Matt Kilty

I'm Latif Nasser.

I'm Lulu Miller.

This is Radiolab, and it is with that mystery that we kicked off our latest live show about voids.

Right.

And so in that place, in that very void adjacent place, we wanted to make an episode about not just about voids, about people reckoning with voids, standing on the edge of them, trying to decipher the sounds coming out of them, trying to measure them, trying to decide whether or not to scream into them.

Yeah.

So as we head into the fall, we hope you enjoy this end of summer experiment we did.

And let's pick back up with that mystery hum.

Hey, everybody.

Don't mind me.

I've just been hanging out up here for a little while.

I'm a producer at Radiolab.

My name is Matt Kilty.

Please join me in casting your eyes out to the sublime, the awe-inspiring New Jersey.

Now, pretend it doesn't exist, which, like, really shouldn't be that hard to do.

Instead, just imagine it's just ocean, the sea as far as you can see.

Now, thousands of years ago, that sea that you imagine in your mind's eye was thought of as a river, a river that circled all of Earth.

And the thing that was big, enormous, the thing that we thought was at the center of the Earth, the center of the universe, really, was the land underneath our feet.

The ocean was just this kind of like tidy boundary that seemed to surround this big island we were floating on.

And this idea, you can trace it back the world over, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon.

The Greeks handed it down to the Romans.

It persisted into the Middle Ages.

This idea that the sea, at least on paper, was contained.

But then...

The Europeans, they started building bigger ships.

They started venturing further out.

And as they did, the sea began to expand.

There was Columbus.

This day we completely lost sight of land.

1492, trying to find India.

They wouldn't see it for 33 days.

1501, a matter of a scoochie.

In the vast sea.

Sailing south across the Atlantic.

1520, Magellan crosses the Pacific.

In that exceedingly vast sea.

And in 1580, Sir Francis Drake goes two whole months without seeing land, 10,000 total miles around the globe, proving, for the first time ever, that the sea, in a sense, is never-ending.

And with that, in a matter of a century, the ocean went from something that was contained to something that was terrifyingly, staggeringly huge.

As these explorers mapped out the oceans, we began to realize that we were just simply a speck floating on this vast, churning sea.

and to stand on any shore and look out across that vastness.

That's writer Victor Hugo in 1866.

And for him, and others like him, painters, philosophers, poets, the sea became this place to go to contemplate our very own existence.

I'm going to wait for the helicopter at this pivotal juncture.

I'm giving it a second.

I'm giving it five seconds.

So we contemplated the smallness of it in the face of such enormity.

Hit it, Victor.

All right, it was incredible, but that was then and this is now.

And if you are one of those people who still looks out across an ocean, you feel a sense of awe and wonder and a little bit of terror.

Well, I'm sorry, but you're a child.

I don't know what to tell you.

It's really not that big of a deal.

It's like a six hour flight to Europe, which is probably what you're looking at.

That's it.

And I mean, I don't know, to be fair, for like 300 years or whatever, this ocean was kind of like the biggest thing any of us could conceive of.

There was nothing bigger.

Until some very obsessive women came along.

So...

Around 1890, Boston, Harvard, every night, a team of astronomers, all men, would sit in the Harvard Observatory, and they would point an 11-foot-long telescope into the night sky, and then they would open the shutter, and the telescope on a clock-driven mount would move in time with the rotation of the Earth so that the faint light of the stars would stay fixed in relation to it.

They would move at the same rate.

Telescope, stars, in lockstep together.

And for 30 minutes, maybe an hour, that faint light would come rushing down the telescope onto this glass plate about the size of a notebook that was covered in this emulsion.

The light would hit the plate and slowly little dots would start to emerge.

Stars, hundreds of them, thousands of them, tiny little individual ones, big clusters of stars, all of them trapped within this glass plate.

Think of it like a photograph of the night sky captured on the glass.

The plate would then be marked with date and time and sent over across the street to this brick building that was full of computers.

These are maybe people you've heard of the Harvard computers.

These are the women who were not allowed to work in the observatory because of the patriarchy.

But they could go to this brick building where they were essentially computing the data, the data of the dots on the plate of the stars.

So their job was to figure out the positions of the stars or if a star was actually a star or just like a speck of something or whatever.

All of this was a part of our most significant attempt at cataloging the heavens.

Now, one of these computers was a woman named Henrietta Leavitt.

Got some fans in the house.

So, Leavitt started at the observatory at the age of 25.

She was a former lit major who her senior year took an astronomy class and was just like,

I think, I have no idea, she didn't write anything about what she experienced in that moment, but whatever it was, it had to be profound, because after that, for 30 cents an hour, she would go to this brick building, sit with about a dozen other women, and using a magnifying glass, she would study plate after plate after plate.

And her job was to mark any star that she saw on these plates that were variable stars.

What's a variable star?

Great question, astute listener.

So variable star is a star that over time varies in brightness.

So some nights it appears a little bit dimmer, some nights it appears a little bit brighter.

This is just a thing that some stars do over the course of their life.

So her job was basically to look for these dots on thousands of these glass plates that were getting lighter and darker and lighter and darker, and then circle them.

Over the course of 28 years, she finds 2,400 of them, and that's it.

That is her job.

But it was in the midst of this, in the midst of these 28 years, where something incredible happens.

The thing that would shift our gaze, our deepest sense of awe and wonder as a species, from the sea to the stars.

So Levitt's doing her job day in and day out when she comes across this one plate, a plate that contains the Magellanic Clouds, which is just like a cluster of stars close together that look like a cloud in the night sky.

Now, this was crucial.

Nobody knew how far that cloud was from Earth.

In fact, we knew very little about how far anything was from Earth.

We had an approximate distance to the sun, to the moon, a few nearby stars, but that was pretty much it.

Beyond that, we really had no idea.

Mainly because we didn't have a good way to measure anything in space.

We didn't have like a yardstick.

And so what we had settled on was this idea that everything in the night sky, all of it, was a part of our Milky Way galaxy, and that we here on Earth, we were floating in the center of the Milky Way, and that was the entire universe, us right there in the center.

But this plate was about to change that.

Because Levitt noticed this pattern, which was the bright stars, the bright variable stars that she was circling on this plate in the cluster, they varied really slowly.

So it took them a long time to go from bright to dark, bright to dark.

It was almost like uniform, so the brighter the star, the slower it would flicker.

And she's like, oh, OK, there's a little pattern here.

So she goes looking for it in the other stars in the cluster, and she finds, sure enough, that the dim stars, they varied more quickly.

And this pattern, it was really reliable, so reliable, in fact,

that one could use the time it takes for a star to flicker to just, whoop, on a graph, figure out the brightness of that star.

Which, I don't know, probably doesn't sound that important to anybody here, but this is a thing that would truly crack open the universe.

Because, and this had always been the problem about figuring out distances in space.

Like, let's say you're looking at a bright star in the night sky.

Well, how do you know that bright star isn't just, like, really close to you?

Or a dim star, is that a star that's really far away, or is it just a dim star?

Nobody knew how to answer these questions, but suddenly, Leavitt could.

The rate at which a star flickers tells you its intrinsic brightness, and once you figure out the brightness with some fancy math, you can start to figure out distances.

And so if we jump ahead 10 years after Leavitt plots out this pattern, publishes it in paper, in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble is out in California with what was then the world's largest telescope.

And he's pointing it up at another cluster of stars called the Andromeda Cluster.

And like I said, at that time, people deeply believed that our entire universe was the Milky Way, but Hubble had suspected different.

He just never had a way to prove it.

And so there he is, pointing this incredible telescope up at the cluster.

And in the cluster, he sees a few little flickering stars.

And so he watches one of them, the star called V1.

And he watches it go from bright to dark, bright to dark.

Counts the number of days, grabs Levitt's calculations, does a bunch of math, and he gets a number.

An astonishing, unfathomable number.

900,000 light years away is that star from us, which is way outside of our Milky Way galaxy.

And this is an important footnote.

Hubble actually totally botched it.

He's not even close.

That star is not 900,000 light years away from us.

It is, in fact, 2.5 million light years away.

And just to put this into perspective, if you think about it like this, so think of Earth as us here in New York City.

The edge of the Milky Way galaxy, what we thought was our universe, is probably like out around Moscow.

What Hubble was observing, what he was measuring, would be like from us here in New York to the moon.

And in astronomy circles, this was huge news.

Because what it told us for the first time is that that cluster of stars isn't just a cluster of stars in our own galaxy.

It is, in fact, a galaxy in and of itself.

And so Hubble keeps at it, and he keeps pointing this telescope, and he finds another cluster of stars that is 2.73 million light-years away.

He finds another that's nearly 10 million light-years away.

another that's 15 million light years away, another that's 23 million light years away.

And as he's measuring these galaxies, he realizes that they're all moving out away from each other.

Out into what?

Nobody knows.

It is just trillions of galaxies expanding out into the infinite.

And with that, suddenly, we were confronted by another sort of dark mirror, this one with tiny little specks of light, an even bigger void for us to confront.

And it would take some time for people to start waxing on about the enormity of this void, conjuring up just how itty-bitty we really are, where our eyes would start to turn away from the sea and up to the stars.

A void that goes on forever.

I mean, further than forever.

A forever that is getting bigger with each passing moment that we sit here and contemplate it.

And to do this, to gaze up into the depths of the universe, is, as Victor Hugo might say, in the imagination.

like beholding the vast unknown.

Lulu.

Latif.

Radiolab.

And today we are playing a recording of a live show we did a few weeks ago in New York City.

And for the last story, I'm taking you to space with a guy who is reaching out into that void.

So I am in the middle of reading the book series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with my son.

And in the second book, there is this device called the Total Perspective Vortex.

It's a closet-sized machine that you walk into, close the door behind you, and what it does is it shows you, like really, truly shows you

how small and insignificant you are in the universe.

And I should have mentioned, it's actually a torture device.

No one has ever survived it because it is just that psychologically, cripplingly unbearable to know how trifling you are in the grand scheme of things.

But I think there's something maybe even worse than knowing how small you are.

And that is the possibility that we are all alone.

How tragic would it be if in all these trillions of galaxies that each have billions of stars, that each have umpteen planets, if nowhere in there was there a single friendly face or tentacle or whatever else there might be?

The cosmic loneliness is just too much to bear.

It's like we're all a toddler wandering alone at night in the middle of the Sahara.

When I got my first laptop,

In high school, it was a hand-me-down from my mom.

It was like thick as a brick.

And one of the first things that I did was I installed this program called SETI at Home.

Has anybody heard of this?

Does anybody know what I'm talking about?

Yeah?

Okay, a few people.

All right.

So SETI is this decades-old research organization.

They're funded in part by NASA.

It's a highly respectable thing.

And the idea is in the title.

It's SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The reason I heard of it as a high school kid was I watched the movie Contact like four times in theaters in one week.

And I was just obsessed.

And this program, what was so cool about it was it let you be Jodie Foster on the hood of her car with the headphones on listening for alien signals.

And

And the way it let you do that was it would use your, for me it was my laptop, you could use your spare compute time.

When you weren't using the computer, it would analyze all these radio signals that were slurped up from all over the sky and it would be looking for some kind of alien message.

And I just remember this one night when I was in high school, I woke up and I felt my laptop and it was super hot.

And I was like, oh my God, is my computer discovering aliens right now?

Cut to years later.

I start working at this show, Radio Lab.

And one of the first people that I pitch to interview was this guy, Doug.

Okay.

You sound great.

Doug Vakoch is his name.

He worked at SETI.

But unlike almost every other employee of SETI, he was not an astronomer.

He was not a physicist specializing in radio telemetry or anything like that.

He wasn't even a scientist.

Um, when I was prepping to interview him, I saw his resume and he had just like all kinds of weird things on there.

There was like, he studied, uh, comparative religion, but he also studied like ecofeminism and psycholinguistics and all these things I'd never even heard of.

Um, and so it would be years before the movie Arrival came out, but, but

Like Amy Adams in that movie, that's his job.

He is an alien translator.

And he told me that in the interview, he'd wanted this job, he'd wanted to talk to aliens since he was a little boy.

So initially he wanted to be an astronaut until he realized that like just space is too big.

The distances are too vast.

Like you can't actually go meet an alien face to face.

You got to do it remote.

So that's why he got obsessed with SETI.

And he told me about how he basically made the job at SETI for himself.

Like he bugged them until they hired him.

And when I interviewed him, he had worked at SETI already for about 15 years.

And so I asked him, like, okay, say an alien message appears out of the blue today.

Like, how do you even start to translate this thing from an intelligence that is completely different, that's completely foreign, that's totally incomprehensible to us?

And his answer was like, okay, well, you can't really know how you'd start until it actually comes and you see how it comes, da-da-da-da.

But you actually don't have to go that far to practice.

So it's like, okay, I'm going to go try to, you know, talk to dolphins or octopi or something.

Another way to practice, try to understand Mayan or Babylonian ruins.

And so that was like, that was his job.

He would like practice this sort of thing every day, cracking codes and studying animal behavior and deciphering hieroglyphics.

And then so that we did that interview.

It's great.

A couple of years later, the movie Arrival actually comes out and I'm watching it.

And I'm like, oh, my.

This is like all I could think about was Doug.

It's Eddie.

So I call him up.

But weirdly, this is what I heard on the other end of the line.

What the heck is Medi?

And it turns out there's like a whole juicy backstory behind that single letter change.

Tell me the origin story of Medi.

So he explained that for a long time, even before he started at SETI.

He had this feeling that pointing our microphones towards the sky, that just wasn't enough.

It's like a high school prom or something, you know?

So Doug's like, come on, someone's got to say something, anything.

It could be as simple as, you know, just like a, yoo-hoo!

Or it could be something more complicated, like something like, hey!

We're a couple billion moderately intelligent carbon-based life forms on this third planet off of this particular yellow dwarf over here.

So nice to meet you.

We love long walks on the beach, breathing oxygen, and true crime podcasts.

Please get in touch.

Especially if you know anything about runaway global warming.

Thank you.

So Doug brings this idea to the SETI board.

One SETI researcher at Berkeley went on record saying that, quote, 98% of astronomers and SETI researchers, including myself, think that this is potentially dangerous and not a good idea.

It's like shouting in a forest before you know if there are tigers, lions, bears, or other dangerous animals there.

We've already been beaming out our TV and radio episodes for decades.

So he got together a bunch of other like-minded researchers and they started METI.

Are you like rival siblings?

How would you describe it?

Now, when I heard about Doug and Maddie, I wasn't as much worried about the dark forest problem, but I was more like, who is this guy, Doug, who wants to speak for all humanity?

And what kinds of things does he even want to be beaming out there on our behalf?

So in 2017, Doug and his team did it.

They encoded a message into a radio signal.

It was a mixture of math and electronic music.

and they beamed it out from a giant radar antenna eight miles southeast of the Norwegian city of Tromsø.

The target was, as you obviously can see right here, it was a star called GJ273, or Leutn Star, and its planets, which include at least one so-called super-Earth.

It's a little over 12 light years away, which means the message is actually still on its way over there.

It'll arrive in 2029 or thereabouts.

And then best case scenario, or I guess worst case scenario if you're afraid of them, best case scenario, if there are beings out there and they are sentient enough to receive our message and have the technology to be able to respond and they decide they want to do that right away, the earliest we would hear back

is the early 2040s.

And in this case, a hope that there is someone out there listening.

Thank you very much.

We want to end this evening in which we've been looking out into the void by actually going out there, following Doug's messages, in a sense, out into space, beyond our atmosphere, beyond our gravity, beyond our plodding earthly concerns.

with an excerpt from a gorgeous novel, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, which tells the story of six astronauts on the International Space Station spending most of their time not gazing out at the cosmos, but gazing down at us.

It will be read by the brilliant artist, actress, host of the WQXR podcast, Helga.

Please welcome Helga Davis.

And that, my friends, is our show.

As you probably know, it has been a deeply unsettling summer for Radiolab and across public media.

In July, Congress voted to eliminate all federal funding for public media in America for the first time in history.

That has resulted in a direct loss of millions of dollars to WNYC, our home station.

And so if you care about what we do, if you want to keep us around, the best way to support what we do is by becoming a member of the lab.

We'd love it if you check it out.

Membership starts at just seven bucks a month.

Not that much money.

If anything we have made is meant seven dollars in a month to you, that would really mean the world to us.

It's such a capacious tote bag.

It's like you're carrying a void around with you wherever you go.

Yeah.

So this show was written by me, Lulu Miller, and Matt Kilty.

It was edited by Pat Walters and executive produced by Sarah Sandbach.

The show is sound designed by Jeremy Bloom and Matt Kilty with live scoring by Mantra Percussion.

Fact check by Diane Kelly and Natalie Middleton.

Stage direction by Kristen Marting.

Scenic design by Norman D. Sherwood.

Lighting design by Mary Ellen Stebbins.

We love those people.

And one last thank you to our voice actors, Davide Borella, Jim Peary, Armando Risco, and Brian Wiles with casting by Dan Fink.