This is later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear weekday
afternoons on the Drive. His name is Adam Frank and he is a self
professed as alien optimist, but he's also has the advantage of being an astrophysicist,
Professor Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester and author of
Light of the Stars, Alien Worlds, and the Fate of Earth. His
newest creation, the Little Book of Aliens, and he in it says the
human species is poised at the edge of its greatest and most important journey.
Well, Adam Frank and Little Book of Aliens, what journey would that be?
Well, first of all, Lee, thank you for having me on.
And that journey, the one I talk about in the book, is
you know, after being an astrophysicist for thirty years, I want people to
understand how close we are to answering that question. Are we alone? Using
taw these new technologies we have, we may be the last generation that doesn't
know whether or not there's alien life out there. I see some of these
fantastic pictures of crab nebula and distant areas and worlds and they're so very colorful
and beautiful. Will they be that way with the naked eye? You know,
there's some when those telescopes you do see some you know, people tweaking
the colors, and in some cases those are infrared, those are colors the
eye can't even see. But what's really amazing about those telescopes is that they
can actually see into the atmospheres of planets, exoplanets that are light years away.
And as in the book, I show that that's how we're going to
be able to find life on these distant alien worlds, but they're light years
away. I've always had this question, even going back to my astronomy electives
that I took in college. Light years. That means if we had physically
the ability to travel the speed of light, it would still take years to
get there. That's true, and that's why the capacity to do it from
a distance. We couldn't do this before. The capacity to investigate these alien
planets from a distance using things like the James Webspace Telescope is so amazing.
And what I try and show in the book is show people how we can
do it now, and we're just going to get a lot better at it.
With like the newer telescopes, the ones that are on the board that
we're developing right now. So even though these things may be ten light years
away and would take ten years to get to at the speed of light,
using our telescopes right now, we can peer into their atmospheres and look for
what do we call either biosignatures or techno signatures that could tell us that there's
life right now on them. Little Book of Aliens and Adam Frank is here,
So some of these systems that we're looking at, are they that similar
to Earth and proximity to a star, proximity to water. Yeah, that's
a key idea. That's a great question because the key idea that we've been
going on is this idea of what we call the habitable zone, that there's
a band of orbits around any star where if you poured water out on the
surface, it would just stay liquid water. Because we think liquid water is
necessary for life. So the way we're going to find life, and as
I talk about, you know, I kind of really explore this is by
looking at planets like Earth that are in the right place. They don't have
to be exact Earth analogs, right, you can have planets that are sort
of Earth sized, but there are going around stars that are much smaller than
the Sun, what we call dwarf stars. But basically, what we think
water, we think water is the key. Liquid water is the key.
Now I'm getting back to the this is this is the part that I think
blows people's minds because we start throwing out some of these numbers, like we
throw out the national deficit as though, you know, we keep this in
our back pocket. But when you are looking in to the telescope, when
you're when you're when you've told the telescope look at this particular system and you're
seeing and let's say it is ten light years away. Conceivably, that means
the system could have ceased to exist and we're just seeing the light because it's
taken ten years for it to get to us. But you still have a
reasonable when you see something like this, a reasonable idea of its age and
where it is and its life cycle. Yes, we can tell we can
date the stars. We can literally from the starts themselves. We can tell
whether that's a newly born planetary star and planetary system, or whether it's a
planetary system that is you know, tens of billions of years old, So
the Earth is about four and a half billion years and we'd had life on
Earth for over three point eight or at least three and a half billion years,
so we think probably that's how long it takes to develop a civilization.
But the cool thing is is that life appeared on Earth, at least microbial
life, immediately, So that does suggest that life is pretty common. As
soon as Earth could have life, it got life. Adam Frank in his
book Little Book of Aliens, and we're not talking about the Little Green Men,
but we might be talking about a extraterrestrial bacteria we could did. There's
there's two possibilities, right, and we can find them both. One is
looking for what I call dumb life microbes forest I mean, I don't mean
to insult forests, right, yeah, but we can find those are biospheres
right where the just like on Earth's, life hijacks a planet. So a
biosphere is the sum total of life on the planet, and we can find
those from their signatures of how they've changed their at the planet's atmosphere. We
can also find what are called techno signature. So the NASA grant that I
have I got I'm the principal investigator on a NASA grant, the first one
to ever study intelligent life on planets and techno signatures. Like all the technology
on a planet also changes a planet's how it behaves, and we can find
those as well. And that's one of the things I'm really giving people an
understanding of how close we are to finding either biospheres or technospheres using the technologies
we have now reasonably what's the closest system we're looking at for one of these
types of life. Well, remarkably, the closest star with planets to us,
Alpha Centauri, or the proximate Centory System, is only four light years
away. If you could travel at a good speed close to the speed of
light, you could get there in around four to ten years. So that
is one of the first places that we're going to look. But if I
were to go to speed of light, I wouldn't have any any thickness,
would I. I would just be this blob of because of the speed.
But yeah, I mean there are there are ways around that I gather there
are actually, you know, you could accelerate on a spaceship at you know,
one ravity, like you could just be sitting in your spaceship, you
wouldn't feel anything different than right now, and we could get you up to
speed close to the speed of light pretty quickly. So it still is actually
reasonable, and there are people exploring these ideas. I actually have a whole
chapter in the book where I go through all the ways you could cross interstellar
distances right because whether it's us or whether people think UFOs are actually aliens,
which you know I don't, I go through all the ways you could either
travel just below the speed of light, you know, or even the possibilities
if we want to extend the physics we understand to traveling faster than the speed
of light. Uh huh, Well, the Little Book of Aliens talks about
it, and Adam Frank is the one who's composed it. He's an astrophysicist
and alien optimists. Can you define that term? Yeah, alien optimists.
The reason I use that term is if you what's cool about the question are
we alone? Is that it's two thousand, five hundred years old. You
can see the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, yelling at each other about and
for all of history we've had either people being opimistic about it, saying,
oh, there's so many stars in the sky, there must be life in
the universe, and then optimists who say, yeah, even though there's so
many stars in the sky, there's you know, the odds of forming life
are low. So they are alien pessimists. So the whole history of the
human race has been optimists and pessimists yelling at each other over their opinions.
And I go through the history in the book. But now what's amazing is
for the first time we can actually get data. And it's a bit arrogant
to assume of all the billions of systems that are there, that we're the
only ones. Well, that's why I'm an optimist. I look at odds,
I look at how many stars there are, and I say, look,
it's got to happened somewhere else. But you know, here's an interesting
point. If we're just talking about civilization, smart life. If every civilization
only lasts, say ten thousand years, which would be a lot longer,
you know, than we've lasted in terms of technology, being a technological civilization,
then you know, the galaxy is so big that the odds that that
you're around when someone else is around kind of get pretty low. So it
could be that we live in the sterile galaxy just because nobody makes it more
than a thousand years. Adam Frank, astrophysicist, alien optimists and author of
The Little Book of Aliens, available everywhere you get books. Thank you for
joining us. It was a real pleasure. Thanks a lot, Lake.
Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and
remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia presentation