How Will We Know We’re Not Alone?

The Joy of Why

Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine

Science, Life Sciences

4.9 • 577 Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2024

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We have identified thousands of planets just in our neighborhood in the Milky Way, mostly from the way they impact their host stars. Basic calculations suggest that there are countless more across the galaxy, and that billions of them could potentially support life. But what kind of life they host, and how we would be able to detect the presence of those biological processes from Earth, remain big questions in the world of exoplanets and astrobiology. What technologies might lie ahead to help us answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe?

Lisa Kaltenegger, an astrophysicist and astrobiologist at Cornell University, talks to Janna Levin about that search, the atmospheric fingerprints of life, and why an advanced alien civilization might decide not to talk to us.

Transcript

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0:00.0	For millennia, ancient astronomers observed strange points of light that traced unusual patterns in the night.
0:10.0	While most stars shifted collectively, a handful arched dramatically across the sky.
0:16.0	The Greeks named these outliers wandering stars, or Asteris Planitae. Eventually, we'd realize these objects weren't stars at all, but the term planet would stick.
0:26.6	As science progressed, we came to recognize that these planets orbit the Sun, that our Earth is a planet,
0:33.6	and only three decades ago, that planets, exoplanets exist outside our solar system.
0:40.5	Now astronomers estimate that there are trillions of exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy alone.
0:47.2	And with remarkable instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope,
0:50.9	we're able to detect other worlds more readily than ever before.
0:55.6	I'm Janelle Levin, and this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine where I take
1:02.0	turns at the mic with my co-host, Steve Strogetz, exploring the biggest questions in math
1:08.3	and science today.
1:31.1	Thank you. questions in math and science today. In this episode, Astrophysicist and Astrobiologist, Lisa Kaltenegger, brings us along on the hunt for exoplanets and the quest to find alien life.
1:38.3	Lisa is a professor of astronomy and the founding director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University. She is a world-leading expert in modeling habitable worlds and is also the author of a new book, Alien Earths,
1:47.2	the new science of planet hunting in the cosmos. Lisa, thanks for joining us on The Joy of Why.
1:53.3	So good to have you. Thanks for having me. I've really been looking forward to talking. This is a topic
1:58.6	that has been of personal interest to me for a long time.
2:03.3	The first convincing evidence of an extrasolar planet or an exoplanet was only confirmed
2:10.0	fairly recently, 1995. That's still recent in scientific terms. Now, why would we have thought
2:17.0	before 1995 that it's reasonable to presume that
2:21.7	other planets exist in other solar systems? Why would that have been a premise before the
2:25.7	observation? It was quite interesting because throughout history, there were always times
2:31.0	when people said, oh, there must be other worlds. And then it swapped
	...

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