in today's episode john is joined by jill tarta jill tato received her bachelor of engineering physics degree with distinction from cornell university and her master's degree and a phd in astronomy from the university of california berkeley she served as project scientist for nasa's seti program the high resolution microwave survey and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide tarda's work has brought her wide recognition in the scientific community including the lifetime achievement award from women in aerospace and two public service medals from nasa tata is deeply involved in the education of future citizens and scientists in addition to her scientific leadership at nasa and seti institute tata was the principal investigator for two curriculum development projects funded by nsf nasa and others many people are now familiar with her work as portrayed by jodie foster in the movie contact event horizon and my channel are now available as a podcast on apple podcasts spotify and youtube memberships early ad ad-free episodes bonus episodes and sleep focused content sign up now by clicking the links below to your platform of choice dr jill tarter welcome to the program thank you john a pleasure to be here doctor i have been a seti enthusiast for probably NUMBER_TOKEN years now since i was a teenager maybe even a little bit before and you've been around the whole time you have been in seti maybe longer than anyone now what originally piqued your interest here at what point did you look up at the sky and say i wonder if there's someone out there well for me that was when i was a very young child walking along the beaches of the florida keys the gulf keys and my father was explaining the constellations to me and it was back then those keys were incredibly dark they were uninhabited mostly no street lights nothing like that so the sky was beautiful and i just wondered if somewhere on a planet around one of those stars creature would also be walking along the beach with its parent and seeing the sun our star in its sky it's kind of an interesting thought that maybe one commonality that we would have with alien life is beaches because if liquid water or some solvent of life maybe ammonia or something like that is obviously key to biochemistry so they would probably have beaches right could well be yes now within seti seti is hard and there there's no question that you're you're looking for a needle in a haystack in a universe that emits enormous amounts of radio naturally so what is it that you look for what characteristic is it that you look for in a signal to differentiate it from say just some event in the cosmos is it narrowband signals or is that also not a very good indicator no we use in the radio we use frequency compression the fact that it's a very narrow band feature in the optical we look for time compression we look for a very bright pulse that is also perhaps monochromatic because it's a laser so the frequency compression in the radio is a good bat because when you when nature emits it does so on the basis of multiple atoms or molecules and they have relative motions to one another and so even though a particular atom or molecule might emit at a particular precise single frequency because the ensemble of the emitters is necessary to get enough intensity to have an
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN event horizon and my channel are now available as a podcast on apple podcasts spotify and youtube memberships early ad ad-free episodes bonus episodes and sleep focused content sign up now by clicking the links below to your platform of choice END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN