Gilster offers a sobering look at the Fermi Paradox by shifting the focus from loud signals to the quiet possibility of passive observation. It is a brilliant exercise in intellectual humility that highlights the limits of our current detection methods.
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Alien Probes, the Fermi Paradox, and What We’re Missing with Paul GilsterAdded:
You have fallen into event horizon with John Michael Godier.
In today's episode, John is joined by Paul Gilster.
Paul Gillster is a full-time writer who focuses on space technology and its implications.
He was one of the founders of the Tao Zero Foundation which grew out of work begun in NASA's breakthrough propulsion physics program in support of research into advanced propulsion concepts for interstellar missions. He now serves as a board member for the interstellar research group. He is the author of seven books including Digital Literacy and Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning for Interstellar Flight, a study of technologies that may one day make it possible to send a probe to the nearest star. He tracks ongoing developments in interstellar research from propulsion to exoplanet studies on his Centauri Dreams website. In the past years, he has contributed to numerous technology and business publications, been an active columnist in a variety of magazines and newspapers, and has published essays, features stories, reviews, and fiction in both in and out of the astronautics field. He is a graduate of Grenell College who specialized in medieval English literature, primarily Anglo-Saxon.
during his six years of graduate work at UNCC Chapel Hill before going into commercial aviation and eventually writing.
>> Paul Gilster, welcome to the program.
>> Thank you, John. What a pleasure to be here. Uh thank you so much for having me >> and it's a pleasure on my end as well because I have been an avid reader of Centauri Dreams and and the book from quite quite some time ago now for many many years. It's it is the hub. It is the hub for people that are interested in uh the future in space exploration.
>> Thank you so much.
>> I'm curious, how did you get into this originally?
>> You know, the interest in Starfleet goes back to being a young kid in St. Louis, Missouri. Uh and one day picking up a copy of Paul Anderson's novel, The Enemy Stars. And I look at the back of the, you know, look at the back cover to see what's, you know, what's the synopsis of the book? and so on. And they're talking about sending a a starship in the direction of the general direction of the Southern Cross. And I'm thinking, whoa. You know, all the science fiction books I was reading as a kid were all about going to Mars and stuff. But now, wait a minute. Now we're talking another star. And that just really grabbed me.
You know, that whole notion. Read the book, read a lot of uh science fiction involving travel to very distant destinations. And that was always been in the background of my interests of you know as I was going along got involved in a lot of other things. But uh come the year 2000 or so, I was casting about for something new to write about uh and just came up with I I think I had read something in LA Times piece on the Voyagers, you know, and and I thought, you know, wonder where we are with interstellar stuff. It's and so I just started poking around at it. It gradually turned into a book proposal and with a lot of help from some very good people uh in the publishing business became the reality of the book uh in 200 I guess it was actually early '05 that it was published at that point um I sort of made the transition stopped doing everything else I was doing and simply decided okay this is what I'm going to do from now on I'm gonna I'm I'm seeing a a a a niche here. And I was aware of the fact that as I did my research, a lot of the conferences on astrophysics and space exploration, some of them would have a little bit on interstellar stuff. It was always the last session so that when everybody else was leaving for the airport, some poor guy would get up and give a talk about interstellar stuff. It was always considered so marginal. And I thought, wow, this this is this got growth pro.
We need to get this going. You know, why is this so apparently esoteric that people aren't studying it much and um of course then we, you know, we were getting the exoplanet boom. We're starting to look at exoplanets coming in and yeah, it just seemed like the time was right. So I said, "That's it. That's that's where I go with the rest of my life. That's what I'm going to focus on." And it's been that way ever since.
Fun fact, there's something about St. Louis because I am from St. Louis. No, >> are you real?
>> And in fact, St. Louis is on the other side of that wall. Um, no kidding.
>> Uh, so yeah, there's just something about it. I guess we like space and and >> that must be. Yeah.
>> Stainless steel arches and things like that.
>> Absolutely. All that good stuff. Sure.
>> Now, in that time that you've been doing this um full-time, are you happy with the progress? Now, I admit I'm not because I think I think if we'd have gone back to the 1970s and pursued Mars, we'd be there and perhaps we we we made a mistake there by by lagging so long. But are you generally happy within the realities of how things get done on >> Yeah, I I think so, which is not to say that I wouldn't have hoped for a lot better. Uh however, now looking back at it with the perspective of of you know the years and you know being as old as I am now and seeing how things work, I think well really we haven't done so bad. I mean we have managed to get human probes past the planets you know all the planets we've looked at them.
Um, I remember back, gee, I think it was in ' 04, I was talking to Adrien Hook at JPL and uh, Hook was one of the great Apollo guys. I know some of these guys and their numbers are dwindling, alas, but there's still some very good ones out there. Remember those days? And I remember him saying to me, um, you know, we're doing okay. We could have really totally instrumented the solar system by now if we hadn't worried about stuff like the shuttle and the ISS if we'd really concentrated. Uh and so but but at the same time we we do have a lot of data that we've gathered. I I can remember though John about 19 75 or so sitting in a restaurant in St. Louis in Clayton and talking to a friend and we were just discussing, you know, when are we going to get to Mars? What do you think? And we're all thinking mid80s maybe. You know, we're all thinking that's probably doable.
If you look back at it now, of course, it w it would not have been. Even if we' kept up with the Apollos and such, I doubt we would be ready even now because there's so many issues that have to be solved, but we're on the, you know, we'll get there. Um, anyway, I I wish I could find a way to get things going a little faster. It seems kind of absurd that we just flew around the moon again after all these years. It was wonderful to see, but you know, we Apollo 13 did that too.
And uh, you know, I I I I think there was a time frame there, maybe if it had not been for the Cold War, maybe if not for Vietnam. Who knows? Uh, but we just lost lost the ball there. And and for a while there, we weren't doing really innovative stuff.
I think the I think the sad fact is that we lost the political to geopolitical impetus. You know the the cold war went a different direction and yeah thus thus you know evaporated the interest.
>> But as we both know space technology and developing space technology and space exploration pays back in the economy in droves.
>> Oh yeah.
>> Compared to investment I've I've seen numbers as much as 25 times when that returns to industry.
>> So it seems to me to be you know, one of the best things we could be investing in. What are your views on that?
>> I think you're exactly right. I think it pays for itself and more. We get a lot out of it. And of course, a lot of the stuff we are doing today comes out of computer stuff that we did during Apollo and during the space program years at its height. Um there's no question it'll pay for itself. um given the NASA model and going through Congress for appropriations, uh we are unfortunately or I mean unfortunately but in a sense fortunately we're responsive to the people as as Congress should be but the I think in general the public lost the interest which then was reflected in what Congress decided to do with the budgets. Uh and then there's just been some really bad decisionmaking going on.
I mean there there have been programs uh like SIM the space interpherometry mission where billions went into this wonderful concept wonderful space telescope and then cancelled. Uh you know you you take a few things like that and cancel them then you start over again on another instrument.
Uh it makes you very frustrated. So the model of how we do the research has really been strained. Now of course we're into the commercial arena where there has been a lot of forward motion especially in just getting into orbit and doing all this. Uh so I'm all for that if we can keep that going in the partnership between government and commercial interest. Uh it was something that wasn't there before. So I'm I'm not pessimistic.
Um, I just think it uh you can't take anything for granted here and I I don't know how long it's going to be before we actually do land again on the moon. Seems like budget cuts and budget issues are still problematic. Um, we'll get it done. I just wouldn't want to venture a timeline on it.
The one that scared me recently, which seems we seem to be past it, but was the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope because there were talks of not funding it even though it's finished.
>> Yep. It's finished. It's It's going to go. I think >> it's going to go to Yeah, it the save was made, >> but for a while there, that was touchandgo because it looked like it could get cut >> when the thing is sitting there finished. I know that would have been a total fiasco, >> double waste because the whole point of that mirror donation from the uh Department of Defense to NASA was not to waste it, >> you know, and it was it's the size of a Hubble Space Telescope mirror and it's like, well, we don't want to waste this.
Let's give it to NASA.
>> And then NASA goes in and you know, there was all So, it would have been a double waste if if it had been cancelled while it's sitting there finished. It it would have that would have been a total fiasco. And uh but I tell you though on the on the positive side um I was up at Goddard up in Maryland um back when they were finishing the vibration testing on JWST and I can remember you know looking at this thing still in component form but they were doing vibration tests and noise tests and stuff like that.
That launch was the one that worried me more than any other launch in my entire life. I was really I mean the amount of money that went into that and it ran way over as you know. Then the thought what if we lose I just thought if we lose that one we're really how long will it be before we ever do it again? Uh I thought of that launch was a miracle. I just I just loved every moment of it and I'm so delighted with what we've gotten out of this great telescope. So, um, you know, I'm I'm really looking forward to Roman where that's going to take us. Uh, we do have the extremely large telescopes, the ELTs coming along. Those have exoplanet capabilities too, uh, which will be really interesting to be able to get their data measured against our space telescope data, everything else. Um, so the exoplanet work is coming along well. Um, you I would like to see more of a human presence than we have in space, but I'm delighted to see the fact that we're getting really good at things like robotic telescopes. And uh, on the robotics front, we're doing okay.
>> I think what excites me the most about the Nancy Grace Roman telescope is that it's wide field. This is going to yield some amazing images that you know that um I mean web is doing so but this will be in you know back to Hubble type things but much wider fields of view and I'm like I want to see the deep field that it takes. I want to see that. Now, to sort of switch gears here, in 1960, I believe the year was, uh, Ronald Bracewell suggested a type of interstellar communication where you're not sending radio waves. You're sending a physical probe with information. You here we are, this is our encyclopedia galactica, or maybe it's everything we've ever learned about about the uh the galaxy and the universe in general.
Here is a complete >> view of physics. you know, this the payoff for such a thing could be amazing. Now, you recently I mean, it's just it's mindboggling. But the the point is is are we still in that mode of thinking because now we can look for this stuff. We can look and see if there's anything like that out there with artifact study.
>> Um but is it is that idea a bit dated?
What's the current status of the thinking on the brace wall probe? I have to say I think the um current thinking is probably even more uh interested and interesting than back then. Uh after Bracewell, you get Tipler uh you get the idea of using a self-replicating probe.
Bracewell didn't come up with that one.
He he had the idea that you could send probes into the galaxy and given how old the galaxy is and given how the age of our own planet is not nearly as old as the entire galaxy uh it becomes a question of well we have enough time there that a civilization a couple of billion years older than us could have arisen several many could have arisen they would have had time if they survive to send their probes throughout the galaxy by now. So here again, as farmy said, where are they? Why do we not see evidence of these probes? And I think there's there's a certain group within the SETI community that's quite interested in keeping an eye out for such things. Uh so-called lurkers, as as Jim Benford calls them, could be in the solar system. Now, yes, they might carry, let's say, an Encyclopedia Galactica.
I don't know if if we could really know anything about their motivations other than that they might just be curious.
They might just be out there, if they're there, uh, simply keeping an eye on things and kind of having a scientific interest in various planets and solar systems. We we just don't know. Um, but first we have to see if we can find one of these things. They would be extremely hard to find if they're there.
U unless they tipped us off to their presence. I of course in 2001 space odyssey know we find the slab on the moon and then communication is starting up uh one form or another. Um would such a probe try to communicate with us? Bracewell thought it might. He was of the opinion that a probe like that would wait until it had solid evidence that there was a technology here and then would probably do something like beam a radio signal back to us that we had sent out. You may remember this happens in the film Contact uh where a TV signal was returned. Um it's an interesting concept but so far we haven't had that happen.
There were some interesting radio receptions in the 1920s that seemed to be echoes from uh of our own broadcast back to us, but nothing ever really came of it. I think that's still there have been explanations for that. No one has totally solved what happened there, but I don't think anybody really believes that was from a bracewell probe. Uh I I think the idea though that it could be means that the effort to build the case for finding such probes will continue.
>> The mysterious long delayed echoes.
>> Yeah. Interesting. You know, >> stuff because it's hard to it's hard to sit there and think about the ionosphere ducting and holding something for that long because some of those delays were like seven seconds.
>> Yeah. Very strange.
>> Yeah. Very strange. But if you were getting a repeated uh demonstration of that, it would certainly alert you. On the other hand, these were very sporadic and to my knowledge, we haven't had any recently. So, I I don't know what to make of it other than to say it's so far unsolved. Probably some kind of natural phenomena we'll we'll learn about at some point, but uh that's I don't think it's ever fully been resolved. But I do I do think a brace wall probe would um I mean if I were building one I I think I would make it kind of a passive object that would sit that would alert me to the presence of a new technology coming online and then basically wait for me to do something about it. Do do I want it to contact this techn I mean we it may may not want to disrupt any existing civilization. may just want to observe if it's out there. Uh, and if it's not out there, if if we do not have a galaxy full of probes, you then come down where Frank Tipler was, they're not there. I mean, his belief is that we should have seen them, and there's no evidence whatsoever that they're out there. Therefore, there are no extraterrestrial civilizations at all. That's that's quite a reach. But uh there's a logic to it which uh uh I can understand.
>> Yeah. And there's a lot of fun science fiction scenarios hidden in this because if you have a uh a probe like this that comes in a brace wall probe and parks itself here and it's just sitting there watching.
>> Yep.
>> Not only might once it decides it's time to establish contact, you know, you're you're here, you've arrived, we'll talk, and it says I'm I'm out here. And then it gives us their encyclopedia galactic.
in also says, "I've been sitting here for a billion years. Here's the last billion years of the natural history of your planet."
>> That would be nice, >> you know, and that would be like the ultimate in all truism and tell you that, you know, these these aliens probably aren't out to take us out here.
They're very distant, may not even still be there, but their probe >> recorded uh the history of the planet.
And, you know, from the time >> that would be a very positive outcome.
Of course, the other the flip side would be the dark forest. you know, here we are. There's probably, one would think, other civilizations out there. Why are they so quiet? Um, is that does that imply there's a menace out there that all civilizations are concerned about? And here you get into things like the the Berserker probe idea, the the the machine intelligence that essentially goes around trying to annihilate biological life. Uh so there have been a lot of science fiction on that line as well. Um and and of course we're in a position of not having any idea. Uh I think the the scary thing about that idea is that it does fit everything we know. Um and it explains why we one reason why we have not had any sort of contact was because they haven't gotten here yet. And let's hope they don't. But I mean you could come up with so many different possible solutions to the where are they question that the mind boggles. Uh Steven Webb has a entire book about 75 solutions to this and Milan Churovich uh also a wonderful volume on probing what could be the answer to this. I think it's profoundly interesting that we have not established any sort of direct evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. I really would have thought we would have by now and it fascinates me that we continue to not have any sort of contact.
>> Yeah. Web uh I think I think he's over 100 now, you know. He may well be >> they coming and but I myself know of I've kept a tally on my own on the firmy paradox solutions >> including variations on a theme. I'm up to 140 >> potential solutions. So there there there are all kinds that just tells you it's a very unconstrained thing is what it does >> very unconstrained and the beauty of it is that this question really takes in so many different disciplines. Uh it it's a fascinating thing that it is not only a matter of astrophysics and direct observation using our instruments but we also have to bring into question what are we looking for in terms what do we expect in terms of behavior? Uh if we're trying to figure out why we haven't had any sort of contact, what motivations might there be not to contact us? And that that really gets us into a jam because we're trying to figure out how beings whose existence we have never established might think about us and about other civilizations. Uh it's it's fascinating room for speculation and um uh sets the imagination free. So indeed lots of good science fiction ideas. U I love I think it's in one of David Brin's novels. I think it's in existence uh where where the one of the problems becomes a SETI detection is made and then not so much not too much later a second one saying basically don't believe that guy you know we're the ones you want to talk to you know you can play around with this a lot and and get a lot of enjoyment out of it but I'm glad to see that the the effort continues And I'm also very glad to say that uh SETI has now moved into this phase where we are actively looking for so-called technos signatures which to me is a much better way to proceed. I I think the idea of looking for some kind of astronomical data uh which may show up in new stuff or it may show up in 100-year-old plates from Palomar. Who knows? but some evidence that there's something being manipulated out there by a technology uh may be the first evidence we have uh and I think that's that's a very productive way to go.
>> Well, I agree and I mean there you know it's well out there that searches for photographic plates of astronomical photographic plates for transients is actually showing something.
>> Yeah, they're finding things that shouldn't be there. Um and I I know that uh uh one recent study did find some apparent uh objects seemingly in orbit um when we didn't have anything in orbit, >> right?
>> So So uh obviously that bears watching.
Um yeah, all these all these mysteries are out there needing deeper investigation.
Yeah, that's uh VR and colleagues that that uh reported that and it's been strengthened, believe it or not, so recently and other papers that were independent. So, so certainly something to keep an eye on. Um as as disconcerting as it might be. Now, wasn't there an idea, and I cannot remember the term for this, I should, >> but I I can't, you know, I'm a half a century old. um where you have just a reflector, a corner reflector out there that is just bouncing back your signals and just giving um giving you back what you're sending out in a recognizably um artificial way, but it would be very cheap to do because sending out corner reflectors, you know, an alien civilization, it's a cheap thing to send across the galaxy. What are your views on that sort of thing? I think it, you know, you you could make a case for it as a easy way to um become noticed by a civilization. Uh I think if you're going to go to the trouble of sending anything, you probably want it to have more capabilities than that. But but the the idea of simply first of all establishing the contact. Sure. I mean, why not do that? Um it it would be relatively simple. I would I'm not even going to think about the economics of it because I know some people talk about the economics of of of beaming signals versus other types of signals and so on. Who knows what economic factors would be going on in a civilization capable of doing what a card of two or even three civilization might do. But um yeah, I think there there are a lot of ways that we might do it if we had the capability of sending out this kind of probe to call attention to it. There you get into the whole question of should we be sending a signal out, making ourselves known and I I think it's unresolved.
I I I think we do have to be cautious here simply in saying that we have no idea where or what might be out there and probably getting a consensus which is international before we do anything to call attention to ourselves beyond what we already have is a good idea. I think it should be an international type of decision as opposed to say gosh my old buddy uh Alexander Zitzv in Russia sent out signals to he sent several you know out and we we used to argue about this. He wrote some things for Centuri Dreams for me and we always argued about this because um I was in favor of going very slowly and getting consensus among the community of science and a larger uh consensus. Um, and he just thought, "No, no, we're going to start sending signals." Um, and and in the the uh uh Russia of his day and USSR of his day, the idea of uh this this cosmos being filled with, you know, benign Marxist civilizations was out there. And the assumption was, oh well, they'll just call us back, you know, and say hello and we'll establish contact. Uh I'm a little more cautious. You know, we're the product of evolution. Uh evolution, at least in our case, has given us an aggressive side so that we could survive. Uh who knows how another civilization would respond if it stumbled upon us. We just don't know.
>> Well, that brings up the darker scenarios. I I I spun a rather uh rosy, you know, rosecolored glasses one earlier. But there's also the idea that the first communication that you get from such an alien probe is an EMP as it EMPs you back to the stone age because it doesn't want your artificial generalized intelligence getting out of that planet that you're on.
>> You've gone too far. You need a reset.
And that the whole concept of sending out probes like that is downshifting civilizations, >> giving you the Firmeny paradox because nobody except one gets far enough out there and you get an alien police action scenario.
>> So in that case, you're dealing probably with a single or civilization way back in the day.
>> The first >> it's kind of keeping an eye on things and making sure it stays at the top.
>> It's policemen. Yeah, >> that's that's another one of those 140 explanations. Yes.
>> Yeah, it is. Yes. Um but uh but if I had to guess I what what is your your lipmus test here? What is your feeling on what the actual solution is? My gut feeling and that's completely unscientific, but it's my gut feeling based on an informed opinion is that intelligence is just very rare and you know it it's just too far away. Maybe we'll find it. Probably won't ever meet it. But this doesn't happen often because it really only happened once on Earth out of many many species. We're it, you know, other than maybe some of the homid precursors might have done something. But >> yeah, >> who knows Neanderthalss might have as well. But um but fundamentally um >> unless the octopus ups its game, Earth has, you know, only seen one one species >> that got technological and it took it billions of years to do it and that conspicuous to me. What What's your personal view on that?
>> Let's remember though, as Jason Wright has pointed out, that uh we really don't know what might be in the historical the fossil record of the planet. We don't know that we're the first technological civilization. There could have been one millions of years ago conceivably. I know there's there was a number of papers written about this possibility.
It's obviously remote, but we probably would not have a trace at this point. Uh which really gets me to where I come down. I I think John that we're kind of on the same page on this. My thought is that we will find life almost everywhere we go. Uh any most any solar system we go to, there's going to be some form of life. I suspect if if I had to uh come up with a number and and I think I think the early SETI optimists were arguing things like 10,000 civilizations in the Milky Way or something. That was what they were hoping for, thinking they might see. If I had to pick a number, I would pick between one and 10 active civilizations. Now again, I have no basis for that other than my hunch, but I think what we are going to find is that civilizations do not last very long.
uh I suspect that the uh technologies that we develop ultimately are self-limiting and that therefore we're likely to encounter as we go out into the galaxy places where there was a civilization once uh ancient ruins I I think is very possible. Um there's no way to know that and there's no way to know whether that means we will follow in that same trajectory or not. But it's worrisome when you think about the number of things technologically ranging from ecological disaster to pandemics uh nuclear uh AI whatever the number of things that we have to navigate is is a very large uh number and uh if the filter for survival is ahead of us we may not have gotten through it yet. We may have to be very cautious and very careful to try to survive this. Uh if the filter is behind us, maybe we've already gotten through it and we can navigate these waters.
Let's hope that's the case. Well, and there are, you know, there are so many unknowns. The unknown unknowns as as was famously said, you know, that that you just don't know because how do we know that a highly advanced alien civilization? We always looked at it in terms of the cartev scale.
>> Mhm.
>> But that may not actually, you know, that's only one metric. That's energy usage. And it may simply be that >> the more advanced a civilization becomes, the less detectable it is. And it just simply they could be unbelievably advanced but but very quiet because they're very efficient.
Something like that.
>> I think that's I think that's right. And I I think as you get a civilization older and older if it does survive it does become more difficult to find it. Or it could. Let's put it that way.
Because as you say the the key word of efficiency there means that as such a civilization ensures its own survival by extracting what it needs from its its the area that it's in um it may become very hard to detect. it may sort of merge with its background. And I think we have to go even further than that and say that from our human perspective, it may be that the evidence of extraterrestrial technology is out there in plain sight and we just don't see it because we take it all as being part of the natural order. Um, we may not be at our stage of the game able to see the kind of things that a truly advanced culture might be able to do. U I know there's some interesting thought about looking at steady targets in very high energy situations where a civilization might try to um extract the maximum amount of energy. For example, in um binary star systems where there is a a a black hole nearby and so on and you might be able to uh draw all kinds of energies in that vicinity. These are the places that you might well find an advanced civilization extracting energy.
But the other side of that is uh if you think about computation uh computation does best when it's cold and it's very possible that um an advanced culture as it becomes um non-biological which is certainly possible uh would simply gravitate toward places that are outside the large bright galaxies and maybe we don't see them because they're simply not putting out much of a signature that we can see at these distances. So there are lots of possible explanations there.
Our biggest problem is how do we think like they do? Uh how can we put our minds into well it's like we can't even put our minds into what an octopus does as you point out or what a dolphin does.
Um how do we possibly try to understand the kinds of thinking that might go on?
There may be intelligence underneath Europa's ice that is of a high order of a kind that we will never encounter and probably wouldn't recognize if we saw it. Um so very hard to know. I think we need to be very humble as we try to solve fairmy and as we study these matters. Just reminding ourselves that we have brains that u may not yet be up to the task of solving every one of these mysteries. I think we just keep looking. We look hard for anomalies and we try to figure them out. And I think when we do that, we look at the anomalies with a very rigorous scientific framework, but always open to the possibility that there may be new science to be learned from them.
Sometimes that doesn't happen though because there are anomalies >> and perhaps the best one that I can think of there are a number of them but the best one I can think of is Shipolski star where there's reported transuranic elements in the makeup of the star that really should not be there because it either means if that detection is correct >> which they're not very well constrained as to what you know elements of plutonium are going to look like in a spectrum but the general idea is it was And it certainly has weird stuff like >> technesium, >> which isn't uh isn't something you see too often.
>> So the bottom line though is that when that detection came out, which is getting probably close to 10 years ago from that Russian team that that characterized it, >> very very very very little has been done. Even though the payoff of that is either you found an alien civilization or you found a new nuclear process that happens in a very special kind of star that's very rare. And either way, it just seems worthwhile to look into. But >> yeah, >> very little has been done, precious little since then.
>> What's in a way that's kind of encouraging though because there there is a lot of work remaining here. And you're right, an example like this could well be evidence of a civilization trying to manipulate its star and to do things that we maybe don't understand or maybe things we could even figure out. I mean, there are various things you might want to do with a star. Um, or or there are various ways that a star could throw a signature like that depending on what's around it or near it. Um so it I think it's fascinating to try to figure this out. Now I don't think we can resolve this in terms of binary choice here. But yeah, we need to do a lot more work when we find an anomaly like that. I think that's that's just the kind of thing that deserves a great deal of study. I I was so glad that um the the whole u idea of looking for Dyson spheres emerged. Uh there had been work done by it. I mean Richard Carrian had done some serious work with the Iris uh uh >> yeah and you know great stuff. And then and then going into the galactic mode uh and looking for possible weird infrared signatures on a galactic basis. looking at entire galaxies, looking for are there zones that look like their infrared uh signature is is strange. Now, no Dyson spheres have been found. Now, a few possible interesting candidates, but nothing really stands out. But I mean this is the kind of thing that is exciting to me that pushing into new areas of research that are suggested by theory as well as the occasional rogue observation. Yeah. And of course you like when we had Boyon star Tabby star uh for a while there that looked very interesting as a conceivable mega structure. Um, and uh, probably not, but just the fact that we can be theorizing about it and that we can find the signatures that could be a mega structure tells me we're we're on the right track. We need to keep looking for things like this. Um, I think I think we should find them uh at some point, but if we do, um, we're going to have trouble figuring out exactly what we're looking at. I I suspect it'll be still be mysterious. I mean, I don't think we're ever going to get something that says, "Oh, we found a Dyson sphere." I think we're going to see something that says, "This is a very strange signature." We don't see how it's happening. Uh, it sort of corresponds to a Dyson sphere, but not really. What is it? We don't know. Um, I think we're going to be confronted with a lot of mysteries like that.
>> Well, I think it depends to on what we mean by a Dyson sphere because a solid sphere, the viability of that is a little bit iffy, but >> it's unstable.
>> Dyson swarm, however, we're already building one.
>> Yeah. You know, we have a rudimentary one with our our solar orbit and earth orbit for that matter. Um, solar powered probes. So, >> bear in mind though that uh Colin McInness has just demonstrated that a Dyson sphere itself can be stable and and there are ways to do that which frankly would not tax a civilization that could build one. So, it could be done. Uh, at least certainly from our perspective, a swarm makes more sense.
Um, and and I don't know why you would ever necessarily need to have a solid sphere. I'm not sure what benefit that would bring uh if you could do the swarm idea. But on the other hand, there are probably many other ways that an advanced culture could create the kind of energies that that would produce. And that being the case, um, you know, that we we can't necessarily think that our assumptions about it that make sense to us are going to apply here.
>> It also pays to remember too that in this discussion, which has gone on for many decades now, new ideas are still coming up. I recently was uh interviewed Ken Roy on um his idea of shell worlds.
Well, that hadn't really been thought thought about before, you know, and things like that. So, well, is there a is there an infrared technic signature of an exoplanet that's been encased like that? What what's what what could we look for? So, we haven't even come up with all of the ideas yet, you know, much less trying to read the mind of an alien civilization that's a million years more advanced than we are. We are still coming up with ideas ourselves.
And you know, if you look at what we've done with SETI, I mean, we've really gone out a relatively small distance with our SETI and our exoplanet searches and everything else. We have tried the the extragalactic SETI which was a great idea but most of our exoplanet detections have been within a very close range and really most of the intensive SETI work in in radio as well as uh laser has been relatively nearby. Um and obviously we're covering a very small part of the galaxy when we do that. uh my friend Claudia McCone who recently deceased unfortunately wonderful Italian physicist uh his view based on everything he after a lifetime of study uh he believed that the average distance between civilizations could be probably in no less than about 2600 light years and he based that on all kinds of calculations which I did not understand I mean he he was he was a very brilliant man and I couldn't follow his math But uh that's a number I've roughly heard from other people that it's it seems like we need to we should probably give up on the idea that there's there are civilizations a lot of them nearby.
We probably would know that at this point. Uh but uh we still have the option of when you consider how big the galaxy is. Uh there could be a great number of things out there we just haven't even begun to to study yet.
Yes. Uh Clauddio Mccone taught me the correct pronunciation of the name Skiaperelli very forcefully once. Yeah.
>> Yes. He was very good about pronunciation of >> he was. Yeah. He was a wonderful wonderful man and a great believer in SETI.
>> Oh yeah.
>> And spent so much time on it. In fact, he was the one who took the worked on the Drake equation and put error bars into it and everything and he kept working on these things >> and his mathematical study and everything >> mathematical study and oh yes he was and of course he he too was one of the early pioneers in the idea of using the solar gravity lens. Uh I first heard about that through uh studying uh Greg Matlo's books and in 2009 I went to Princeton to be at a conference and Clauddio uh was there and we had breakfast and um we became great friends. Um I think that was a wonderful insight as well and as you know John there's a a very concerted effort going on at JPL to come up with a mission concept for getting to the solar gravity lens which would allow us to have an unprecedented ability to really see a an exoplanet up close. Um, obviously I think the the best target for the first time we ever did it would be Proxima B just because it's a known planet in a known habitable zone and you know it's it's close and it's also where our first interstellar probe probably would go once we get one out there. Um, but the idea that we could actually get an image of continents, possible oceans, whatever, weather patterns, conceivably vegetation, uh, that's kind of breathtaking. And that could be done from a vantage point uh, out out there past 550 AU. It's it's a long way out, but it beats going all the way to Proxima to to get that look.
And um I'm I'm hopeful that someday that mission will fly. I I wouldn't dare say when it could. I I think the science is good, but my gosh, uh we have so much trouble getting anything funded right now that who knows, but it's very dramatic to me that we might actually get a close-up view of an exoplanet at some point, maybe this century. I think that's a wonderful thought.
I think so too. Uh just the idea of turning the sun into a telescope, you know.
>> Yeah.
>> Is is amazing. And there's also a variation of it that uh David Kipping came up with the teroscope where you can do it with Earth using the atmosphere.
It's a variation but not quite the same thing.
>> I love what David did with that and his uh his explanation on his cool world site is really worth following if anybody has missed that. Uh it's fascinating to think. So there yes there are a lot of things we can do with telescopes uh to to really learn more and let's face it um part of the problem with the space program slowing down the way we talked about is that people I think the public lost a sense of mission there where are we going and why and as you mentioned the cold war spinning down back in the Apollo days you know everybody was talking about beating the Russians to the moon it was like it was a big feel um I think it was kind of illconceived but but nonetheless it did drive a lot of popular sentiment if we were to get a image of a planet around Proxima Proxima B and to actually see living things on the surface vegetation uh obviously an ecosphere that kind of thing would put a lot of spring back in the step of space exploration I think At that point, the idea of sending a probe to get a close-up look gets a whole different impetus. And a lot of people would say, "Yeah, I'm let's look into that. How can we do that? What what ways can we use to get there?" Because it really looks like there's something there. So, um, I'm I'm all for doing anything that would help bring us a destination in view that would galvanize public opinion and get us interested in going.
>> What did you think about Kipping's other newer idea, TARS? the idea of of creating a uh you know a basically it's not quite exactly the same thing but just creating a you know dual colored you know spinner basically and then using that to launch a probe at high speed you know basically a chip probe as opposed to the idea of a laser sail >> I think it's ingenious and the more I thought about it uh the beauty of it is we could talk all day about having a a laser array which can launch sales and then once it's been used for the mission can then continue to be there and continue to do stuff. Uh economically uh Kipping's idea really makes a lot of sense compared to the cost levels that um the starshot idea has. And yeah, I love that concept.
I'd love to see this tested out more um and tried on nearby destinations and just to see what we can do. But if you're talking about launching a an extremely tiny payload uh without some of this overhead, sure, why not look into that? That seems to be a much cheaper way to go to at least to investigate and and see what we might come up with. I love these ideas that come out of nowhere. It takes somebody as brilliant as David Kipping to think of them. I don't know how that works. I mean, I don't have that kind of mind. I just stand in awe of these people, which is one reason I wrote Centator Dreams in the first place. U I'm just I'm just amazed at what they come up with. Uh just as I was amazed at reading about in 2001 about the experiments that the Benford brothers were doing uh at JPL using lasers to send small sails flying up against the ceiling proving that laser light could drive a sale. Uh that that's the kind of thing someone has to think of it first and then when you've put all that together uh wow uh real technological advance can occur.
All good ideas start that way with speculation essentially and >> absolutely hence the value too of good science fiction and if you get good good writers using uh you know known physics and then trying to push them a bit uh you can often come up with some very interesting ideas.
>> Yeah. And we had a great crop of science fiction writers. The 20th century was good to us, you know, on that count.
>> I think so. I think a lot of great ideas came out of that. Not only in terms of physics, but in terms of gosh, psychology, sociology. I mean, you name it. There has been excellent science fiction that has analyzed it and looked at it and tried variations on it. Uh so that's a good reason to keep your hand in with science fiction.
>> Absolutely. And it continues, you know, and some of, you know, we still have some, we've still got, as you mentioned, David Brenn, um, you know, I think Larry N still around. I mean, it's so, hey, um, it continues. Um, now, just as an off-the-wall question, >> what was your favorite science fiction novel? You know, it would be hard to pin one down, but I have to say that the one I that is most vivid in my memory as a young man was reading Ringworld.
And I love what Larry did with this concept back then. I had it never occurred to me to I mean, the idea of something wrapping its way around an entire star. And I knew I knew nothing of Dyson's work at that point. Uh this is when Ringer World came out, which I guess would have been early 70s as I remember. And uh that whole concept and the uh all that that it implied uh totally blew my mind. And it was such a pleasure in Huntsville back in 2017 to get to spend some time with Larry Nan and um to talk to him a little bit about Ring World and about what he was then working on with Greg Benford, which was this this trilogy they did on building an enormous structure. Another enormous structure. Yeah. Ship Star Bowl of heaven. The idea that you could drive this using a star itself as your propulsion method and bringing the star with you. I mean it was just I mean it was so crazy interesting and you know the physics worked pretty much on Shipstar. Um, I think Greg would admit that uh probably there were some issues with the whole idea of uh getting that the the uh the the pillar of propulsive stuff from the star up to the uh the bowl. It was tricky and he was trying to do with magnetic fields and it it he was having trouble coming up with that. I've regretted the fact that that's never been physically really attacked. I'd love to see somebody really take that concept and really work it hard and do the calculations. But but it's a great science fiction notion. Uh anyways, it's taking known physics and bending them around to see what we could do. And in that way too, you get an idea at least of trying to figure out uh what can happen if maybe an advanced civilization comes up with something and has better engineering or more advanced engineering than we have. Sometimes it just takes the right question. Uh and uh it's it it requires somebody to ask it.
>> The future is here because that would have been science fiction just a decade ago. You know, >> I told him on the phone, you know, uh, reading science fiction 30 years ago, a guy is in his starship and he's talking to the computer and the computer's talking back to him. And now I'm doing this, you know, uh, I I can go on AI and and I I do research with AIs. I don't I don't write anything with AI. I'm a stickler on that. I don't let an AI write anything for me, but I often if I'm looking for information, uh, I will take the output of several AIs and then check them against each other. It's I find it fascinating how lifelike they are, uh, in terms of solving the the whole touring business.
My gosh, uh, we're there, you know, they're talking to us like sometimes you really can't tell, are you dealing with another person there or not? It's fascinating and very science fictional.
Yes. And it wasn't that long ago that we were talking about, you know, Mishioaku famously saying, well, these AIs that we have, you know, which is this would have been close to 20 years ago, they don't even have the intelligent of co intelligence of a cockroach.
>> Yep.
>> Uh they blew past that.
>> Yep.
>> They they they're past the birds.
>> They flew past it so fast.
>> So fast. and and a path that no man saw it, you know, just evoke Sean. We're all talking about every might as well stick Carl Sean in there. Um that uh >> the one area that nobody predicted that AI would ever be able to replace were things like art and creativity um was one of the first, >> you know, to a real problem. And as a as a content creator like myself, first of all, I've got AI clones out there. You know, you just can't stop it now. And two, um, >> you know, it doesn't matter if the information is correct to most most of these people making AI content, you know, the so-called slot content that that people are are up in arms about.
>> Yeah.
>> The fact is that's what AI does well and we didn't predict it. We didn't predict have that ability.
>> It's astonishing how realistic some of these can be. If you look at AI deep fakes and so on, uh you know, taking a long dead actor and putting him into a another cinematic role, that kind of thing. Uh it's astonishing and again it happened that fast and as you say, it's now a serious problem. Uh if you look at the number of books on Amazon that are written by AIS now, and people are using this, you know, as a way to generate quick content, put it out there with a price tag on it. or in the music business where somebody will collect a bunch of tracks from an artist and then slap a cover on it and make it look real and then wind up getting the revenues from it where it's not his work at all.
Uh there are lots of things we got to get through with this. Not to mention the ramifications of weaponized AI and warfare. So a lot of you know a lot of worry ahead as well as uh remarkable discovery. But I'm, you know, I'm very uh positive about things like medical advances using this stuff and certainly going through reams and reams and reams of astronomical data looking for things.
Most of our most of our data in the computer banks about the stars has simply never been examined and there's just too much. and AI can go dig in and help us find the anomalies that we're looking for as well. So, it's it's a very challenging but a very interesting time in that regard.
>> And it's it isn't just astronomical stuff. It also things like particle physics, you know, with particle accelerators, they have to throw most of that data away. They're like, we need to look for this.
>> Yep.
>> But they're not looking at the rest of it because it would a human can't.
>> Yeah. How would you possibly do that?
For a while, they thought you you could do that if you put enough human eyes on it. So, you do have all these projects with people looking, >> but boy, that that just doesn't cut it when you're talking about the amount of data you're talking about.
>> Uh, and the kind of specialization that's involved in that data. Uh, your average human team, I don't care if you have 100 million people looking at it, uh, that's not going to do it. It takes this kind of technology to make it possible to really dig in deep and find out what's going on.
>> Yeah. And it's uh but it also is exciting because the fact is we have all these data sets that are recorded. Maybe not so much in particle physics. I I don't think they can record all of that because it's truly Titanic. But the fact is is that we have all like we were talking with the astronomical plates and with within star as a matter of fact because remember during the the period where we weren't sure if this was dust or you know partial mega structure or an Arnold Louver or what whatever was going around.
>> Yep.
>> That during that time though people were going back and looking at older photographic plates including ones taken in the 1890s in the Vatican trying to see that star. what the profile it was doing, you know, and and what we had in the data set.
>> That was really interesting. That that was that's really what brought that to the attention of the public, I think, the fact that there were projects that had digitized all these old plates and were then examining them very cautiously and carefully and with with great results. I mean, I think it really did help in the study of that particular star. Uh, and I know uh uh I covered that quite a bit on Centauri Dreams. I just thought it was fascinating. Uh, and I think it helped us to uh to solve the the problem there. But um, yeah, all of this stuff is out there and we just have to find a way to really make use of it now that we've collected as much as we have.
you know, Bajin Star and the the that star's phone number is forever burned into my brain. KCA462852.
It's I covered it. I was, you know, right there.
>> And >> it was exciting, but one very useful thing I think it did was it gave us a dry run on what happens when you think you've got it and what is the the ramifications of it. Number one, the world did not freak out. You know, number one, it did not end civilization.
Everybody is like, "Well, that's interesting." Even though >> if you think about it, there's a certain spookiness to seeing an alien civilization building something you don't quite understand out there. And they did it 2,000 years ago from your perspective. Yeah.
>> During the days of the Roman Empire, they were doing this. And I just thought, that's spooky.
>> Spooky indeed. And it if it were there, something that's really big and mysterious. Yeah, that that is spooky.
Uh I think there is a good lesson though. Uh people I think maybe when I was growing up the idea was gosh, if we ever find evidence of extraterrestrials, you know, everything will blow up. Everybody go crazy. You get some of that in in Carl Sean's contact, especially the movie version where, you know, all kinds of reactions going on. I don't think it's going to be like that at all. If we do find something, I don't I think people are pretty well resolved. There's probably something out there. Um, and especially if it's like in a distant star, I think a lot of people will find it interesting. I don't think it overthrows uh religion or it overthrows our whole philosophy. I think it just becomes something kind of fascinating because we've been, you know, we've been educated to the fact that this is probably true and a lot of popular entertainment is telling us it's true. I think the public is ready for it.
>> Oh, I think so. Very much so.
Especially, you know, just come out and say it. The UFO people, they've they've believed that, you know, that there there has been a presence here of of aliens for 70 years. And did have they exploded? No. No. No. No. just doing their research and you know and and things like that and >> um so it's I I don't think it would be I think that I think the world grew up but I would also point out that I think the world grew up a long time before that because remember first of all l was running around saying hey there's a civilization on Mars building canals >> and people didn't freak out back then either and that's a lot closer >> that's an alien in your backyard if Mars has got you know what had Martians, little green men or something like that.
>> If that would have turned out to be true, they're right there and it's War of the World's time. You know, >> they're drawing their their plans against us over there. But the thing is that nobody really, you know, I think at the time, I think a lot of people were like, >> I don't really believe that that's what that is. We'll see.
>> There were people talked about, well, let's try to signal them if they're there. I mean, you know, Marone talked about doing that. I mean, um, and and some plans for, you know, cutting a big symbol in a forest and that kind of thing that would be visible from Mars.
Um, I think most people probably thought it was interesting, but probably not true. Uh, on the other hand, you've got you've got Edgar Rice Burroughs writing, you know, his Mars stories. And um, you're right. I don't the only panic that happened was with the with the Orson Wells thing which was you know a very realistic at the at least at the time it seemed a realistic broadcast and would had no disclaimers and scared a lot of people but I don't think it's because you know I I think you could have scared a lot of people in various ways if you did it that way and didn't have any disclaimers and it came across as if it were the real deal. Uh, I think that was what that was. No, I I think you're probably right. I I think we're we can handle it if we find out that we're not alone in the galaxy. Um, and I do not expect it to be a huge problem. Uh, I think it starts to become a little closer to home if it becomes a situation where we feel like we're being contacted. I mean, if we did have Bracewell Probe wake up and say, "I'm here."
that is very close to home and at that point maybe you know I think that would get a lot of people wondering and maybe the fear factor goes up a bit until we know more about it but who knows >> thankfully uh the broadcast that Orson Wells did I don't remember what year it was if it was still the Mercury Theater U was if it was 38 it been a Campbell Playhouse it was the same production it's just they changed names because they got Campbell >> I may be wrong I think it was 38 >> but if you listen to it. It Orson Wells made that sound like a news broadcast >> and that's what scared people. They were like, "Is this fiction or is this Well, he was intentionally doing that and that's why it scared people is because, you know, um >> Yeah, I think so. I think so. You may remember there was a film about um uh World War II some some decades back where they kept having they they shot it as a news story, but they kept interrupting it and saying this is fictionalized. Did not want to do that again. Uh Wells really uh should have done something to prevent the scare going on because a lot of people listen to him on the radio.
>> Well, he was he was oddly fascinating. I like listening to old radio. Um I've always been an radio guy.
>> Me, too. I've got a big collection of old radio.
>> I I I have always loved it ever since I was a kid. And the fact is is I don't think anybody's going to beat Orson Wells as far as radio theater.
>> Um I there's never been anybody since then, you know.
And there wasn't anybody before. He pioneered it.
>> Yep.
>> And I love listening to those shows and they're free to listen to now. You just find them on a Roku channel or something and and just put them on.
>> They're out there.
>> They're out there and they're still very very good, >> you know? They're very good still. And well, it's like who who's going to stop reading HG Wells?
>> Yeah, that's exactly right. And by the way, uh speaking of radio shows, uh the old Xinus one, for example. Yeah.
>> Uh had a lot of really high-grade science fiction scripts from big writers. A lot of these were drawn from the science fiction magazines at the time. And I was always fascinated to listen to those because these would be really solidly done science fiction shows um that just ran rings around what was on TV at the time most of the time.
Um so that's worth looking for too.
Dimension X was the same uh studio I think that did that.
Have you uh been keeping up on more modern sci-fi? Have you seen the uh let's say uh Project Hail Mary?
>> I have seen that. I enjoyed every bit of it. Now, I I as you might imagine, I I have various groups of people that I talk to on a regular basis that are in this business.
And in one mailing group that I'm in, uh this came up. And uh it was interesting to me that um I just totally loved the film and so did a friend of mine a who was a very rigorous physicist. Another fellow made the quite accurate observation. Well the whole propulsion thing is ridiculous. I mean this whole thing about this thing that will eat this the star light and all this kind of stuff. Well yeah and but the point was we have to give it the fact that it's a Hollywood movie. I mean we have to give it that much. We know that we don't know how to get a starship to another star with a human on it. So, they had to come up with something, you know, unobtanium or whatever you want to call the propulsion unit in in in that's used here. Uh, I thought they did well by simply not playing it up a lot. I mean, they had to mention it and what they were doing with it, but really there was no way you could come up with a solution in the film for the propulsion enigma. I thought everything else about it was fascinating. The visuals were really interesting. The acting was over-the-top good. I just thought Ryan Gosling was superb. Um, so my feeling was it took me back, you know, I don't think I've enjoyed a science fiction film that much since gosh, I mean, you'd have to go way back uh to, you know, to 2001 or maybe even Forbidden Planet when it came out.
I mean, the, you know, I I just thought it was a kick uh and and very well- handled.
Yeah, I uh I would agree. Um it's certainly the best since the 1980s anyway.
>> Great job.
>> And it uh it also and like you said, Ryan Gosling, I mean, he had to act with a puppet >> and and he had to carry that movie for the most part and he did a really good job to the point that having read Pro, you know, the book, Andy Weir's book before that, and I've interviewed him several times on his books, The Martian and and uh Artemis, etc. The thing is now I can't get the image of of uh for Ryland Grace. I no longer remember what I envisioned the guy in the book. It's Ryan Gosling now and Rocky is that you know the the puppet and it's like well that that movie was a success.
>> Say what I do. I I have a standing rule that if I really love a novel I really don't want to see a movie based on it because it will do that. it will take my images and replace them. Uh I I eventually do it anyway, but I mean I I haven't even seen all the Tolken movies because I just love the trilogy so much.
Uh and I have all my own images of this stuff. But in this case, I had not read the book and so I just saw the movie by itself. Now to me, it's maybe better to do it that way so that the reading of the book lets me plant new images over the top of the movie ones. I don't know.
Anyway, uh it it was a cinematic experience. I loved the uh planet at Taetti, how they portrayed that. That was remarkable visually. Uh just a lot of things about it I liked.
>> Yeah, same. I I was happy to see that movie because we don't really see that quality from Hollywood very often anymore.
But I did I would have actually have to say though that when I saw of course I read the Lord of the Rings and was totally enthralled with The Hobbit when I was eight years old.
>> Yeah.
>> And then when I saw the movies they actually did conform more or less to my visions of of what I had thought >> but I did notice a lot was missing like Tom Bombadil and you know things like that. Yeah.
>> But they were stunning. Those but those didn't actually replace my images. But Ryan Gosling did. He's forever burned into my brain.
Well, where do you think we're going to go now as far as private exploration of Mars? Do you think that, you know, I know SpaceX has kind of backed away from that Mars colonization idea to focus on the moon, but do you think that a private enterprise can actually outdo a government as far as um colonizing or at least visiting um you know, the other terrestrial planets, which Mars and I don't know, that's probably the only one you can. Um, >> yeah.
>> But what do you think about that?
>> I I would like to think that it would be possible to do it. I mean, that's the old Heinline mode, you know, from the 50s that the the guy puts together a a moon ship on his ranch and blasts off and, you know, destination moon and all this kind of stuff. Uh, I'd like to think that's possible. I do think the the Mars project is going to take so much more work. It's probably going to have to be uh at least a joint effort. I mean, I I think that's necessary. What people keep ignoring, I think, about Mars as a destination is we just don't have any idea what we're talking about yet in terms of human factors here. uh we do not have in orbit any dedicated medical facility by which we can really dig into things like how how are we going to induce the artificial gravity we need on board the ship? How effective is it going to be?
Uh how are we going to cope with things like cosmic rays along the way? Uh what happens to people in 38G over long periods? I mean, gosh, Musk used to talk about colonies. Um, if you're going to have a colony, uh, you have long-term habitation. I don't know if that's possible or not. It may well be, but we don't know that yet. And there are so many human factors we haven't looked into. And I think that whole question has to be resolved. Um, we haven't even been able to create truly successful closed loop life support here on Earth uh over long stretches, although there have been experiments to do that. And and I think the Russians are maybe a little ahead of us on that. But, uh, this is going to be a a major deal. It's not like going to the moon in the 60s because like going to the moon in the 60s, you were going you were landing, you were coming right back and you were staying inside the magnetosphere. you were you were basically close enough that if something went wrong, you had some protection. Uh however, going to Mars, you're out there. Uh you're you're subject to subjected to radiation of far more intense kind and uh you know, you're way outside of Van Van Allen belts and everything else. Um all this has to be resolved. So to me that's a huge research project itself. To me, that's another Apollo type uh project just to make sure we get the human factors, the actual rocketry of doing it. Yeah, I think that could be done commercially. I think you're getting there with Starship and and yes, we can do it in terms of actually putting a payload on Mars. We can probably put an automated factory on Mars to start producing fuel, but getting humans up there and doing all that, uh, there's a lot more work.
>> Well, one thing that I think about a lot is what else could you do as far as robotic exploration of Mars with Starship because this is above and beyond Mars rovers. I mean, you could send an instrument package of your dreams there with that with that platform. And I would like to see more thought um on NASA's part as to and more funding of course um which is hard as you say hard to come by nowadays but I in a in a perfect world >> I would love to use the capability of of Starship to just send science instruments that we could only have dreamt about.
>> Yeah.
>> You know >> because remember we're still we're still arguing about Viking. You know there's still a contingent that says Viking found life back in the 80s. um that has not been conclusively disproven and and the guy behind the experiment that seemed to suggest life still believes he found life. Um we could we could send instruments up there to make some very conclusive tests uh in the soil. We could even send instruments in there to go down deep into the ground and find out what's going on down there into the caves, you know, where if there's any chance of of finding something, that would probably be a good place to look. I think Mars probably has life. I think it's probably deep underground. Um, I suspect we'll find it. I mean, gosh, we know it had oceans and and we know it was a very clement place for a while there before it lost its magnetic field. So, um I would be all for that. And I think while we're trying to figure out the human factor, which is always going to be the most difficult thing, whether it's interplanetary or interstellar, uh we should be going full tilt on instrumentation and robotics. And uh I think we can have an answer to life on Mars in relatively short order if we want to do that.
>> If we want to do that a sample return mission though it doesn't appear to be funded even though we took the samples you know. So it's it's silly. Now just to for more information that was the labeled release experiment and it was engineered by Gil Leven who believed that he found it and also the principal investigator Dr. Patricia Anne Strat who I interviewed. I was actually her the last person to interview her before her passing.
>> They both believed that was it. And it's mysterious because it looks like it.
>> Yet, >> there is about 20 other lines of evidence, some even very recent, >> of past microbial life on Mars. You know, just weird geological things that that look like what life would do here on Earth.
>> And I think you're right. We could figure it out in short order. But before we send anyone to Mars, we need to do these experiments >> because you should not send them, you know, when you're having hints and indicators like this, >> send the robots first and >> Yeah.
>> make sure you get the samples in.
>> Yeah. Because you want your crew when it gets there to know what to look for. Uh if if you have robotics up there telling you about a certain site, for example, of high biological interest, that's exactly where you want your crew to go.
Uh yeah, I think that this is a necessary precursor. You're scouting the terrain. It only makes sense to do it that way. And the only way to do it is on the surface or below the surface, and we've got the tools to do that if we make a dedicated attempt to find life and to make sure. I mean with Viking that that test could have been set up in such a way that it was conclusive but they didn't have the budget to do that.
Uh there there were ways that it could have been altered and expanded to make it more airtight. And um we could build those with current technology and get that up to Mars uh a lot cheaper than it would take to get humans up to Mars. I mean, I'm all for the human space program, don't get me wrong. I just don't know if I think it's the essential thing to do. I think I think it comes after a a solid wave of further robotic work. And I I think it's it's going to have to be that way. Um, humans are just delicate. We're not designed for this kind of thing. And getting them there is going to be tricky. and keeping them alive is going to be tricky. So, let's find out what we can and let's go ahead then and really get serious about the Jovian moons. You know, we're we've got we've got two big missions headed in that direction. Who knows what they'll find? We're going to learn a lot more about Europa when we get the Express up there. Um, so there's a lot we can still do with our robotics. You know, I ran a on Centauri Dreams, I was kind of teasing the readers, uh, you know, when we had we had Cassini going around Saturn and it when it was time for Cassini to be to self-destruct so that we didn't contaminate anything, um, there was a certain amount of sadness in that. You know, we're going to lose this wonderful instrument and look at all that it's done for us. And I ran a photo of the Cassini team alto together and uh then wrote about how Cassini was now going to be have to be you know flown into the atmosphere and perish and simply said uh thank you for all you have given us and half about half the responds were you shouldn't talk about a machine like it's human like that. The other half said, "Oh, that's great that you complimented the mission team." And I thought it was fun because I was kind of trying to elicit that response to say, you know, some people are going to think I'm being anthropomorphic here. But I'm really thinking about the mission team.
But it, think about it, it is kind of we do get attached to our tools, especially well like Voyager. You know, when Voyager went past Neptune, I was very sad. You know, I thought, man, this is the end of the line with Voyager. Of course, now it's gone another 30 years some odd. Uh, but at the time, you know, you do get kind of wrapped up in your tools. So, uh, it's interesting to me that that we're at a stage now in technology where we're we're actually getting human sounding AIs. I mean, I'm not saying these are all sentient beings. I'm just saying it's interesting in human psychology. Uh, that we're working with tools now that that in many ways uh reflect us and in some ways now are beginning to surpass us.
Now, thoughts on the ignored planet that also hints life, Venus, and with the phosphine and the the unknown UV absorber and everything else. Do you think that um maybe our focus on Mars, maybe we should spend a little bit more time on Venus as well?
>> Sure, because that's cheap. I I I think you can do that pretty inexpensively. Uh we know from I mean Jeff Lannis has done work on this, the idea of putting floating platform into the atmosphere there. uh as a research station uh up in the part of the atmosphere where it's got terrestrial temperatures um would would be something we could do without huge expense and it does not involve landing humans and it does not involve peril to anybody uh yet it would give us priceless information about that atmosphere what's beneath uh as well I think Venus is quite interesting I remember one time talking about the whole Bracewell thing uh with Greg Benford and we were having a wonderful conversation about where a civilization might have parked a a probe in our solar system and and he was saying, you know, we we know Earth has various small asteroids that occasionally get into orbit around us. Maybe there would be one or one of these, although they're very transient orbits. And I said, "Well, have you ever thought about looking at Venus?" And Greg said, "Well, my god, Venus is a hell hole." Well, yeah, now, but I mean, go back in time.
There was a time before we got the uh hellish atmosphere that we now have there. Conceivably, Venus would have interested a a civilization looking at our solar system. They might have parked a probe there just to keep an eye on it.
Maybe two billion years ago. Who knows?
So yeah, I think Venus is quite interesting and I think there's going to be a lot of good science done there and I would love to see us with some kind of presence in that atmosphere looking for some kind of uh biological signs possibly there. If there were life on the surface long ago, it may well have taken to the air and still be found there. So it's worth looking at. Well, life life on Earth, microbial life on Earth, pervades the entire atmosphere basically. It does. And it it stands to reason that if something arose or was deposited on Venus, you know, from Earth or whatever or vice versa, >> then um it might have adapted through extreme evolution.
>> I think and surrounded itself, I think, with S2 molecules and things like that that could protect the biology >> and may still be there. Yet we see the hints, you know, we see mysteries with Venus. And I think it often gets ignored in in comparison to, you know, Mars and Europa.
>> Yes.
>> But it's interesting. But I have a big question about uh Europa specifically.
Now, we look at Europa and if you remember back in the history of of uh of of wondering about alien life, >> right? I can't remember the scientist that did this but he found that the you know the striations that are present on Europa are the same color as bacteria here on Earth specifically Eoli as I remember and um what what is the difference because you look at Enceladus doesn't have any of that >> you know it just looks you know it's got blue striations >> similar situation with with Europa and Europa's got all that ruddy darkness which I mean you wonder why bio spewing sulfur everywhere but still what is the difference?
>> Well, it's a you do have a much different uh landscape there with with with Enceladus and having those polar tiger stripes, you know, and the the venting that it's doing is setting up a much different situation uh where that where the south pole there is open opening up uh enough to let that stuff out. Europa being as smooth as it is, uh obviously a frozen surface that we can actually look at and see how it is at times ruptured and then iced back over.
Uh I wouldn't want to speculate because I'm not I'm not up on the science in terms of exactly what is doing going on with the coloration there. Um, but it's interesting to me that this is a surface that really does look like it has been uh in motion over time. To me, that implies it's a it's a a surface layer of ice that's not as deep as we tend to think it is. Richard Greenberg was convinced um that it was relative not thin, but but certainly not 100 kilometers or whatever uh and that it could be penetrated. uh he's now retired, but he wrote a wonderful book on on Europa making that case based on the close study of the surface. But here again, we're hampered by the fact that we're dealing with the Galileo probe, which was sending us information through its uh uh its low low gain antenna. We didn't get nearly as much data as we wanted. So, it's really going to be great when we get express in there to take some close looks at this surface and also to give us some information about the uh gravitational field, which is going to tell us a lot about what's underneath there and maybe some clues on to how deep this this ice layer actually is. Um, I tend to think of these two moons as being just fundamentally different in composition. And I really wonder if Europa, I don't know about Enceladus, but Europa seems to me to be a really interesting case of a world that's getting a lot of heating through tidal forces and definitely has the everything in place that it looks like it would need to produce some kind of life. Uh people talk about microbial life. I I wouldn't even want to speculate as to what kind of life, but I think it's very possible that over time uh things have formed down there. And who knows about we talked about intelligence. I mean, what kind of intelligence might evolve in that kind of environment? I have no idea. But someday maybe we'll be able to get a probe through that ice and extremely hostile surface as you know because of radiation. That's going to be a real problem. But um if we can finally penetrate that, it's going to be fascinating to see what we discover.
>> Drill into Europa and the first thing you find is the octopus and it has the last laugh. Now, tell everybody about your books and where they can be found and Centauri Dreams itself.
>> Yeah, Centauri Dreams can be found uh on at Amazon and and in bookstores and such. However, it's it's a 2004 2005 title. um I faced the problem of what to do after I wrote the book. Uh my previous books were all mostly involved with internet technologies and that's what I did before I switched my career over. Then it became a question of okay what do I do next? Um in terms of space and that's why I created the website.
Um, I really decided from remembering how long it took to produce the book and then looking at how fast the things were changing that I'd be better off doing as a second edition a website that I could update frequently. I wanted to be able to take uh current stuff and turn it around pretty quick. Now, example being something like Voya John Star. again.
Man, that was so exciting. And I I would have hated to have approached that from a book perspective. I really wanted to be able to track that and to be able to send off an email uh you know to Tabby and say, "Hey, people are saying this.
What are you saying? You're the one that's named after." And all the getting a response going publishing the next day with that response. That kind of thing interested me far more. So, uh, uh, Centauri Dreams first edition is the last book I've written at this point about it. Everything else is on the website, which is now over, it's it's about 5,000 some odd posts now, and I've kept it going since 2004. And I think I'm very comfortable kind of staying where I am with that right now.
>> And it's makes for fascinating reading.
That's where I go to escape and just want to let my mind wander is uh, Centauri Dreams at the top of the list.
>> I appreciate that, John. That was very kind of you.
>> Yep. Yep. Very valuable. Very valuable to anybody that's uh looking to the future. Paul, thank you for joining us today. I hope we can do this again sometime. And I look forward to the next post in Centauri.
>> Been a real pleasure talking to you.
Look forward to to future podcasts. Keep the keep the light burning, Eric. Keep the torch going. I appreciate all you do.
>> Thank you. Event Horizon and my channel are now available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube memberships. Early adree episodes, bonus episodes, and sleep focused content.
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