I think it's sort of like.
Welcome, everybody, I'm Simon Jackman, outlets across the university with the spice sector,
and I'm very pleased to introduce and say the head of our physics department and
Phil Diamond is going to say a few words of welcome and then we'll get on on.
Find out about the aliens, sir. Sir.
So I'd like to introduce a speaker tonight and start by making a remark that this talk, of course,
about a question that we care about finding as the search for life in the universe is fundamentally important question.
I realise we must look at the cool does.
It doesn't do that, but we're doing our part here tonight as well.
As you enter this room, we were unaware of what we did and not in place of the night sky and what was not to determine with probability.
Ninety nine point nine ninety seven is another aliens in this room.
There are a lot of persistence. I am that point no. One. That's right.
So so go that as the president and Chief Executive Officer and Centre Institute, which he joined in 2015.
It's what predominantly applied technologies with over 20 years of experience over the products and up
to three great occasions and more than a decade in X-ray and semiconductor processing technologies.
His corporate background spans the spectrum from venture backed start-ups to Fortune 100 multinationals responsibilities ranging from R&D,
engineering and operations to sales, marketing, product management and CEO positions.
Most recently, he was the vice president of sales for the Colour of Inc. right hand that the company's
penetration into optical networking of the rapidly evolving went to data centre market prices.
That he was vice president of product management for optical fibre broadband hybrid right modules.
Microsoft has had a variety of senior positions prior to that.
Also waits for the technologies that select Semiconductor and X Ray to Inc., which is not quite as nice as the 10X.
Contract also includes Sections Transit, AT&T and Bell Labs Alternate Products Business Unit,
and he served as president at the U.S. operations and the service company Public Energy.
It's going to be a physics from Holy Cross College and a master's in business administration from Georgetown University,
is plus member of the Advisory Board for the Middle School of Business Administration at Georgetown
and as a current member of the Octopus to the American and the International Astronomical Congress.
Please join me in welcoming. OK, I believe I'm muted working.
And let me start with a spoiler alert, there will not be an announcement tonight about any discovery.
I'm sorry to disappoint anybody who was expecting or hoping to hear the the contrary,
but but I do hope to have some engaging and compelling and fun information for you about the search for intelligent life, actually.
Indeed. More broadly, the search for life in the universe and the work we do at the City Institute.
So I hope to introduce you to the City Institute, to the research, education and outreach programmes of the institute and most importantly,
about the power we find in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary science, science and also the power of partnership and collaboration,
including a collaboration we have with Oxford University and a machine learning AI programme applied to space science and also the power, if you will,
of space and space exploration as a foundation and a platform on which to engage the public and to get the public excited about science,
about STEM, to improve science literacy, etc. So that's the journey I hope to take you on tonight.
I do want to start. Let's see, I guess a with with a nod to where I am.
I mean, for me, it's such a great honour to be here at Oxford University in the Department of Physics,
to be here at a university with such an incredible history.
And here are just four of the hundreds or maybe thousands of incredible and amazing brains and intellects and
individuals and personalities who have walked through the the the grounds of this incredible campus and institution.
What's interesting here amongst this particular group of scientists,
I did notice when kind of perusing the history of Oxford and some of the noteworthy
graduates or attendees of the university that in the sciences in particular,
last names beginning with H were somewhat disproportionately represented.
So I would like to point out that if you are studying physics or the sciences at Oxford and your last name begins with H,
we have high expectations, so please keep that in mind.
But of course, there have been great minds, not just in the sciences. We have people like J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis.
I managed to sit and have a pint with with Simon at the Eagle and Child Right,
where they sat and and discussed their their science fiction or their fantasy literature.
And of course, Oscar Wilde is another one. Oscar Wilde studied this field called classical motivations.
I have no idea what that means. Somebody here in the audience probably does and can enlighten me.
But I will say that what he. We can get even with him a little bit because he had never heard of astrobiology.
I'm quite sure. So with that, let me launch into a story about the City Institute and what we're all about.
And it starts with a question. This is a good way to start.
I think any discussion and the question is, do there exist many worlds or is there but a single world?
This is one of the most noble and exalted questions in the study of nature.
Now, this is not a quote from Stephen Hawking. It's not a quote from Carl Sagan or David Attenborough.
It's actually a quote from this gentleman, Alberto's Magnus, who is a Jesuit priest,
educator and philosopher in Germany Air and the in the 12th and 13th centuries.
And so it's just an indication that this question is not new.
This question probably dates back to the time that humans first gazed up into the sky and looked at the stars and wondered What else is out there?
And are we alone here? And of course, it was Carl Sagan who famously said, If we're all there is what a waste of space.
So in any case, that is really the underlying science question behind the institute.
We're trying to find out are we alone? So a brief history of study is maybe interesting.
It starts really the and I guess to get back to that question.
The exciting difference between now and the time of Alberta smugness or almost any other time in history is that unlike those past times right now,
we actually have the tools and technology to answer those questions. We've never had that before.
So that makes a compelling case for for this work. It starts really in a publication in Nature in nineteen fifty nine from a couple of physicists at
Cornell University who put out this paper said called searching for interstellar communication.
So this was by Kerkorian Morrison. And it really put forth the idea.
For the first time of it was let's be honest and anthropocentric idea,
because it sort of put human motivations and behavioural characteristics on the part of alien intelligence.
But it said that if there are alien intelligence out there,
if they have developed technologies that include the ability to manipulate the electromagnetic
spectrum and make their presence known either intentionally or unintentionally,
maybe we can listen in and find them. So it's really an exciting and interesting.
And as you can probably imagine, somewhat controversial paper at the time of publication, but it really is the birth of all city endeavours.
And then in 1959, just a couple of months later,
Harlow Shapely from Harvard University actually speculated that as many as 100 million worlds might exist where life has been forged by evolution.
That's a pretty bold statement. Now, turns out that Harvard, if you if you look at Avi Loeb and the muumuu of incidents we had recently in his paper,
speculating that it's possible that could be an alien spacecraft. Harvard is maybe not unfamiliar with putting out this sort of speculative ideas,
but but this was a really interesting proposition on the part of this astronomer at Harvard.
And then in July of 1960, from actually from April to July of 1960,
Frank Drake of Drake Equation famous everybody here familiar with the Drake Equation.
Anybody not familiar with Drake Equation. The doors are over here. If that's the case now.
So Frank Drake launched Project Osma at the 25 metre dish,
which at the time was the large dish at the National Astronomy Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.
So that was the first ever city endeavour using radio astronomy or radio telescopes to listen for signals in in deep space.
The a year later, in 1961, a meeting was held at Green Bank that was called for by NASA.
So Nasser brought together a bunch of scientists, including Frank Drake, Carl Sagan and about a dozen others to address the question.
From a scientific point of view, is there scientific merit to the idea of looking or searching for extraterrestrial intelligence?
Is there legitimacy in such an endeavour and undertaking?
So Frank, the group that gathered,
called themselves the order of the dolphin and the attendees included this this kind of interesting range and cross-section of individuals.
But the result of as a result of that meeting, Frank decided, like anybody who knows how to run a meeting, we need an agenda.
I hate going to meetings where there's no agenda, Frank said.
We need an agenda if we're going to have this discussion. And as a result of thinking that through.
He started writing down the agenda items that he thought should be discussed.
Things like, Well, what are the what's the rate of star formation?
How many stars have planets, how many planets might be in the habitable zone of their star,
how many planets that are in the habitable zone might go on to develop life and so on?
And he realised as he started putting these things together, he had a relationship that was unfolding.
He had a formula or an equation which is now known as the Drake Equation, and that is here.
So again, as as a quick review, we have end, which might be the number of detectable civilisations where technology has evolved,
is a function of the rate of star formation or star birth at times the fraction of those stars that might have planets around them.
Back in 1961, we didn't know the answer to that question.
The number or portion of those planets that might be rocky Earth like planets in the habitable zone of their host star,
the fraction of those planets that might go on to develop life sabel,
those that go on to develop life, the fraction of those where the conditions are right for evolutionary forces and processes to take hold,
such that that intelligence evolves and emerges times the fraction of those planets where intelligence and
complexity evolves and emerges that might have communications capability or might have developed technology,
essentially the ability to manipulate the electoral map. That spectrum in a way that might be detectable from great distances.
That's if subsea time's the last. And my favourite variable in the Drake Equation L.
How long do technological civilisations last? And that is not just a matter of how long do they survive.
It's not necessarily that the endpoint might be the extinction of the civilisation, but rather how long might a civilisation remain detectable?
Our own civilisation on this planet is arguably going a little bit dark over time as more of our communications,
including things like television and music,
et cetera, is done over the internet, which is in turn done over optical fibres, which do not emit signals that could be seen from from space.
So we're going dark. We're going to need a little bit quieter. There's also the issue that as a result of the gift of technology,
we've imposed upon ourselves some interesting challenges that we need to overcome if we're going to survive long term.
And so it may be as well that civilisations could get to a point where they emerge into a
state or evolve into a state where they are no longer deploying or dependent on technology.
They're perhaps back into a more symbiotic relationship with their environment,
balance with the ability of that environment to generate resources, etc. so they go dark.
In any case, L is is kind of an appealing and intriguing variable in its own right.
There are some noteworthy anniversaries happening just this year, as it turns out.
So July 1969, of course, the Apollo 11 moon landing 50 years ago, coming up very soon in September 1959, so 60 years ago,
was that Gakonis and Morrison paper, which is really something of of, ah, an important anniversary for the institute and for the science we do.
In June of nineteen forty years ago or so, in 1949 or 70 years ago,
George Orwell published his famous book 1984, saying, OK, well, what is 1984 have to do with any of this?
Well, 1984 was the birth of the said.He Institute. So Big Brother, as predicted by George Orwell in 1984, didn't quite emerge,
although it looks like it's coming along now in terms of cameras everywhere watching what we're doing.
But the City Institute was founded in 1984. Thirty five years ago this year, so an introduction to the City Institute.
Our mission statement, quite simply, is to explore,
understand and explain the nature and origins of life in the universe and the evolution of intelligence.
And that last statement is really important because it differentiates us from NASA, whose interest in astrobiology,
while legitimate, sort of terminate at the discovery of microbes and microbial life.
So we're interested in. So what happens next and what are the conditions under which microbial or very basic life might evolve
into something a little bit more interesting that we might theoretically have a conversation with?
For example, so in a sense, we're boldly going where no other institute goes before.
We're the only institute in the world, to my knowledge,
whose singular mission and purpose is this search for extraterrestrial life from the microbial level on up.
So that's the sole purpose and science mission of the institute.
We're all here simply to answer this question Are we alone?
So what do we do at the institute? Fundamentally, we're working to understand the origins of life starting at its most basic level from the
formation of molecules and prebiotic chemistry to the evolution of more complex organisms,
sentient beings and ultimately intelligence.
So we're really on a journey to try to understand how we went from the pre biological sort of current galactically structured universe.
How did we go from the early cosmology following the Big Bang through to the onset of
chemistry and this transition from chemistry and prebiotic chemistry into biology?
And ultimately, how did biology evolve, at least on this planet, to give us philosophy?
That's the journey and mission of the institute. We have our own sort of giants that we we stand on the shoulders of at the institute.
Frank Drake himself was one of the founders. Frank is now 88 years old.
He's still around. He still comes out of the institute about once a week, and it's always fun for him to come into the institute.
When I happen to be giving a tour and happening to be standing by the Drake Equation,
which is in the front lobby and happened to be describing it and somebody asks me, was frank still around?
And he walks through the door at that moment, and that's really good.
I've told him that that happened once and I've told him I want to have him sitting at a desk outside the
door where I push a button and he comes in on cue because it was it was so brilliant when that happened.
Carl Sagan was another one of the original founders of the institute, as was Charles Townes.
Charles Townes is a Nobel laureate who was the inventor of the laser and the laser.
So everything that has to do with lasers, whether it's surgery or communications or supermarket scanners,
ultimately traces back to the work of Charlie Townes and then Jill Tarter,
who is a woman astronomer at a time when women weren't even allowed in observatories.
So talk about a strong character and a brave character and a brilliant, brilliant mind.
Anybody see the movie? Contact most everybody or a lot of people?
If you haven't, I recommend it. It's still as as interesting and fascinating today as it was 25 years ago, or 20, at least when it first came out.
But Jill, being a colleague and contemporary of Carl Sagan's from Cornell, as was Frank.
So Frank and Carl and Jill all came out of Cornell Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Jill was the inspiration for the character played by Jodie Foster in that movie.
I like to point out that she is, you know, the movie.
The first half of the movie is based on Jill's life, not the second half, but in any case.
So Jill is is another one of our our founders.
In 1984, when the institute was founded, there was four trustees, one principal investigator that was Jill.
And as of 2019, we have 16 trustees. We also have a science advisory board that includes, amongst others, Brother Guy console.log.
Now, who's the astronomer for the Vatican? And a lot of other notables on the science board.
We have 90 scientists and and principal investigators. They represent 23 different academic research disciplines.
We have them organised into six research divisions. We also have 70 affiliates or affiliates are individuals who write grant proposals under the.
And through the Senate Study Institute to submit to NASA or other funding agencies.
We have three primary activity centres, which I'll describe in a moment.
And in addition to the research, which is our primary function, we do have 28 of the other staff who are involved in things like education programmes,
outreach and communications, grant proposal writing and the middle and, of course,
administrative and support staff who are equally important members of the team.
So our primary structure around these three centres that I mentioned before is research,
which we say is to explore it's education to inspire and its outreach to engage.
And the engagement of the public is something we take very seriously as serious as our science.
We are a principal science partner to NASA, where one of the top 100 contractors to NASA.
I will point out that the difference between sort of the bottom part of the 100 and the top part is really big.
So we're nowhere near the size of Northrop Grumman or or Boeing, but but we are at least in that top 100.
We also get funding from U.S. Geological Survey from the National Science Foundation,
Space Telescope Institute, National Institute of Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But the bulk of our of our funding comes from NASA. As such, we are, by definition, a publicly funded, taxpayer funded enterprise.
And as a result, we have a responsibility and a duty to give back and share with the public the work and the science we do at the institute.
So that's why outreach and public engagement is so important.
I think in addition to its opportunity to hopefully inspire and engage the public, it's it's a it's an actual duty and responsibility.
The Carl Sagan Centre for Outreach, sorry for research, is structured into six areas six domains,
so astronomy and astrophysics, exoplanets, climate and geoscience, planetary exploration, which is really about.
A study of our own solar system and how do we explore the planets and moons of our own solar system?
Astrobiology, which is, on the one hand, an envelope expression which could be used to describe all of the work of the institute.
But in this case, I'm referring to astrobiology in terms of the study of what we call extremophiles or extreme biology life in extreme
environments and how that research informs us in terms of the science we undertake for study endeavours more broadly.
And then last but certainly not least,
the namesake activity our study programmes in which we leverage both the optical and the radio domain to do steady work.
I will say that in the area of exoplanets in particular, we've had a lot of engagement.
We had members of the science team of a programme called the PI, the Gemini Planetary Imager,
which was using the eight metre telescope Gemini Telescope in Chile,
which took the first ever photograph actual image of a planet around another star.
And that was done in 2015, and that was done using technology called adaptive optics,
which compensated for the Earth's distortion of the atmosphere and also a coronagraph
which blocked the light of the star so that you could image something close to that star.
A very important technology. So leveraging those two technologies, we took the first ever photograph of a planet around another star,
and it's actually quite a moving thing to see when you realise what it is you're looking at, because we didn't even know they existed.
Not too many years ago.
We also were very active in exoplanets, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about this particular area in terms of the Kepler mission,
which was the Planet Hunter Space Telescope that NASA launched some years ago.
The mission just came to an end, although the science continues. So we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.
In the meantime, back to the Drake Equation, I think one of the things that the Drake Equation evolved to represent,
in addition to this interesting way of perhaps speculating on the number of intelligent and technological species,
it's actually a roadmap for astrobiology that wasn't necessarily what Frank had in mind when he put this together.
But in a way, this really takes all the elements of science that we need to consider when we're considering the question of life in the universe.
And so we actually map the research of the institute and the divisions of research to the various variables of the Drake Equation.
So we have astronomy and astrophysics which address things like star formation and planet formation.
We have exoplanets which address things like what fraction of stars have planets and how does that happen?
And then what portion of those planets might be in the habitable zone might be Earth like planets.
And then there is planetary exploration, which addresses both of those same variables, as well as f sabel what fraction of planets might have life?
We still think, and I think there's a reasonable case to be made for the idea that Mars may,
may harbour life, not on the surface, almost certainly, but maybe even a metre below.
Lots of good evidence to suggest that there is climate in geoscience, climate and geology.
I mean, biology and climate and geology of things like volcanology, earthquakes.
All of these mechanisms are intertwined and interrelated in terms of what does habitability mean?
How does life start? How do nutrients and life and prebiotics get distributed in a planetary environment, et cetera?
So climate and geoscience are quite interesting. Climate is another area where we can look at to say,
Is it possible that biology creates a signature in climate atmospheres that we could detect from a great distance?
And we're about to embark on a mission.
The James Webb Space Telescope, everybody, please cross your fingers that that's going to launch when they say it is, but that is going to, I think,
transform space science and exploration and questions like that that we are pursuing
in a similar manner to the way that Hubble transformed astronomy and astrophysics.
I think it's going to be an order of magnitude more profound in terms of what we learn and observe from James Webb once that gets up there.
But climate again, is is an important ingredient in this question of life in the universe.
Astrobiology again addressing the questions of habitable zone planets, indeed the evolution or the development of life on those planets.
That's where those two solid lines are kind of where NASA's interest in astrobiology comes to an end.
At the institute, we extend that study of astrobiology to include how does intelligence happen,
how does complexity take place, and what are the conditions under which that might happen?
And ultimately, what what are the odds of technological civilisations emerging from those evolutionary processes?
And then, of course, our sweaty work is focussed on f sub C,
that fraction of life bearing planets where technology does emerge and also that that interesting variable L and I will say as well that.
When we talk about the emergence of technology and humankind's own position along that spectra, we're only 100 years into our technology phase,
so we kind of defined technology as the onset of the manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum,
specifically the invention of the radio, which is, you know, more or less 100 years ago.
So humankind is really 100 years into our technology phase, which means we're in our infancy.
I think it's extraordinary to look back and think what's been achieved and learnt and understood it in 100 years.
What are the next hundred years hold in store for us?
I think, you know, it's a it's a nonlinear function of knowledge and information that will just continue.
We're science partner to to NASA on a variety of missions.
We've been involved in almost every non manned or personal mission that NASA has ever flown since the institute came into being,
including the Cassini mission.
We had scientists who using the the Cassini data, wrote the first papers on driving the geology and structure of the moon of Saturn Enceladus,
which is compelling and interesting as a possible harbour of life below its icy outer surface.
That particular moon has an odd wobble as it goes around Saturn.
And scientists had been trying to derive the geological structure that would would result in that funny orbital dynamic.
And so our team looked at the data and modelled a moon in which you have an icy outer crust and a global
ocean underneath that and a solid core and no physical contact between the solid core and the outer crust.
And they then applied that model, and it absolutely nailed the observed data and behaviour of the planet.
So or the Moon rather? So interesting work there.
We've had scientists at the institute studying so-called propellers or proto moons sort of getting born, if you will,
in the ring system of Saturn and the propellers refers to sort of the way that material leaves behind as it begins to retreat in Saturn's rings.
And another scientists looked at the Cassini data and came to the conclusion that the rings of Saturn may only be about 150 million years old,
which is an interesting finding and discovery on a on a planetary system that's, you know, four point two to five billion years old.
So some interesting aspects of that Kepler and K2 mission I'll talk about in a little bit more detail and come back to that New Horizons.
The scientists from the City Institute, Mark Showalter, was part of the New Horizons team, leading what's called the Hazard Avoidance Team.
The Hazard Avoidance team has the important responsibility of making sure there's nothing in the way,
as the spacecraft hurtles at forty thousand miles an hour towards Pluto and now more recently towards the Kuiper Belt object MU69.
And as a result of the work that they were doing in in that preparation for the flyby back in July of 2015,
they started by using the Hubble Space Telescope, and then they began to be able to use the onboard cameras and systems of the spacecraft.
And as a result of that, two new moons of Pluto were discovered that had been never known before, which became known as Kerberos and Styx.
And so they are attributed to Mark Showalter from the institute. And to to the team.
A funny side story is that the band sticks for the young folks who may not have heard of them.
But my generation, we've heard of that, that band, they thought, Oh, well, they the NASA has just named a moon after our band.
How cool. Let's go show up. And so they came to the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University, where that the New Horizons team was based,
and they wanted to get their picture taken with the guy who discovered their moon.
And so for about two weeks on the NASA's homepage,
there was a picture Mark Showalter with the band Styx on either side, if you could still find it online.
It's really quite cute, and Mark keeps a copy of it in his office, and he likes to hold it up and show people and ask them to spot the one.
That's different. So it's good fun. But in any case, so, so the The New Horizons mission was interesting.
I also like to remind people how amazing some of these missions are when you talk about the investment of personal capital and time as a scientist.
So New Horizons launched in 2006.
I don't know how many years, but probably at least a decade had gone by in terms of mission,
concept and planning, spacecraft design, development, manufacture, cetera.
And then the launch 2006. It takes nine years for that spacecraft to reach Pluto, and the science took place in seven minutes.
So it's a seven minute flyby after nine years and billions of miles of space travel at forty thousand miles an hour and then seven months of data.
Download a data transfer because it takes that long to transfer all the data back to Earth because the data pipeline is rather.
Ltd. They're not using fibre optics, needless to say.
So a little bit of constraint there, but I just think that's representative of sort of the scientific bravery of some of these missions.
Staking your career on a seven minute flyby while waiting about 15 years for it to happen is pretty interesting stuff.
OSIRIS-REx is an interesting mission. This is a capture and return mission.
It's the first such mission for NASA, other than the first trips to the Moon, where they brought back lunar samples.
But it's the first robotic mission to an object in space where the idea is to capture material and bring it back.
It is not the first time for humankind to do this. The Japanese have done this with an asteroid already once.
But where we've gone to OSIRIS-REx, that spacecraft arrived in December of last year.
It will orbit this about five hundred metre spheroid asteroid called Bennu for a couple of years, mapping it and analysing it and studying it.
And then it will go down to the surface. You can see in this photograph or not a photograph of this animation or cartoon,
a picture of the spacecraft and you see this harm called the TAGSAM or the Touch-And-Go Sample ARM Sample Retrieval ARM coming down.
So the spacecraft will hover very close to the surface of the asteroid. Get closer and closer until that arm can touch down.
Kind of an old fashioned sort of like a car filter, air filter and a carburettor will actually be on the surface.
They'll suck regolith and material through that filter captured in the filter that will then get popped into a backpack,
which you can sort of see as that little dome on the top of the spacecraft. The spacecraft will then return to Earth in 2023 and in September of 2023.
If all goes well, I think around about the 14th and possibly around 2:00 in the afternoon,
it will eject that backpack and it will be parachuted down into Utah for retrieval.
We have two scientists on that team, one who's waiting for the material to arrive in 2023 to analyse it,
and we have another one who was called upon because Bennu is doing something interesting.
It's ejecting material into space and scientists don't know how that's happening or why that's happening, necessarily.
And so this particular scientist has a global camera system that is actually able
to look at at meteorites and trace them back to their origin of space object,
which could be a comet in this case, because the orbit of Bennu and the orbit of Earth overlap and intersect.
The idea is if this object is putting material out on a regular basis at those times where our orbital paths cross,
we might be able to capture some of that material and and learn some interesting things about it.
So and understand how and why it's happening in the first place. Back to Kepler, just briefly, that one launched in March of 2009.
Bill Borucki from NASA Ames was the principal investigator on that took him five tries at NASA to get that project funded.
I personally believe that this is one of the most profound missions in NASA's history in terms of science.
And the reason I say that is because, unlike other NASA programmes and spacecraft which have done amazing science,
captured incredible images, taught us all kinds of interesting things.
The Kepler mission has hurt permanently and profoundly transformed our understanding
of our place in the universe because it taught us that planets are everywhere.
And until Kepler came along, we didn't know that although many in the scientific community, I think,
had a pretty good and accurate understanding of planet formation and a pretty good idea that probably planets are more common than we might think.
The Kepler mission taught us that essentially every star in the sky, statistically speaking,
has one or more planets around it, and it taught us more than that.
We're able to look at the orbital periods. We're able to see how far those planets are from the Sun,
from their star and therefore which what portion of them might be in the habitable zone of that star.
We were able to kind of determine their size, and what we realised as a result is the number of planets in the habitable zone of their host star.
Just in our galaxy that are rocky sort of Earth like planets is estimated to be between 10 and 60 billion.
So that's a lot of candidate possibilities for something interesting, like life to have happened or to have taken place.
So I think Kepler's marvellous instrument, this is kind of how it worked.
This is an animation of of the light curves, which are the type of data that Kepler is is picking up.
So Kepler, first for three years, was staring at a piece of sky in the constellation Cassiopeia if you held up your your fist at about arm's length.
That little circle would be about the size of the section of Sky being stared at.
It's about 200000 stars being looked at for constantly for a three year period.
And what it was doing was looking for these transits or when a planet.
Would go between our point of view and the star and therefore slightly dim the light of that star enough to be measured.
Now this is a great exaggeration in this animation. The light curves do not dip that much, but an Earth like planet around a Sun like star,
for example, might only dim the light of that star by one part in 10000.
And when you're talking about point sources of light on a on a large sensor array, that's a very, very sensitive measurement.
But the instrument was capable of doing that, and it discovered a lot of planets.
So that's the data set as of the end of 2017 of candidate planets coming from the Kepler system.
Those are in yellow. The bluish and greyish planets were discovered by other techniques, such as radial velocity method.
They tend to be good at finding the larger gas giant planets, but not the smaller ones.
The scale on the y axis is the radius of the planet, and the x axis is the orbital period.
So Earth like planets would be in sort of the lower right hand side.
Interestingly, not a lot of Earth like planets with one year orbital periods, although some but but a lot with much shorter periods.
And now we have the TESS mission, which is the follow on mission.
It's the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and that's mapping the entire sky.
It will be looking at any particular field of view for a much shorter period of time.
But the idea is to map the entire sky to look at stars closer by and to give us more and better information about exoplanets.
And this, in turn, means that now we know where to look in terms of setting.
So Ceti becomes a more purposeful endeavour where you have targets of interest instead
of just random points in the sky to look at a random types of stars to look at.
Interestingly enough, although the Kepler mission came to an end officially last year, the Kepler space telescope is still making news.
So a team at University of Hawaii just published a paper in March,
so a few weeks back confirming the very first exoplanet candidate that was in the Kepler dataset a full 10 years after launch.
So really interesting. And as is so often the case, data collection is one thing, data analysis is another,
and it gets back as well to how we handle all the data we're amassing on an increasing rapid basis.
But but the data is there to still be mined,
and the results so far as a mission update again are 4000 confirmed exoplanets in the Kepler field and over 3000 planetary systems.
And as I mentioned before, between 10 and 60 billion candidate planets in the habitable zone of their host star.
I talked a little bit about New Horizons missions or won't won't go into that again into much detail.
But but they did the flyby of Pluto back in July of 2015,
and also all those stunning images of Pluto that you saw that came as a result of that flyby.
Pluto turned out to be a far more interesting Little Rock than we had thought
has mountains that are made of water frozen as ice that is harder than stone.
So a lot of really interesting features on that planet. And clearly, when you also when you see on planetary systems and moons, you know,
these areas of smooth surface, you know, there's something interesting happening.
There's some kind of tectonic activity or other activity which is able to sort of wipe out in a race things that would otherwise be looking like.
For example, meteor rather impact crater sites that would be on these objects.
OSIRIS-REx, we talked about as well the sample return mission. So this is a picture of the the spacecraft being assembled and the lift off.
I actually got to go and see this launch. If you ever get a chance to go see a launch live, take it, break your date, whatever you have to do.
Go, go see it. It's really quite an extraordinary thing to see a spacecraft take off into space.
I like the fact, however, that OSIRIS-REx is perhaps the most tortured acronym that NACI has ever come up with.
It stands for origins, spectral interpretation, resource identification, security,
Regolith Explorer, and I will decipher that for you in a separate two hour lecture.
Some other time, NASA also has something called the The Astrobiology Institute,
which is a virtual institute where teams of researchers from different academic or research institutes
come together to study astrobiology to help inform the design and development of technologies,
tools and instruments to identify life on other planets and other places.
And we run one of the teams.
It's a 15 person team that has representatives from a wide variety of different universities in the U.S. and other science institutions.
If the audio is working here, I have just a little clip from Natalie Cabral, who is the head of research at the City Institute.
And also the head of our team for NASA. We'll see if this is going to work.
Welcome, ladies, and welcome. My name is Natalie Cabral and the director of the council and Centre for Research at the City Institute.
First, I would have to apologise because I will have to put these glasses on.
The light is extremely bright today and really, this is needed.
We are here today until it is located in the Chilean Altiplano, at an innovation for three hundred metres, so a little over fourteen thousand feet.
And clearly there is a lot of wind today.
The temperature is a little cooler than in buttonless, where we were at thirty five hundred metres and the environment is completely different.
I am here with a very multidisciplinary teams.
We have engineers, roboticists, we have microbiologists, geologists, environmental scientist, planetary geologist and astrobiologist.
This project is under the umbrella of the Astrobiology Research Division at the City Institute,
and it helps us better understand if life has a chance to appear on a different planet in the Solar System here today and for the next three days.
We are here in an environment there where many hydrothermal springs on Mars.
We have the mineral and spectral evidence of that.
Many places like this one right now behind me, where energy, nutrients, water and shelter were present.
So right now we are doing what we did.
In fact, analysis trying to understand how the orbit imagery is informing us about what's happening at a microscopic scale.
Our goal is really by understanding the special scale and spectral resolution and the new methods of approaching biosignature detection.
What we want to do is to create the next generation of astrobiology exploration tools and technologies,
since we know that Mars was habitable in the past.
The next logical step is then to look for biosignatures traces of life on Mars, and obviously they are not clearly exposed at the surface.
So we'll have to do a little forensic. But when I look at the landscape around me and those centres in the hydrothermal springs,
I cannot help but think about our own planet and its beginning and primordial horrors that was pretty much looking like this.
And it's an environment like that where life appeared on this planet.
And now I would like to share with you this flag.
This flag I take with me everywhere where I go.
This is the said institute expedition flag number one.
It was deployed last week still out there, but unless it is here today with a lot of wind, as you can see,
flooding that still as close to forty three hundred metres over 14000 feet and the geyser is giving us a some sort of a fireworks to end this video.
Flag number two is actually a few thousand kilometres south of here,
with Dale Anderson in Antarctica and flight number three flew about a week before
we left on the Sofia aeroplane with teachers and Formula Harmon and Bill Diamond.
I thank you very much for sharing this time with us. And I say on behalf of my team, Thank you.
I have a very nice evening where you are in New York and maybe see you soon at the City Institute.
Goodbye. But in any case, hopefully that gives you an idea of some of the types of work that is done in the field.
So in addition to being partners on on spacecraft missions,
a lot of the work we do is basically field expeditions all over the planet, the Antarctic, the Arctic, et cetera.
So she mentioned Dale Anderson, a Dale Anderson studies Limnology.
Limnology is the study of of inland water ecosystems.
So lakes and things like that. And he's in particular interested in frozen lakes.
So he's been studying frozen lakes in the Antarctic and the dry valleys of the McMurdo Valley for decades now.
And what he's interested in is biology and extreme by biological systems,
complex biological systems that exist in these ecosystems or in these environments.
The photograph below the text here is actually a photograph of cyanobacterial mounds that he finds under these frozen lakes.
So they they go to these lakes, they clear off the snow on top of the ice.
They drill through three metres of ice, typically to get to the water.
They take heaters and they put them through the hole to melt them wide enough for a person to get through.
And then they scuba dive under the ice, which sounds like a lot of fun to me.
But in any case, they see these incredibly complex and interesting ecosystems where life thrives and exists
in conditions that we would have thought some decades ago was not what was not possible.
We also have people studying the neurology and chemistry Janice Bishop as a planetary scientist and chemist,
and she does a lot of fieldwork on volcanic islands of hydrothermal sites, cold deserts and working also with actual Martian meteorite samples.
There's a picture of her in Hawaii.
He or she gets the tough duty of going to places like Maui, while Dale is in the Antarctic, and she's holding a handheld X-ray diffraction instrument.
She's interested, in particular in clays.
Clays, as are a mineral formation, are interesting because we know that clays only form in warm, wet conditions.
So if you find clays on a place like Mars, which we have done, you can infer that Mars and one point in its past was warm and wet,
which is now pretty well widely accepted in the scientific community that early on in its manifestation,
Mars had a global ocean looked a lot like Earth. It was a blue planet, not a red planet.
There's still a lot of water on Mars.
There's enough water locked up in the ice on the poles that, if at all melted, it would cover the planet in about 20 metres of water.
We see running water on Mars. We've had evidence of that from the orbiting reconnaissance satellite at Mars,
and we've even discovered subterranean lakes or we believe we have, through radar data, discovered subterranean lakes on Mars.
So there's water, there's geothermal heat. There are the conditions that perhaps a metre or more below the surface could still harbour life.
NASA believes enough in this ad that they are launching what's called Mars 2020. Some of you may be familiar with that or even involved in it.
The Mars 2020 mission is another Curiosity like rover.
It looks very much like Curiosity. It has a lot more sophisticated instrumentation and technology on board,
specifically designed to look for extant or extinct life on on the Red Planet.
We also get involved in hardware and technology development. So this is Phillip Sarah Philip Sarrazin.
He works in X-ray systems and design development of X-ray instrumentation.
He and his colleague, David Blake at NASA Ames develop the so-called CheMin system,
which is an X-ray diffraction chemical and minerals analysis instrument onboard the Curiosity rover.
So while we are here speaking to one another, the Curiosity Rover CheMin system is up there on Mars,
doing its thing and analysing the surface composition of the planet.
A very interesting project, from my point of view is is Lawrence Doyle, who is a physicist and astronomer who is studying non-human communication.
So he is for the first time. As far as we know, applying information theory,
which was first developed for the telecommunications industry and applying that to non-human communication.
The idea is to look for perhaps the underlying and fundamental mathematical constructs that constitute information being transmitted.
So whether information or communications might be occurring in the electromagnetic
spectrum or in through optics or through chemicals or acoustics or any other means.
The important thing would be to find out if we pick up some sort of signal.
Is that signal containing does that signal contain information or is it just some sort of random noise?
As Lawrence likes to say, and I love this quote, it would be a shame to pick up a signal and not recognise the fact that it contains information.
So he's got some really groundbreaking work funded by the Templeton Foundation in partnership
with the Alaska Whale Foundation to study the communication patterns of humpback whales,
which are extraordinary. They had a global communication network long before we did.
And to to apply information theory to that,
to understand the basic elements that constitute information and communications from the point of view of our city endeavours,
the actual search for intelligent and technological civilisations, we take advantage of both the optical and the radio domain and the radio domain.
The technology is is improving.
That means more antenna, more dishes, a bigger, more sensitive receivers, broader frequency response, a broader dynamic range or bandwidth.
The technology has the ability to look at at long range, but it's still limited in sensitivity.
So sweaty endeavours could not, for example, pick up the kind of radiation that we emit from our planet, which is not directed.
It's not high energy pointed in any particular way. We call it leakage. It's radio, broadcast, television, airport radar, et cetera.
So if we were to discover an Earth like planet with similar kind of leakage, we wouldn't be able to detect it with today's technology.
Of course, we expect that will will change in the future. And again, with our knowledge of exoplanets, we will be able to make more targeted searches.
But nevertheless, it's it's it's still a compelling technology to deploy and to look for signs of technology as a proxy for intelligence.
In terms of the comparison between radio and optical, it's got lower bandwidth, but more complex propagation.
But I think it's also important to note that our search space at the moment is infinitesimally small,
a good way to think about about how much of the sky we've looked at or how much of the universe we've studied.
Next time you're at the beach, bring a measuring cup, stand at the shore,
walk into the water, maybe go up into your knees and dip the measuring cup in the ocean.
You probably won't find any whales, but you would, of course, be incorrect.
Draw the conclusion that there are no whales in the ocean, but that's about the extent of the universe that we've explored through City and Deborah.
So we're really not even at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this.
This search in the grand scheme of things, we are also now looking to use optical technology to search for laser pulses, for example.
Lasers might be used for communications. They might be used for propulsion as the Breakthrough Starshot programme proposes to do.
Lasers are quite visible and quite distinct from natural optical emissions.
There tend to be monochromatic. They can be short pulse durations, so they're easy to spot right up the road from the City Institute,
Mountain View is the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where the world's most powerful laser is based.
And we know that, for example, if you took the output of that laser,
you coupled it into one of the eight metre class telescopes we have on Earth and you shined it off into space.
It would outshine the Sun by about ten thousand times. So lasers can be easily differentiated and detected from great distances.
So another logical thing to potentially look for. So we're building a system of observatories where we'll put pairs of of four cameras,
sets of four cameras or eight and total on six different locations around the planet three in the northern hemisphere
or three in the southern hemisphere to survey all of the sky all of the time and just look for these optical pulses.
And that's what we call the Laser City Project. In terms of traditional radio city, we have a lot of activity going on.
Our plan over the next few years is to continue to develop World-Class techno signature
and city capability search capabilities and to conduct World-Class searches.
We have a radio telescope array called the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, partially funded by Paul Allen from Microsoft.
And we are in the process at the moment of upgrading all of the feeds or the antenna on those dishes to give us more frequency
response out to 15 gigahertz improved sensitivity so we can look further out into space and improve overall system performance.
So we'll be be upgrading all of the dishes over the next couple of years to this second generation technology.
We're also working now in a really interesting programme with the VLA,
which is the very large array operated by the National Radio Astronomy Organisation in the United States
and the VHLAH is the most advanced and sensitive array telescope in the northern hemisphere at this point.
And it's not typically used. It's not ever used for city endeavours.
Although interestingly, if you get a copy of the film, contact the dishes on the cover of that movie poster art the Velar.
But we have reached an agreement with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to put out 100
gigabit ethernet spigot on the back ends of the VLA and basically siphon off data in real time,
commensal or, in other words, simultaneously with whatever else they're looking at.
And so this is going to give us an update. I think for some extraordinary discoveries that you know, may not just be set,
it here may not be steady at all, but even just some phenomenal radio astronomy could come from that.
So very exciting project. We're also partnering with Caltech to put some different back Intel technology on the
Allen Telescope Array to undertake a wide field survey for FRBs or fast radio bursts.
If you're anything to do with the astronomy community, you know the astronomy community is very excited by these phenomena, which we don't understand.
They're extremely high energy radio bursts from very, very far away in a millisecond pulse of radio burst energy.
These objects have put forth more energy than our Sun does in an entire year.
So a fascinating area of research that we will continue to investigate with our own Allen Telescope array.
There's also interesting questions about indirect observations of technosignatures.
For example, might transit life curve anomalies suggest alien technology?
So ever anybody heard of the Tabby's Star that made the news a few years ago out of the Kepler data?
So this was a star whose light curve, instead of just dipping a slight amount suggesting a planet dipped by 20 percent,
something huge and interesting is going on in this planet. One of the speculations was maybe this is an alien megastructure.
Maybe it's a Dyson sphere or some other kind of of of a technological object or artefact.
I would say that the current theories that I believe are probably the most plausible is that this is dust,
but we don't have any definitive results yet on exactly what is going on.
It remains an interesting mystery, but it does it again.
Just suggest the broader possibility that there are other indirect phenomena we may observe that may in fact be signatures of technology.
Can we detect biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres?
So when the James Webb telescope launches, we're going to have the ability to probe exoplanet atmospheres and understand their composition.
And it is possible, for example, to look at an atmospheric composition and make a determination that that
composition couldn't exist without the existence of biology or life as we know it,
or it couldn't be stable. So we might be able to infer the presence of biology just by studying exoplanet atmospheres,
we might be able to reveal technology in the survey of of exoplanet atmospheres.
If we look for something interesting, like SF six, for example,
we might discover something that nature actually doesn't produce, but only technology produces.
And that would, of course, at least be another proxy for the presence of technology or intelligence on that planet.
Is it possible to detect something like terraforming? You've heard of the TRAPPIST system, which is a planetary system of seven stars and planets,
rather all of which are about Earth sized planets around an M dwarf star.
Three of those planets are known to be in the so-called habitable zone of that dwarf.
If we were to start looking at the atmospheres of those exoplanets and we found a couple or three with, say, identical atmospheres.
That's probably not something that nature does or would do,
and we might infer from that that somebody's been doing some terraforming and or messing around with those planetary environments.
So lots of interesting ideas and thoughts about indirect observations of phenomena that we might ascribe to technological civilisations.
Just briefly about education and outreach programmes. Again, because I I mentioned how I believe they are, they are so important.
These are eight interesting images that I will ask you for a moment to ponder about what it is they have in common.
And I can see the dynamics there,
thinking about the maths and trying to figure out the orbital dynamics or something else going on, that's common between those.
Well, the answer that I'm looking for has nothing to do with science.
It has to do with the fact that every one of the objects you see was on the front page of the New York Times at one point.
So that's really interesting. There aren't many other branches of science that have the ability so often to make
the front page of the New York Times as space science and space exploration.
And that, I think, gives those of us doing this kind of work a tremendous opportunity,
a tremendous platform for public engagement, for education and outreach, about our science and about science more broadly.
And as you can see sort of from the breadth of research we do at the institute,
there isn't a branch of science that doesn't touch space exploration and steady endeavours.
And so you can use a platform like space exploration to teach all science.
And there are two things that all children love.
Anybody know what they are. Dinosaurs and space.
So the you know, the first group that comes together and makes the blockbuster movie about dinosaurs in space is really going to have a home run.
But in any case, so why not take advantage of things that children find and young people find and humans find inherently
fascinating and use that and leverage that interest to teach science to to help improve science literacy?
We have a huge problem of science literacy in our own country. There could even be problems in certain parts of the leadership in our country.
In that regard, I won't go into details, but it's it's science.
Literacy is extremely important. Having a scientifically literate electorate is extremely important for our future.
So it's it's really important and interesting and so that we believe is an opportunity and a responsibility for us to do this.
Public engagement and outreach. We're very active in terms of telling stories around the work we do.
So when something interesting happens, we try to get it out in the news. So we publish news releases.
We had an interesting one, for example, in mid-March where we were using a drone to map icy lava tubes in Iceland as a precursor for developing those
technologies that will be used on the Moon and on Mars to go into the lava tubes that exist on both of those objects.
And interestingly, we've been going to a place called Devon Island, which is in the high Canadian Arctic.
It's the largest uninhabited island on Earth. It looks like Mars.
If the sky were kind of pinkish, you'd say, OK, I'm on Mars. It's red, it's cold, it's dry.
NASA and the Mars Institute in the City Institute have been collaborating there for 20 years,
doing things like developing the technologies for rovers,
for habitats, for spacesuits, even for human behaviour in these kind of conditions, exploration conditions, et cetera.
Last year, we took Google along with us.
And what Google did there was bring a team to use Google cameras and technologies to take pictures and do mappings and so forth.
The cool thing is right now Devon Island is on Street View, so.
So check it out. So go to Google and go to Street View and you can walk the non-existing streets of Devon Island.
But you get a sense of what this absolutely extraordinary and very otherworldly place right on our own planet looks like.
Lots of fun. Other vehicles for outreach. We have a radio show and podcast podcast called Big Picture Science.
It's a weekly programme. It's not restricted to space science and exploration.
It covers all science. It should come with an FCC warning that says if you don't like puns, don't watch the programme but or listen to it.
But it's really it's quite brilliant. They do an amazing job, and you can listen to past and present episodes from their website.
The Big Picture Science or our own City Dawg, but it's it's a wonderful public engagement tool.
We have monthly lecture series called said. He talks that we deliver at an auditorium operated by at SwRI, just down the road from us.
And these are free and open to the public. And we videotaped them.
We livestream them when we can, and we give scientists from our own institute, from NASA, from around the world.
Opportunity come and speak and talk about their work. And there's a library of over 400 lectures on our YouTube channel, called said.
He talks that you can explore it, covering everything from dark energy and dark matter to matter to advanced propulsion technologies and so forth.
We have an artist in residence programme where artists spend time with our
scientists over a summer period and get inspired for new works of creativity.
And it's a new method of of of kind of understanding and perceiving the science we do.
Some of our scientists get an opportunity to look at their work interpreted by an artist and see something that they never realised was there before.
So it's quite good. We're very active on Twitter and Facebook.
We do weekly Facebook Live presentations where we put one of our scientists or colleagues from other
organisations and institutions in front of the camera and talk to them about their science and their work.
And we let the public watch and ask questions and answer those questions in real time.
So it's good fun. I like to think again, I mentioned this at the very beginning.
One of the so-called one of the powers of the institute or one of the powers that I think we're trying to exploit,
and that's the power of partnerships and collaboration.
These are some of the organisations that we're collaborating with in terms of both funding and partnerships and programmes
like the Frontier Development Lab and and in academic relationships very quickly about the Frontier Development Lab.
So this was a programme conceived of by the Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA headquarters,
and it was really designed to look at and explore three fundamental ideas.
One, the applicability of artificial intelligence and machine learning to basic science
priorities to the efficacy of interdisciplinary teams working on short time horizons.
Three The ability of public private partnership to accelerate NASA's objectives. A better, faster cheaper.
Results in science. It's basically a programme where we bring together early career PhDs and machine learning and artificial intelligence.
We pair them off with their counterparts in science domains,
and they take on projects that are science based of interest to to NASA and other partners.
This initial partnership is from the City Institute and NASA.
This year we have Google Cloud as our premier sponsor partner, providing technology, money,
subject matter experts, cloud compute resources, et cetera that we could otherwise not afford.
And we have, as of last year, a partnership with Oxford University and the European Space Agency,
bringing the FDL programme to Europe to teams that I described earlier were based here at Oxford.
And this year again, we will be having three teams at Oxford University.
Seven teams at the City Institute in the United States. And it's it's evolving into a wonderful example that not only, I think,
proves out the three theses that Nasser was trying to exercise in the first place.
But what interdisciplinary science can achieve? What these teams achieve in an eight week intense workshop is absolutely extraordinary.
Simon Jackman from Oxford here can tell you a lot more about what the the two ESA teams did last year and what they're going to be doing this year.
And if you want to find out more about how you might get involved,
please speak to Simon if you'd like to get more information to get involved in the programmes run in the U.S., you can.
You can speak to me or reach out to me, but it's it's really an interesting and compelling programme, an opportunity.
And we'd love to see it grow and prosper.
I think there's a lot more compelling and amazing work that's going to be done off of this programme in the years ahead.
These are some of the other organisations that are involved.
Companies like Intel and Videla, they're bringing hardware, you know, massive compute resources to bear on the programme.
They're bringing funding IBM, Lockheed Martin, the X-Prize, et cetera.
So this is really what collaboration and partnership is all about.
And an amazing science is, is the result or the output.
Just as a quick example, last year, in twenty 2018, we had seven teams in the US for this eight week workshop.
We had two teams working on astrobiology questions to teams on space weather, to teams on space resources.
And one team studying exoplanets and developing new algorithms for planet data extraction on the TESS mission.
And again, we we've been expanding the partnerships year over year.
We're about to start on our fourth year of the programme.
And what was achieved, for example, last year, we had nine teams, including the two here at Oxford.
They were from studying six domains. We had 12 partner organisations.
Thirty six, sorry. Thirty seven researchers. Forty two mentors.
Fifteen countries were represented. They came from 25 different universities.
We had thirty two speakers interacting with the students and I rather the participants in the programme.
We have a relatively modest support staff of 10 people supporting that programme.
Again, it runs for eight weeks. It starts with a one week bootcamp that both in the UK operation in the US.
It ends with a grand finale last year hosted an intel. This year will be hosted at Google and we we developed a two hundred and sixteen page report.
I assume you can probably just hold it up for everybody,
but it's available on the Frontier Development Board website if you'd like to see the output of the teams and the science that was done.
What's also extraordinary is in this eight week workshop period, a peer reviewed journal.
Articles have been generated by many of the teams, which in an eight week research undertaking, is somewhat extraordinary.
So that's the the programme, I think is an extraordinary opportunity for all of us in terms of research and education and outreach.
And again, I'd like to think that we can build on this model of partnership and cross collaboration and interdisciplinary science,
bringing disparate disciplines together to do extraordinary things.
And with that, I thank you. How?
One last, one last thing. This is just a little bit of 60 second fun.
Finding life beyond Earth is no longer a dream.
It's a discovery that will likely be made during our lifetimes and it will change everything.
We have been here for more than 30 years, at the forefront of a quest that many consider science fiction.
Mars is the closest planet where we might find the possibilities of alien life.
We are home to over nine explorers scientists. This just takes your breath away.
Working towards a singular purpose kind of best to understand what you have in
your own backyard as you're looking up into the cosmos to understand the origin,
prevalence and nature of life in the universe. What we are doing is to try to understand Are we alone in the Solar System?
Why do we pursue our mission? Because the discovery of life beyond Earth will change everything we understand
about the human past and will open a new window into our collective future.
We are trying to understand why we even exist. We are the City Institute.