#373 - NASA Physicist Comes Clean on Advanced Ancient Civilizations | Adam Frank
Danny Jones Podcast
Danny Jones
4.3 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2026
⏱️ 171 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | All right, Adam Brank, thanks for coming, man. |
| 0:08.6 | That's a pleasure. |
| 0:09.6 | Is it true? |
| 0:10.6 | You are one of the first scientists to get a grant from NASA to look for aliens? |
| 0:16.2 | Look for, not for aliens, but for intelligent civilization, signs of intelligent life. |
| 0:22.4 | Signs of intelligent life. Yeah. Because there's the whole history of SETI, right? So SETI, |
| 0:25.8 | the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is old, right? Goes back to the 1960s, really, |
| 0:30.5 | was first searches were done then. And, you know, it kind of, it was always marginalized, right? You know, there were scientists who were doing it, but it was never very well funded. So we can talk about things like the Fermi paradox, why there is no Fermi paradox. But we can get to that. But just that said he was never really well funded. And then it really, there was a couple of congressmen in the 80s and 90s who really were like, we're not going to fund this stuff. And they just kept, they basically said to NASA, you can't fund any of this. Like, you know, you'll just get burned if you do. And then, but in the, by 1995, we discovered our first planet orbiting another star. So that was a big deal. Like that was when. That was the first exoplanet we discovered? Exoplanet, 95. So when I was coming up in graduate school in the late 80s, if you asked me if there were any other planets, I'd be like, don't know, we could, you know, so our solar system could be the only one, right. So 95, we discovered the first exoplanets. So the field of astrobiology, of thinking about life in space, sort of starts, really |
| 1:30.8 | starts in earnest then. |
| 1:32.1 | NASA starts putting money into it. |
| 1:33.9 | But there was always this thing of like, sure, we'll study dumb life, like microbes, we'll |
| 1:39.0 | go to Mars and we'll look for microbes and stuff, and we can talk about that. |
| 1:42.6 | But still, if you wanted to look for |
| 1:44.5 | intelligent life, there was still kind of a bias at NASA. They literally, in some of the language, |
| 1:48.8 | like, oh, you want to apply for a grant? You can look for life, but don't look for intelligent life. |
| 1:54.1 | And then there was this famous meeting in 2018 that where somebody in Congress said, oh, |
| 1:59.0 | we need $10 million. NASA should have $10 million program for techno signatures, which is the new word for SETI, |
| 2:05.5 | searching for signatures of technology. |
| 2:07.6 | Interesting. |
| 2:08.2 | And that was when sort of like NASA was like, oh, okay. |
| 2:11.5 | So they brought a bunch of us together, people who were kind of interested in. |
| 2:13.7 | It was an amazing three-day meeting. |
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