@@kkgt6591 "First light" for Vera Rubin Observatory should be August 2024, and LISA is closer to 2040, haha. It's in the planning stages now but has been green lit.
@@kkgt6591First light for Vera C. Rubin is expected in 2024 The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT; 38m optical telescope) should be complete in 2028 And LISA (a space-based gravitational wave observatory with arm length of 2.5 million km) is expected to launch no earlier than 2037
Symptoms of life: some chemical species can arise by the action of sunlight falling on a suitable chemical soup and/or brew. There are some species which can NOT arise unless there is intelligence and the ability to manipulate things at the molecular level, or the ability to perform chemistry. Analysing chemical species found in the atmospheres of planets would indicate whether blind chemistry or intelligence is at work.
Your channel is so refreshing because of your attention to accuracy. Also your resilience to people with loaded questions is awesome to watch. Thank you sir.
@@simonmultiverse6349 The Inverse Square Law rules OK! You're never going to hear anything. Radio tx/rx is a human construct, and is a very wasteful means of communication. Extraterrestrial beings with long beards, bringing their own gravestones along. How many 40,000 years old Extraterrestrials have you seen?
Sometimes loaded questions are necessary to push back against dogmatic groupthink, and to challenge bad assumptions we have regarding the nature of the universe and the mysteries of life beyond Earth…
Loving these interviews!! This is some of the best astronomy content anywhere. Any chance of doing a “great observatories” series? Interviews with Rubin, GMT, ELT scientists?
Vera C. Rubin Observatory: We have --- ENTIRELY BY ACCIDENT --- discovered two interstellar objects: I/Oumuamua and I/Borisov. These discoveries were made by accident, before the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, therefore one has to ask... what interstellar objects are we going to discover in a year or two when we start sifting through the data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory? We will also find new things in our solar system.
Thank you so much for this update on the Vera Rubin Observatory. I had the privilege of visiting The University of Arizona Mirror Lab in 2009 when the 8.4 meter glass for this telescope (which contains both the primary and tertiary mirrors in a single casting) was being prepared for grinding and polishing. It had been removed from the furnace, the foam cores (that created the reverse side honeycomb) removed and the mounting brackets for the polishing machine bonded to the underside. I have pictures of both the mirror laying horizontal in its frame and the underside. Can't wait for First Light and your podcast with the first data stream!
Love the idea of a live stream during the first hour of light... watching the NSF stream when dart impacted live with the project head was soooo cool. Seeing the reactions on everyone's face as the images came down was priceless.
Inspiring! Lots of great content and enthusiasm. It has me juiced for the LSST era. Still my fave scientific observation was from Dr Davenport regarding us putting objects into space - "Space is super-duper hard"
I have an idea for the 'first hour of data' video: Set up a webpage or something that displays the live event stream and lets viewers vote on which events are most interesting, maybe with an optional few-word reason, as triage for which ones to discuss. (Maybe somebody will even put "Planet 9" in the reason field and turn out to be right!) If the video will be streamed live, then you can just announce where the voting page is at the beginning and put the URL in the corner or something; if it's going to be released only after recording, then you can announce the time in advance so people can vote during the first hour even though they won't be able to watch you simultaneously. I don't know, though, if the data from the first three nights will be meaningful in terms of event detection (if there's no older data to compare it to), so maybe this isn't feasible.
Holy S@#$ Holy S%&@ Holy S^!@ I've been following this for a long time and I'm even more excited than when I first heard of LSST. I cannot wait for every bit of information coming our way 😲😲 Great interview, thank you to the both of you!
Yes, not only do we have to know WHERE to look and what frequencies to monitor, but most importantly, WHEN to listen. Even the first two elements is a prodigious task, but it does no good if the target is not transmitting at the time. Its a wonder we would ever receive ANYTHING. Having a "timer" would be great.
I had asked this question at question time , i now i find that you basically already answered it here with this interview, looking for alien techno signatures before and after super nova's. thankyou for all your great work. .
Well! About time for LSST get going. I’ve been following for a while. Patient but also eager. After he spoke of doubling the number of in-solar objects in a few months of operation…. that is almost beyond belief.
I'm very late to this interview - I'm still catching up on all of Fraser's past content - but man, Dr Davenport is an EXCELLENT guest. He's erudite, warm, very knowledgeable and he's very engaging as a speaker. For my money, the likes of Dr Davenport and Adam Frank are unstoppable as science communicators and of 'boosters' for the field. Thanks for the video, Fraser.
My new favorite "Go-To" for all my Space News. Stumbling upon Fraser Cain about a month ago....has been one of the greatest moments in my journey to learn all i can about Space. EDIT: had to correct a spelling error. Edit #2: another spelling error!!! 🤣
I just discovered Fraser a month or two ago and love this channel, too! May I also mention Anton Petrov is also a great youtube channel. He is also honest, accurate, and no clickbait videos ever.
Fascinating video, glad to discover your channel just now! Guest really does fit the movie stereotype of the guy in the middle of innocently biting into a slice of pizza only to spot an anomaly on the screen of a radio astronomy instrument. Freezing mid bite, he swivels his chair around a few degrees whilst sliding it closer to the instruments, and begins to twiddle knobs with his other shaking hand...
I remember many years ago I downloaded an application on my desktop system. It was the SETI search engine and it ran when I was not using the computer. Every so often the application would send the findings on its last packets and then download the next packets and would start scanning again. I was hoping someone would update the app and integrate AI into it. I am sorry it is no longer active. With all of the high-end cell phones, laptops, and desktop systems it would make sense to me to go forward.
@JamesDavenport - I think that would a blast of a YT episode on your channel this fall. A historic look back on the SETI @Home project, what did it mean, what did it do in terms of science, and how it helped to laid down the foundations of AI assisted astronomy, time domain astronomy, and what Vera Rubin will do in 2025 from a research astronomers perspective.
The question is, when we see a supernova are we going to send a message? Because if the answer is "no" then I see no reason to expect that anyone else will.
I understand that the evil aliens on planet axolotol use this approach to “fish for suckers”: they set off a supernova to get your attention, flash a signal, and if you signal back, you end up on the dinner table. It’s said to be the best fun in the Universe - if you’re an axolotolian.
It's not going to happen that way, but if evil aliens do live near one they'll be alerted by our signal. What's more likely is they have telescopes powerful enough to discover our planet has abundant live. That's because they're seeing us about a thousand years in the past. If they wait until they get a signal, they'll get here in a few thousand years. It's not the problem you imagine.
Great conversation. Fun and informative. Thank you. From someone now retired, who often has time to look up and wonder what will yet be learned in my lifetime.
"The inclination for everybody to look up and wonder is the most natural thing. And it's what makes astronomy the most beautiful science because it belongs to everybody and it speaks to everybody. You don't need a laboratory to wonder." Dr. James Davenport 💯 Beautifully said!
Super interview and very excited for the VRO now, it all sounds way too good and way overwhelming for us humans to go through... Are there even enough data storages in the world to keep this thing going? :D
Sometimes your episodes are way more interesting then their topic says. I just say WHOA about this one. All your episodes are interesting but sometimes they get very special 😊
Nice idea! And for the future we can also follow big gravitational events. These a really universe-wide "light-beacons". PS M101 is outside of Vera Rubin observable sky. For now we'll have to use another big one.
Question: I loved your perspective on lots of small space telescopes over very few super powerfull ones (I think it was shortly before JWST). How does Vera Rubin sit with that? Could Vera do the job of an entire class of telescopes? Will it underline the cost of choosing a handful of super elites vs. several hundred low innovation telescopes? All of the above or too early to tell? And congrats on another amazing interview!
Took me forever to even begin to wrap my head around the details of the proposed idea. Due to the time delay of receiving the notification of the supernova; there is almost no point in trying to signal anyone 'behind' the nova in relation to you. Unless you are a light month away from the star going supernova in which case your species probably has more pressing issues. Also very little point in sending a single that nobody's looking at because they are looking at a different part of the sky because there is an exciting supernova to look at. So there is basically an expanding conic section directly behind your planet that is a good place to send a signal. Each system has one, and the window for observing a reply gets worse the farther you go
Yes, but it could still give us thousands of targets to look at with pretty good timing. Instead of randomly scanning 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
This was a great video thanks, mind blown, clever people around. I have some great ideas myself, sadly not useful at the scientific level.. I like how the problem is becoming, are we smart enough to understand the information coming in to us.
What a excellent idea! Maybe we will see something from an alien civilization. I wonder if we have already seen signs but just haven’t recognized them.
There is something about Dr. Davenport's metaphor of playing Marco Polo when we were kids for the search for life out there that just... Really got me in the heart.
In many ways, the long-term preservation of any record of human existence beyond our planet involves factors that are challenging to predict or control. Unforeseen events, environmental conditions, and cosmic occurrences will inevitably influence the fate of our attempts to leave a lasting mark. While human intention and effort play a crucial role, the role of "dumb luck" or uncontrollable variables remains a significant aspect of such ambitious undertakings.
Excellent interview. As you promised Fraser, I 'brainjaculated' in the latter portion of the video as Dr Davenport discussed the capabilities and potential of Vera Rubin. Amazing stuff. By the way, I wonder if the stellar surveying being done by Vera Rubin will amount to Astrometry, in the sense that it'll add to the work of scopes like Gaia in understanding the location and relative motion of stars?
Colleagues have suggested that I might save SETI a bunch of money, saying that I should call them and let them know I am here. Now if I were serious in generating a signal, it would be using the widest form(s) of transmission and using effective signal beaming and ultra wide sources in combination. I would also consider imbedding a time-base for referential framing.
Very fascinating. Love it. BUT.. I feel you glossed over two obvious questions/issues in the first 20 minutes which left me confused: 1) are we assuming that another intelligent exoplanet planetary race came to the same conclusion that we just did about sending a communication signal “here we are” after an astrological event? 2) What signals are we prepared to send (or not) to allow other ET life forms to discover our presence. And where do we direct this signal to?
The cool thing is that AGI is coming far quicker than anyone besides key insiders is expecting, and if we’re nice to it and treat it ethically, it might be willing to contribute to the science of poring over the many exabytes of data Vera Rubin will generate over its first decade of surveying.
Questions that came to me while listening and biking: 1. The next paper on the super nova communication technique should be from the standpoint of "we've just seen a super nova, which stars should we alert to our presence, presuming a limited capacity for that?" 2. How fuzzy does the ellipse get as the stars move and can you account for that? 3. Is a capitalist economy the same as Roko's Basilisk? Not sure why in the third, but so be it
That is an interesting idea. Instead of waiting to receive a signal, we send our own at the stars in the area we expect to broadcast. If we do receive a signal, and find it is a radically different frequency, we could change ours.
Fraier, thank you for this episode. We really needed some in-depth info on what's probably going to be the most influencial telescope of all time. You should also do some shorts to hook people's attention!
@@frasercain I dislike shorts too, but I thought it might be a good way to engage the younger generation and attract them to your channel. Long time sub. Keep up the good work!
When I saw the Starlink train cruise across the sky I knew immediately what it was, but my brother, he thought he was witnessing "something else" and was actually disappointed when he found out what it really was. Personally, I am in zero doubt that there is other life out there, but the one thing that I am NOT so sold on, is that there be INTELLIGENT life there too. It's only natural for us to ponder about the incomprehensibly staggeringly remote chances of us being here, as intelligent beings capable of doing all that we do. When we find life orbiting some other sun like star the odds of us finding not only life but intelligent life are not good at all, we may find many worlds with vastly different organism's on it but my bet is that we won't run into something that rivals ourselves for many many centuries.
Vera is gonna cause data overload, but it's going to be worth it just because of what it will tell us about our own solar system. If Vera reveals a new planetoid, unlike JWST, Vera will be revealing something that Mankind might someday exploit. I think the solar system science and what Vera is going to do to our local map is going to easily be her most useful and inspiring contribution.
geez fraser you sure werent kidding about vera rubin data. its incredible. i have no idea how they can save all this immediate data and parse it, what a challenge.
Dr Davenport is part way home. The biggest problem is just how much power it takes to transmit a signal that is above the backgroud noise any reciever has to look through for a signal. What we need to do this is a super large antenna dish and a transmitter on the giga-watt or even Terra-watt scale on the far side of the moon and send out a 4 or 5 bit homing beacon. Making a message that tells other beings about the timing and direction to a supernova is a hell of a task in its own right. We need to teach them our language to do that.
Will we start preparing to transmit such a signal ourselves, for the next such event we see? I think that's an important part of this puzzle. If we hope to notice others, we should reciprocate and *work* to be noticed!
Humans will be continually building better and different telescopes until they reach the conclusion that they will never be capable of seeing "everything". Only then we will stop looking and humanity can finally breathe a sense of relief.
Great conversation! I'm wondering how we tell the ET's that this is the technique they should use? Or do we assume that they would come to that same conclusion and send out their signal to us (or all the galaxy)? Curious how this would work out.
It's the assumption thing. The idea is that really, we can't depend on any one civilization out there with the capability to send such a signal to do it, but it's perhaps a worthy bet that at least some portion of possible civilizations out there may have at least some scientists that think of this and put the plan into action. The numbers we're talking about here are staggering, so odds are, if there can be civilizations out there, it may just be common enough for this project to yield a positive result. We wont directly disprove anything by doing the experiment, but if we do it a few times and get no results, we are at least significantly diminishing our perception of the likelihood of large numbers of intelligent civilizations being out there.
A really nifty idea how to look for signals from this expanding sphere. However, as Dr. James said, 'we only have to look'. Never a thought about sending a signal ourselves. So, if the aliens are in any way like us, we'll all be listening avidly for each other and never hear a thing 🤔
talking about star events, and Dr Davenports made me think about could we detect SOS signals from smaller solar events inside a solar system. It seems like a time when a multiplanetary species (a high point of technology capacity) would be in peril would likely be when they are noisiest.
I wonder if seti and others take into account that AM & FM radio and digital radio signals sound like static to each other. How do they look for tech signals in static if our tech is incompatible?
percisely. It's so hopeful but I think that having a non binarie sun and a huge jupiter but most of all it's exceptrionally rare that the planet that's in the habitagble zone happens to basiocally be a binarie planet with a moon 1/3rd the size of it's host planet, also sucking up all theseasteroids protecting the powderpuff planet that got slimey and launched us out of it's 99.99% of species already extionct. mammals are older then dinosaurs. we didn't have a chance SOO that's another filter for intelligence. :Like literally FLIGHT has evolved atleast 3 seperate timwes on this planet currently still onlife onplanet but inteligence has only evolved ONCE. Let alone language, that's just nuts ALSO we used up this oil for our tech jumpstaert.oh the magnetosphere that's another filter!! it's just uncommon we are specialo, we have a great duty to LIVE
Cool technology coming for sure. As to broadcasting to other civilizations as mentioned, what would we do to broadcast our location? Or are we a long way away from the technological level required to make ourselves seen and we're hoping the civilizations we're looking for are far more advanced than us?
So could you correlate the date and time of the 'WOW' signal to determine which star has the right location coordinates to be the likely source of the 'Wow' signal? For the Crab nebula supernova? Others?
This is really exciting to narrow the search dramatically, so we can focus on the more promising star systems. 🙂 Alien scientist: "WOW! Did you see that big Mamma !??
The idea of always monitoring the sky by multiple scopes intrigues me. Perhaps the name Starship isn't to imply "it will make it to other star systems" but to lock in the possibility that "it will bring the stars to us". Once developed, SpaceX will mass produce, just like anything else. Imagine just one, out of dozens (or thousands) being used for nothing but launching large space scopes... Daily!
Given how few space telescopes we have and how they were built to the extremes of precision at massive cost, I'm really curious how constellations of CHEAP (no more than a couple of hundred pounds) satellites would compare. I'm imagining a sensor module piggybacking on some percentage of Starlink satellites or something like that, which could be thousands of very small very cheap space telescopes delivering 100% coverage, but with reduced capabilities would it get us anything more than we have now in terms of what can be detected?
I have a question, is it possible that with the capabilities that starships brings to the table that we have a space based vera robin ir still starship is small for this task
What if the nerds on Planet X have to apply for funding every time they see a supernova & want to fire up their costly power-hungry response system. If their funding bureaucracy is like ours, and take years to work, and hence really smear out any semblance of timing accuracy. Obviously, I’m being a bit silly, but there are many other ways the purported timing accuracy could be dramatically degraded.
Dr. James Davenport is F'ing clever ! that is genius level thinking, and it makes perfect sense that any civilization that rivals our own would have the same considerations as we do, the constants of reality pave the way for how to do this.
This is a clever concept. An intelligent lifeform would expect the supernova to be studied other intelligent life forms. Any signal they send out would have a better chance of being noticed. I expect certain frequencies would be better for this. Focusing our efforts on those frequencies would reduce the time required for detection. Do they modulate light frequencies the supernova gives off, expecting them to be watched? Or pick gaps in that "noise"? Will we be ready to send our own signals when Betelgeuse lights off?
What about light echoes? Like if there was a flash of light from that direction and 10 min later passed by something in the opposite direction, can we see something faint, at least briefly for a flash, over there. Like dim planets in the Oort cloud (so like days later instead of 10 min….)
Man, what an incredible time we live in. JWST, Vira Rubin, and eventually LISA, and many more. It's a wild time to be alive :)
When are the latter 2 will be online??
@@kkgt6591 "First light" for Vera Rubin Observatory should be August 2024, and LISA is closer to 2040, haha. It's in the planning stages now but has been green lit.
@@kkgt6591First light for Vera C. Rubin is expected in 2024
The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT; 38m optical telescope) should be complete in 2028
And LISA (a space-based gravitational wave observatory with arm length of 2.5 million km) is expected to launch no earlier than 2037
Symptoms of life: some chemical species can arise by the action of sunlight falling on a suitable chemical soup and/or brew. There are some species which can NOT arise unless there is intelligence and the ability to manipulate things at the molecular level, or the ability to perform chemistry. Analysing chemical species found in the atmospheres of planets would indicate whether blind chemistry or intelligence is at work.
@@kkgt6591Vera Ruben online this time next year, LISA not until sometime around 2040
Your channel is so refreshing because of your attention to accuracy. Also your resilience to people with loaded questions is awesome to watch. Thank you sir.
I'm not saying it's aliens,
but....
A L I E N S
@@simonmultiverse6349 The Inverse Square Law rules OK! You're never going to hear anything. Radio tx/rx is a human construct, and is a very wasteful means of communication.
Extraterrestrial beings with long beards, bringing their own gravestones along. How many 40,000 years old Extraterrestrials have you seen?
Sometimes loaded questions are necessary to push back against dogmatic groupthink, and to challenge bad assumptions we have regarding the nature of the universe and the mysteries of life beyond Earth…
Loving these interviews!! This is some of the best astronomy content anywhere. Any chance of doing a “great observatories” series? Interviews with Rubin, GMT, ELT scientists?
Vera C. Rubin Observatory: We have --- ENTIRELY BY ACCIDENT --- discovered two interstellar objects: I/Oumuamua and I/Borisov. These discoveries were made by accident, before the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, therefore one has to ask... what interstellar objects are we going to discover in a year or two when we start sifting through the data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory? We will also find new things in our solar system.
My god this might be my favorite interview of all time!!!!
Glad you enjoyed it. :-)
Thank you so much for this update on the Vera Rubin Observatory.
I had the privilege of visiting The University of Arizona Mirror Lab in 2009 when the 8.4 meter glass for this telescope (which contains both the primary and tertiary mirrors in a single casting) was being prepared for grinding and polishing. It had been removed from the furnace, the foam cores (that created the reverse side honeycomb) removed and the mounting brackets for the polishing machine bonded to the underside. I have pictures of both the mirror laying horizontal in its frame and the underside.
Can't wait for First Light and your podcast with the first data stream!
2009?? Are you sure it wasn't the mirrors for JWST? I think those mirrors were done there as well.
This is the show I have been waiting for! I am so excited for the Vera Rubin. Thanks for the great coverage
Herheheeehe me too bro
Thank you, Fraser, so much for curating this guest and this topic, we talked about VRO recently, and can't wait for it to go online!
Another great interview. Always makes me smile when Fraizer makes his getting his brain around a concept face.
THIS is the most amazing conversation I have heard about future possibilities in a long time. Thanks Guys! :)
How have I not even heard of the Vera Rubin telescope? This thing sounds AMAZING
Love the idea of a live stream during the first hour of light... watching the NSF stream when dart impacted live with the project head was soooo cool. Seeing the reactions on everyone's face as the images came down was priceless.
Inspiring! Lots of great content and enthusiasm. It has me juiced for the LSST era. Still my fave scientific observation was from Dr Davenport regarding us putting objects into space - "Space is super-duper hard"
Dr. Davenport is really great.
I have an idea for the 'first hour of data' video: Set up a webpage or something that displays the live event stream and lets viewers vote on which events are most interesting, maybe with an optional few-word reason, as triage for which ones to discuss. (Maybe somebody will even put "Planet 9" in the reason field and turn out to be right!) If the video will be streamed live, then you can just announce where the voting page is at the beginning and put the URL in the corner or something; if it's going to be released only after recording, then you can announce the time in advance so people can vote during the first hour even though they won't be able to watch you simultaneously. I don't know, though, if the data from the first three nights will be meaningful in terms of event detection (if there's no older data to compare it to), so maybe this isn't feasible.
This man's enthusiasm is infectious!!!
Holy S@#$ Holy S%&@ Holy S^!@ I've been following this for a long time and I'm even more excited than when I first heard of LSST. I cannot wait for every bit of information coming our way 😲😲 Great interview, thank you to the both of you!
Yes, not only do we have to know WHERE to look and what frequencies to monitor, but most importantly, WHEN to listen. Even the first two elements is a prodigious task, but it does no good if the target is not transmitting at the time. Its a wonder we would ever receive ANYTHING. Having a "timer" would be great.
Wow! This is so exciting! Great interview as always. And I love how the thumbnail makes it look like some futuristic science vessel. Haha
I had asked this question at question time , i now i find that you basically already answered it here with this interview, looking for alien techno signatures before and after super nova's. thankyou for all your great work. .
Well! About time for LSST get going. I’ve been following for a while. Patient but also eager. After he spoke of doubling the number of in-solar objects in a few months of operation…. that is almost beyond belief.
Amazing stuff gentlemen. Thank you.
I'm very late to this interview - I'm still catching up on all of Fraser's past content - but man, Dr Davenport is an EXCELLENT guest. He's erudite, warm, very knowledgeable and he's very engaging as a speaker. For my money, the likes of Dr Davenport and Adam Frank are unstoppable as science communicators and of 'boosters' for the field. Thanks for the video, Fraser.
Excellent interview, I was already excited about Vera Rubin before, even more so now.
Another great broadcast from the direction of the GCA ! I shall research Vera Rubin further !
My new favorite "Go-To" for all my Space News. Stumbling upon Fraser Cain about a month ago....has been one of the greatest moments in my journey to learn all i can about Space.
EDIT: had to correct a spelling error.
Edit #2: another spelling error!!! 🤣
I just discovered Fraser a month or two ago and love this channel, too! May I also mention Anton Petrov is also a great youtube channel. He is also honest, accurate, and no clickbait videos ever.
"Exit: had to correct a spelling error."
now it is 2. No worries. It made me :- )
@@istvansipos9940 🤣🤣🤣
@@robotaholic YES!!! I'm also a follower and member of Anton !!! He's the teacher I wish i had in school!!!
Proper interview, thanks james and fraser
Fascinating video, glad to discover your channel just now! Guest really does fit the movie stereotype of the guy in the middle of innocently biting into a slice of pizza only to spot an anomaly on the screen of a radio astronomy instrument. Freezing mid bite, he swivels his chair around a few degrees whilst sliding it closer to the instruments, and begins to twiddle knobs with his other shaking hand...
I remember many years ago I downloaded an application on my desktop system. It was the SETI search engine and it ran when I was not using the computer. Every so often the application would send the findings on its last packets and then download the next packets and would start scanning again. I was hoping someone would update the app and integrate AI into it. I am sorry it is no longer active. With all of the high-end cell phones, laptops, and desktop systems it would make sense to me to go forward.
I remember running that on my computers too.
SETI@ home was a great program and really gave the feeling of contributing to something really great.
SETI at Home! It was a major milestone, and the folks who designed it have helped build much of the Breakthrough SETI projects too!
@JamesDavenport - I think that would a blast of a YT episode on your channel this fall.
A historic look back on the SETI @Home project, what did it mean, what did it do in terms of science, and how it helped to laid down the foundations of AI assisted astronomy, time domain astronomy, and what Vera Rubin will do in 2025 from a research astronomers perspective.
The question is, when we see a supernova are we going to send a message? Because if the answer is "no" then I see no reason to expect that anyone else will.
I understand that the evil aliens on planet axolotol use this approach to “fish for suckers”: they set off a supernova to get your attention, flash a signal, and if you signal back, you end up on the dinner table. It’s said to be the best fun in the Universe - if you’re an axolotolian.
Setting off supernovae is the tricky part.
It's not going to happen that way, but if evil aliens do live near one they'll be alerted by our signal. What's more likely is they have telescopes powerful enough to discover our planet has abundant live. That's because they're seeing us about a thousand years in the past. If they wait until they get a signal, they'll get here in a few thousand years. It's not the problem you imagine.
Watching real time updates in two years sounds so exciting‼️
Great conversation. Fun and informative.
Thank you. From someone now retired, who often has time to look up and wonder what will yet be learned in my lifetime.
Fantastic chat fellas - a pleasure 👍🏻
"The inclination for everybody to look up and wonder is the most natural thing. And it's what makes astronomy the most beautiful science because it belongs to everybody and it speaks to everybody. You don't need a laboratory to wonder." Dr. James Davenport 💯 Beautifully said!
Great quote. 😀
great discussion. very excited for these science projects over the next decade
I'm really glad you enjoyed it. Vera Rubin comes online next year. :-) The wait is almost over...
Thank you again Mr. Cain for an awesome interview. I for one enjoy your content, and your various subjects and topics. Loyal fan.
Hi James! I'm a fellow Davenport from Washington state! I subscribed to you because I think your content is great but also we're probably family. Lol.
It's time for a Davenport reunion.
What a wonderful interview with Space Jesus Fraser!
Super interview and very excited for the VRO now, it all sounds way too good and way overwhelming for us humans to go through... Are there even enough data storages in the world to keep this thing going? :D
Yes, but developing this storage system was one of the big engineering challenges developed with the observatory.
Sometimes your episodes are way more interesting then their topic says. I just say WHOA about this one. All your episodes are interesting but sometimes they get very special 😊
Nice idea!
And for the future we can also follow big gravitational events.
These a really universe-wide "light-beacons".
PS M101 is outside of Vera Rubin observable sky. For now we'll have to use another big one.
Yes, a large gravitational wave !
Question: I loved your perspective on lots of small space telescopes over very few super powerfull ones (I think it was shortly before JWST). How does Vera Rubin sit with that? Could Vera do the job of an entire class of telescopes? Will it underline the cost of choosing a handful of super elites vs. several hundred low innovation telescopes? All of the above or too early to tell? And congrats on another amazing interview!
It's about 5,000 of the best amateur astrophotography telescopes taped together.
Starlink V.5😅🎉
really good topic today thanks Fraser :)
Wow, had no idea of the capability of this telescope. So cool. Between JWST and this we might really get some answers.
Yup. Wait until I tell you about the E-ELT (Extremely Large Telescope).
@@frasercainOr LUVOIR-A (I really really hope it will get funding!!)
Took me forever to even begin to wrap my head around the details of the proposed idea.
Due to the time delay of receiving the notification of the supernova; there is almost no point in trying to signal anyone 'behind' the nova in relation to you. Unless you are a light month away from the star going supernova in which case your species probably has more pressing issues. Also very little point in sending a single that nobody's looking at because they are looking at a different part of the sky because there is an exciting supernova to look at. So there is basically an expanding conic section directly behind your planet that is a good place to send a signal. Each system has one, and the window for observing a reply gets worse the farther you go
Yes, but it could still give us thousands of targets to look at with pretty good timing. Instead of randomly scanning 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
This guy has really grown on me! Thank you and keep up the great work. MH
Glad you enjoyed it
Thanks!
Thanks a lot!
Okay 8 minutes in and I’m already thinking what makes anyone think that some alien species would come up with this same idea?
great discussion! Love the idea of using a Hydrogen Alpha filter. That would be and amazing image.
This was a great video thanks, mind blown, clever people around. I have some great ideas myself, sadly not useful at the scientific level..
I like how the problem is becoming, are we smart enough to understand the information coming in to us.
What a excellent idea! Maybe we will see something from an alien civilization. I wonder if we have already seen signs but just haven’t recognized them.
There is something about Dr. Davenport's metaphor of playing Marco Polo when we were kids for the search for life out there that just... Really got me in the heart.
In many ways, the long-term preservation of any record of human existence beyond our planet involves factors that are challenging to predict or control. Unforeseen events, environmental conditions, and cosmic occurrences will inevitably influence the fate of our attempts to leave a lasting mark. While human intention and effort play a crucial role, the role of "dumb luck" or uncontrollable variables remains a significant aspect of such ambitious undertakings.
This guy put everything on in the "Seattle local" disguise kit
Great interview Fraser. Another exciting telescope coming online in less than a year!! 🎉
Excellent interview. As you promised Fraser, I 'brainjaculated' in the latter portion of the video as Dr Davenport discussed the capabilities and potential of Vera Rubin. Amazing stuff.
By the way, I wonder if the stellar surveying being done by Vera Rubin will amount to Astrometry, in the sense that it'll add to the work of scopes like Gaia in understanding the location and relative motion of stars?
Colleagues have suggested that I might save SETI a bunch of money, saying that I should call them and let them know I am here. Now if I were serious in generating a signal, it would be using the widest form(s) of transmission and using effective signal beaming and ultra wide sources in combination. I would also consider imbedding a time-base for referential framing.
Also why woulldn't you purposely make it blend into the noise with hard encryption and/or camouflaging techniques
Very fascinating. Love it. BUT.. I feel you glossed over two obvious questions/issues in the first 20 minutes which left me confused: 1) are we assuming that another intelligent exoplanet planetary race came to the same conclusion that we just did about sending a communication signal “here we are” after an astrological event?
2) What signals are we prepared to send (or not) to allow other ET life forms to discover our presence. And where do we direct this signal to?
Iwas gonna say - hydrogen line filter survey...but you got there anyway. Can't take my eyes and ears from this one Fraser! 🤓
The cool thing is that AGI is coming far quicker than anyone besides key insiders is expecting, and if we’re nice to it and treat it ethically, it might be willing to contribute to the science of poring over the many exabytes of data Vera Rubin will generate over its first decade of surveying.
Great interview! Looking forward to 2025 1st hour Vera Rubin live stream! Where is the RUclips stream reminder?
I'll keep you posted.
Questions that came to me while listening and biking:
1. The next paper on the super nova communication technique should be from the standpoint of "we've just seen a super nova, which stars should we alert to our presence, presuming a limited capacity for that?"
2. How fuzzy does the ellipse get as the stars move and can you account for that?
3. Is a capitalist economy the same as Roko's Basilisk?
Not sure why in the third, but so be it
That is an interesting idea. Instead of waiting to receive a signal, we send our own at the stars in the area we expect to broadcast. If we do receive a signal, and find it is a radically different frequency, we could change ours.
Fraier, thank you for this episode. We really needed some in-depth info on what's probably going to be the most influencial telescope of all time.
You should also do some shorts to hook people's attention!
We've tried doing a few shorts. I really don't like the format very much but I know that's probably just me
@@frasercain I dislike shorts too, but I thought it might be a good way to engage the younger generation and attract them to your channel. Long time sub. Keep up the good work!
So many exciting survey telescopes coming online soon.
Love this guy!
When I saw the Starlink train cruise across the sky I knew immediately what it was, but my brother, he thought he was witnessing "something else" and was actually disappointed when he found out what it really was. Personally, I am in zero doubt that there is other life out there, but the one thing that I am NOT so sold on, is that there be INTELLIGENT life there too. It's only natural for us to ponder about the incomprehensibly staggeringly remote chances of us being here, as intelligent beings capable of doing all that we do. When we find life orbiting some other sun like star the odds of us finding not only life but intelligent life are not good at all, we may find many worlds with vastly different organism's on it but my bet is that we won't run into something that rivals ourselves for many many centuries.
Vera is gonna cause data overload, but it's going to be worth it just because of what it will tell us about our own solar system. If Vera reveals a new planetoid, unlike JWST, Vera will be revealing something that Mankind might someday exploit. I think the solar system science and what Vera is going to do to our local map is going to easily be her most useful and inspiring contribution.
geez fraser you sure werent kidding about vera rubin data. its incredible. i have no idea how they can save all this immediate data and parse it, what a challenge.
Dr Davenport is part way home. The biggest problem is just how much power it takes to transmit a signal that is above the backgroud noise any reciever has to look through for a signal. What we need to do this is a super large antenna dish and a transmitter on the giga-watt or even Terra-watt scale on the far side of the moon and send out a 4 or 5 bit homing beacon. Making a message that tells other beings about the timing and direction to a supernova is a hell of a task in its own right. We need to teach them our language to do that.
Will we start preparing to transmit such a signal ourselves, for the next such event we see?
I think that's an important part of this puzzle. If we hope to notice others, we should reciprocate and *work* to be noticed!
So, I hope you explain a bit about who Vera Rubin is. One of the coolest figures in astronomy.
That will be AMAZING time when Vera Rubin starts observing!
Humans will be continually building better and different telescopes until they reach the conclusion that they will never be capable of seeing "everything". Only then we will stop looking and humanity can finally breathe a sense of relief.
@@clifflayne9073 hold my beer, it’s in our nature to constantly explore and solve the mystery of the universe
Thank you for this interview
Great interview 👍👍👍
Great conversation!
Question: Which type of telescope could exclusively watch a few hundred thousand stars?
Great interview, great dude, Great subject.
Great conversation! I'm wondering how we tell the ET's that this is the technique they should use? Or do we assume that they would come to that same conclusion and send out their signal to us (or all the galaxy)? Curious how this would work out.
It's the assumption thing. The idea is that really, we can't depend on any one civilization out there with the capability to send such a signal to do it, but it's perhaps a worthy bet that at least some portion of possible civilizations out there may have at least some scientists that think of this and put the plan into action. The numbers we're talking about here are staggering, so odds are, if there can be civilizations out there, it may just be common enough for this project to yield a positive result. We wont directly disprove anything by doing the experiment, but if we do it a few times and get no results, we are at least significantly diminishing our perception of the likelihood of large numbers of intelligent civilizations being out there.
The Inverse Square Law rules OK! You're never going to hear anything. Radio tx/rx is a human construct, and is a very wasteful means of communication.
An excellent idea! Bravo!
The widening sky will be the next limit!
Fabulous talk !!
Thanks a lot, glad you enjoyed it.
A really nifty idea how to look for signals from this expanding sphere. However, as Dr. James said, 'we only have to look'. Never a thought about sending a signal ourselves. So, if the aliens are in any way like us, we'll all be listening avidly for each other and never hear a thing 🤔
You can do the supernova triangle technique on almost any star at any time and I'm not convinced its better than selecting a star
this has me super excited!!
talking about star events, and Dr Davenports made me think about could we detect SOS signals from smaller solar events inside a solar system. It seems like a time when a multiplanetary species (a high point of technology capacity) would be in peril would likely be when they are noisiest.
I wonder if seti and others take into account that AM & FM radio and digital radio signals sound like static to each other. How do they look for tech signals in static if our tech is incompatible?
percisely. It's so hopeful but I think that having a non binarie sun and a huge jupiter but most of all it's exceptrionally rare that the planet that's in the habitagble zone happens to basiocally be a binarie planet with a moon 1/3rd the size of it's host planet, also sucking up all theseasteroids protecting the powderpuff planet that got slimey and launched us out of it's 99.99% of species already extionct. mammals are older then dinosaurs. we didn't have a chance SOO that's another filter for intelligence. :Like literally FLIGHT has evolved atleast 3 seperate timwes on this planet currently still onlife onplanet but inteligence has only evolved ONCE. Let alone language, that's just nuts ALSO we used up this oil for our tech jumpstaert.oh the magnetosphere that's another filter!! it's just uncommon we are specialo, we have a great duty to LIVE
Cool technology coming for sure. As to broadcasting to other civilizations as mentioned, what would we do to broadcast our location? Or are we a long way away from the technological level required to make ourselves seen and we're hoping the civilizations we're looking for are far more advanced than us?
Simple yet, clever endeavor.
What about starting with a past signal, like the WOW signal and looking for supernova around that time?
Ooh, clever idea
💡0:22 "Bright supernovae" Pronunciation: 👉soo-per-NO-vee,👈 not soo-per-NO-vay. Thank you.
So could you correlate the date and time of the 'WOW' signal to determine which star has the right location coordinates to be the likely source of the 'Wow' signal? For the Crab nebula supernova? Others?
This is really exciting to narrow the search dramatically, so we can focus on the more promising star systems. 🙂
Alien scientist: "WOW! Did you see that big Mamma !??
The idea of always monitoring the sky by multiple scopes intrigues me.
Perhaps the name Starship isn't to imply "it will make it to other star systems" but to lock in the possibility that "it will bring the stars to us".
Once developed, SpaceX will mass produce, just like anything else. Imagine just one, out of dozens (or thousands) being used for nothing but launching large space scopes... Daily!
Given how few space telescopes we have and how they were built to the extremes of precision at massive cost, I'm really curious how constellations of CHEAP (no more than a couple of hundred pounds) satellites would compare.
I'm imagining a sensor module piggybacking on some percentage of Starlink satellites or something like that, which could be thousands of very small very cheap space telescopes delivering 100% coverage, but with reduced capabilities would it get us anything more than we have now in terms of what can be detected?
I have a question, is it possible that with the capabilities that starships brings to the table that we have a space based vera robin ir still starship is small for this task
What if the nerds on Planet X have to apply for funding every time they see a supernova & want to fire up their costly power-hungry response system. If their funding bureaucracy is like ours, and take years to work, and hence really smear out any semblance of timing accuracy. Obviously, I’m being a bit silly, but there are many other ways the purported timing accuracy could be dramatically degraded.
Dr. James Davenport is F'ing clever ! that is genius level thinking, and it makes perfect sense that any civilization that rivals our own would have the same considerations as we do, the constants of reality pave the way for how to do this.
Playing Marco Polo, I would stay underwater as much as possible so I wouldn't have to yell "Polo"...lol
This is a clever concept. An intelligent lifeform would expect the supernova to be studied other intelligent life forms. Any signal they send out would have a better chance of being noticed.
I expect certain frequencies would be better for this. Focusing our efforts on those frequencies would reduce the time required for detection. Do they modulate light frequencies the supernova gives off, expecting them to be watched? Or pick gaps in that "noise"?
Will we be ready to send our own signals when Betelgeuse lights off?
The problem of being alone in the universe is that if true, we will never know.
Great vid and info. 2:00 😆
What about light echoes? Like if there was a flash of light from that direction and 10 min later passed by something in the opposite direction, can we see something faint, at least briefly for a flash, over there. Like dim planets in the Oort cloud (so like days later instead of 10 min….)