:56If technological civilizations arise
45:59and use that technology to destroy themselves
46:02in a short period of time,
46:03there's no one there for us to hear.
46:06Conversely, if we hear someone,
46:07we know they've been around for a long time.
46:10And so my question would be,
46:11how'd you do it?
46:12If we're something very special,
46:14then we're at quite a different threshold,
46:16at a threshold where we have to realize
46:18that our planet is something
46:20that we've got to nurture
46:21as the most special thing,
46:23one of the most special things in the universe.
46:25And either way,
46:27I think SETI changes our way of thinking
46:29and changes it enormously.
46:31In the infinity of space,
46:39could this delicate blue planet
46:41be the only lonely island
46:43waiting for a bottle to wash up on its shores?
46:46Or is it one of thousands?
46:49Millions?
46:49Is it already bathed in faint voices
46:53from distant worlds?
46:55Or the last desperate warnings
46:57from long-dead civilizations
46:59lost amongst the stars?
47:05Like it or not,
47:07searching for extraterrestrials
47:09has become a serious scientific endeavor.
47:12It may be foolish.
47:14It may be unsuccessful.
47:15Other civilizations may have learned
47:18that it makes more sense
47:20to keep tight-lipped
47:21in a dangerous cosmos.
47:24But not so humans from Earth.
47:27We've already made ourselves
47:29brilliantly conspicuous.
47:33You should remember
47:34that we have been transmitting
47:36radio signals from this planet
47:38in their untold millions every day
47:42for the last 40, 50, 60 years
47:45with increasing strength
47:47and that going out from the Earth
47:49in an ever-expanding sphere
47:51are all the powerful transmissions
47:55of the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.
47:58Those have already passed the nearby stars
48:00and if there are civilizations out there
48:03they will already have discovered us.
48:09What a long-term gadgets for you to see
48:12Here's a crazy little thing we call TV
48:16Do you have electricity?
48:20We're humans from Earth
48:23We're humans from Earth
48:27Next week, a mission to Mars
48:30probes the mysteries of the Red Planet.
48:32That's on Monday at 5.
48:34Next today, two mysterious abductors
48:37probe the memory of Sinclair.
48:39Will humans and aliens ever live in peace?
48:41Babylon 5 is in a few minutes.
48:43You see here to manifest destiny through
48:47Ain't nothing we can't get used to
48:51No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
Be the first to comment
Add your comment