Dean chats with recent Cornell PhD Akshay Suresh about BLIPSS (The Breakthrough Listen Investigation for Periodic Spectral Signals). It's the latest effort in humanity's endeavor to communicate with intelligent extra-terrestrial life. New episodes release every other Friday!
Additional resources referenced in this episode:
- Software offers new way to listen for signals from the stars
- SETI : the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
- ABC TV - SETI promo (ABV-2, 8/12/92)
- WORLD SPEAKS TO WORLD WITH MYSTERIOUS SIGNALS THROUGH VAST SPACE - TESLA, THE ELECTRICIAN, SAYS HE RECEIVED A MESSAGE FROM MARS
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: [00:00:00] Listen closely. Okay, so it's 1901, winter. Very early morning, the sun isn't up just yet, and this scientist know, you might have heard of him. His name was Nikola Tesla. He's sitting on a hillside in Colorado with his ear up to a receiver. He built this lab called the Tesla Experimental Station just two years before.
To conduct experiments regarding wireless communication. The station lives up on Pike's Peak, where the high altitude conditions are basically like a playground for electrical currents. Photographs and illustrations from around this time show Tesla standing on this wooden platform at the lab.
Overlooking the scenic mountainside. He's usually surrounded by machinery [00:01:00] or gigantic sparks of lightning. There's this huge radio tower coming out of the roof of the station behind him. And all of these metal cans wired together on the ground near his feet. So that's the scene. And he's just listening, and listening, and listening.
Until... he hears something.
The next day, Tesla tells his San Francisco examiner. that he believes he's received a message from Mars.
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio. I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up, a show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing [00:02:00] universe of ours so great. Our guest this week is Akshay Suresh, PhD graduate in astronomy from Cornell. And BLIPSS project leader.
So sorry to leave you hanging with that Tesla thing. I mean, did Tesla hear a message from Mars?
He wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, "A new voice from a planet millions of miles removed was spoken over one of the myriad of unwired telephones of the universe. And there, near the lonely mountain peak, in the fathomless calm of night, the voice at last found a listener. And the world spoke to world, in language strange at first, but sure to be clear."
So Tesla was convinced. This was a message from Mars to him and he was the listener. And well, unfortunately, Tesla's [00:03:00] theory was pretty much immediately dismissed by the scientific community and he tended to be super vague and secretive about his experiments in general, so we really don't know what it was that Tesla heard that night.
So, what was it?
You know, I know that there's like this idea like aliens are gonna visit us and we're gonna... See them and we're gonna find them on Mars and that's glamorous and awesome But it's probably not how it's gonna happen. Like if if we find aliens somewhere We're probably gonna have to hear them because it's just too far to go to these places If there is life on Mars, it'd be microbial small and underground.
So not exactly like getting on the radio and calling us And that's what we're seeing everywhere in the solar system. Now, there could be places in the solar system where life exists. Getting to them is tough for us. So, why not let [00:04:00] them come to us over the airwaves?
[archival audio]: At NASA, our goal is to explore and utilize space. to help america advance science and technology.
Dean Regas: Now, over the past century, there have been several efforts to communicate with extraterrestrial life. The most notable is NASA's SETI Institute. That stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. This was founded in 1984 with the sole purpose of searching for ETs.
[archival audio]: The purpose of SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is to detect evidence of such intelligent life. in our Milky Way galaxy.
Dean Regas: They use radio telescopes that are constantly innovating and improving to figure out, you know, how they can listen better, listen clearer. The newest iteration of this is called BLIPSS.
This stands for the Breakthrough Listen Investigation for Periodic Spectral Signals, with two S's, by the way. [00:05:00] What kind of message would you want to send out if you were an intelligent civilization? and you wanted to be heard, well, I mean, I think podcasts are probably a good way to do it, but I think that your best way to do is just repeat something.
Computers are crunching all this, they're looking for things that are repeating over and over again. There's lots of these telescopes that are listening for these kind of things. And aiming at the center of the Milky Way is a good place to go because that's where more stars are. That's where potentially more planets are.
So getting back to the BLIPSS project, this is an exciting new way to kind of pick up where SETI left off. And I'm really excited to have our guest here today. It is Akshay Suresh, who is a PhD graduate in astronomy from Cornell University. And man, I can't wait to talk aliens with him. Akshay, thanks so much for joining me today.
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Hi, Dean. How are you? Great to meet you.
Dean Regas: Nice to meet you too. So what brought you into the, the world of [00:06:00] astronomy? What, what, what fascinates you the most about, about space and, you know, just the universe in general?
Dr. Akshay Suresh: That's a great question. So, personally, I love solving puzzles, and to me, that's where the fascination with astronomy came about.
The universe is just a mysterious, open, limitless repository of scientific puzzles waiting to be explored. And what I really find even more intriguing is that several of these puzzles change over time. So the universe and astronomy in general always offers something unexpected and exciting to study.
Dean Regas: You know, for most people, astronomy is, you know, looking through a telescope, the optical wavelength of light. And you know, this is a weird question, but do you have a favorite wavelength of light to study?
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Yeah, great. That's great. So I actually like radio waves the best. So radio waves are really long, stretched out wavelengths of light.
These are invisible [00:07:00] to our naked eye. But we use them daily for communication, say our mobile phones use them, our microwaves use them. They're also used for like aircraft navigation, like radar. Part of my study is looking for radar like signals from outside our galaxy.
Dean Regas: Well, and so we were talking earlier about the, the BLIPSS program how did that come about? And are you like actively thinking, okay, we're going to find intelligent life out there? Is it possible? What do you think? What do you think our chances are?
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Those are great questions, but the goal is to detect repeating signals or recurring signals from distant alien poles. It might be indicative of potential alien technology.
And I actually began working on the software back in 2021, when I started out as a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, at that point, one of my collaborators, Dr. Vishal [00:08:00] Gajjar had been contemplating BLIPSS as an innovative idea to push the frontiers. In our search for alien technologies,
Vishal's vast and rich research experience and my coding skills were able to bring BLIPSS to fruition. Now the question of intelligent life is interesting in itself. I must first say, like, the concept of intelligence is quite subjective. For the purposes of our conversation, By intelligence, I'm going to consider life forms that can engineer their own technology for their sustenance.
Personally, I do firmly believe that technologically advanced life may reside beyond our planet, in our galaxy, and even further. Just because the universe is so vast, the lifeforms themselves may be drastically different from any we see on Earth, but they likely rely on the same fundamental means for interstellar communication.
Dean Regas: So this is not [00:09:00] something like we're looking for microbial life. This is, you know, life that can communicate is basically what we're looking for.
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Correct. That's right. We are looking for life that has built some form of... technology for interstellar communication.
Dean Regas: And so how is this different or similar to the SETI projects, you know, from the late 20th century and early 21st century?
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Traditionally, most SETI campaigns have looked for extremely narrowband transmissions. It could be just a few hertz wide. and peculiar one off events. So ascertaining their origin by going back to a specific direction on the sky and figuring out if it has some kind of artificial characteristic suggestive of alien technology is hard to pinpoint.
And this is where my effort comes in. By looking for repeating transmissions, you can study the signal multiple times over and over and can precisely determine its true physical nature.[00:10:00]
Dean Regas: Well, I'm going to ask you a question you probably can't answer, but can you give us the scoop? Have you heard anything so far?
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Unfortunately, no conclusive signals so far, but the hope is... We would find one by churning through vast amounts of data from different sky regions. And this is going on with telescopes globally in China, in Australia, South Africa, in the Europe, and even now in the United States with the 100 meter Green Bank telescope in West Virginia primarily.
And now the Allen telescope array. And California has joined the fray as well.
Dean Regas: Well, I would figure if you found something, it'd probably be published and it'd be in the everywhere. Now, there's, there's some studies that are coming out not, you know, a few years ago that they haven't been really firmly established too well about the transmission of radio waves that they maybe decay over a certain [00:11:00] period of light years or a certain distance.
Is there any news on that from that front? Is there a, you know, a fear that maybe signals decay over distance and that they might be hard to hear from? very vast distances.
Dr. Akshay Suresh: It's an intriguing question. To our knowledge, at least studying astrophysical sources, we do not have evidence that the radio waves can diminish in intensity over time. So for instance, we can detect radio waves from galaxies, which are very early on in the formation of the universe. A bigger question would be the longevity of the intelligent alien life that is transmitting such signals.
And perhaps do the alien life forms have, like, a certain range of lifespans based on the planetary environments? Or is it that any life that we consider to be intelligent must have [00:12:00] found ways to live sustainably?
So potentially, as humanity on Earth... As we make the transition towards sustainable technologies, we should be looking for evidence of similar technologies beyond the Earth as well.
Dean Regas: All right, well, that reassures me that our podcast today will be broadcast to Alpha Centauri in, you know, about 4. years.
They'll hear that. Oh, well, we actually have to broadcast out into space, don't we? All right, we'll work on that, we'll work on that. So, do you see this technology as being something the public can... access easily, maybe even participate in? Is there some public element to this?
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Most certainly, that would be my hope in the very near future.
At least, I would say even like two to three years down the line. Like our software, Blips, using just CPUs, the software can crunch several gigabytes of data in a little under 30 minutes. And with [00:13:00] laptops and tablets ever growing in compute power, I imagine backyard astronomers will soon be able to do the processing with their own devices.
And data are always available open source from radio telescopes globally. So even if someone does not have their own radio test scope in their backyard, anyone with basic computing skills would be able to pull down the software and just run it on a piece of data for 15 to 20 minutes and get the results straight on their lap, which would be exciting.
Dean Regas: Oh, well, that sounds wonderful. You, you hear it everybody get to work. You're going to be hunting aliens with us as well. So let's say you roll into the office. You get good news from the computer, there is a conclusive signal. You know, you're like, all right, this is it. What, what would that look like? What what would you foresee a a real legitimate signal sounding like?
Dr. Akshay Suresh: That's a good question.[00:14:00]
So I'm again, just guessing at possibilities because we've not found anything conclusive so far. But thinking about it, I would think, I would think that a alien signal which would be coming in from the sky might seem like weak interference, potentially, because it's coming in from really far away. And it, ideally, you would hope that the interference shares some characteristics with those of human technologies, which we can relate to, but is definitely not something, say, associated with a satellite.
As soon as I walk into the office and if I hear that, I'd be skeptical to begin with. For a signal to be conclusive, we need to ascertain for real that the signal is originating from the sky and not from some ground [00:15:00] based human technology. And the second one is we need to confirm that the signal is real through confirmation with multiple telescopes.
And if we do... Get both of these points checked off. Then I would be willing to consider the possibility that the signal may be produced by artificial technology.
That would be the first step and beyond then you need to have a protocol for how would the, how would, how should humanity react in response? To a potential extraterrestrial message.
Dean Regas: So have you heard anything funny that you weren't expecting to hear? Or anybody that's broadcasting from Earth that you accidentally got?
Or a certain Cincinnati radio station that has too much power that shoots out into the universe? Have you ever come across any odd things like that? That's great.[00:16:00]
Dr. Akshay Suresh: We do see like really odd signals in our data. Some of which we can attribute to, say, geostationary satellites, which are directly overhead the telescope. So, no matter where you point with just a single telescope, you do catch the signal from the satellite. Certain other sources of interference are more obscure.
They come and go, and it is not quite as easy to tell the exact source of these interference signals. So it's a puzzle in itself.
Dean Regas: Well, yeah, this has been great. This is fun talking about this and I wish you luck. I hope it's like one of those fields where you're. Listen and listen and listen and you could go years without anything and then man, your patience is enviable or admirable.
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Yeah, thanks. We are hoping to have like a radio telescope on the far side of the moon as well, which would be our [00:17:00] dream for astronomers.
Dean Regas: Oh, absolutely. In the shadow there, you get a little quiet zone. That would be oh, that would be amazing.
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Yeah, so that's something which all of us are pitching to NASA quite recently, so we're hoping that would come to fruition.
Dean Regas: Oh, yeah, I know they've been talking about that for a long time. Well, Akshay, thanks so much for joining me today.
This has been really insightful. Best of luck with your search and hopefully we'll be hearing about some discoveries. I can't wait. Thanks so much for talking today.
Dr. Akshay Suresh: Thanks for having me, Dean. It is a pleasure. I really enjoy talking about my science and communicating with the public.
Dean Regas: But yeah, I'd be happy to chat more, too.
Yeah, most certainly.
Looking up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Ella Rowen is our show producer, audio engineer, and extraterrestrial ambassador. Oh, I think she has some messages for them too. We come in peace, right Ella? Yes. Our theme song is [00:18:00] Possible Light by Ziv Moran. I'm Dean Regus, and keep looking up.
