Those scientists in the audience right now who will be inspired by what they hear to study astro biological or perhaps some of the other sciences as well. We appreciate your attendance. I will recognize myself for Opening Statement and Ranking Member as well. As we discover more planets around the stars in our own galaxy, it is natural to wonder if we may finally be on the brink of answering the question, are we alone in the universe . Finding other life in the universe would be the most significant discovery in human history. Scientists estimate that there are 80 billion stars in the milky way galaxy. To date more than 1,700 nearby planets have been found by the earth space telescope. Last month astronomers discovered the first earthlike planet orbiting its star at a distance where liquid water could be present, a condition thought essential to life. Called kepper 186f, its only 10 larger than the earth and about 490 lightyears away. The transiting survey satellite which will launch in 2017 and james Webb Telescope launching in 2018 will help scientists discover more planets with potential bio signatures. The United States has pioneered the field of astro biological and continues to lead the world in this type of research. The sample of professional papers pup lished in Science Magazine between 1995 and 2013 illustrates the Significant Growth and growing popularity of the field of astro biological. Between 1995 and 2012, the number of papers published on astrobiological increased ten times and the number of scientific reports that cited astrobiological increased 25 times. Astrobiological is a serious subject studied by serious scientists around the world. Reflecting this interest, next september the library of congress and glass will hold a twoday astrobiological symposium on what societal impacts could be of finding microbal, complex or intelligent life in the universe wlfment life exists on other planets continues to be a matter of debate among scientists. Around the world a number of astronomers listen to naturally occurring radio frequencies. They try to filter out commozz koss mick noise and human made interfernings to find anomaly thats could be from civilizations elsewhere in the universe. The at many telescope, financed by microsoft cofounder paul allen and telescope in puerto rico are two wellknown locations for conducting radio astronomy searches for life on the universe. Recently they detected pulsed signals that last only a few mill seakeds. These fast radio bursts as theyre called have caused scientists to speculate as to their cause. Some scientists have theer sized they could be from stars colliding or extraterrestrial intelligent source. Others search for light pulses instead of radio waves. Researchers run by the Harvard Smithsonian center of physics and university of californiaberkeley aemergency others use optical telescopes to try to detect than joked pulses pulseshes nano second or other naturally occurring phenomenon. I hope todays hearing will enable us to learn more about how research on astrobiological continues to expand this fascinating frontier. The unknown and unexplored areas of space spark human curiosity. Americans and others around the world look up at the stars and wonder if we are alone or is there life on other planets . That concludes my Opening Statement. Ranking member, gentle woman from texas, miss johnson, is recognized for hers. Thank you very much, mr. Chairman and good morning. In the interest of saving time, i forego making an Opening Statement insteadly simply want to welcome the doctors to this mornings hearing on the search for life, including intelligent life in outer space. You both are distinguished researchers and i know that you will have thoughtful testimony to present and this afternoon we will determine whether we have researchers to continue this. So thank you. I yield back. Thank you, miss johnson. I would like to introduce our witnesses at this point. Our first witness, dr. Seth shostak, senior astronomer at the Study Institute in mountain view, california. He held his position since 2001. The doctor has spent much of his career conducting Radio Astronomy Research on galaxies. Dr. Shostak has written more than 400 published magazine and web articles on various topics of astronomy, technology, film and television and also edited and contributed to nearly a dozen scientific and popular astronomy books. Hes authored four books including sharing the universe perspectives on extraterrestrial life and confessions of an alien hunter a scientists search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Can you hear him each week as host of onehour Radio Program entitled big picture sinings. Dr. Shostak received bachelor of physics from princeton and ph. D. From the California Institute of technology. Our second witness, dr. Dan wertheimer, worked at the Space Sciences laboratory at ucberkeley since 1983. Hes currently the director of several of the labs centers including the center for astrong mee signal processing and electronics research. Additionally mr. Wertheimer serves as chief scientist for the labs seci at home program and associate director of berkeley Wireless Research center. Mr. Wertheimer coauthored bio 20020 and editor of astronomy, molecules, microbes and extraterrestrial life and astronomical and biochemical origins and search for life in the universe. His research is featured in many broadcast stories such as abc and cbs and many major newspapers and magazines. His work has also reached a younger audience through scholastic weekly, a Science Magazine for kids. Mr. Wertheimer received his bachelors and masters in physics and astrong mee from San Francisco state university. I will recognize to start us off today dr. Shostak and then we will go to mr. Wertheimer. Thank you, congressman for the opportunity to be here. I will just give you a few bigpicture thoughts on thoughts for search for life and in particular intelligent life that can uphold its side of the conversation as opposed microbial sort of life. This is obviously a subject of great interest to many people. Let me back up and say when you read in the paper about discovery of new planet or something water on mars, youre looking at one of three horses in a race to be the first to find some extraterrestrial biological. The first horse is simply to find it nearby. Thats where the big money is. Rovers on mars, moons of the outer solar system. At least a half a dozen other world thats might have life in our solar system. Chances of finding it i think are good. If that happens, it will happen in the next 20 years, depending on the financing. Second horse in that race is to build very large instruments that can sniff, if you will, the at moos fear of plan atmosphere around planets of other stars and find oxygen or methane, which as you know produced by cows and pigs and things like that but biological in any case. So you can find pigs in space, i suppose. That is again a project, depending on funding that could yield results in the next two decades. The third horse in that race is seti, search for extraterrestrial intelligence and that idea if you have seen the movie contact you know what the idea is, eavesdrop on signals that are deliberately or accidentally leaked off somebody elses world. That makes sense because in fact even we, only 100 years after mar conian and invention of radio, we have technology that would allow us to send bits of information across lightyears of distance to reputed extraterrestrials. Let me tell you why i think theyre out there, by the way. Its unproven whether theres life on earth. Thats the situation today. You heard me say twice now that i think that situation will change within everyones lifetime in this room. And the reason is were the universe is very infectant with habitats for life. Congressman smith mentioned the number of stars in our galaxy. With respect that number is larger. Its Something Like 200 to 400 billion stars. But we now know at least 70 of them have planets. Recent results from nasas keppler telescope, astoundingly successful instrument, suggests one in five stars may have planets that are cousins of the earth. What that means is in our own galaxy, tens of billions of other planets that are the kind you might want to build condos on and live. Tens of billions. If that is inadequate for your requirement, let me point out there are 150 billion other galaxies we can see with our telescopes, even with similar complement of earthlike world. What that means is the numbers are so astounding if this is the only planet in which not only life but intelligent life arizin, we are extraordinarily exceptional. Its like buying electricals of lottery trillions of lottery tickets none a winner. That would be very unusual. Although everyone likes to think theyre special, and im sure you all are, maybe were not that special. Certainly history after strong mee shows every time we thought we were special we were wrong. What is done so far . Various kinds of radio searches. I wont detail technology. We looked at parts of the much of the sky as fairly low sensitivity over a limited range of radio wavelength. Radio sections of the band. We have looked in particular directions at a few thousand star systems. In other words, we have just begun the search. The fact we havent found anything means nothing. Its like looking for mega phone in africa and giving up after you only examined one city block. And the reason the search has been so cramped, so contradicted so far is simply, to be honest, the fact theres no funding for this. Its all privately funded. Total number of people in the world that do seti for a living is fewer than number of people in any row in the audience here behind me. Thats the world total for this endeavor. When are we going to find them . You heard me suggest that may happen rather quickly. Let me point twout other things, one, this is very interesting to the public because they have seen extraterrestrials on television and in the movie all the lives. That also give its a giggle factor. Very easy make fun of it. Very easy make fun of Ferdinand Magellans idea to sail around the earth or captain cook, exploration, thats what this is. Consequences are always shall we say celebratory, theres life, intelligent life that calibrate our position in the universe. As congressman smith said probably be greatest discovery humankind could ever make and whats important is this is the first generation that has both the knowledge and technology to do that. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this question. Can you guys show the slides . I want to walk you through some of the seti experiments we and other people are doing. As seth mentioned this nasa keppler mission from that we learned there are a trillion planets in our milky way galaxy, lots of places for life and we learned a lot of these planets are what we call goldilocks planets, right distance where its not too hot or cold. Rocky planets, liquid water. There could be life out there. How are we getting in touch . One of the ideas is earthings are sending off radio, Television Signals in space. The early shows like i love lucy 10,000 stars. Nearby stars have seen the simpsons. Turn that around and if were broadcasting maybe other civilizations are sending signals in our direction even leaking signals the way we unintentionally send signals or maybe deliberate signal. They could be sending laser signals and there are a number of projects looking for laser signals. This is a project at Harvard University of very clever project. This is a project at lick observatory. Also a project at the in hawaii looking for laser signals. People are also looking for radio signals. Our group uses the Worlds Largest radio antenna, we call it radio telescope. This is in puerto rico and its 1,000 feet in diameter. It holds 10 billion bowls of corn flakes. We havent actually tried that. [laughter] its operated by National Science foundation and moan astronomers would be lucky to use this telescope a day or two a year. We figured out a way to use the telescope at the same time other scientists are using it deloket data all year around and were checking data all year around as i talk to you. That is a problem. Even though we get the Worlds Largest telescope all year around it creates enormous amount of data. To analyze that data we asked volunteers for help. You can help us by running a program on your home computer or laptop or desktop computer. You install a program called seti at home. Screensaver program. The way we take the data from the Worlds Largest telescope and break it up into little pieces, everybody gets a different piece of the sky to analyze and install this program and it pops up when you go out for a cup of coffee and computer go through data looking for all of the different frequencies and data types. This is what it looks like when its running on your computer at home. It takes a few days to analyze data looking for interesting signals. When finds interesting signals, sends them back to berkeley and then a new chunk of data, part of the sky to work on f youre the lucky one that finds that faint murmur from distant civilization, you might get the nobel prize but theres a catch. Nobel prize, you have to maybe share with a lot of people. There are millions of people who downloaded the seti at home screensaver. Split over 200 countries. Together volunteers have formed one of the most powerful uper computers on the planet enabled most sensitive search for extraterrestrial signals anybodys done so were grateful for the volunteers. Now we made that more general so you can participate in not just seti with your home computer but you can participate in a lot of projects. Climate prediction projects, gravity weight project, protein folding, look for malaria drugs, h. I. V. Drugs, cancer drugs and allocate how you want your spare computing cycles to be used on your home computers. One of the new projects were working on is pan chromatic seti and were asking observatories around the world to look at a lot of different wavelength bands, a lot of different frequencies, targeting the var nearest stars and trying to cover all of the different bands that come through the earths atmosphere. Radio frequencies and infrared frequencies and wavelengths and also obstacle frequencies, laser signals and this will be extremely comprehensive search because weve got eight different telescopes were using. And looking at all of these different bands but only targeting nearby stars. Another project were just launching this year is called interplanetary eavesdropping. The idea of this project is there may be signals going back and forth between two planets in a distant solar system. For instance maybe eventually we will have machines or people on mars went will have Radio Communication or laser communication on our two planets. Put it the other way, distant civilization may have colonized a planet and there may be radio signals going back and forth between those two planets. Now with the keppler spacecraft, we know exactly planets in distant solar system are lined up with earth so we can schedule our observations and target that and see if we can intercept those signals back and forth between two distant planets. We are using green bang telescope in west vath to do that experiment. While swept found e. T. s so far but we made a lot of interesting discoveries. Discovered a planet made out of solid diamond. First maps of the black hole center of galaxy. They are used in all kinds of things, Brain Research that could eventually control prosthetic arms. Were just getting in the game. We only had radio 100 years. Its like alooking for a needle in a haystack but im optimistic in the long run. The reason im optimistic in the long run is seti is limited by competing technology, which is growing exponentially, limited by telescope technology. Chinas building a huge telescope bigger than arasibo and australians and South African and europeans working on a huge telescope made out of thousands of dishes combined to make a giant telescope. I think i will stop there. I have a couple potentialsky read you from the volunteers but im out of time. Thank you very much. Thank you, mr. Wertheimer. Thank you both for your excellent testimony and actually you have anticipated my questions a little bit but would i still like to go forth with them and let me address the first question to both of you. Starting with dr. Shostak and it is this, a twopart question what do you think i can anticipate your answer a little bit on the basis of your statement but what do you think is the possibility of microbial life being found in the universe or intelligent life being found in the universe . So the first question goes to the possibility. Second question would be what do you think is the likelihood of finding either microbial life or intelligent life in the universe. Two different kinds of questions. Dr. Shostak . Well, the probability of life, of course, its hard to estimate because what we do know now and something we didnt know evently even 10, 20 years ago we did not know were there habitat thats could support life . What amon industry has proven in the last astronomy has proven theyre made out of the same stuff, distant galaxies same 92 elements on the wall in your ninth grade classroom. So this means if you have taken chemistry in school, you dont have to take it again if you move to another galaxy. Its all the same everywhere. We know Building Blocks are there. We know there will be plenty of planets where you have liquid water and atmosphere, the conditions you have in hyattsville, for example. So life could arrive on any of these places we also know life began on earth very very, quickly. Its only a sample of one so not entirely convincing but it does suggest it wasnt very difficult for life to get a foothold on this planet so maybe elsewhere. So life i think is maybe not so hard to get started. Thats sort of the general impression among scientists. What they believe is not so important is finding its important. Second part, what about intelligent life . Thats a lot harder, right. The earth has had life we know for at least 3 1