Exploring the Universe; 9; Is There Other Life?

there are radio waves, visually, even as patterns on our oscilloscope here, or I can pick them up as sound through the shortwave radio and you can hear the sound. Now that may sound like static, and it is, but a very special kind of static. It comes from planet Jupiter, which was recorded visually by a radio telescope. The radio telescope is one of astronomy's newest and most powerful tools for exploring the universe. The one you see is the largest in the world. It directed toward the heavens, toward a spot in the heavens, and it picks up radio waves from one thing nearby planets like Jupiter in our own solar system. And then it probes outside of our system and records radio waves from the crab nebula here in our galaxy, and it reaches beyond our galaxy through other galaxies and remote parts of the universe. It picks up radio emissions from a source where actually nothing is visible. These are sounds from space, and a fair question is a message from some far off person or beings like ourselves buried someplace in that static. That question has been asked many times, and today, for the first time,

really, scientists are in a position to investigate that age-old question. The question of is their other life in the universe? Here's their other life in the universe. Is it a familiar question? I think you've asked yourself that one. All of it has. We usually think of life as being more or less like ourselves, so we're made out of things like this. This is a model of a molecule, which is built of atoms, mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, three basic ones, and others too. And the molecules, and from their on life and earth, is built of these elements. Astronomers have found these same molecules,

or at least atoms in space, way out there. So consider for a moment what the essentials might be, which would be needed to start a cycle of life and evolution on some other planet, far out there in space someplace. First, our hypothetical planet would have to have a sun. That was the source of the heat, the radiant energy, which makes life possible. However, not just us on, but one that says the right size and temperature, or the distance from the planet, which we're talking about as the source of life. Two small sun you see, or one too far away, wouldn't provide enough heat and energy to produce and sustain life. And on the other hand, if the sun were too large, or too close to the planet, it would be much too hot there to let the molecules get together and begin life or evolution. These solar flares are the kind of heat that I mean. So for life to evolve, the planet must be large enough to have gravitational pull to keep its atmosphere as the earth, which you see here briefly, from escaping into space. And the hypothetical planet must have also lots of atmosphere with some water in, presumably it's in the atmosphere,

or it's on the surface of the planet like this, enough water at least, and temperature enough to keep it from freezing and boiling, either or. Well, that's the limitations, you might say. So one of the chances, then, of really finding life as we know it, or any kind of life, that matter, someplace in the universe. Start please with the chances of life in other parts of our own solar system. First, there is the sun, which, as you see here, in that film, close up to the sun is a whirling, intensity hot ball of gas. Surface temperature, 10,000 degrees. Life, as we know it, is not possible there at all. Now, this is our friend, the sun here. The air is planted as mercury, right over there, a little one. And life isn't too likely there, because mercury faces the sun all the time as it goes around, it looks right at it, and one side's very hot, and the other side is very cool. It points away and it's always dark. So, find me while I move the earth here. The border zone, the mercury we went, by the way, is not likely. Venus, who is very bright at night, and all there. Venus is not too close to the sun,

not too far away. It's a probable place. Astronomers thought for a while that Venus might have life on, but recent findings show that its temperature is just a bit too hot, like that really is very unlikely. And now that gets us to earth, we have life, we're pretty sure. And down nearby neighbor, where is Mars today? Here he is over here. He's going around, you'll see, and after a while he'll be over, and very close to us. Mars is a candidate for life. Pretty good when really, has a thin atmosphere, and by our standard, it's not unseasonably cold or unreasonably cold, either one. In this picture here, which you see through an actual telescope, the polar ice cap gets smaller and smaller at the top as it shrinks and melts with the approach of Mars in summer. The dark patches that you see, developing now, I thought to be Mars in vegetation, which appears during the moist season after the polar ice cap is melted. That's the planet which we're getting closer to in every way, every day. Then out beyond Mars, while the chances of finding life become really progressively smaller, as far as you go. When you

get the Jupiter out here, it's very big. There's a thick atmosphere, a very cold gas, this photograph, the telescope shows you the bands of gases around the planet, very cold, way below zero. Life is not very likely on Jupiter, nor for that matter on very handsome Saturn. Saturn has a lot of beautiful rings, but much of these gases hide in the Thane ammonia. In fact, the ammonia is in crystals, it's so cold on Saturn. And further out, you have Uranus and Neptune over there, and where's Pluto? Here's the Pluto way out there. Far too far from the Sun, far too cold. He's not in scale, or they'd be in Central Montgomery, how they might be. Probably then, there's no life in our solar system, beyond Earth, and perhaps on Mars. But our Sun is a star, you know, rather a second-rate star, but the best we have, but there's so many other stars, and maybe they have planets too. And you know, on a clear night,

without a telescope, you can see between two and six thousand stars would be naked eye. And with a good small telescope, you can see millions of stars. And with a big one, well, it's hard almost to say how many. And the largest telescope in the world at Mount Palomar, when you look through that, you go billions of light years into space, and you see on photographic plates, billions of stars, and billions of galaxies, composed of billions of stars. And perhaps, as the diaphragm opens there, and the observer in his cage, at the time, focused the mirror, begins to look upward, as the Sun goes down. And he looks out toward the edge of our galaxy, the Milky Way. One of the millions of Suns there has upon it, which is suitable for life. But how likely is this? Is man unique? Is the question that each of us has asked? And I think we can ask now the man who is most likely in the world today to know the answer to that. Is Dr. Hala Shapley? Dr. Shapley, of course, is one of the greatest astronomers of all time,

that's not too sporting a term, Dr. I believe there were the early Greeks in Copernicus and yourself who put us... Put us near places. Well, Dr. Shapley didn't put us in our place. The Greeks thought that the center of the universe was the world, and then Copernicus put it in the Sun, and you put us in the galaxy, and then out, and where is the center of everything now? The center of everything, I don't know what the word mean anymore, we've got to the place where nothing has a center. I asked that question a minute ago, let me repeat it. Is man unique in the universe, do you think? The chemically, say? Unique in his chemical composition? Not at all. No, he's very common on it. Well, for this example, you know elements like hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen there, they're very important elements for life. What is it? About nine tenths of the ocean is one element, oxygen, and the crest of the earth, half of it is oxygen, and the atmosphere of nearly 22 percent is oxygen, and you are two thirds oxygen, so you're made of the same

stuff as the stars and the galaxies, as well as the planets that we spoke about, or the phenomenon of the surface here. You'd rather strange if I were unique then with all this. It'd be very embarrassing, I'd think to us, because there's no... Uniquity left over. We know all about all the elements, and there's no other queer element that you could be composed of. One of the odds then that there is life, statistically direct. Oh, the odds that there is life, I think, are very high, others think it's even higher than I think, and I think rather boldly in it, but here is the point. There are 10 to the 20th power, that's a shorthand way of saying, 100,000 million billion. That's 100,000 zeros after? Yes, one with 20 zeros after. Well, that many stars, and all of stars have a potentiality of having warmed up planets in the right zone that you spoke about, so you have liquid water, and so I'd say that even if only one star in a billion had a planetary system, and only one in a thousand of those had planets in the right place for the liquid water

and so forth, put it down as much as you can, you would have then about a 100 million planets where I would say high life exists. High life as we do. High life is because. I mean, elevated life, not just the likens, not just the algae. Well, how did this get started? Isn't there a great gap between the most complex organic molecule and the simplest form of life? Is there a gap in that? Well, there was thought to be over a good many years, but in the last 10 or 20 years, we see evidence that, of course, we're all one stream, that there's a cosmic evolution that's gone through the universe from the hydrogen atoms, through the rest of the atoms, through the molecules, into organisms, through all the organisms, all the way up to us. How is this determined? Is it still going on? Let's experiment. It's present time. I wouldn't say that life, so-called life originates easily because it'll be a little difficult here on the surface planet, but there's no question at all, but the evolution is going on all the time. As has in the past, new stars are being born, new galaxies are coming into existence, and new opportunities for this biochemical operation that we call life.

We're speaking when you say life, as we know it, another- That's right. Life as we know it, life based on those elements, those atoms I mentioned before, especially carbon and nitrogen and hydrogen. Yes, that kind of life. Isn't this kind of limiting us? Couldn't it be life based on silicon and something else? Yes, that's right. We take ourselves seriously and think that our kind of life is what could exist. But often it's been suggested that instead of having carbon, we could have silicon. And instead of some other element, we get some substance, and still could have a living organism. But the best biologists or biochemists that I know say, no, that isn't the way it's going to work. There's a universal biochemistry, and the biochemistry we have here that we call life is the same. Generally, it's the same as they would have elsewhere. They could be surprised sometimes. We could be surprised. We have so many kinds of life, though already, a million kinds of life on the surface of the earth. Very different than you and me, a big and small. There are more than 200 kinds of beetles and one kind of man. Yes, I'd say we're rather unique in that way as we got by. How hard can life be and still have

people? I don't know. When you, as you said, a bit of gold, when it boils away into a vapor, hot vapor is no place for portaplasma adventuring. And when it's frozen, no, we want water in a liquid state. There are creatures living in the hot springs out in the elephant? Oh, a bit, yes. But they're not hot the way a star surface is. Not the 10,000 degrees of the sun surface, no. Would you say we're the most complex form of life, any place, or other places? I think it'd be much more complex in a lot of other places. There's no reason why we on this little planet around a run of the mill star at the edge of one galaxy would be the place where the top most of anything would happen. No, I think to probably have been excelled easily in a lot of places, but we're out of touch. For the time being, do you think we may get in touch sometimes? Well, I'll leave it to you. I'll leave it to you. I'll leave it to Dr. Morrison. Yes, I see. Though, speaking of the other possible lives which do exist, if we were to reach them, I'm going to ask this question, Dr. Morrison, what could we hope to learn to improve the human condition here? Well, on the way out and without getting far out, we'll learn by our new techniques,

a good deal about our earth and a good deal about our atmosphere and about electric conditions around here. And so the byproducts for the first year or two of travel toward another star might be very rich in just improving knowledge. And that, of course, in helps mankind. The other planets could be a million years older than we, for example. A lot of them, we could be considered. We think we're about third generation, and there's some that must be video older than that. And of course, great many young ones. Well, think like you yourself and one generation have taught us and how much we have for another generation. How much do you get for another generation? Yeah, you have a lot of time to undo what I've told you, yes. They out there, too. Thank you, Dr. Barryman. Thank you. So, out there in the universe, as Dr. Shapley in Men and Stars predicted, there must be, by a reason, a hundred million planets which have life on as we know it. This is pretty starting, but it's as true as two and two being four. It's pretty doubtful, too, that we as humans will ever travel actually beyond our solar system to

to come even to the closest of them. If you look out with the telescope or with your naked eye, you'll see a bright star, if you live in the South, called Alpha Centauri, a nearest neighbor star. But to go there, it's quite a trip more than 25 trillion miles away, traveling at the speeds of our present spaceships, it would take thousands of years to get there. The original crew of that spaceship would have lived out its life, and a new crew, been born, and lived out its life, and more generations. The journey would be completed by descendants maybe 15 to 20 generations later. So don't plan on leaving for Alpha Centauri or even approximately right away. Someday, though, a better idea may work. We may be able to contact them by radio, and they may be able to reach us, in fact, perhaps they are now. The tool for communication exists in this, which you see here, the radio telescope. It's only a few years old, but as a radio telescope, it looks out into space like this at stars, galaxies, and objects which can't be seen beyond the range, perhaps, of optical telescopes, or hidden from view behind dust clouds,

and you see in the center here. These dust clouds, this black streaks there, are the center of our own local galaxy, the Milky Way. The dust clouds are cosmic dust, behind which are many stars and points of radio emission. The signals which you hear in the background now come from that area. And astronomers who are reading them here are looking at them. The reason something like this, intelligent beings out in space may well have invented radio transmitters, we did after all, and if they did, perhaps they're trying to get in touch with this. And so a few courageous pioneers have listened to this static modest space, began to analyze it, and hope to find a message in those signals. It's a perfectly sensible thing to do, it's a kind of a miracle that hasn't been before. And one of the men who did it is with us right now, he's Dr. Philip Morrison. Dr. Morrison is a theoretical physicist at Cornell University, and a man was an outgoing imagination. Dr. Morrison, these radio emissions or transmissions would be heard. Are they like radio broadcast waves that we get from local stations? They're the same sort of wave. Your set radio or TV picks up

the deliberate signals from stations, but it also gets the ignition noises in the lightning storms, natural, or let us say not deliberate for them. That's what we hear now, the natural radio emissions from the electrons of space. We hope very beneath them somewhere might be a deliberate signal. You imply then that in these signals which are buried in here is the existence of people as advanced as we are in some ways. Being, let us say, as advanced as we are technologically, I should think most likely very much more advanced. The time that we have known radio and radio telescopes is tiny on the scale of the age of the earth. 1931 or something like that. And radio itself is only 50 or 100 years old. We have no senses for it. There's no natural source of radio of any great strength on earth. And we expect that beings who have evolved over billions of years have no reason to be just in step with us. Therefore, there are probably many, many years ahead. And if somewhere that have had the same kind of history as we, they will be technologically far

more competent than we are. Well, why should we look? These telescopes look out towards specific points of their stars. Yes. The distances are so enormous, as you know, that the transmitter would be dwarfed if it were not directional and beamed like a searchlight beam, thus the radio mirrors, which look like giant searchlights, which are radio searchlights. You have to point those at the right star around which is the right planet with the right beings anxious to beam toward us. Now, those stars, we will say, will probably be stars rather like our son. There are plenty of them, for Dr. Shapley mentioned that. I think he's very conservative. In our galaxy alone, there are a hundred million stars close enough to the sun to be the hosts for life. What that will do is to start anyhow. That would do as a start. We look at one for, listen to one for how long before we know what there's a signal in there. Oh, that depends on your receiver and many circumstances. We have to try to find out the best way to listen. Then we must search one by one with our best means and then probably not give up. Search again with still better means when they're improved until it will go.

Well, I heard about Project Osama, is that doing that? These people began the first job. They bravely tried, look at just two out of the hundred million stars and they didn't find anything, but you wouldn't expect to find needle and haystack the first time you look. No, not exactly. What kind of a message, though, do you hope to find in the signals of what will be there? I think it's pretty clear how to decipher the message. Don't forget, if the message is there, it will be a message aimed at people like ourselves, of beings like us who will try to understand it. Therefore, it will not be complex. It will be made as simple as possible, spelled out how to decode it on the face of it. We don't have experience with messages like that, but there must be some. You begin with a simple arithmetic. We can recognize that. Then the signs for plus minus and so on. Then more complicated, finally. And from this we can show, you could make television pictures, how to decode television pictures. I think they're coming over, you know? There'll be TV pictures in pulses, which we'll slowly have to learn how to decipher. They would send the TV pictures and then a little information on them. Write a primer on how to decode them, and then a little more new picture, and then a primer in the new picture. Anytime

Newtonian built a way very long for the primer to tell you what you're seeing. The first open-end program. Do we have radio transmitters now powerful enough to signal back? Almost, so. I think it could be arguing that we could. But first let's hear the signal, and then we'll certainly bend our greatest efforts to answer it. It would be 10 or 20 years, one way message, wouldn't it? In the closest case, it would take us 20 years for a two-way conversation. Well, we're not going to be rushed into it then. No, it's better to listen for a long time. There may be some very good programs coming up. And Dr. Morrison, I hear the word convergence used in connection with you a lot. What's convergence? I think the idea is quite a simple one. People ask, how could it be that beings far away in a different planet in a different world would come to the same sort of technology that we have? And the analogy that I would like to give, we can see here in the animals of our own Earth, who have bi-natural processes evolved. For example, long ago, there was a fossil reptile. You see him there. He swam in the ocean, 300 million years ago. Look at the shape of that fella. Beautifully streamlined, suitable for swimming.

And nowadays, we see an animal, which was descended from land animals, the purpose who swam from the ocean very well, too, and has a shape. Look at it. Not so different from that reptile. Yet this animal is not descended from that reptile in any way. He comes from land animals, which came out of the sea long after the existence of that old ichthyasaur. Now, what has happened here is convergence. These two animal forms, by natural forces, came to look at the same, because they had the same problem to solve, to swim very well and fast in the sea. In the same way, I think the beings will evolve. Wherever life gets to the suitable complexity, who have the same need to cope with their environment as we have had, to make shelter, food, clothing, communication, and so on. And it will be led by the same natural forces to come to all the means of communication that we have had. Sounds very reasonable. Other planets, though, may not have the same kind of environment over a very long period. Is that possible? Could it change rapidly? Our changes slowly to us. Well, it will be slow on the biological scale. But once culture gets going, then this is a much more rapid scale of change. We have an example

of convergence there, too. For example, if you look at early forms of writing, here are two compared, one from Central America, and one from Egypt. Three thousand years apart in time, and five thousand apart in distance. And yet, they look much the same. If you try to make writing, you come out with nearly the same forms. Dr. Morrison, those are a lot of exciting ideas. I wonder if we could get Dr. Shappel over here and kind of put you two together. Dr. Woodjoof, orbit into the place here, and I'll just try to get you two angry at each other. That's not very easy, I'm afraid. Where do you disagree? You both heard each other talk a bit. Must be some argument to start with someplace. Well, I take a rather dim view of the value of trying to get in contact with so-called sentient beings, I'd call them another place, because we have so many other problems, so many other ways to spend our big money that I would think it's a bit on the foolish side. If you could do it as a byproduct,

and I think that was your idea, as a dark, as weekends or something of that kind, you could turn on it, right? That might be all right. I think it's quite clear. It's very hard to start any experiment going, which doesn't have a good chance of success. This is the needle in the haystack search. I think it's a terribly valuable search. I hope it will be pressed. But, you know, you can't expect it to weep right away. The fellows that have to do it feel concerned to go year after year, decade after decade, and no success. I think you're quite right. It's a byproduct. Every radio astronomer, I hope, in some years time when we decide what is the best thing to do, will commit his machinery 10% of the time, maybe, one day and every 10, or one hour and every day, to doing this search the rest of the time he does his own work. Then nobody feels he's made a big sacrifice, and yet the sky is well-patrolled. Don't you think that would be a reason to explain it? Well, that's reasonable, yes. Would you like to know, to get a message from another planet now, would you take a chance on the information or influence it might have on our civilization? Oh, I don't know whether I have much influence on our civilization, because the civilization is so slow catching on to advances in science.

I wouldn't think, but it would help out science a good deal. This is one of the big valuable things that you might think you agree, that in attempting to get across space, and here across space, we're going to find other things along the way. For instance, as we start off far, the moon, we're going to find out more about the earth, and we start off for the nearby stars, we're going to find more about the solar system. So I think there's a byproduct there also of incidental things that we may find that are valuable, even if we did take the dim view of the whole enterprise. Surely that, but I can't believe that we will rest content until we know whether we are alone as our theories suggest we are not. Aren't we three fellow sitting on a bench here in a little tiny spot in the universe and saying that we are able to conceive what can be that we don't know about? Well, we are reasoning, I think, from some evidence we are here. We've heard the arguments of the atoms and the stars. Oh, the evidence for life existing elsewhere, it seems to me is very strong. You agree on that, don't you? It is very strong. It is very strong.

And I think they understated by a million times when I said a hundred million. I should have said a hundred million in my own opinion, but I would be careful, incidentally. And now, good many people are saying, well, perhaps half the stars in our own Milky Way system have planetary systems. Well, that's going a little too far, perhaps. But undoubtedly, we have good arguments for the believing in the existence of life elsewhere. And since there's so many stars, I believe I'll have to go along and say there's probably a great deal of high intelligent life. Life is surpassed for the stars, because you see, we aren't so very far along. We have only a few sense organs. If we had a few more sense organs, one of you mentioned, one on radio, why we might know a little to something. Is it possible that they have surpassed us and been coming this way for a hundred years under here? I thought you might ask that question. I think it's very unlikely that travel through space is the most difficult technical project I can think of. If you wanted to send a really sizable rocket, a really great distance, you'd have to use all the energy that the world muster is now, just to make that one trip. I don't think they'll do it. Maybe a ceremonial visit

as from one chief of state to another. But communication by electrical minions is the fastest and best as we know even here on Earth. Fair enough. Yes. A man said something which is rather starting once. I would like to have, as we finish our program today, your opinion of this statement. He said, I conceive of nothing in religion, science or philosophy, which is more than the proper thing to wear for a while. In 1915, when you began to find those supernovae in Andromeda, the universe was this big. When you finished, it was a billion, billion times bigger. It's not perhaps what we're wearing today's clothes and might not be changed. Yes. In other words, this is a temporary situation where you're in. That's what you're saying. Oh, I'm asking you. Yes. This is temporary. Yes. I think so. I think what we've done towards extending the spectrum you see from the visual, the color spectrum way. I didn't throw the violin way out into the red, but we tremendous advance that was in knowledge. I think what we've done with that periodic table I told you, you

know, you are made of star stuff. I wanted to get that across, or the stars are made of you stuff if you want to be vain about it. But anyway, the same elements are all the way through. And that is one of the big advances that we hadn't done a century ago. So I think you're right. They're going to be some big, but where would it be? But I don't think it will end what we know now. I don't think you'll fit elements in between. No. Or nor will you add anything different from the rest of the spectrum that we now know to the far ends. We begin to see something just as close, always fit the man. So I think the clothes will change, the styles will change, but some things will remain final. Yes, hands and feet. You know what I think is very important. That is the advance of technology, the little byproducts, accessories. I think that's where we're going to make our big advances in the future. I think that's the next thing to do, certainly. I am anxious, most anxious of all, to see that that shot between 64 and 66. When the Mars probe will land, land of new instruments, they call them a gulliver and multivayer, sticking out little tentacles with sticky tape on them and trying to analyze chemically, whether the vegetation on Mars is really present. And sending back the information. And sending back the information to us. We'll be here

and watching. Thank you very much, Dylan. Thank you. Dr. Phillip Morrison and Dr. Highler Shapley. To the people who know more than most anybody, I could think of whether or not there is life elsewhere. And Dr. Shapley says 100 million to one that there is. And so for this half hour of the Earth, having moved during the meantime, quite a bit, we will move along with it. Come again soon, please. Encourage. National Educational Television.