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What you are about to see is an exercise in imagination.

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We've been studying a crashed alien flying saucer.

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Here inside our top secret hangar, we've examined the advanced technology it's built

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around.

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Now we'll go inside to discover what options are included on this model.

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An anti-matter reactor, a tele-transporter, laser weapons.

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With the help of leading physicists, astronomers and engineers, we'll learn about its power

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plant, its weaponry, and most importantly its mission.

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And maybe in the process, we'll learn something about ourselves.

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Through alien engineering.

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This is an alien spacecraft that crashed in the desert some years ago.

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We recovered it.

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Now our goal is to figure out how it works.

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We've been studying it for some time.

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Now we'll go on a remote video tour inside the craft.

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Our robotic camera is providing a remote video feed from the spacecraft housed at Hangar

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18.

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As you can see, this is quite an enterprise.

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This is your first peek inside this alien vessel.

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Clearly this is the main gallery.

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But it's not safe for humans to go inside just yet.

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We believe this is the sick bay.

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This is the...

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facility.

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Every ship's got to have one, you know.

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Here are the control panels.

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This is where they operate the ship.

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We've hacked into their computer system and we've learned a lot.

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Also, no joystick.

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We think they control it telekinetically.

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Below deck is the anti-matter reactor.

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Now that's a complex piece of machinery.

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Rather difficult to explain in lay terms.

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So that's what's inside an alien ship.

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An anti-matter reactor that can produce short bursts of intense energy to power exotic machinery

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like wormhole generators and warp drives.

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And it runs on anti-matter, the highest octane fuel in the universe.

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If you had one ounce of anti-matter and you could annihilate it with one ounce of ordinary matter

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would give you an amount of energy equivalent to one million tons of rocket fuel.

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Anti-matter sounds like science fiction, but it's real.

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And we humans are making it right here on Earth.

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Actually, below Earth.

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At a government lab outside Chicago, 30 feet below ground, is a giant enclosed ring four miles in circumference.

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Here at Fermilab, the building blocks of the universe are being transformed into something fantastic.

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Fermilab's mission is to do high energy physics research.

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High energy physics research is trying to understand the forces of nature at the smallest distance scales.

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To see and investigate small distance scales, you have to have very high energy.

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Why? Because the subatomic particles have to go fast. Very fast.

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Fermilab operates one of the world's highest energy particle accelerators, called the Tevatron.

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Here, scientists make particles of anti-matter.

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Back in 1928, Paul Dirac determined that we have matter like protons, neutrons, electrons and the things that they make up.

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And particles which have the same behavior but their charges opposite.

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And the term that was come up with was antimatter.

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Protons have antimatter counterparts called anti-protons, identical in mass but opposite in charge.

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Electrons have anti-electrons called positrons.

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Antiparticles can combine to create anti-elements such as anti-hydrogen.

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Theoretically, any element can have an anti-element counterpart.

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In 1932, Carl Anderson was the first person to detect the existence of anti-electrons or positrons from cosmic rays.

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And then many years later, in 1955, Emilio Segre and his collaborators at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California

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created the first beam of anti-protons by using a beam of protons striking a copper target.

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And they detected for the first time anti-protons. Those were the first proofs of the existence of anti-matter.

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Quantum physics predicted the existence of anti-matter.

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But until 1955, scientists couldn't make any.

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It seems the universe is filled with matter and very little anti-matter.

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So the most reliable way for us to have anti-matter is to make it.

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That's what Fermilab does.

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We create anti-protons by taking energetic protons and slamming them into a metal target.

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It creates enough energy density in the target that you can create particles.

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And there's a certain probability that you will create anti-protons.

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It's a very small probability, but it is large enough that we can actually create numbers that we can count.

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For every 500,000 protons that we put on the target, we can collect one anti-proton.

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This all takes place in the giant accelerator rings underground.

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They need all that room to get the particles moving fast enough before they hit the target to make anti-protons.

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After the anti-protons have been produced and collected,

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the stream of anti-particles must be kept close to the center of the tube and prevented from coming in contact with the walls.

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We actually magnetically levitate it.

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We have a ring of electromagnets with a stainless steel tube, which has all of the air evacuated out of it.

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That's about 500 meters in circumference.

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And these anti-protons that are collected after these collisions with this target disk are put into this ring,

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which we call the accumulator, and this tube is big enough and there's no air in it

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so that the particles can just sit there circulating.

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They have to keep those anti-particles isolated because if they come in contact with the particles in the wall,

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they will annihilate each other.

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So it would pose a big problem for beings like us who are made of matter if there was more anti-matter in the universe.

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It's a good thing that there's not equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in the universe

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because if I was to sit here in this chair and my anti-matter counterpart came up and touched me on the shoulder,

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that would be the end of us and a good fraction of where we're sitting.

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Matter and anti-matter combine in a virtually perfect conversion of matter to energy.

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In other words, 100% of the matter and the anti-matter become energy.

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Even in the best fusion reaction, perhaps 2% of matter becomes energy.

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Anti-matter is really the perfect form of energy storage because you get all of the energy out of the matter and the anti-matter

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if you can make them annihilate and that's a tremendous amount of energy.

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But a tremendous amount of energy is exactly what we need if we're going to power an interstellar spacecraft.

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So what about using that tremendous potential for fuel?

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Suppose you had one pennyweight of anti-matter, that's one tenth of an ounce of anti-matter.

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The amount of energy in that one penny worth of anti-matter would be enough to launch the space shuttle 60 times.

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So what's the miles per gallon conversion on something like that?

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If you had anti-matter gasoline, you'd be able to travel 40 billion miles per gallon, you know, and that's not even fixing your car up.

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Great mileage, except that our nearest star neighbor after the sun is in the Alpha Centauri star system four light years away.

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That's roughly 500 gallons or 30 tanksful to travel to Alpha Centauri.

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We humans will have to crank up the anti-matter assembly line if we want to take a trip like that.

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Although Fermilab has been making anti-matter for over 30 years, they've barely got any.

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Fermilab has one trillionth of a gram of anti-matter stored in its accelerators.

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With the rate at which we make it, it would take us about 40 some million years to make a quarter of a gram of anti-matter.

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That means it would take billions and billions of years for us humans to make enough anti-matter fuel to get to Alpha Centauri unless we learn how to make it faster.

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Or we could just steal the alien anti-matter supply and their engine.

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The aliens who designed the ship we found have solved many dangers and drawbacks associated with anti-matter fuel.

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First, they solved the problem of anti-matter storage tanks.

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Our alien ship has a miniature version of Fermilab's magnetic accumulator.

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The aliens also solved the problem of fuel supply.

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Either they have found a source for it out in space, or they can create it on a large scale because they've got a huge supply of anti-matter on board.

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But as we solve one riddle, we encounter another.

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This alien spaceship clearly has turrets for weapons.

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What are those for? Defensive or offensive? What do our alien engineers intend to do to us?

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Weapons of mass destruction appear to be a standard feature of our alien spaceship.

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That's disturbing, but not really surprising.

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We'd like to assume any alien visitors would be friendly, or at least not belligerent when they touch down on Earth.

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But the aliens who built this ship clearly would rather be safe than sorry.

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How else to explain these death ray laser beams built into the ship?

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Come to think of it, it makes perfect sense to pack heat when you're penetrating space.

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You'll never know what you'll run into.

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Maybe you'll encounter hostile creatures along the way.

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Like us, we're fairly hostile, and we have our own Earth-grown futuristic weaponry.

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Naturally, they involve laser beams too.

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And we don't need alien technology.

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The U.S. military is working on several directed energy weapons.

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A laser is just a device that allows you to send out a very coherent beam of light.

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If you think of a laser pointer that's used commonly now for briefings and stuff like that,

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it just allows you to get a very intense beam of light that goes a very long distance in a very small area.

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In fact, the term laser is an acronym for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.

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Focusing a laser is so simple, it's child's play, literally.

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If you recall when you were a kid, you probably had a magnifying glass,

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and you used to use the sun to put a beam of light on a leaf or maybe even a bug,

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and you could create a lot of heat, that's what you basically do with the laser.

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You focus that beam of light on something that you'd like to damage or destroy,

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and you hold it in place long enough to heat it up and damage it or destroy it.

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Lasers make excellent weapons for two reasons.

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One, laser beams travel at the speed of light, since that's what lasers are, light.

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Two, they can be aimed and focused with incredible precision,

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not a lot of collateral damage with a laser beam.

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The first laser was actually a maser developed in the mid-1950s.

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It didn't use visible light, but instead harnessed microwaves and ammonia gas to create a beam.

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But by the late 1950s, optical lasers were created, and today they're everywhere.

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Lasers are used in CD players, they're in dental drills, you use lasers in measuring devices.

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Lasers are everywhere pretty much.

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Lasers can differ by wavelength or power, less than a watt of electricity powers most commercial lasers.

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Military lasers are stronger.

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At the Laser Effects Facility at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, they can be much stronger.

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They have to be.

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Their mission is to blow things up, or at least fry them.

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The laser is called EDCL, and it basically stands for Electro Discharge Coaxial Laser.

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It's a carbon dioxide laser, but we use three different gases to facilitate making the laser beam.

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We use helium as kind of a lasing medium, and then we use nitrogen and carbon dioxide.

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You can't see the beam itself.

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The laser light is being emitted in the invisible infrared region of the spectrum.

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Kirtland's facility studies the effects of high-powered lasers on target materials.

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For instance, if someone said, we'd like to see what a laser could do to a satellite, we would evaluate the different parts of that satellite to determine how we could damage it.

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The laser at Kirtland's facility doesn't usually use enough power to blow things up, it just burns them.

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But it could if it wanted to.

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It depends on how much power that you put onto the target.

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You can make a very small sized shot, put tons and tons of power into it, and you're going to have a higher heating rate on that target.

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But this is just a relatively small laboratory laser.

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The U.S. Air Force is working on a far larger and more powerful laser weapon, and it flies.

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The airborne laser is a 747 airplane.

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It's a jumbo jet that we put a very sophisticated optical system in the aircraft, a battle management or command and control system, and high energy lasers in the back of that.

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So think of an airborne laser as a jumbo jet that has a beam of light that comes out the nose of the airplane that can be directed onto a boosting ballistic missile to destroy it.

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The airborne laser began as an Air Force program to shoot down short-range missiles.

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In 2001, it became part of the missile defense program with the goal of destroying medium and even intercontinental ballistic missiles.

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Infrared cameras are designed to detect a missile launch.

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Detection information is passed to onboard computers which direct a turret in the nose of the craft toward the missile.

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The turret uses two sets of lasers, one to lock on to the target, the other to fire on it and destroy it.

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With a range of a few hundred miles, a handful of these weapons deployed in hot zones would be a powerful defense.

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What the airborne laser actually does is we have a deformable mirror in the optics train, and that mirror is used to pre-distort the high energy laser beam.

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So basically the atmosphere and effects between the airplane and the missile are taken out by that pre-distorted beam.

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Sounds a little like science fiction, but it's actually a concept that's used every day in observatories around the world.

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Much of that work is done here at Kirtland Air Force Base, so that's a very well proven technology.

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Very impressive, but still light years behind the blaster we have on this ship.

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But these aren't even the big guns.

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Remember anti-matter? The stuff that combines explosively with matter?

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To produce utter annihilation?

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Our alien ship supplements its laser weapons with an anti-matter torpedo.

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There is no ignoring that the alien ship bristles with offensive weapons.

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But are there any defensive weapons?

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Our engineers believe they've found a device that generates a force field shield.

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A shield that deflects or absorbs an enemy's blow is an almost perfect defense.

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Better yet, don't let the enemy know you're there.

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The first thing to keep in mind when you're walking around an alien spaceship full of exotic options and controls is to be very careful.

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Someone accidentally presses the invisibility shield button and...

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WHAM!

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Many witnesses will report seeing the craft as clear as a truck on the street in broad daylight,

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and as it's flying away, or even as it's approaching, suddenly it's just not there.

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They wink, they blink, they pinch themselves. It's gone.

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It could be that the ship's instantaneous acceleration just made it look like the craft disappeared, but not ours.

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Among the defense mechanisms on our alien spaceship is a cloaking device, perfect for sneaking out of dangerous situations.

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Okay, so it's not perfect, but it's a lot better than anything we humans have been able to achieve.

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When light hits an object, it excites the atoms and the atoms then re-radiate.

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If you want invisibility, that requires controlling the atomic structure of the atom itself.

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No one knows how to do that.

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In fact, some of our fellow Earthlings further down on the evolutionary scale seem to do a better job of disappearing on command than we do.

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There are animals which can change their coloration depending on the background they're up against.

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Chameleons are of course very well known. There's some flatfish that can do this also, a tiny freshwater soul which have both eyes on the same side of their head.

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But if you put them on a bottom which has got any particular pattern, they'll realign their coloration to match that.

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The flounder performs its disappearing act thanks to chromatophores, special cells containing pigment granules that enable the organism to change color.

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The really striking experiment, somebody tried putting these things on top of a square checkerboard type pattern.

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They couldn't match it exactly, but they came real close. The edges of the black squares were somewhat rough.

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The spacing was correct and they were approximately square.

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Camouflage isn't the same as invisibility, but it could achieve the same result.

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If you electrify a piece of cloth and put sensors in the system so that it can in effect see, you could presumably change the cloth coloring to match the background in an active way if you had a little computer to do it.

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Invisibility is a nice option. The alien ship also has a force field among its defenses.

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The force field generator is even capable of repelling laser weapons.

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However, force field shields and cloaking devices aren't the exclusive domain of alien engineers.

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The Department of Defense is spending R&D money to turn science fiction into science fact.

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Here at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, Mounir La Russie is at the forefront of cold plasma research.

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Plasma might one day hold the key for futuristic defensive weaponry, once limited to sci-fi movies.

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This very well could be the force field or the cloaking device of the future, somehow similar to what people have dreamt about in Star Trek.

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Great! So what's plasma?

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Matter comes in four known states, the solid state, and then you heat it and you get the liquid state.

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Then you heat that and you get the gaseous state. And if you keep on heating that, some of the molecules and atoms get stripped from the electrons and then become ionized.

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When it comes like this, we call it plasma.

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99% of visible matter in the universe may be plasma, including stars.

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And it comes in natural and man-made varieties.

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In nature, when you have a storm and you get lightning, that light you see that comes from the plasma.

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That's air breaking down because of the high voltages between the cloud and the ground.

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It's man-made in neon lights and fluorescent lights.

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Inside of those, the gas is broken down into the state of plasma.

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Dr. La Russie's device generates a plasma plume by applying voltage between two disc-shaped electrodes in the presence of helium gas.

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The U.S. Air Force provides some of the funding to Dr. La Russie.

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Their hope is that someday, cold plasma devices can act like the fabled cloaking devices and force field shields on TV and in the movies.

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We are trying also to apply plasma in a different kind of setting so that plasma can play a role of a shield or of a mirror to bounce off electromagnetic waves.

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Instead of having a really solid material that is there, when the plasma is switched off, there is nothing.

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Then you switch on the plasma and then the plasma will act as a mirror that you can bounce electromagnetic waves from.

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La Russie hasn't quite used plasma as a protective shield, but he's working on it.

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Depending on the density of the plasma, it could absorb certain electromagnetic waves, such as radar.

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Then nothing bounces back and the radar thinks that it's nothing out there.

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That's a stealth use of plasma.

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In essence, you've created a cloaking device invisible to radar.

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Another use would involve embedding electrodes into the skin of the craft,

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which could instantly generate a protective plasma shield that absorbs microwave energy.

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We know how to make the plasma.

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However, to take it one step further and to get it to actually play the role that you wanted to play as a protective shield or protective skin is feasible,

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but there is a lot of technical and scientific issues that need to be tackled.

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It's going to be a while before our scientists on Earth can build a proper cloaking device,

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but this alien ship might help speed development.

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The saucer has everything. Laser weapons.

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Cloaking devices and plasma force field shields.

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It's almost like the aliens watched our old sci-fi movies and TV shows before they built this ship.

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If that's what they did, if they copped some of their best gadgetry from our human imaginations,

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there just might be the greatest spaceship option imaginable, a tele-transporter.

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This crashed alien spaceship that we've been examining and exploring has lots of weapons and gadgetry well beyond our current capability,

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but not beyond our imaginations.

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Many of the options we've found on this new model spaceship are ones we humans have already conceived of.

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In science and in science fiction.

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It's interesting to think about the connections between science fiction and science.

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I think the point is that there's this relationship between the two.

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They both spur the imagination.

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And not often, but sometimes you actually come up with the same solution in science fiction and science.

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But it's really provoking the imagination that is what caused me to be a scientist.

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Of all the imaginative devices conceived for space travel, the most appealing has to be the tele-transporter,

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the device that can instantly beam a being from one place to another.

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What seduced me into writing The Physics of Star Trek was actually the transporter.

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I travel a lot and it'd be great to go from one place to another without going on an airplane.

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And the transporter in Star Trek is fascinating and I began to think,

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well how could you make a transporter?

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And I thought it'd be a great way to describe the laws of physics.

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It should come as no surprise that the alien ship does have a transporter that can reduce an object,

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including a living creature, into a matter stream, then send it to another location for reassembly.

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This is truly the Rolls Royce of alien technology and one of the most challenging to engineer.

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You'd have to take a human being and you'd have to kind of disassemble that human being

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and write down the position of every single atom in the body.

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And then you'd take that information on where all the atoms in the body were

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and you'd send that information to another place and then some little assembler on the other side

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would just put all the atoms together and when you're done, what have you got?

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You've got the person, you're just disassembled.

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But what if there are glitches?

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That would be kind of scary to get in a transporter and know that,

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well the first thing that happens is they're going to rip you apart into atoms.

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Would you still be the same person once you put yourself together from raw materials?

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It'd be pretty tricky to do with technology because it would take, I think, about a billion quadrillion bits

279
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to write down the position of all the atoms in the body and how would you reassemble them?

280
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If we started all on computer disks, they'd stack from here to one third of the distance to the center of the Milky Way.

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The aliens have installed a super compact supercomputer that can handle all that data.

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You'd need some sort of nanotechnology that could put all the atoms in the right place and get everybody started up again.

283
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Still, I'm ready.

284
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There's a side benefit to the transporter the sci-fi screenwriters never explored,

285
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but our alien engineers certainly must be aware of.

286
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If you can pull apart something into a pile of atoms, then reassemble it somewhere else,

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then you must be able to take any pile of atoms and reassemble them the same way.

288
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In other words, the teleporter can also be a copy machine, a cloning device,

289
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as long as you have the information on how to reassemble the atoms.

290
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So the way I would transport you is to take you and scan you and take all the information that makes you up as a human being

291
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and transport it from one place to another, and then take some atoms I already have over here

292
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and combine them with that information and make another copy of you over here.

293
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Great, except you're still over there.

294
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That's simple, I vaporize you, now you're only over here.

295
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So the transporter is not just a good defensive weapon, cleanly beaming aliens out of dangerous situations.

296
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It's also an offensive weapon, capable of making multiple copies of their best alien warriors.

297
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Again and again, the most bizarre things we humans can imagine are standard features of the alien ship.

298
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They may work at a level beyond our understanding of physics and the natural world,

299
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but they don't necessarily defy physics and quantum mechanics.

300
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Maybe anything and everything is possible.

301
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I always like to keep in mind the one proverb that you sort of go by,

302
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and that is you should always keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.

303
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By studying the craft, our engineers can tell us how it works, but there's still one big mystery.

304
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Where did it come from?

305
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In order to get to the bottom of this crashed alien spacecraft mystery,

306
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we need to figure out where it came from and who built the ship.

307
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Maybe we can spy on these alien creatures from a distance and find out their intentions.

308
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But how do we arrange to do that?

309
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In a sense, we're already trying to do that.

310
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The human race has cocked an ear toward space for the past half century.

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If the aliens speak, the SETI Institute may hear it.

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SETI is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and really what it is, is an experiment to try and find out

313
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if there's anybody out there that's as clever as we are, or more clever,

314
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not by going there or waiting for them to come here, but simply by trying to eavesdrop on signals they might be sending our way.

315
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Radio signals, light signals flashing, pulsar lights, things like that.

316
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So why would scientists believe there could be life out there?

317
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I think that if you were to ask the next five astronomers you meet, hey, do you think that there's life out there?

318
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I think most of them would say, yeah, it's pretty likely, because we now know there are lots of worlds out there.

319
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Maybe some of them are like the Earth, but many of them could support life, at least in principle.

320
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We also know that life is pretty tough.

321
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We found some life on Earth that's living in environments that you and I probably wouldn't want to live in,

322
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but that are very accommodating to small forms of life.

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And, you know, the third thing is that the entire universe is built out of the same stuff.

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It's the same chemistry, the same physics everywhere.

325
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So unless there's been some sort of miracle here on Earth, it just seems reasonable to expect that there is a lot of life out there.

326
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Intelligence strikes some people as being a fairly unlikely development, but that's unclear.

327
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The SETI Institute's listening post is nestled in Hat Creek, California, on an old lava bed.

328
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The valley and surrounding mountains block nearly all of Earth's man-made noise,

329
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providing a perfect listening post for alien messages, assuming they're sending any.

330
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It's a great thing, because we look for natural sources of radiation,

331
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and any kind of man-made terrestrial radiation is a problem for us.

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The piece of equipment behind me is an antenna, one of the individual elements that will comprise the 350-element

333
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Alan telescope array when it's completed.

334
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The listening post consists of an array of radio telescopes resembling satellite dishes.

335
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They collect radio radiation from space.

336
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Among all the noisy frequencies out there, SETI listens most intently to microwave signals.

337
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There's a good reason for this.

338
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It turns out the universe is darkest and quietest at the microwave wavelengths.

339
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And so it's the prime channel, if you will, for interstellar contact and communication.

340
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In fact, we use this channel to communicate with spacecraft for the very reason that we can do it,

341
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most reliably with the least expenditure in equipment and energy.

342
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There's another practical advantage to microwave radio signals.

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It turns out that it doesn't take very much energy to send information via radio from one star system to another.

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And also radio waves go right through the gas and dust that's between the stars.

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If we know that, they'll know that.

346
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So what does the SETI institute listening for exactly?

347
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A narrow band signal, which is just a signal that's at one spot on the dial,

348
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because transmitters make narrow band signals.

349
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We're not looking for the message, we're not looking for mathematical equations or anything like that.

350
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We're just looking for a lot of radio energy at one spot on the dial.

351
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Listening for aliens wasn't the SETI institute's idea.

352
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Inventor Nikola Tesla first searched for extraterrestrial radio signals in the 1890s.

353
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Soon followed by Guglielmo Marconi.

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Both thought they heard something.

355
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And indeed they did.

356
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Something that sounded very intelligent in its nature, a sort of chirping sound coming in the radios.

357
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It turns out that this was a natural phenomenon, energetic particles moving in the magnetic field of the Earth.

358
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But it wasn't until the late 1950s that developments in radio telescopes and receivers

359
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allowed us to listen carefully to the stars.

360
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And astronomer Frank Drake was one of the first scientists with his ear lifted to the heavens.

361
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In the late 50s I constructed the first system and carried out the first search of this kind

362
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at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.

363
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It used a 85 foot radio telescope and we used it for two months to search for signals

364
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from the two nearest stars like the Sun, Tosetti and Epsilon Erydny, with very high sensitivity.

365
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They didn't have to wait long.

366
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The very first day when we pointed the telescope at the star at Epsilon Erydny for the first time

367
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we heard a chirping sound in our radio receiver, something we had never heard before.

368
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And it was very exciting as you can imagine.

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We thought, can it really be this easy?

370
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He's turned the radio on, pointed it at the star and there it is.

371
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Before we could establish the actual origin the signal had disappeared

372
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and we had to follow that for weeks hoping for it to return and finally it did.

373
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And it turned out to be from one of our airplanes but it was an exciting moment.

374
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There have been others.

375
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In 1977 Ohio State University's radio observatory actually picked up a signal which has become famous.

376
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It's called the WOW signal and the reason it's called the WOW signal is that Jerry Airman

377
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who came in and found the signal after one night of recording.

378
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He was just flipping through the computer printout and he saw this big signal there

379
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and he wrote WOW next to it.

380
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Some very careful searches have been made to try and find that signal a second time

381
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but it was only seen once.

382
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And unfortunately as a scientist you have to say, well if I can't confirm it

383
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then who knows what it was and I can't claim that it was ET.

384
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So far no credible alien transmission has been received in any SETI search.

385
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But we do know for sure that intelligent creatures hitherto undetectable and within our own galaxy

386
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have sent signals into space for years.

387
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They would be us.

388
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Our earliest radio and television broadcasts are now light years away.

389
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Aside from these unintentional broadcasts

390
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we have sent one very clear message in 1974

391
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from the most powerful radio telescope transmitter in the world, the Ariscebo Radio Telescope.

392
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We sent a signal which lasted three minutes

393
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and it's coded in such a way that the extraterrestrials can construct a crude picture from it.

394
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A picture which starts by establishing a number system.

395
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It then shows the chemistry of the key molecule of human life, DNA.

396
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It shows a sketch of the solar system, there's a sketch of a human

397
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placed in such a way that you can tell it lives on planet three, which is the one we call Earth.

398
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Today it is on its way to a great globular cluster of stars known as Messier 13.

399
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It will arrive there in about 25,000 years.

400
00:42:17,280 --> 00:42:22,280
Who might hear that signal some 25,000 years from now?

401
00:42:22,280 --> 00:42:25,280
What sort of commotion might it create?

402
00:42:25,280 --> 00:42:29,280
Is it similar to what they'd send us if they could?

403
00:42:31,280 --> 00:42:34,280
Maybe that's the wrong question.

404
00:42:34,280 --> 00:42:39,280
Maybe what we should be asking is, why do we care whether they're out there or not?

405
00:42:39,280 --> 00:42:42,280
Why do we seem to be reaching out to them?

406
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You could say, oh, it's because of all the movies and television shows about aliens,

407
00:42:48,280 --> 00:42:53,280
but I think that that's actually a consequence of our interest, not a promoter of it so much.

408
00:42:53,280 --> 00:43:00,280
I think that we're inherently curious about other beings that might be comparable to us in abilities,

409
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and in this case maybe far beyond our abilities.

410
00:43:03,280 --> 00:43:07,280
I think that we're wired to be interested in other intelligent beings.

411
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So in a way it's curiosity, but I think it's curiosity that's born of evolution really.

412
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It's in our genes to be curious about the unknown.

413
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Real or imagined, our alien visitors help us conceive new worlds,

414
00:43:24,280 --> 00:43:32,280
not just on distant planets, but right here on planet Earth at Fermilab, at the SETI Institute,

415
00:43:32,280 --> 00:43:37,280
and in the classrooms and laboratories of physicists all over the world.

416
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We've been inspired by the unknown to contemplate solutions for problems we might not have otherwise considered.

417
00:43:48,280 --> 00:43:51,280
There's really two different ways of looking at science.

418
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One says, well, how does the universe really work, and how do we know?

419
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And the other way of looking at the world is, how could the world really work, and what is it that we don't know?

420
00:44:07,280 --> 00:44:09,280
We know a lot about our universe.

421
00:44:09,280 --> 00:44:16,280
Still, there's so much more to learn, and so many other places to go.

422
00:44:16,280 --> 00:44:21,280
It's tragic. There's this whole universe to explore, and we're stuck here on Earth.

423
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We haven't even left the solar system.

424
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And so it's easy to hope that one day we will be able to travel throughout the galaxy

425
00:44:29,280 --> 00:44:32,280
and experience directly all its wonders.

426
00:44:34,280 --> 00:44:38,280
And perhaps one day we will.