[Applause] our voices have ascended
into space announcing our presence to the universe other men on other worlds may be listening we await an answer from
afar placed by an intelligence we do not know we will not recognize we may not even understand radio waves that might bear
the conversations of distant beings are monitored Day and Night by
astronomers throughout the world our understanding of life in
outer space May begin with reaching out to another form of intelligence
here on Earth if
we can communicate with one strange intelligence we
can hope to communicate with others the stars and galaxies beckon us to
ask are we alone we listen for the answer this series presents information
based in part on Theory and conjecture the producer's purpose is to suggest
some possible explanations but not necessarily the only ones to
the Mysteries we will examine [Music] we have always dreamed of talking
with Celestial beings discoveries in deep space have revealed that the
same chemi
stry that created Earthly life operates elsewhere perhaps we are not
accidents of creation perhaps we are not alone giant Ultra sensitive instruments tune in on the frequencies of other
worlds as we begin a cosmic Journey our search for intelligent life beyond the
planet earth has begun and the job is as immense as the universe itself our galaxy alone contains
an estimated 250 billion stars and there are at least 100 billion other galaxies how many of
these stars have earthlike planets harb
oring life until recently we searched with our eyes
aided by telescopes then with the Advent of radio a whole new noisy Universe emerged and
man began to listen to the stars in 1971 at NASA's ases Research Center 24 scientists and
Engineers began the search for other life led by Dr Bernard Oliver and Dr John Billingham the
group concluded that radio is the most effective way of detecting other voices in Space the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence nicknamed seti became a reality Dr Ol
iver explains the concept
of doing this really has its origin in the belief that we will have to go to other stars rather
than just other planets of our own system before we find intelligent life and we belief that
that is an extremely difficult thing to do physically if we are not going to cross the G
of interstellar space how then are we going to ever detect other intelligent life the answer
seems to be by looking for evidence of it in the form of signals that it may either radiate
on pu
rpose to arouse our attention or simply in the course of its own activities it's quite
possible that signals have been falling on the earth for uh millions or billions of years
in 1931 extraterrestrial radio signals were accidentally discovered by Bell Telephone engineer
Carl jansy jansy detected a hiss that seemed to be coming from the very center of our galaxy for the
first time Dense Star clouds invisible to optical telescopes revealed their presence through radio
emissions Gro Reber an
enthusiastic radio amateur confirmed jansky's observations using a homemade
backyard antenna Reber found found that radio emissions of natural origin occur throughout our
galaxy then in 1961 the search for intentional signals began at Greenbank West Virginia a radio
telescope was used for the first time to listen for intelligent signals from Space Project osma
a Whimsical reference to the land lying Over the Rainbow was followed 10 years later by the most
far-reaching life search program ev
er devised the Cyclops plan was to start with a modest size
antenna element say something like 300 ft in diameter and simply add additional ones as time
went on to increase the total collecting area this sort of a system is known as an antenna array
and it works by having all of the antennas feed their signals together into a common receiver a
common detector uh so that they add in phase and act as if they had been picked up by a single
antenna so we believe we can take as many as a thousan
d antennas and connect them together
in this fashion and get a huge collecting area a listening post beyond Earth is an
alternative explored by seti astronomer Dr Charles Seager a basic problem in a search
for extraterrestrial signals has to do with the interference to receiving systems produced by
all our transmissions in the same radio frequency spectrum space uh may offer some advantages
and may not be all lot more expensive for a large receiving system than on Earth space has
the advan
tage of uh a more benign environment uh you don't have winds and storms and rain and
repainting to do all the time it's very quiet also you can put up a very light system
in space it floats there the backside of the moon is attractive since there you are
beautifully shielded from all Earth activity [Music] what we envision is to reproduce
in the craters of the Moon a series of aroso type antennas and it's estimated by
Engineers that one could build uh a th000 to 3,000 foot or even larger pe
rhaps arbo type
structures relatively economically scattering them among a bunch of adjacent craters uh
on the back of the Moon an alternative to the uh moon is to have an antenna floating
in space in orbit around the Earth the early antennas would be so arranged that
they could be constructed in space carried out in pieces on a shuttle along
with the workers necessary to construct it it would then be set into orbit and the
shuttle would return while we tried out the device while we wait f
or a call
from space we have not ruled out breaking the Silence of the universe by
sending our own signals to Cosmic [Music] neighbors nestled in the tropical mountain jungle
of Puerto Rico is the largest radio telescope on Earth a, ft across and 300 ft deep the arbo
telescope can listen to signals from the farthest Brees of the universe it can also converse with
other beings in the Cosmos on November 16th 1974 man prepared to beam his first and only
intentional signal to intelligence beyo
nd the [Music] Earth our message traveling at the speed of light will
take 24,000 years to reach star cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules in code the message
describes our solar system the earth and the life of on it the chemical basis of life on Earth
is represented by the famous double helix of DNA the final depiction of a human being is like a cry
in the night of space who or what will answer our call on March 2nd 1972 Pioneer 10 began its 21mon
journey to Jupiter attached to the s
pacecraft is a plaque a kind of planetary Rosetta Stone
designed by astronomer Dr Carl Sean but in the remote contingency that there are Interstellar
space fairing society which might someday pick up this derelict no longer radioing we thought
we would put put a message on it to indicate a little bit of where we are when we are and who we
are we think that the the information on where we are and when we are indicated in this part of
the message by the configuration of certain Cosmic objects
called pulsars will be completely
obvious to uh any society capable of traveling between the Stars these two objects will be more
mysterious because it is unlikely that there will be human beings anywhere else even though there
may be other creatures elsewhere and the plaus served a very useful purpose in making us think
about what sort of impression we might wish to give to the [Music] cosmos Pioneer 10 flew past
Jupiter in December 1973 in 1984 it will leave the solar system forever who
will pick up our
message floating in interstellar space radio waves traveling much faster than Pioneer will
provide our first clue any signal that we pick up will certainly not have originated from a
civilization much less Advanced technically than we because it is only very recently that
we have been able to radiate and detect such signals if we look at the enormous time spans
involved then it seems very likely that what we will find is a civilization considerably more
advanced than ourse
lves and which might have reasons for attempting to contact us that we do
not even comprehend at the present time at Ames Research Center psychologist Dr Mary Connor is
working to determine what an extraterrestrial civilization might be like basically of on
the non-technological issues which is what I'm primarily concerned with we're concerned with
with two basic questions one is what is what can we know about the nature of the intelligence
that we are likely to contact well what do we know
about intelligence we could ask what is
intelligence what possible forms can it take what can we learn from animal intelligence the
dolphin although it shares our planet exists in a world of its own it speaks a language we do not
comprehend its brain size is comparable to man's yet the dolphin is still an enigma as alien to
us as a creature from outer space at San Diego's SeaWorld trainers and scientists work behind
the scenes in an intensive effort to unravel the mysteries of dolphin sona
r and communication
tell you what we'll give you another Munch for that the dolphin has always seemed akin to man
and some have wondered if this creature even now is attempting to communicate with us difference
but he doesn't know yet what the difference means the greatest problem Remains the
limit of our own experience there you go despite our theories and our hopes
man has yet to exchange one word with the dolphin SeaWorld's curator of mammals Dr Lanny
Cornell and researcher Sheri Gish a
re interested in cracking the communication barrier one of
the projects that we have in an overall study of communic ation amongst Dolphins is one between
two animals in two pools separated by a soundproof gate which allows us to determine specifically
when the animals will be able to communicate with one another Cornell and his assistant will
monitor every sound emitted by the two dolphins The Exchange each signal and response will
be carefully studied and patterns of sound production anal
yzed sound waves are converted
into a form that can be measured electronically an oscilloscope reveals the changes in
frequencies some inaudible to the human ear at 116th normal speed the intricacies
of dolphin signals become [Music] apparent the dolphin is one for form of non-human
intelligence the form that extraterrestrial life may take is subject to Scientific speculation
it does appear that at least at our present stage of evolution there may be some advantages
to being structured uh
at least with some of the characteristics that we have there are clear
advantages for example to having two eyes uh with which you can uh see in color and with
which you can achieve binocular vision it's clear that the advantages to having an upright
posture clear the advantages to having a a brain located at one end of the body and you
can go on like this if it is inevitable that another civilization will have had at one point
some of the characteristics we have now we'll contact with thes
e alien beings from some unknown
Planet bring doomsday to our tiny world or do the benefits to our future outweigh the dangers
the greatest miracle that we have before us is the fact that within a few billion years the
universe Through The Marvelous laws of chemistry and physics has converted part of itself into
Consciousness and that part can now contemplate the universe that began it a French scientist
put it this way astronomy is useful because it shows us how small is man's body How Gre
at Is
Mine Dr John Krauss is an electrical engineer and astronomer at Ohio State University he
is one of a few who are working intently to solve the riddle of the universe to answer the
question are we alone he is philosophical about his mission I think one of the exciting things
about all this work is that uh those of us who are involved are like Pioneers we are exploring
the the Universe it's a pioneering venture to uh find out what is out there and perhaps who
is out there searching for
extraterrestrial intelligence is um like looking for um a needle
in a hay stack assuming that we're not unique and that there are intelligent beings elsewhere
we have to try and second guess them but uh you you need need some kind of um road [Music] map Dr
krauss's road map is a giant radio telescope that he helped design and build he affectionately
calls it big ear larger than three football fields in area Big Ear Has detected signals
from the most distant known objects in the universe co
uld Big Ear Now find intelligence
signals in the vastness of [Music] space hi Ed Bob hi Dr CR anything interesting well we
began our search on Friday the 7th of December 1973 Bob Dixon and Ed TGA work for weeks
setting up and testing an eight channel filter and getting it ready for the life search
well why not run it let's give it a goal all right there was no fuss or Fanfare switches were
set recorders started and the data began to flow now our big ear was listening for
other men on other
planets circling other stars who might have built
Beacon stations to announce their presence if Bob Dixon said we got something
that looks interesting John I I'm sure it wouldn't be that he'd recorded a voice
saying uh this is planet MX3 calling Earth it wouldn't be anything as direct
and unequivocal as that it would just be a little bump on a squiggly line
record that went on for hundreds of feet that uh occurred in a way that set it
off from others we may have to wait a long time the pr
obability of Life developing
elsewhere is hard to determine definitely but I don't think it is zero and if it is not
zero then I think we have a chance someday this uh call from space may come it's hard to
say when it will the signal that we're looking for might be found uh within a day but it
might take uh might be weeks years but it will have profound significance to man if
we are not alone what will we say to our [Applause] neighbors for centuries man thought that the
Earth was the cent
er of the universe the sun moon and stars were to light our our days and
nights then Galileo turned his telescope to the sky and we learned that the moon and planets
were worlds Beyond dispute that the Stars weren't just ornaments in the sky but represented a
cosmos far beyond man's Earthly imagination we dreamt of life beyond the planet Earth and
set out to explore the universe we began humbly with the moon I Wasing [Music] on we found
that there is no man in the moon but there are nine ot
her planets in our solar system
so we set our sights on Mars and sent our probe now we look Beyond to the vastness of
the universe and search the stars for voices of other beings if we were in fact to decipher
messages from the other civilizations over and above simply receiving a signal and knowing that
they are there then it is conceivable we might learn about the pathways that they took when they
were at our present stage of development I think in this way uh one can easily visualize a n
etwork
of intercommunicating societies growing up in our galaxy such a network could achieve results in
science and in philosophy and in other fields uh that would be more painful if they were isolated
past human history may be only the Prelude to our future as members of a galactic Society our
future will begin with a call from [Music] space la
Comments