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This is later with Lee Matthews the
Lee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear weekday

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afternoons on the Drive. His name
is Adam Frank and he is a self

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professed as alien optimist, but he's
also has the advantage of being an astrophysicist,

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Professor Department of Physics and Astronomy at
the University of Rochester and author of

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Light of the Stars, Alien Worlds, and the Fate of Earth. His

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newest creation, the Little Book of
Aliens, and he in it says the

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human species is poised at the edge
of its greatest and most important journey.

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Well, Adam Frank and Little Book
of Aliens, what journey would that be?

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Well, first of all, Lee, thank you for having me on.

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And that journey, the one I
talk about in the book, is

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you know, after being an astrophysicist
for thirty years, I want people to

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understand how close we are to answering
that question. Are we alone? Using

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taw these new technologies we have,
we may be the last generation that doesn't

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know whether or not there's alien life
out there. I see some of these

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fantastic pictures of crab nebula and distant
areas and worlds and they're so very colorful

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and beautiful. Will they be that
way with the naked eye? You know,

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there's some when those telescopes you do
see some you know, people tweaking

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the colors, and in some cases
those are infrared, those are colors the

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eye can't even see. But what's
really amazing about those telescopes is that they

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can actually see into the atmospheres of
planets, exoplanets that are light years away.

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And as in the book, I
show that that's how we're going to

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be able to find life on these
distant alien worlds, but they're light years

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away. I've always had this question, even going back to my astronomy electives

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that I took in college. Light
years. That means if we had physically

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the ability to travel the speed of
light, it would still take years to

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get there. That's true, and
that's why the capacity to do it from

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a distance. We couldn't do this
before. The capacity to investigate these alien

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planets from a distance using things like
the James Webspace Telescope is so amazing.

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And what I try and show in
the book is show people how we can

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do it now, and we're just
going to get a lot better at it.

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With like the newer telescopes, the
ones that are on the board that

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we're developing right now. So even
though these things may be ten light years

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away and would take ten years to
get to at the speed of light,

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using our telescopes right now, we
can peer into their atmospheres and look for

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what do we call either biosignatures or
techno signatures that could tell us that there's

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life right now on them. Little
Book of Aliens and Adam Frank is here,

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So some of these systems that we're
looking at, are they that similar

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to Earth and proximity to a star, proximity to water. Yeah, that's

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a key idea. That's a great
question because the key idea that we've been

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going on is this idea of what
we call the habitable zone, that there's

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a band of orbits around any star
where if you poured water out on the

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surface, it would just stay liquid
water. Because we think liquid water is

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necessary for life. So the way
we're going to find life, and as

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I talk about, you know,
I kind of really explore this is by

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looking at planets like Earth that are
in the right place. They don't have

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to be exact Earth analogs, right, you can have planets that are sort

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of Earth sized, but there are
going around stars that are much smaller than

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the Sun, what we call dwarf
stars. But basically, what we think

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water, we think water is the
key. Liquid water is the key.

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Now I'm getting back to the this
is this is the part that I think

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blows people's minds because we start throwing
out some of these numbers, like we

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throw out the national deficit as though, you know, we keep this in

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our back pocket. But when you
are looking in to the telescope, when

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you're when you're when you've told the
telescope look at this particular system and you're

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seeing and let's say it is ten
light years away. Conceivably, that means

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the system could have ceased to exist
and we're just seeing the light because it's

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taken ten years for it to get
to us. But you still have a

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reasonable when you see something like this, a reasonable idea of its age and

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where it is and its life cycle. Yes, we can tell we can

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date the stars. We can literally
from the starts themselves. We can tell

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whether that's a newly born planetary star
and planetary system, or whether it's a

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planetary system that is you know,
tens of billions of years old, So

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the Earth is about four and a
half billion years and we'd had life on

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Earth for over three point eight or
at least three and a half billion years,

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so we think probably that's how long
it takes to develop a civilization.

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But the cool thing is is that
life appeared on Earth, at least microbial

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life, immediately, So that does
suggest that life is pretty common. As

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soon as Earth could have life,
it got life. Adam Frank in his

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book Little Book of Aliens, and
we're not talking about the Little Green Men,

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but we might be talking about a
extraterrestrial bacteria we could did. There's

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there's two possibilities, right, and
we can find them both. One is

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looking for what I call dumb life
microbes forest I mean, I don't mean

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to insult forests, right, yeah, but we can find those are biospheres

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right where the just like on Earth's, life hijacks a planet. So a

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biosphere is the sum total of life
on the planet, and we can find

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those from their signatures of how they've
changed their at the planet's atmosphere. We

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can also find what are called techno
signature. So the NASA grant that I

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have I got I'm the principal investigator
on a NASA grant, the first one

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to ever study intelligent life on planets
and techno signatures. Like all the technology

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on a planet also changes a planet's
how it behaves, and we can find

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those as well. And that's one
of the things I'm really giving people an

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understanding of how close we are to
finding either biospheres or technospheres using the technologies

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we have now reasonably what's the closest
system we're looking at for one of these

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types of life. Well, remarkably, the closest star with planets to us,

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Alpha Centauri, or the proximate Centory
System, is only four light years

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away. If you could travel at
a good speed close to the speed of

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light, you could get there in
around four to ten years. So that

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is one of the first places that
we're going to look. But if I

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were to go to speed of light, I wouldn't have any any thickness,

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would I. I would just be
this blob of because of the speed.

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But yeah, I mean there are
there are ways around that I gather there

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are actually, you know, you
could accelerate on a spaceship at you know,

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one ravity, like you could just
be sitting in your spaceship, you

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wouldn't feel anything different than right now, and we could get you up to

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speed close to the speed of light
pretty quickly. So it still is actually

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reasonable, and there are people exploring
these ideas. I actually have a whole

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chapter in the book where I go
through all the ways you could cross interstellar

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distances right because whether it's us or
whether people think UFOs are actually aliens,

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which you know I don't, I
go through all the ways you could either

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travel just below the speed of light, you know, or even the possibilities

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if we want to extend the physics
we understand to traveling faster than the speed

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of light. Uh huh, Well, the Little Book of Aliens talks about

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it, and Adam Frank is the
one who's composed it. He's an astrophysicist

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and alien optimists. Can you define
that term? Yeah, alien optimists.

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The reason I use that term is
if you what's cool about the question are

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we alone? Is that it's two
thousand, five hundred years old. You

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can see the Greeks, the ancient
Greeks, yelling at each other about and

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for all of history we've had either
people being opimistic about it, saying,

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oh, there's so many stars in
the sky, there must be life in

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the universe, and then optimists who
say, yeah, even though there's so

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many stars in the sky, there's
you know, the odds of forming life

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are low. So they are alien
pessimists. So the whole history of the

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human race has been optimists and pessimists
yelling at each other over their opinions.

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And I go through the history in
the book. But now what's amazing is

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for the first time we can actually
get data. And it's a bit arrogant

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to assume of all the billions of
systems that are there, that we're the

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only ones. Well, that's why
I'm an optimist. I look at odds,

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I look at how many stars there
are, and I say, look,

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it's got to happened somewhere else.
But you know, here's an interesting

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point. If we're just talking about
civilization, smart life. If every civilization

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only lasts, say ten thousand years, which would be a lot longer,

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you know, than we've lasted in
terms of technology, being a technological civilization,

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then you know, the galaxy is
so big that the odds that that

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you're around when someone else is around
kind of get pretty low. So it

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could be that we live in the
sterile galaxy just because nobody makes it more

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than a thousand years. Adam Frank, astrophysicist, alien optimists and author of

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The Little Book of Aliens, available
everywhere you get books. Thank you for

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joining us. It was a real
pleasure. Thanks a lot, Lake.

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Thanks for listening to Later with Lee
Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and

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remember to listen to The Drive Live
weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia presentation