April 30, 2018 8:00 pm

Re-Visit Listening for Aliens, with Carolyn Porco on StarTalk All-Stars

This week on StarTalk All-Stars we’re taking it waaaay back. We re-visit Listening for Aliens, With Carolyn Porco, which originally aired as our second ever episode of StarTalk All-Stars.

On this episode, Carolyn answers fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about the search for ET alongside Chuck Nice and Dan Werthimer, the principle investigator of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative:

“…The program includes a survey of the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth. It scans the center of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane. Beyond the Milky Way, it listens for messages from the 100 closest galaxies to ours.

The instruments used are among the world’s most powerful. They are 50 times more sensitive than existing telescopes dedicated to the search for intelligence…”

If “Breakthrough” sounds familiar to you it should. It’s under the same project banner as Breakthrough Starshot, an idea to build light beam-propelled nanocrafts able to reach Alpha Centuri, which we’ve also discussed on the StarTalk Podcast Network.

Later, you’ll also hear the difficulties about the Drake equation, and the protocols in place to respond to alien life, including, who speaks for Earth. (We might have found the best candidate on our most recent episode of StarTalk – Into the Wild, with Jane Goodall.) All that, plus, we debate the biggest questions surrounding ET communication: should we be doing it in the first place?

Are you getting our signals? Please join us tomorrow night for Listening for Aliens, with Carolyn Porco (Repeat) at 7pm ET right here on our website, as well as on our All-Stars channels on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. If you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen