DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
For centuries, people have looked up at the sky and wondered if there's anyone else out there. For Frank Drake, that question started when he was a little boy, listening to his father talk about other worlds. His daughter, science journalist Nadia Drake, tells the story.
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NADIA DRAKE: He started to wonder, did those places really exist? And if so, could he find them? And could we maybe actually communicate with whomever lived there?
ELLIOTT: Frank Drake grew up to be an astronomer and became the first person to go on a modern search for extraterrestrial life. Brendan Byrne covers space for Central Florida Public Media. His new podcast, When We Find Them, follows the search for life on other planets and asks the question we may not be prepared for - what happens if we find it? Brendan Byrne, welcome.
BRENDAN BYRNE, BYLINE: Hey. Thanks for having me, Debbie.
ELLIOTT: I want to know, right out of the gate, how you got into this. Is this something that you've always been fascinated with? What gave you the idea for a podcast about the search for life in outer space?
BYRNE: Debbie, I've been covering space for more than 10 years and interviewing lots and lots of people who are on the search for life, and I learned that we're getting really, really close. And so as a journalist, I was like, boy, if that happens when I'm still working, how would I ever cover such an event like that? And so that really got me thinking about it.
And as you hear in the first episode, I asked the president of the SETI Institute - this is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - what would happen? And he said, well, they'd probably call a press conference. And to me, that was kind of mundane. I've covered hundreds of press conferences in my day, and to think that the most profound announcement of humanity would be at a press conference was really interesting to me. And I just got to thinking more about that day that I may get to cover this moment.
ELLIOTT: So in your first episode, you say that modern efforts to search for life in the universe can be traced back to Frank Drake. Take us to what he was doing back in 1960 that nobody had tried before.
BYRNE: Yeah. He took an 85-foot radio antenna and pointed it at two stars about 11 light-years away. And using a radio telescope, he was listening for radio signals at a very, very specific frequency that he thought would be used by any civilization out there to either contact us or accidentally send these radio waves out into the world. He named it Project Ozma. He was a big fan of "The Wizard Of Oz" books. So that comes from "The Wizard Of Oz" books there because he was looking for a strange and faraway land. Unfortunately, he didn't find it, but what he did do was set off the modern efforts to search for extraterrestrial intelligence via radio astronomy.
ELLIOTT: You talked with his daughter Nadia Drake, who's now a science journalist, so she followed - in a way - in her father's footsteps. You talk to her about how he decided where to point these two antennas in an attempt to make contact with life beyond Earth. Here she is.
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DRAKE: Dad's plan was to point it at two nearby sun-like stars. He picked sun-like stars because the one planet that we know of that's inhabited orbits the sun. And he reasoned that if those stars had planets in orbit around them, as the sun does, and if those planets were anything like Earth with civilizations that were anything like ours, then they would be releasing distinctly artificial radio signals into the cosmos.
ELLIOTT: So he was listening for someone who might be like us. Has the search for life beyond Earth changed since then?
BYRNE: Fundamentally, it has not. We are looking for, for the most part, things that are just like us. We're looking for liquid water. We're looking for oxygen. We're looking for carbon-based organisms. And we're also using telescopes to look into the atmospheres of planets that exist outside of our own solar system - looking for those things that are linked to civilization and human activity and living beings.
ELLIOTT: So if there's life out there that is not trying to talk to us, you're making the case here that scientists say they can look for clues of life in a planet's atmosphere in other ways - somehow (laughter) including farts in another world. Is this true? Would you explain that? What does an alien fart tell us?
BYRNE: Well, an alien fart tells us that there is something living there - right? - 'cause living organisms make that - make a fart. We also assume, because we are looking for beings that are just like us, we assume that they're probably polluting their planet with industry. So we're also looking for byproducts of advanced civilization, essentially galactic pollution, and that's going to tell us that there's life out there.
ELLIOTT: Are we even allowed to say fart on the radio?
BYRNE: You know, I hope so.
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ELLIOTT: We've watched the discovery of aliens play out in movies so many times, right? I think of "E.T.," of course. That's the first thing I think of when we talk about this. And there was, like, some horrible movie we watched in high school, "Plan B From Outer Space," you know?
BYRNE: (Laughter).
ELLIOTT: Like, I can just remember that's always sort of been a theme in pop culture or science fiction. What would it really look like here on Earth if scientists found evidence of alien life?
BYRNE: Yeah. I always think, too - like, "Independence Day" was the movie I grew up watching, and that was not a very good day when the aliens came here.
ELLIOTT: No.
BYRNE: You know, we don't know if that's actually what's going to happen, right? We don't know if contact is made, you know, will they come in peace? Will they not? Just because it's never happened before. But I was warned by many scientists when reporting this podcast that, you know, that actual day is probably going to be pretty boring (laughter). It's going to be a little blip on a data sheets or evidence of a microbe on Mars and not really this kind of alien invasion or first contact that we've seen in the movies. So we have to temper our expectations when it comes to that.
ELLIOTT: Do you get the sense that the experts consider this an inevitability?
BYRNE: Yes. Yes, absolutely.
ELLIOTT: Wow.
BYRNE: From most of the experts that I talked to, it's not a conversation of if we will find them. It's a matter of when we will find them. And we, as society, will certainly change. A lot of the scientists that I talk to think that we will change for the better because we will know that there is someone else out there, and we are not alone. And hopefully, that brings us all together and makes us realize that we are one Earth amongst a sky full of other civilizations out there.
ELLIOTT: That's Brendan Byrne. He covers space for Central Florida Public Media, and his new podcast, When We Find Them, is out now. Thanks, Brendan.
BYRNE: Thanks, Debbie. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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