but the advancement of A.I.

might bring new tools

to chip away at the larger, even existential questions.

Are we alone in the universe?

Can we create lifelike, intelligent machines?

Maybe they're all moonshots, but imagine, one day,

having a second, synthetic version of you.

-How's it going, brother? -Oh, not bad.

Just spent the last hour mapping half the cosmos.

I'm looking for a constellation to name after us.

You mean "me," yeah?

Whatever. Semantics.

I'm doing all the work.

Touchy.

The starry night sky has been a source of fascination

and curiosity for centuries.

Is there something out there?

We've got all these suspect places to look for life

in our own solar system.

And we're just one little solar system

in a large galaxy,

which is one of many, many galaxies in the universe.

And so you realize pretty quickly

the chances of life elsewhere are pretty high.

[tuning radio]

[man] ...we hope we have a number of listeners out there.

Most of you are probably soft and squishy humanoids.

In case any artificial intelligence is listening, welcome as well.

[Bill Diamond] You'll appreciate this,

being a data scientist,

you know we're generating about 54 terabytes of data

every day, so...

See, that's music to my ears, right there.

[Diamond] That's music to your ears.

That's a nice playground for your algorithms.

[Downey] In remote northern California,

two scientists are on their way to collect data

in hopes to answer a cosmic question...

one that's as old as humankind itself,

or at least, Galileo.

[Graham Mackintosh] When it comes to the search

for extraterrestrial intelligence...

[Diamond] Right.

...there is decades of scientific discovery

and progress

which is relentlessly telling us

life is more likely than we thought.

Yeah, the body of evidence is becoming--

That's right.

...overwhelming, but can we find it?

[Mackintosh] When I was ten years old,

I was determined to have my own computer,

and I found out there was a kit that you could buy

and put together for yourself,

so I earned enough money to do that,

and that got me hooked.

I've been obsessed with computers ever since.

And I hope, I believe, that A.I. can help us dig deeper,

and hopefully come to the answer we're looking for.

Is there life beyond the Earth?

[Diamond] Ever since humans have been able to gaze up at the sky

and look at the stars,

we've wondered,

"Are we alone?

Is this the only place where life has occurred?"

The SETI institute is trying to answer this question.

SETI institute was founded

by Frank Drake, and Jill Tarter,

and Carl Sagan.

I co-founded this institute back in 1984

as a way to save NASA money.

...see if we can backtrack

to see if we can figure out what's venting...

Since then,

it has grown far beyond any of my expectations.

We have nearly 80 PhD scientists here.

Our research really starts with, "How does life happen?"

What are the conditions under which life takes hold?

We're trying to understand that transition

of how the universe

and how our own galaxy and solar system

went from chemistry to biology.

The number of civilizations

that there might be in the galaxy

is of the order of a million.

[Downey] Carl Sagan helped bring the cosmos

down to Earth,

but he wasn't the first to popularize it.

Ever since Orson Welles scared our pants off

with War Of The Worlds,

pop culture has had its eyes on the skies.

Little green men, extraterrestrials,

contact with aliens continues to capture our imagination.

[Diamond] We're interested in all kinds of life,

but of course we have a special interest

in intelligent or technological life beyond Earth,

hence, SETI.

Hello, this is Seth Shostak speaking to you

from Big Picture Science.

Today we're going to talk about artificial intelligence.

The machines of today are a lot smarter, if you will,

at least more capable,

than the machines of 50 years ago, incredibly...

There's vast amounts of data coming from space,

and A.I. can, um...

allows us to understand that data better

than we have been able to in the past.

It's this new capacity we have to see patterns in data...

[Tarter] We are trying to find evidence

of somebody else's technology out there.

We can't define intelligence,

but we're using technology as a proxy,

so if we find some technology,

something that's engineered,

something that nature didn't do,

then we're going to infer

that at least at some point in time,

there were some intelligent technologists

who were responsible.

[Diamond] So, Graham, we call it Area 52.

[chuckling]

[Mackintosh] We are headed to the Allen Telescope Array,

and tonight we are going to be doing an observation

which really is looking for signs of extraterrestrial life,

and we're gonna be using A.I. models

in a way that's never been done before.

[Diamond] All right, we are good to go.

So I gotta turn my cell phone off, no Bluetooth, nothing?

Nope, we need to be in a place that is radio quiet,

so you don't have interference,

or at least, you minimize interference.

We're gonna come around another bend a little up ahead,

and you'll see the dishes.

[Mackintosh exclaiming] Oh!

[Diamond] There we are.

Welcome to the Allen Telescope Array.

[Downey] The sole mission of the Allen Telescope Array,

or A.T.A.,

is to search for extraterrestrial life.

Past telescopes were basically toy binoculars

compared to the A.T.A.,

which was built in 2007

with support from Microsoft's Paul Allen.

Part of what makes it light-years ahead

is its wider field of view,

and ability to capture a greater range of frequencies.

It's also an array,

which basically means

it's a group of many small dishes

working together to cover more ground,

or sky.

Welcome to the A.T.A.

Fantastic.

Okay. Looks like Jon is out there.

I think he's manually turning those dishes to get 'em lined up.

[laughing]

-Hey, Jon. -Jon!

-Good to see you, man! -Good to see you, yeah!

My name is Jon Richards,

and I'm the Senior Software Engineer

at the Allen Telescope Array.

Radio astronomy is similar to optical astronomy,

except the radio wave frequencies

are much lower than visual,

so to receive radio waves, you need an antenna.

Take a look, Graham. Under the bell jar,

you see the actual antenna

that's picking up the signals coming from space.

This is spectacular.

[Diamond] It's kept

below the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

That brings the noise level down,

exactly what we want for deep space observation.

Just amazing.

[Richards] The radio signals from each one of these dishes

are brought into our control room,

digitized, made into binary ones and zeroes,

and combined together

to create the effect of having one large dish,

so we can actually map out the sky

much like you would

with a regular optical telescope.

All right, let's head back.

Let's go.

The observation we're gonna do tonight

is with the Trappist-1 system.

This is a star that has planets circling,

and at 8:00 tonight,

two of those planets are gonna align perfectly with Earth,

which makes it exactly the right moment

to do an observation.

We're gonna be listening in

for signs of any kind of communication

between these two planets,

even if that's not communication directed at us.

[Diamond] We're counting down to 8:01 p.m.,

which is when the orientation of these planets

are going to be lined up in our line of sight,

the so-called conjunction.

[Downey] It's a little like an intergalactic stake-out.

The guys are waiting

till the two planets are closest together,

and then plan to eavesdrop on their conversation.

They have no idea what they're listening for,

or if there's even gonna be a conversation.

[Richards] So we can take out this board here.

We're gonna repurpose it.

-So that's ready to go? -Yeah, let's go put it in.

All right, let's get it in.

[Richards] Since the site's getting close to 20 years old now,

my job is to get all this data coming in cleanly

and recorded cleanly,

and that is a challenge.

Here's the computer which is sending all the data

that we receive from all of our dishes

to our 48 terabytes of data storage,

so we need to replace a card.

This card will control our data storage.

[Mackintosh] You know, often

when people think of the search for extraterrestrial life,

they're thinking of someone with headphones

listening in on something that is sent to us,

something that's obvious.

It's really not like that.

It's a lot more subtle,

and that's why we're going to be collecting

enormous amounts of data.

All of the different parameters we might have to explore

set that volume, that exploration volume,

set it equal to the volume of all the oceans on the Earth.

So how much have we done, in 50 years?

Well, we've searched one glass of water

from the Earth's oceans.

The technologies that we've had to use until now

were not big enough, not adequate to the job.

Okay.

[Mackintosh] That's why we need computer systems

and artificial intelligence systems

to really turn that search on its head.

[Parr] When we think about traditional software,

we think about human beings writing lines of code.

What's extraordinary about A.I.

is that we're teaching machines how to learn.

This is why it's a quantum leap,

because for the first time,

instead of human beings writing the software,

the computer's actually building an understanding itself.

[Richards] We have to keep in mind

that the Trappist-1 system is 39.4 light-years...

39.6.

39.6 light-years away,

so this actual positioning was 39.6 years ago.

So not only are we, uh,

are we doing SETI research tonight,

we're time-traveling.

[Downey] That's right.

Because of how far away these planets are,

and how long it takes radio waves

to travel through space,

the guys are listening to a conversation

from about 40 years ago.