Starts at 10am – not really a full room, but I can see Joe Nickell in the audience. I’m over on the side, so 
I can use my camera. Do check out the entry by Barbara about a panel we attended on the first day.
Plait starts by talking about how the ‘upping of the odds’ that there is likely to be ‘another earth’. “They could be super-Mars or super-Venus… but they’re out there, we have the Keppler Mission now, staring at a single spot in the sky and every time a planet passes in front of the star, the starlight dips a little and it’s already detected a few planets this way – it’ll be able to find out, will take a couple of years, and the number we find will give us a better idea of how many there are and how likely there is to be life outside the solar system’.
“And so, the qu as to whether if we’re alone – the answer is ‘don’t know’ – but I suspect that it won’t be much longer before we know. Now error bars are plus or minus infinity.”
Pamela Gay – what amazes her is how far technology has come. She also reflects on how vegetable life would be a good find too. Two kinds of life, says Shostak – there’s stupid life! Assumption is that it’s a lot more common. I have some video of her discussion, should be up on YouTube later today.
Shostak jokes that maybe that’d make the vegetarians happy. Sending probes to Mars, et al – there’s other place that there may be liquid water, so there’s other places to investigate. “That’s where most of the taxpayers funding is going – there’s a three-way bet on where life could be”. The first ‘horse’ is that there’s vegetable life likelihood. The second ‘horse’ in the race is spectroscopic analysis of atmosphere – finding methane and the like. The notion of “pigs in space”. To do that requires telescopes for which there isn’t enough funding for… yet. The third is intelligent life, the fundamental premise of us not being alone. In general, this is being debated. Third horse? We might find artifacts; there’s a limited effort to do that. By data-mining info from infra-red telescopes, by example.
He says that the lack of investigations that are using the measurement of gravity waves – they don’t move at infinite speeds, no one has measured the speed of gravity – “you’d have to shake a star and that’s an engineering problem!!”. The thing about finding another ‘earth’ – there are about 350 likely, what fraction of stars would have planets are half to a third. The solar system produced orphan planets, but on other hand, are they all dead? When you build a planet, they stay warm for a long time. What Kepler is doing now is taking data – will do this within the first three weeks. We should find out more in January! They want them checked on the ground insofar as much as that can be done. How do we know that we can trust it? We have more checking to do and have confidence in two-three years that the findings are right.
Pamela – planet easy to find that goes across stars – so find them lined up – could it be likely that they can see us transiting from their perspective – as well as us seeing them? Pamela is ‘more for plants’ since the possibility that they might not be friendly life?
Plait – on gravity wave – a lot of things about it, but shaking a star is too difficult! Shake a black hole instead! As far as societal impacts, overturning society may not be such a bad idea. “I read with amusement the futurists, as I believe they are grossly wrong. There are no flying cars. I don’t like making big predictions about where the future is going to lie. Many of these revelations have been over a long time and the death of television – those of us using the internet were aware. Societal changes are difficult to predict.” May not have the big impact if life is found. Should we be trying to communicate with aliens? Beaming our presence out into space, there are military radars, for example, someone might be looking in our direction, so we’re broadcasting our presence whether we like - “Klingons are easy, whereas the [something] eat humans!” A xenophobic alien race could easily kill us.
Fermi paradox briefly explained by Shostak – in 1950, by Fermi, how long would it take to colonise the galaxy if you wanted to do it? The whole point is that if anybody wanted to do this, they have much more than enough time to have done it. If there really are a lot of societies, then even if 99.9999% are not interested, just a small percentage – then why don’t we see it? But has to guarantee that none of them wants to colonise? Just have machinery do it? Why haven’t we seen that? Is there galactic police that prevent it? There’s lots of ambitious societies that may not have decided to colonise. But the question ‘should we broadcast’, it’s been done a few times (the Australian project, for example) – there is an international SETI organisation. SETI is a very small enterprise, almost all USA. Europe apparently has the resources, but apparently don’t. Why so little interest? Shostak sees it as a cultural problem, stemming from his experience in Europe.
Pamela on contradictions to the Bible that finding alien life might have? “We’re pretty bad about going ‘it’s just USA’ – as long as you keep blinders on, it’s easy not to think globally. If you’re now thinking on a cosmic perspective, what might happen then? It changes our place in space; one of the neat body of research we look at, includes galaxies. Main because contribute to research. One thing people talk about is looking at galaxies gave a sense of vastness and being one of a long period of time. “Technlogically only able to do cool shit for a few hundred years!”
Societies are only just starting to spring forth – we don’t know what may be possible – “in our lifetimes, we’ve gone from little to a lot, started to dig on Mars and there’s ice and oxygen, just frozen”. There’s the ingredients for life and magaritas! “Some of the questions we’re struggling with include the population of the galaxy and we have the chance to see what is happening in our lifetimes.”
Then it’s a Q&A. Various questions about the likelihood of life, how often some things happen – boiling down to not enough data yet and the more we know about the frequency of life, then the more we know about the frequency of civilisation. One of our greatest fears – we can’t find civilisations that don’t leak light and only use fiber optics, a nice green-conserving society… we won’t be able to see them, only those who have pollution! Plait says ‘funding’ – we find life, astronomy will get funding for life!
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