UNIVERSITY PARK, PA. — “Most of the sky has not been formally searched for extraterrestrial intelligence,” said Adam Frank, Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester, author of several books related to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and a regular contributor to NPR. “If the stars are the ocean, and we were searching the ocean for fish, how much of the ocean have we searched? It turns out to be a bathtub. So, the reason why we haven't found [signs of extraterrestrial intelligence] is because we haven't yet looked [everywhere].”
Frank joined a panel of experts for a discussion about SETI after a free screening of the 1997 award-winning film “Contact” on Dec 3. The event was part of the Penn State Eberly College of Science’s Science Matters: Spotlight Sessions and the Friedman Lectures in Astronomy and Astrophysics. In the film, a SETI researcher played by Jodi Foster detects a radio transmission from an extraterrestrial intelligence and ultimately makes first contact.
“One of the things I love about this movie is that it's science fiction, but it's also really firmly rooted in real science,” said Jason Wright, professor of astronomy and astrophysics and director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center (PSETI). “It was written by Carl Sagan, a great scientist himself, and he worked closely with a lot of the people who pioneered the field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”
In addition to the ethics of following instructions from an unknown species, the film explores ideas around the value of curiosity, the roles of the government and billionaires in funding research, and the sometimes-complementary nature of faith and science, which the panel agreed are all still relevant today.
“The story confronts some really timeless themes: how do we know what we know, what are our standards of evidence?” said panelist Nadia Drake, science journalist, longtime contributor at National Geographic, and daughter of SETI pioneer Frank Drake. “And there’s a timeless element to it, these questions of solitude, why humans are so bothered by loneliness, both individually and on a planetary scale.”
Several scenes take place at the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which have been used by real-life astronomers for radio astronomy.
“This movie came out in 1997, and in those days, radio was the only tool [for SETI],” Frank said. “Now, radio is one tool out of many. The fact that we have discovered exoplanets — planets that orbit other stars — has completely changed the nature of SETI.”
In addition to radio signals, today’s SETI researchers search the cosmos for signatures of life, called biosignatures, and of technology, called technosignatures. Biosignatures, the panel explained, would provide evidence that a planet is not sterile, such as certain combinations of gasses in the atmosphere that might indicate biology. The search for biosignatures also falls under the field of astrobiology, which, Wright said, has been nurtured at universities. For example, the Penn State Astrobiology Center is the longest running astrobiology center at a university. The center is directed by Jennifer Macalady, professor of geosciences, who moderated the panel.
Technosigantures, on the other hand, could include communication signals or evidence of physical structures, and these are the subject of focus for the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. Penn State is one of only two institutions with graduate-level SETI curriculum and the only curriculum integrated as part of an astrobiology degree. Since it was founded five years ago, the center has produced half of the doctoral degrees in the field.
"I think it's very interesting the ways in which our science reflects our societal insecurities and worries,” Macalady said. “We're in a time right now where there are a lot of insecurities and worries, and then there are other times when we seem a little bit more curious, a little bit more open-minded. And we seem to oscillate. I think that's a really interesting aspect of the SETI story that is really beautifully demonstrated in this film."
While the techniques have expanded, and both funding and public interest in SETI have increased over the past decades, the panelists suggested that understanding and communicating with an extraterrestrial intelligence, as in the film, would likely be a challenge.
“We are much more closely related to dolphins, whom we can’t understand, than we would be to an extraterrestrial intelligence,” Wright said. “We are more closely related to sycamore trees than we are to them. So, if we do encounter a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence, it would be truly alien. The one thing we have to go on is if they send a radio transmission, they know how to build a radio transmitter, so we would have that in common.”
The event was the hosted by the Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and was funded largely by the Ronald M. and Susan J. Friedman Outreach Fund in Astronomy. Ronald Friedman is a member of the department's board of visitors, and the free, public lecture series was founded in 1998.
About Science Matters: Spotlight Sessions
Science Matters: Spotlight Sessions provide a unique opportunity for the community to engage directly with the brilliant minds working on the front lines of discovery to create positive, real-world impact.
Alumni as well as members of the local community and Eberly College community are invited to join the college’s top scientists in candid, down-to-earth conversations that answer today’s most pressing questions — how science is shaping our lives, our society and our future.
Science matters. As part of Pennsylvania’s sole land-grant university, the Eberly College of Science is committed to furthering outreach programs that advance the public’s general knowledge of the everyday impact of science and the importance of funding for both basic and translational research. To view a list of community outreach events, see the Eberly College’s public events calendar.