Hey folks, welcome to Don't Take Out Your Phone. Wow, I loved doing these podcasts. I had an awesome chat with Priyanka Lakia today. He was the anchor for Bloomberg Business in India and we spoke about everything from India's fantastic growth story to his journey from India to the UK and relations between UK and India and all that good stuff and I learnt a lot. And I hope you enjoy it. Hey, it's Lewis. Welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Great, and we're live. Thank you very much Priyanka for coming on my podcast. Thank you all. We've been with each other for like a year or so already. That's right. Yeah, we had some good chats so we should have recorded all of them. But anyway, thanks. So we're at the House in Barnabas which is where we came about a year ago. It's a homeless charity and they've got a great recruitment academy upstairs so we're borrowing their room, which is nice. Lovely. Yeah, it was really cool. So it's been a really interesting story for you. That's right. You relocated for one of the fastest-growing economies, India, into one of the maturists, which is London. Brexit happened, loads of other stuff going on. Tell us more. Well, Lewis, firstly, thank you so much for having me on your show and thank you so much for hosting me at this lovely location as well. Pleasure. It's a pleasure to be here. Now, as you said, it's been an interesting story and I moved here a couple of years back from Bombay to London and it's all thanks to my wife who got an opportunity to move to London. So that's what brought me to London. It was an interesting move. The transition, to be honest with you, wasn't really a smooth story, but then, well, no transition when you're moving from a different city to a new city has been a smooth transition for anyone. But the good part about that was you get to learn so many things, you get to learn, you get to meet a lot of people who then teach you a lot of things on the way as well. So it's been a fairly mixed bag. And you were from Bombay? That's right. Bombay now, Bombay old name, Mumbai is a new name. That's a separate debate altogether. Trust me, I don't want to get into that because that can go on for us together. But the good part about this is when you grow up in Bombay, you get to see how that city is evolved over so many decades and over so many years. And it gives you somewhat of a front row seat by sitting there experiencing what the whole India growth story about as well. So as you said, it's an interesting market to come from because that's an emerging market to an extent. And then you see the kind of growth potential that the country has to offer. And you're seeing what a developed market looks like. It gives you a much better view of what that country can achieve over the next few decades. And then you get to meet people who are participating there. It's a fabulous story. But then you decided to come to Brexit facing the UK. Well, that trust me wasn't something that I really planned because when you look at Brexit, sitting in Bombay or even sitting in India at that time, you weren't really expecting Brexit to happen. And even when we came here, we probably came here in March exactly two years back in June. You had Brexit which took place. It was a surprise. Now, without getting into the debate of if Brexit happened or not, the point so far what we've experienced is the industry that I operate in, the industry and people that I work with, there hasn't been a major impact to say so far. Yes, there is a lot of limbo. There are a lot of question marks. There are a lot of gray areas. But you haven't seen a major impact per se so far. So that gives you that little bit of an advantage of not being too worried about it right now. Well, we don't know probably six months hence or even a year hence if it really does go through. And if there is a chaos or there is a crisis, then it's a whole different ball game. But so far, you've been somewhat insulated from that. And I think that that works, that gives you that little bit of support in terms of the market that you're operating in because for the simple reason that you have the emerging market knowledge and you also are in a developed market which is seeing these kind of developments which then can be leveraged in various ways. Absolutely. And it's interesting that despite Brexit and other stuff going on here, it hasn't deterred you from staying over the longer term. That's right because the thing is you want to see what a developed market holds in store. Now, yes, my career or my life predominantly has been an emerging market like India and we're somewhat seen what that market has in store. I haven't had much experience or an exposure of seeing what a developed market can offer as well. So you're somewhere trying to leverage your understandings and operations of an emerging market and see how that can probably fit in in a developed market to a certain extent. But at the same time, you want to understand what a developed market has to offer and then at some point take it back and implement it in an emerging market as well. So these factors are somewhat attracting me and remember the biggest advantage that London has today, and this is what I personally believe after living in this city for two years is that this country and the city offers is very rare. I've had some time in New York I've spent some time in Chicago as well but the diversity in London is very different to what I've seen in other parts of the world and that's what you really come here for. City welcomes you with a red carpet it doesn't really hold you back in any sense the opportunity it offers. It's great. For somebody who's brand new in the city to actually find his feet in a couple of months time is quite commendable. I don't see that happening in any other city. No, you're right, you're right. But you had a front row seat in India on Bloomberg to witness the fantastic great story. Tell me a bit about that. So well, Bloomberg definitely was a great experience. I was an anchor for Bloomberg TV India rather for almost eight to nine years. I hosted the morning show which was basically on capital markets. I hosted the show which revolved earnings basically anything and everything that revolved around equities was something that I was always involved in during my time at Bloomberg TV India. Now, what that did is at a very young age it gave me a somewhat of an understanding as to what corporate India, how it works how equity markets work what are some of the key themes to look at which are some of the key sectors that have huge potential and what more importantly investors look at when they invest in the markets as well. That definitely was really interesting. Now in that, I don't want to get into the equity part of it because I know your listeners are probably more interested in what happens when we talk about corporate India and the potential there. When you're in an overseas country like UK the media and the headlines more or less revolve around comparing India to China. It's a good comparison because the growth rates currently in terms of the macro situation are probably what China was a couple of decades back. So in that sense, yes, you are following that rule of an emerging market growing rapidly seeing a lot of changes. But remember with India the way the positioning of the government the way the whole democracy operates, there are a lot of hurdles in that. So yes, it's good to compare it to China but what I believe is you're still quite a few decades behind in terms of the growth potential. That's right and it will take a much longer time but the good part is it's open to a lot of foreign companies to participate in that. So yes, if you're a local player you will see that growth potential coming in. The stock markets reflect that the way some of the local corporate houses have evolved over the last couple of years reflect that as well. But the good part about this is you're seeing a lot of new companies evolve. I mean, you've seen a big new local company. That's right. It's all in terms of the local tech space in terms of the local companies that are now starting to branch into let's say it can be an NBFC business or it can be mortgage business all traditional houses are probably more catering to manufacturing have now started to branch out because they have seen that potential from the population for different services. To give you an interesting statuette you probably have less than 10% of the Indian population that's investing in financial securities. Now probably let's say 10 or 15 years back the percentage was at one or two. Today there are reports indicating that the percentage has gone up to what, 7 to 8% is what that's gone up to. What's been the driver? The driver's been fact that traditionally you always had Indian investors invest in gold or real estate. Those two asset classes haven't been performing that well. At the same time as there is more financial inclusion there is more participation in these sectors as well. And that's why today the Indian stock markets aren't driven anymore by foreign money. Don't get me wrong it is a huge driver, it is a huge part of the spin in the local stock market but it's the local population now that somewhere is investing. I was just reading a report this morning Lewis where they mentioned that you've seen monthly inflows of only 2 billion dollars on a monthly basis from the retail crowd. So local Indian investors? All the money is getting invested in domestic stocks. Remember you don't have a lot of exposure when it comes to foreign securities in India it's still a very domestic market in terms of investors, in terms of their preference it's all getting invested in stock markets through mutual funds or through portfolio managers or through family offices who are also participating in this. And we're seeing a growing middle class now? Definitely, that's probably the big story that everyone's been talking about. There are multiple reports there is a question mark on that as well but from someone who's lived in Bombay and who's seen how wealth has evolved in just my neighborhood it gives you an understanding that there is massive wealth generation that's taking place in India and especially the four metros somewhere leave that from the front. You've seen Bombay evolve, you've seen Delhi you've seen Bangalore you've seen Chennai as well Kolkata as well to a certain extent all these cities have been evolving the fact that you're seeing new services being offered you're seeing more jobs being created and that's getting more and more people as participants in the growth story and all of that then leads to consumption. Interesting, so you're seeing normal people come from rural areas into cities? It is, that is a trend that is an active trend and remember it is a trend within any emerging market because as the aspirations grow as the opportunities emerge people then migrate to an area where there's probably much more money or there's a better return or there's a better lifestyle more importantly is what they can then achieve. And are you seeing Amazon and Netflix entering India as well now aren't we? That's right, in fact this is an interesting trend Louis you mentioned that because Amazon and Netflix both of them have been in India for some time now but now with as India probably is home to one of the largest population of under 35. It's probably one of the largest country that has the biggest population of the millennial crowd viewer to categorize it. Now this is driving the whole consumption story to a certain extent and that's why you've got Amazon India and Netflix betting heavily on these markets and in fact I remember recently when I was in Bombay as well I was reading an article which mentioned as to how the head of Amazon India was given a much more senior role in the parent company because the company in India was generating a lot of revenues they were very bullish on that story as well. So Amazon India definitely is a big story and a big opportunity for them but Netflix recently has been generating a lot of local content so Louis what do you think? Local films original content because Bollywood stuff and Bollywood are short series which are again short in local languages they're also looking at ways as to what's more trendy locally now remember you have the western influence to a certain extent but there are still the culture, the way the millennials in India are grown up is still very different and what they like, what they prefer is still very different to what you probably see in TV series in the western world. Netflix India is generating that kind of content and they're actually penetrating the local television market quite heavily and when I said the local television I'm talking about the content I don't mean the manufacturers of television are talking about the content that's been produced on television for these news, for these old traditional channels. So that's changing yours and it's interesting to see how foreign brands are creating localized content. In fact McDonald's did that when they walked into India as well they initially came in with products which were very westernized in terms of to give an example chicken nuggets it never got sold really? It never sold in India. Love a chicken nugget. Trust me if you were to offer me that right now I would go up but it never worked in India and the thing is the menu today in India is very different to what you probably see anywhere in the world No Big Macs and... So you probably don't have any beef burgers obviously but at the same time you have a lot of like you probably have a veg patty which is again stuffed with paneer or it has local ingredients which are probably more famous with you know the locals in that sense so the fact that such a large organization has customized this menu or has adapted itself to cater to the local taste is what a lot of big multinationals do when they come to India. So a lot must have failed on that regard like it must be expensive and very time-consuming to you know to want to break into the Indian market? It is but at the same time remember the aspiration it also helps now because and what I mean by that is when it came in was probably 20-25 years back I can't remember the exact date but it was a long time long time back when they entered the Indian market there was recall there was that weight for McDonald's but when we talk about other brands there isn't that kind of weight so they face that hurdle but at the same time today to give another example H&M when they opened up in India there was a long queue for guys to actually go into the store. Now remember these are guys who probably traveled overseas they've shopped at H&M they've bought some clothes they're aware of it so that trend also is changing now where initially let's say Fazzara or an H&M came and they would have to do a lot of marketing they would have to do a lot of advertising it's not the case anymore people are aware they're more in sync with what brands they need to wear what brands they need to shop from because they're well traveled now with the well generation you've got a large population that does multiple trips in a year overseas right mostly coming to Europe and US and you've always had Southeast Asia as a key location because it's close to India it's a much shorter flight but now you see a lot of millennials or the younger population rather opting to somewhere travel to Europe for ski trips which again remember Indians are not known for their sort of ski trips or that kind of inclination towards a cold destination but now with this generation you're seeing much more sort of preference to have a much different experience as compared to a traditional just sit on a beach have a beer experience because they've done that it's not the first time that they're doing it it's probably the 7th or 8th time that they're doing it now and are you seeing then maybe as a result really good quality young Indians opting to live and work abroad now they're into losing their obviously they've lost you momentarily but is that a trend it's been a trend for a long time it's called the brain drain now it's been there for a long time even if you look at what's happening in the valley you've got some of the big companies being led by Indian origin people who've been there for a long time and they've all been educated in India at some point but then they migrated to United States or some other location where they've got that experience to then work with larger brands but that trend somewhat reversed a couple of years back now with the opportunity that India offers you're seeing a lot of people come back because as I said with the mature market yes you've got some advantages both markets have their pros and cons the one advantage of being an emerging market is you're clocking growth rates of over 20% as a norm you don't have to struggle that hard I mean don't get me wrong it's all hard work at the end of it but 20% is somewhere the norm for most of these mid-sized companies I'm not talking about large established brands but the mid-sized companies where you want that kind of participation you aspire to become a larger company you see healthy growth rates of 20-25% as a norm and remember this is a market as we spoke earlier the financial inclusion, banking accounts these are things which have probably just been in the know for the last 5 to 10 years so there's still a large population that needs to come on board for these kind of services and are we seeing salaries increase as well? that has been a trend slowly and steadily you are seeing that trend coming in it's still nowhere compared to what we see as a global norm but always remember the cost of living is very different to what we have in London, New York or Chicago or even the valley for that matter so, salaries are catching up and a lot of larger brands locally now are offering attractive packages because remember as you said if not, there is that inclination to start looking at overseas opportunities if you don't have that same similar pay packet identical but if that sort of opportunity you don't see that then there is that inclination to start looking at overseas opportunities which you did so how have you found the transition? the transition has been interesting for me, moving from media to more of a sort of a financial role I was changing countries, I was switching cities I was switching my industries well so for me initially it was a lot of hard work but then obviously I met people like you who you know, somewhere guided me who held my hand in terms of pointing me towards areas that I can then leverage my expertise because the good part about London or a developed market is it's a much more professional world a much more welcoming world when you have something to offer and that's what I've somewhere understood that I have something to offer in terms of my understanding, in terms of my access to the Indian market and that's where the transition then came in a little bit much smoother as compared to what you probably find somewhere else so yes, initially there were some hurdles but then as you adapt yourself to how the city operates how things function locally you then start fitting in but sometimes it's tough coming into a big city you know, new social networks and new job and everything people are busy they don't have as much time to spend with you it takes a bit of time doesn't it that's right Lewis and you know the thing here is what I realise when I move to London is you have to constantly keep reaching out because there are people who like to have a conversation and because this market is so diverse in terms of the guys who invest or the people who invest in UK they're not originally from London either, they're all from overseas locations I think it's like 55% of people from London living in London aren't originally from London so it means they're fantastically diverse and everyone's open for a conversation and they're like meeting new people so if you make the effort to do that then it's a snowball effect you end up meeting so many different people that's exactly what somewhere worked for me as well in terms of all in my two years out here I've just constantly kept meeting people who've probably grown up in London who are from various locations in Europe some have moved in from the States some have come in from India just like me probably 10 years or even for some cases 30 years before before me so it's good to learn from a lot of these people as to what their experience has been and more importantly they all want to deal somewhere or the other with India because that's a growing market you see they've already participated in China's growth story or they've had that connect with China at some point now they see that same potential in India so they want to learn more about this market and that's where I step in Brilliant. Have you found that it's easier or harder to build a career in London as opposed to Mumbai? That's actually an interesting question because I'm just giving it a little bit of a thought because growing up in Bombay it's easier to somewhere fit in and to get a lot of opportunities in that sense London obviously as we've discussed and I've told you this as well I came in blind I mean I just literally walked in with my first visit ever when I moved to London to actually visit the city so in that sense it was difficult but after having worked for almost a year and six months out here you realize that this is the opportunity that the city offers in Bombay. Don't get me wrong if you're just looking for a job you will get a job in both cities it's about then stepping up and taking it to the next level I feel that because Bombay is an emerging market and if you're a business owner and if you're trying to offer a service altogether you've got that 25% growth if you're an employee because there are so many people already remember the population of Bombay is almost three times that of London in that and because it's still a very unorganized economy in that sense you don't have a lateral growth in terms of when you're an employee but when you take that same picture to London and because it's a much more mature market and things work in a much more organized fashion so if you're looking at a 9 to 5, if you're looking to work professionally you probably have a much larger lateral growth or an opportunity to move in a lateral growth in London as compared to Bombay. Interesting maybe, I think it's different in different sectors I think you're broadly right it's interesting I heard a stat the other day that in India the average tenure in a job is like a year or year and a half because so many jobs being created in India now that people are very happy to move and so it's very dynamic recruitment market in India in London I think the unemployment rate is quite low and there's an awful lot of opportunity so if you tap into the right space there's some fantastic career options for people. I'll give this interesting stat Louis I mean I have this tendency to walk around on high street and you know whenever you're on Oxford or Regent Street have a look at all the shops that you see I mean you don't have to go in but all these shops have a board outside saying we're looking for help if you want to work in retail send us your CV all the shops and I'm not exaggerating out there take Oxford street take Regent Street or take a local high street where you live as well all these shops are looking for people to work now there are two reasons why they're not getting people one obviously because the sector that they're working in or the industry is languishing and no one wants to step in right now that's one the other bit is obviously the talent that's out there doesn't want to do that because you and me remember this was while growing up probably your first job was always to go into a high street retailer and just be a sales guy you ask somebody who's getting out of college right now if they want to do that majority of them are going to say no because they're either working in a start up or they're more inclined towards doing something which is more tech backed as compared to just going into a Zara or any of these high street brands and spending a couple of months there just trying to learn the ropes of how businesses work or just getting your feed it's such fantastic experience when you're young to do that but most of these young people would probably just be buying their clothes online now exactly tough and they don't relate to that sort of experience now but obviously that's what it's all about I mean you evolve into various different sectors so today you probably have that same college person who's graduating learning about social media and how one can market his services there or multiple other career options which are now opened up which one there when we were probably getting out of college a few years back yeah I did I did so many different jobs retail barman cocktail barman warehouse stacker everything is great why is there such a great trade relationship between the UK and India it's been something which has been there for a long time Lewis and you know you're right in spotting that because when I moved for London I didn't know what's in store for me I came into the city for the first time so I didn't know what to expect but when you come here you hear about so many successful businesses that have been run by Indians not not only from India but even from East Africa or Africa for that matter and they've been here for a long time now with India evolving into a large superpower in terms of the emerging market and you know barring the old history that we already have with the British as well the business potential has really evolved massively that's seen a massive amount of jump recently with Brexit coming in there's more inclination to have other trade partners like China and India and with the Indian diaspora and how massive that is in UK there's always been that connect with operating from India so maybe the real estate industry maybe the financial services industry maybe hotels there's always been that inclination where you always seen a lot of Indian money being invested here and I'm not talking about this is 10 years or 15 I'm talking about this being here since 1950 70 or even 80 years in certain cases you got large corporates or large conglomerates that have invested in businesses in manufacturing in the UK as well there's always been that synergy because yes the technology the expertise of running industries in UK has always been a big advantage and that's always been taken back in India and there's been a sharing in terms of either helping you with manpower to run certain industries out here it's been a very mutual agreement in that sense there's been a lot of talk around visas recently since the financial crisis the UK government of almost half the amount of visas they've been issuing have we seen that drop then in engines being able to come here that's been the case but there are two other reasons as well now remember one of the biggest attractions for Indians to come to London and I'm talking more from the visa point of view has always been student visas now the two top attractions have always been United States and UK in terms of student visas with what Brexit has done in the last couple of years you've seen that trend somewhat go down a little bit because remember any student who comes down here for studying has aspirations to then get into the job market as well what Brexit has done is it's somewhere scared a lot of these students who are then looking at other opportunities so Canada here have been the big beneficiaries of this now the other bit obviously is a skilled worker who wants to come here maybe in the IT industry maybe in the NHS or doctors wherever that has still had a lot of demand but obviously with the way you know you've seen the government headlines on this it's been somewhat of a big debate even in the political circles is what I gather from my limited knowledge out here so the UK need to do a bit more in trying to attract these highly talented Indians to come work here because we will have and we do have skill shortages in these key areas so I really hope that they do more marketing in India and Aniyan the point here is not only about trying to get skilled workers to actually work in let's say the NHS or any of these large organisations it's also about what they can then build here to give you an example I mean in the early you have majority of the unicorns at some point being started by Indian founders or they have an Indian founder as part of it now if that's where the world is evolving into or that's what we're seeing you want not only the high skilled workers who want to come here and then you know work in the organisation but you also want to attract you know the brain in terms of who can you want to get that crowd in along with the workers as well and it's like if you scare one group of people you're going to scare the other group as well and I think that's where the big challenge is how do you keep a balance I mean in the UK and London we've really created a good environment for Indians to want to come work here build a life you know there's a lot of Indians here I'm not sure what the stats are but so hopefully that will continue Well definitely in fact even today you're seeing more and more people now starting to opt to just have a quick weekend or a couple of days in London a lot of you know who I interact with from Bombay what we sense is London is as busy and as vibrant as Bombay is I mean I know you haven't visited Bombay yet it's on your tour list when you go there you'll see it's as vibrant a city as what we have in London out here so a lot of people somewhere relate to London in a very positive way and that's why you see a lot of Indians in the summer I hate the cold as well you must have a busy house then all your friends coming visit they love to stay they love to come over they love to stay with us in that sense and it is something that we encourage as well because you know now that we're in London we like to have our friends over we like to invite them and we take them around in London obviously shopping is a big criteria shopping is a big agenda Is stuff cheaper here? I wouldn't know trust me I'm not a big shop I wouldn't know the pricing bit it's not about the cheaper bit it's just about more options you have it's a variety that you get in Oxford Street or Regent Street for that matter and the options that you open up here are much more as compared to what you find anywhere else in at least in India Do you feel that the economy is going to open up even more over the next 5-10 years It will and Louis as we've been discussing you've got to be patient when it comes to India I say this to everybody that looks at the India market from the investing point of view is that with India you've got to work you take 3 steps forward and 2 backward and that's how you move forward because it's one of the largest democracies that you have in the world today and it's not going to be straightforward remember there are a lot of changes that are happening in the culture you know a lot of things that the way they function traditionally are changing now with the younger generation getting more and more involved politics, government oriented jobs or even corporate sectors so that's changing and it's evolving and you've got to be patient for that change to somewhere take place so I meet a lot of people who've burned their hands in India when they invested probably in 2008 or even during the crisis but if you look at it now you need to take a fresh look because there are new companies that have come into the market there are new business houses that have now become serious players in their respective industries so if you're somebody who's looking to then look at that kind of space it has an opportunity for you but still local companies are dominating local companies are dominating because I mean with any emerging market you have that support and you have that hand holding from the government right now to more promote the local companies but remember as the aspirations grow of people as they realize that a lot of people are opting to travel abroad for example as we said for shopping you will see that you will see the government realize that they need to somewhere tap into and bring these brands locally so that the money then starts staying locally as well rather than that money then going out for shopping or just for travel and tourism is fine but they want that consumption demand to stay more local rather than international we're seeing international brands set up joint ventures to get local partners to understand the market is that the best way for them to get in yes and we've seen plenty of these partnerships in the last 10 years or so is what I would say you've got big high street brands, you've got big mega brands both I mean from US UK who signed up with local partners and they're doing test runs in certain tier 2 cities they're operating tier 1 cities as well they're doing their pilot projects right now but some brands have already given examples Zara and H&M have already become more they've spread their wings in various cities but now you're seeing other players are the local brands who are probably restricted let's say a traditional UK brand like Mulberry for example is looking at Asia as well they probably have India on their list so it's these brands which are not that larger global presence now they're starting to look at India and China as key markets I went to London Tech Week recently loads of entrepreneurs and London is a really attractive place for tech at the moment and a lot of foreign tech entrepreneurs are coming any advice on like settling in and moving from an emerging market into somewhere like this to be fair Lewis the thing is I was part of London Tech Week as well I managed to attend a few events now when you go there you see the aspirations of the entrepreneurs who've come in it's really inspiring to see what they've created it's really inspiring to see what they want to do what they want to build here as well so the good part for them is to always be aware of what you want to build stay in that sort of circle because trust me out here you've got private equity firms not only from UK you've got investors from all over the world and if you have a product which is good if you have a product which is trying to do which is trying to build something you have a lot of investors participating there and that's the only advice for these entrepreneurs because is it easier to raise money here than in Mumbai Mumbai get the technology right well it's I would say it's same because it really depends on which industry you are in because I've got somebody who's just raised a fund to invest in Indian startups in UK it's basically in the UK investing in India and the reason they're doing this is because there are a lot of firms that want to participate in the India growth story but it really depends which sector so if you're doing let's say for something on payments or if you're a fintech firm it probably would make sense to have more operations in UK because the financial inclusion is still limited when it comes to India but obviously the financial inclusion and the way you have payment services and what's being offered in London has a much bigger opportunity but at the same time if you're doing something more consumer related you probably want to be in India because that's where you have massive consumption demand which is lying there so it depends which startup you're in and which industry you're trading in but the startup as I moved just over to the startup seen in India it is a mature well developed ecosystem where you have a good business idea let's say it's in retail you need to raise some capital I won't say it's mature but it's seeing a lot of attention not only from local investors you already have a few homegrown private equity firms VCs that have already evolved over the last 5-10 years but at the same time now you've got a lot of foreign firms who are setting up in India as well because they want to participate in the startup story so it's on a mature market as yet it has a lot of potential it has a lot of people still building interesting products that are being somewhat looked at not only local firms but even VCs and private equity firms from overseas interesting and then London are trying to all they can to attract these people here that's right I mean the thing is you've got ideas and you've got products and you've got a big market that's sitting in India but obviously from an investment point of view you have to look at US or UK where you can then get the money to get you off the ground or you can get that little bit of marketing or how the expansion mode need that sort of push in terms of investors that's when you start looking overseas because yes the local participants will be there but if you really want that global presence or you want that global push you have to get some investors from overseas on board interesting thank you very much really interesting conversation good luck with all of your stuff and I'm sure we'll speak again soon thank you so much Louis for having me thank you hey folks thanks for listening don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places


actually personally or the last one because that implies it's already there okay everyone I hope you got all of your trivia answers down bring your sheets and your golf pencils to Sam to turn in all pencils please do not forget the golf pencils you hold down the button to turn them in to turn in please bring them to us here at the front quietly we are going to grade your trivia sheets during the talk and then announce the winners in between our speakers to welcome our first speaker of the night Trent Thomas Trent is a graduate student in the earth and space science department at UW and he works with Dr. David Catling right yep he's also in the astrobiology program and so please welcome all right I'm gonna move this up hey everybody thank you for coming I've never done one of these before and I didn't know this many people showed up so I'm very excited about that you can all hear me all right I could okay raise the mic better yeah yeah yeah all right I'm gonna go with that and try to speak closer into it oh yeah okay no worries okay so anyway on to the science so the name of my talk is Mars why the hype so I'm gonna talk a lot about Mars but before I get into that I do want to introduce myself so that you believe me for the next 20 minutes when I talk about Mars so my name is Trent Thomas I'm a big fan of Mars in general like Megan said I'm a PhD student at the University of Washington when I've done research on Mars for the last four or so years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and I have a paper on it I'm wearing the same jacket in that picture at a conference and all of this is here just to tell you that I really like Mars and I want you to believe me at least for the next 20 minutes so now on to the science so the name of the talk is Mars why the hype but specifically I want to answer this question for everybody why do we spend so much time and money studying Mars over the last couple weeks I've like subtly polled my friends and family who aren't you know weird space people and I found that they have vague answers to this question like you know they know some general things but once you really ask about it I realize people might not know exactly why everyone cares about Mars so much and so my goal here is to demystify that for everybody so first I want to actually talk about how much time and money do we spend on Mars so if you break it down by number of NASA missions by destination so this is in the history of NASA from about 1960 Mars is by far our most common destination and it's more than double the second most common destination which is Venus so over 38 times just NASA alone has gone to Mars and when you expand beyond NASA to the world and all the other countries that have a space program there's over 50 missions starting from 1960 that have gone to Mars and they've gone in different capacities there's been flyby missions where you know a spacecraft kind of just zips past and tries to take pictures of the surface has been orbiters that stay a while and take better pictures and better measurements and there's also the landers and the rovers which are oftentimes the fan favorites so curiosity in 2012 shout out if you got the trivia question right and then perseverance right now is landed last year and is getting great results and then this trend is here to stay in the next couple decades one of the top priority missions for NASA is Mars sample return where we're going to bring rocks back from Mars and this is you know decades in the making this is a super complex intense mission and just to say that this trend of studying Mars is ongoing and you can also break it down by funding so NASA robotic missions so non crude missions which may not have a scientific motivation maybe geopolitical if you break it down by destination Mars we've got we've spent the most money by a lot we spent 29 billion dollars adjusted for inflation on Mars in the last 60 years since the space program started but for context this is just a drop in the bucket the total cost of the perseverance rover is 2.7 billion dollars from design to construction to launch and operation for a couple years on Mars this is exactly equivalent to running the Department of Defense for 33 hours or Disney's global box office revenue from Avengers Endgame so it may seem like a lot of money but it's really a drop in the bucket and just a couple more hours of the Department of Defense would go a long way for scientific discovery on Mars so anyway just keep that in mind so I hope I've shown you we do spend a lot of time and money studying Mars so now I'm gonna get into the meat of exactly why we've done all this why we sent NASA alone a cent 38 missions and we spent 29 billion dollars so I'm gonna break it down into three reasons so one Mars is close to Mars is easy to study and three Mars is scientifically interesting so first Mars close so this figure is showing the travel times to the different planets in the solar system from Earth and this is based on previous missions that have been launched so starting with the furthest up planets the giant planets Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune they're all six years or more away by mission now other missions like the Voyager spacecraft for example have gotten there a lot faster in fraction of fractions of these times listed however they're fly by missions and they zipped right past all these planets and just got some nice pictures for us however if you want to design a mission to orbit these planets or land on one of the moons of these planets you have to take into into consideration that you need to speed up and then slow down and both of these processes require a lot of fuel which is weight on your spacecraft and the engineers when they are trying to design these missions have to take that into account and that goes into the long travel times on the other hand Mercury on the inside is also about six years or more away but that's actually due to a different reason it's because as you get closer to the Sun your spacecraft gets sped up and so you have to spend a lot more time trying to slow down with different maneuvers this leaves the three planets in the middle here well yeah Venus Mars and the moon are all very good targets simply because they're close this travel time matters a lot because when we're designing scientific missions space exploration missions I would generally design them in a sequence so we're gonna launch one mission Matt get all the science we can't out of that one mission regroup and then design another one to launch and so you can't really watch them in parallel or else you'll waste resources and time so the difference in these travel time five years to Jupiter for example really adds up when you want to send a lot of missions to one place so the second point is that Mars is easy to study so these planets are not Mars but these planets are hard to study so Venus for example has 92 times Earth's atmosphere pressure and it is 870 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface so we've tried to send a few things to Venus and they've melted the longest a spacecraft has lasted on Venus's surface is like 10 minutes so very difficult to study Venus the outer planets Saturn Uranus and Neptune are giant balls of gas so they don't have a surface you just go deeper in and it just gets like foggier and like maybe like kind of wet like it's just you can't like land on them and finally the icy moons so Enceladus and Europa which are moons of Saturn and Jupiter these guys are really interesting because they have you know giant oceans underneath the thick shell of ice and we want to study them but that ice shell is actually very thick it's more than five kilometers thick and a lot more than five kilometers thick in a lot of places we've only successfully drilled about a kilometer into ice on Earth and that's with all of our resources so the ocean is very inaccessible so this leaves Mars and Mars is very comfortable it has less than 1% of Earth's atmospheric pressure so it's not going to crush your spacecraft it is a warm negative 80 degrees Fahrenheit so colder than this Antarctica and cold temperatures like this are actually very good for spacecraft they keep the electronics cool so Mars is comfortable for our rovers but even more than that Mars is easy to study because Mars surface records the entire 4.5 billion year history of the planet so what do I mean by this on Earth you know we have a lot of water a very active water cycle we have plate tectonics we have plants we have people and we all modify the surface of Earth and erode it away so when a mountain forms on Earth geologically speaking it gets eroded down to a flat plane very quickly and so this is a problem when we're trying to study you know the ancient part of Earth's history this is not a problem on Mars has been dry for most of its history and it preserves all of the features that like pop up throughout its history so we can study the whole thing because the surface preserves everything and the surface preserves a lot of really interesting stuff Mars is an extremely dynamic and evolving planet so you know sometimes Mars may appear as just a rock but it has an active interior and this yields a lot of interesting things so first there's plenty of volcanism throughout Mars history and it's home to the largest volcano in the solar system Olympus Mons and there are Mars quakes and that is a measurement of one that is the data from the inside lander that we've measured an earthquake on another planet Mars has a very interesting magnetic field that was stronger in its early times in week now and Mars atmosphere has been stripped over the course of its history it used to be thick and now it is very thin because it's been bombarded by solar radiation all of these processes are fundamental to how planets work and they also occur in our related to earth there's a volcano erupting in Hawaii right now we discover where we most of you have probably experienced an earthquake and our atmosphere hasn't been lost to space because we have a better magnetic field than Mars and furthermore the an interesting thing to study about Mars is the difference between the three interplanets in our solar system so Earth and Mars Venus like I said will melt your spacecraft it is has a runaway greenhouse effect it's very hot earth is temperate and rich with water and Mars is a dry desert what's really interesting is that all three of these planets have a common origin they formed under a very similar set of circumstances at the beginning of the solar system so answering the question why they diverge so intensely is a big question and still unanswered and moreover this question is even more important because we live in a golden age of exoplanet astronomy so we've just so exoplanets are planets orbiting other stars when you look up at all the stars odds are that basically all of them have other planets orbiting them similar to the solar system and and the James Webb Space Telescope which a lot of you are also probably familiar with is now giving us incredible resolution when we try to study these things and we can learn much more about than we ever have before so when we look at planets that are similar to Earth and Mars but they're not and they're orbiting other stars it's really helpful to understand how those planets work in our own solar system okay the last thing that's interesting about Mars is that there was water on ancient Mars this is arguably the most interesting thing I might be a little biased but to show you how we know this I have a couple pictures up here so this picture on the left is a River Delta from Siberia on Earth and the River Delta is when a river empties out onto a plane or small body of water and dumps out all the sediment that it was carrying in a fan structure like this now if you dried up this River Delta and let it sit there for a few billion years that is what it would look like and these pictures are from from Mars Jezero crater and from Eberswald crater you can tell just by looking at their shapes and if that doesn't convince you enough we've chemically analyzed the minerals in these deltas and found things like clays and carbonates which can only form in the presence of liquid water and we found much more features than just these deltas we found canyons carved out by ancient rivers this is on Mars and we found valley net which are kind of chains of rivers put together and evidence like this is discovered every day this paper was literally published last week a week ago and these are new results from the perseverance are over finding more evidence that there was water in Mars's past okay there was water what does that mean who cares well surface liquid water is extremely rare in the solar system and for that matter as far as we know the universe so on earth for example water we have oceans of water it doesn't freeze nor does it boil because earth isn't too hot or too cold this we take this for granted everywhere else in the solar system on the surface of the planets and the moons this is not the case I mentioned those icy moons earlier with subsurface oceans those are underground those are completely different than the surface environment that we know the only other place we know in the history of the solar system I'm just going to keep extrapolating to the universe is ancient Mars is the only other earth like environment that we could ever study and the presence of liquid water is extremely important when looking at this because all life on earth requires liquid water so this is kind of a smorgasbord of different environments on earth and all of which are inhabited by microbes so we have acid mine drainage deserts nuclear waste hot springs volcanoes sea ice hyper acidic lakes like the deep ocean all of these places are inhabited by microbes under the wide range of chemical conditions the one thing that they all have in common is that all of the microbes require water we've never discovered a microbe on earth that can live and grow and survive without liquid water and so this sets up you know the huge question about Mars was ancient Mars habitable and if it was was it inhabited this is in my opinion the big question of why we keep going back to Mars and it's unanswered only because it's so complicated there are so many things that go into answering this question we need to know you know how much water exactly was there what was the temperature of the surface what was the atmosphere made of was there a water cycle how big was the atmosphere why did it all change why does Mars look so different today when did it change and if it was inhabited how did organisms live there they have survived until today when people are looking for life on Mars today or when people are talking about discovering methane or something on Mars that might indicate life generally they're thinking it's life left over from this ancient Martian habitat where it was similar to earth so in general we keep going back to Mars to kind of piece by piece chip away at this big question by answering all of these small ones and so to summarize here Mars is an extraordinary laboratory for answering fundamental questions about life in the universe and planetary science it's good thing it's our neighbor that's it thank you so much oh i answered questions right any questions okay yeah i think if there's questions i'll answer them right is that what we do yeah uh yeah you were first like like gas is coming from a hydrothermal vent yeah um well so Mars is interesting because it doesn't really have plate tectonics and it's geologically very different so we don't have any evidence for those specific things on on Mars no oh oh yeah sorry the question was is there evidence for minerals coming from hydrothermal vents on Mars right is that yeah so um you know in general like the reason hydrothermal vents are thought of as a good place for life to exist or originate is because you get some you get an energy flux there you get heat coming from the interior causing you know a chemical soup that's highly reactive and can give you all the energy you need for life so while like hydrothermal vents aren't on Mars because there's no water right now like we haven't seen anything like that and plate tectonics is a little different we do hypothesize about like underground environments where it could you know feast off of like a pocket of water or brine um and use you know some geothermal heating there to survive but there's no there's no direct evidence kind of linking that environment to Mars uh yeah oh the giant canyon on Mars um okay he asked me to describe the giant canyon on Mars i'm actually not sure exactly where that came from i know it's bigger than the grand canyon um i don't know exactly what drove that process though i don't think it was erosion i think it was just part of you know different volcanoes and things happening sorry about that yeah that is a fantastic question um so the question was about material being exchanged between uh earth and Mars so like meteorites have been exchanged we have martian meteorites for example and we've sent spacecraft to Mars and so does this make it difficult to you know learn about life in the universe if it's there's like this kind of contamination problem and the answer is absolutely um when we send spacecraft to Mars uh there's a very specific set of protocols we have to do to the spacecraft and related to planetary protection so we have to like sterilize the hell out of the spacecraft we have to like you know do all these processes to try to kill all of the microbes that live on our spacecraft so we don't launch them to Mars and like inhabit Mars on our own which we've inevitably kind of done already with all of the spacecraft we've sent um ways to like mitigate that uh for example are when we choose uh our landing spots for our rovers planetary protection is one of like the paramount um considerations you don't want to choose an environment that like where our microbes could just like hop off the spaceship and then like start a whole community um so there's still like you would think we've sent our rovers to the most like optimal and interesting locations but there's actually a few that are even more interesting we just haven't gone there because we want to make sure that we don't contaminate them i hope that answered it cool autumn mm-hmm yeah so Mars is really interesting so plate tectonics if there are people who are not familiar with it um is kind of the um the geologic engine of earth for example um it's where you know we have a bunch of plates floating along the surface these are like the giant plates and when they bump into each other they cause earthquakes one will dip below another and cause volcanoes it's responsible for a lot of the things you see and a lot of geologic phenomena you see on earth and the question is did Mars have plate tectonics um and the answer is i don't really know and i don't think nobody anybody knows um Mars is really interesting um because uh it's actually it's a little bit smaller than earth and that may seem like a superficial difference but it's very important um the size of Mars means that its interior is actually significantly less active than earth's so early in Mars history there's a lot of geologic activity um it had you know overturning and may have had something similar to plate tectonics for like a second um but definitely not over long periods of time no yeah yeah okay so the question was uh what evidence or clues point to Mars having an atmosphere um ancient mars having an atmosphere so uh the first and most like kind of simplest line of evidence is actually the evidence for water so if there's evidence for water flowing on mars's surface that implies a very specific temperature range it can't be too cold it can't be too hot as i've said before um Mars is you know a little bit further from the sun than the earth and without an atmosphere just like it is today it'd be too cold water would freeze there's no water on the surface right now it'll it'll freeze on the surface um and so really the only way that has not been ruled out right now to keep ancient mars's surface warm is a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect so for example maybe as thick as our atmosphere but made entirely of carbon dioxide um or other greenhouse gases like methane or uh hydrogen um and this is consistent with um the uh what we observe about atmospheric loss today on Mars so Mars is very thin atmosphere but we can see it being stripped away constantly by the solar wind and if you extrapolate this back in time you can you know build up to how much there should have been if this is how much you've been losing over time um and additionally ancient mars had the magnetic field which protected it so the atmospheric loss wasn't happening uh more early in the solar system yeah one more very done one more uh yeah um so yes so Mars's atmosphere is being stripped away first of all just because so the sun is the solar wind is just a stream of high intensity light and charged particles just constantly being fired at all of the planets in the solar system and so planets with magnetic fields like earth for example you know standard with a compass there's a magnetic field um it protects the planet from uh that solar wind and our atmosphere is eroded very little like so our atmosphere is protected but other planets um like like the small planets that you expect not to have an atmosphere um that have like a very thin atmosphere like some of the outer moons for example like Io um are subject to that solar wind just bombarding them and ejecting um their atmosphere it's it should be prevalent in almost all the planets the question is just to what degree exactly yeah okay thank you everybody okay now we're gonna go through the trivia answers and i'm gonna announce the trivia winners after that we're going to move on to Chester Lee for our final talk of the night just to remind you if you win trivia please wait until after the second talk to come get your prize um additionally once i finish with the trivia answers we're gonna take a five to ten minute break so everybody can get more beer okay question one in 2012 curiosity rover lands it on mars i'm pretty sure Trent told us that so well done if you got it uh the surface of venus is hotter than the surface of mercury this is due to its atmosphere um mars's moons are phobos and demos as half hall discovered uh the two satellites of mars laurence of arabia had the same setting as the martian in kelly kentucky is where the little green men day's festival takes place seddy stands for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence uh the main field of studies activity is to search for radio signals of extraterrestrial civilization so technologically advanced civilizations uh in the drake equation covers the number of alien civilizations in the galaxy that can come in contact with us so that can communicate and finally tau study and epsilon erin danie i can't pronounce that uh initiative uh was studied by frank drink and the osma experiment uh for finding signals that could come from stars okay so now i'm gonna announce the trivia winners we have one ultimate winner that got eight answers right and we have three winners that got seven answers right so four people or groups of people get a prize okay so starting with the seven answer winners the first person is uh blues clues yeah do the thing okay the second winner is solar man the third winner is kitten mittens yeah like this okay and the ultimate winner that got answers right is downhill romance nice okay so now we're gonna take a five to ten minute break and finish with our last talk of the night thank you thank you davis drinks um vickersans wanted me to announce that laugh just so you know it'd be my pleasure to announce our final speaker of the evening uh chester lee is going to be talking about hunting some little green men he is a graduate student in the u-dub astronomy department um and and with that i'll bring on chester who's chester i was talking to myself into a corner all right is it on all right hello everyone i'm a chester i'm a first year agrest students and uh i know you're all excited about learning more about ufo's and aliens so we are gonna get to it all right so before we get into the the juicy details let me share a story first so this is um giostro tree national park is located very close to los angeles uh as you can see that is uh there is pretty far away from seattle and this on the right is called a light pollution map and depending on the color of it you can see that how bad the light pollution is and pink is the worst so you can see that in the city centers those are those have some pretty bad light pollution but um one thing about giostro tree is that is located in a uh slightly less light polluted area so people go there to stargaze a lot which is um so there are some uh giostro trees and some rocks but other than that is not an exciting place i gotta tell you that and that was this though trees and the rocks was not the reason i went there i went there to stargaze okay i went there to see the milky way so on july 5th 2022 it was new moon so that means that it's a basically a moonless night because you want to see this nice guy when there's no moon because moon just get annoying sometimes because it's just obscure all the nice details of the universe so on this moonless night i went on a stargazing trip with my friends two other friends so we were driving along here along the path here maybe it's hard to see here but it's here so this is the car here and i show you the campus here so this upper is north uh left is west and uh right side is east so i was driving and i was uh to my left is east so i was driving along this pretty dark path and then i i noticed something different something weird i just saw that there was a fire on the mountain i was like that is interesting but then my friend just told me that there was no mountain okay i was like what is that it doesn't look like jupiter mars i mean okay this is a this is just a weird thought i put in it's not real okay it's not the photo i took so it just i just wanted to show you that this is what i feel like i saw i saw like a orange bright spot in the sky i was like how could something be so bright it was brighter than venus which is one of the brightest object in the sky i was like all right you know what time to trust the technology and i pull i pull up this sky view app which many of you may know is basically an argument that reality app that you use to basically look at the constellations and look at the stars and different planets to locate them so i tried to match this orange bright spots with some celestial object that i could find on the app you know what i couldn't find anything it was just there i mean okay by this time i already parked the car because i was like that's kind of weird i gotta i gotta see what the hell that it was okay so i and then we stopped the car we look at it and then it started moving okay and it was moving towards it basically zoom across the sky in 20 seconds this is not ordinary stuff okay how could something zoom across the entire sky in 20 seconds and it and i was like that's interesting but i heard some engine sound i saw some green flashes when it flew by i was like oh yeah that was just airplane there's helicopter there's no way but then okay here's some some some observational facts that we know okay we're scientists here we got we're gonna make some scientific arguments for the for the stuff we saw so it was bright orange which is very unusual because you know that airplanes they don't have the colors they usually have red or green so it moves pretty fast and i heard some engine sound and have some green flashes okay those are comprehensible we can understand those but the weird part is that why was why was orange and why could it stay on the sky for like stationary for a long time because before i stopped the car it was like basically stayed at the same location of the sky and it only moved started moving after we we parked okay all right i i would give you some time to to think about it during my presentation at the end we will review some what what it actually is okay all right actually get get get out of the conspiracy we're gonna go back to science okay all right so this is the jake equation it is basically a random theoretical completely theoretical equation that it basically pops out of nowhere okay it's it's not scientifically based to be honest because uh let's let's take a look at this equation okay so the end which is the end results is the number of technologically advanced civilization that we can find in our galaxy and which is equal to a bunch of numbers multiplied together so let's take a look at each of them so first is the star formation rate in a galaxy and the second one is the fraction of those stars that have planets and going more into that we we have to this number n e which is the number of planets in that solar system and then we have the fraction of those planets that can potentially have those environments for the polite to develop and then we have the the fraction of those planets that actually have life and then that the the fraction that those life can actually intelligence and then go on into those life can release some some detectable signals that we can detect and also very important the last one is the length of time of the survival time of this civilization okay so those number both to all multiply together we can get a number of how many civilization that we expect to have that we can detect in our own Milky Way okay let's let's plug in some actual numbers because we we are astronomers right we all love numbers and equations and math all right so i have provided two possible numbers here and one of them is the lower limits and one of them is the upper limits and so let's say we have 1.5 star forming in our galaxy each year lower upper bound is three per year and then we have these three weird numbers multiplied together equal either a very small number or a pretty large number and then we have those other numbers same thing and then we have like we speculate that for the last variable we can suspect that 300 years is how long a civilization can last while is admitting signal to the to the universe or it can be up to a pretty long time depending on how long the civilization can last so let's hope earth can last long enough to to be detected by alien first but all those numbers we've been multiplying them together we can get to lower we can get a lower bound and the upper bound so the lower bound is we can we expect to find 9.2 times 10 to the negative 13 civilizations in our galaxy what does it mean that means that we are the only one we we are basically the only one in the entire galaxy or the entire universe possibly so that is the lower bound so what about upper bound upper bound is 1.56 million civilizations in our own Milky Way can you can you believe that of course not because we haven't found aliens yet but uh okay so those are our expectations supposedly uh you have to remember the assumption that this equation is completely makeup so okay but anyways they could be out there so the next question is how do we hang them down that is the the science that they're going to get into today so for the most part of my talk it's going to be about technical signature is here's the definition is basically any measurable property or effect that provides scientific scientific okay remember that evidence of the past or present technology so it's basically as you see in this picture here it could be some space junk that we always produce every year every day or it could be some signals that we're going to get into in the next slide okay so the first one is something called a Dyson spear I actually some of you may have heard of that before so the idea is it's basically a mega structure that is created by some pretty awent civilization to harvest the energy of a sunlight star and how do we do that we basically put a lot of solar panels around the star and that's how we do it okay I mean that's how it's derelized to be done and those solar panels or solar energy collectors would then surround the whole sun and then just get all the energy because we know the energy is pretty important otherwise we wouldn't be going into the Middle East right so this is our solution okay this is our future solution to how to solve the energy crisis and this is actually there was a paper about this by Freeman Dyson in 1960 it's an actual published paper that I just realized today because I love it up today I was preparing to talk but it was the title was search for artificial stellar sources of infrared radiation and put it in a simple way is how the heck do we find aliens near this kind of Dyson spear so how does it work why does it have to do with infrared radiation okay so we got to get into this concept of a black body radiation it's some pretty physics term so imagine you have an object it can also everything can absorb some kind of energy and then it would get heated up because of the energy it absorbs and then it would readmit those energy in some kind of different wavelength so if you look at the heaters around you you can see that there's a tube around the fire and the tube is actually absorbed absorbing some kind of and those energy from the fire and in fact the tube because of those energy absorb it it would admit readmit those radiate those energy in a different wavelength and uh sometimes you can see them if they got hot enough so but sometimes they don't but so the rate the the idea is that those kind of solar panels or materials that we use to surround those the sunlight uh solar sunlight star it would absorb some kind of energy from the sun the sunlights and then re-radiate those energy and the radiated energy the wavelength of that light is depending on the composition the material that it made of and the temperature of the collectors and based on some after some physical calculations we can calculate that those re-radiated energy would be mostly in the wavelength of infrared okay so now you know why we have to look for some excess infrared radiation because those those sources could be Dyson spears created by some advanced civilizations so i was not joking this is a scientific topic because people have actually studied them and try to look for Dyson spears using some many uh different instruments and the first group is this uh Fermilab which is pretty popular it is a um particle accelerator lab at uh in Illinois and uh they were used in 2005 they were using the IRAS which is also called the infrared astronomical satellites to look at all of those potential uh Dyson spears by looking at the infrared radiation and they found seven of them does it mean that we found aliens no because they were called some potential ambiguous candidates and four of them were uh were so-called amusing but questionable but uh till today we have not confirmed any of those infrared sources are Dyson spears but then let's go to the next group which is 2015 planet hunters um it is a uh citizen science projects that are a bunch of citizen sciences they are trying to use some Kepler telescope data to find exoplanets and they notice some kind of weird life fluctuation in this star with the name k-i-c-a-4-6-2-a-5-2 yeah star usually have some kind of weird names because there are just way too many of them so they were using this Kepler Kepler space telescope it was um it was launched to discover earth-like exoplanets so it detected this source and then after uh so two years later in 2017 a nature paper was published denying the possibility of a potential Dyson spear source why was that because they discovered that the fluctuations were consistent with the dimming due to dust absorption so once again our uh our hope for finding finding those events Dyson spear was removed so that that was the attempts or there are always more attempts to find those events Dyson spears and uh let's go to the next topic the another example of techno signatures which is radio signals that we basically use every day communication broadcasting radar gps or your wi-fi you're using radio signal all the time so assuming that there is another civilization that is very similar to the human race that we use radio a lot to communicate or to do whatever you want one hope is to find those radio signal emitted by some kind of extraterrestrial life so that is another approach of finding aliens in outer space and how did we do that of course we use radio telescopes so radio telescopes are similar but different from the conventional telescope that you think about okay it is good it means that they can operate 24-7 you don't have to wait till night time to turn on the the regular optical telescope and the fact is that they do not take images okay they do not take like a nice image of the stars or the sky they record the radio signals and convert them by computers into some kind of plot that you can see and they can basically see tens of thousands of light years away so it's a pretty good tool for looking for an extraterrestrial radio wave and people use them to study pre-zards I mean post-ars black holes and a cosmic microwave background and and also people use that for SETI which is search for extraterrestrial intelligence and in this kind of weird place kind of some kind of wilderness in America West Virginia and Virginia here we have this so-called national radio quiet zone what does it mean that means that there's no wi-fi there oops that means that there's no wi-fi there and radio is is not permitted because they have to focus on research they have a bunch of those large radio telescopes located in this national radio quiet zone which people used to do a lot of research on stars aliens and stuff like that so this is going to get into the yep that's right this is going to get into the the work that I worked on about two years ago so I was I was at UCLA as an undergrad and I was in this SETI group it was led by professor John Luke Margo and there was only one mission one only one goal to find aliens the first evidence of other civilizations and uh how do we do that so first we have to identify the candidates because in order for us to to look at them we have to first identify them and see which ones are the the one with most the with the highest probability of finding alien life okay so we look at a bunch of stars we have to look at the size of a of the habitable zone which is the size of the the radius in which liquid water can exist on a planetary surface like thanks uh transfer explaining all those stuff before so that was um we first we need uh some water because we just assumed that water is necessary we don't know that if that's true but we say that that's the case and also we have to look at the spectral type of the star that is basically um what is the color of the star and how massive it is and because we know that there is a relationship between the mass of the stars and the lifetime of the stars so in this figure here we can see that the x axis is basically the the mass of the star compared to our sun and then the y axis is the lifetime of the star okay so we can see that our sun which is around here has a pretty good lifetime of about 10 billion years and if you go to lower massive star they actually have a much longer lifetime which allows for life to develop for a longer period of time but if you go to the the massive stars and you can see that those massive stars they are pretty they have a pretty short life because they burn their fuel so quickly so one of the requirement that we look for those good candidates for to point a telescope at is that we have to look for stars with about the same mass as our sun or lower mass so those are two of the requirements that we look for of course we have some other requirements okay so the second now we got the targets all we need to do is to move the telescope to point at it and to observe it of course we're gonna we're gonna use the big boy the big 100 meter telescope the big 100 meter green bank telescope so on so we were scheduled to observe at one p.m. specific standard time on Wednesday April 22nd 2020 so it was about one and two years ago but then something unexpected happened of course every every time you try to do something exciting there's always something accidentally gonna happen okay so we were notified that the sub reflector of the telescope which you can see it this is this little thing at the top here it has some malfunction and we spend a lot of money okay so before we get into the money part so it's like that when we get those telescope time sometimes you can pay money to get time to pay money to get them to observe something for you so this is a project that we we got to get some donors to donate some money to for us to have some telescope time so the time was kind of expensive and then if this telescope was malfunctioned that means that we're going to lose those telescope time but the on-site director of the telescope was pretty generous and after two hours of repairments the telescope finally went back to work and we were finally ready to observe those the targets that we wanted so at the end the observation went pretty well we observed 16 so extra solar systems so basically 16 solar system with stars and planets and that that day we collected so much data that required 48 hours to transport the data all the way from the telescope to our supercomputers at the rates of 20 megabyte per second that was about 3500 gigabytes so it's i mean it's like a few of your computer assuming you have like a like a one pair of a computer so there was a lot of data so what what do we do with them and how do we find aliens out of those data we got to go to some some some boring data pipeline okay of course it's not like once you once you point a telescope at the target and then you get the data and then you're done no you got to reduce the data which means that you got to calibrate the data you got to extract the useful infinite information you got to remove all the junk all the misleading information from the from the original raw data so we got to go through a bunch of unpacking the data doing some Fourier transform and we got to do some calibration and then we got to set up some filters to remove the bad data points or the the bad signals that we detected because over that day we detected millions of signals in that one single day and we cannot say that we found millions of aliens because that's not the case at most they would be most likely there would be none but we were hoping to find the one that we wanted and so one of my tasks was my part at this project was improving the ETI filters so ETI stands for extra-terrestrial intelligence filters so I had to write some code to remove some some kind of false positive results from this database and at the end oh yeah I forgot to mention that I also signed non-disclosure agreements before I start the project well I think I'm just not supposed to tell you the code but I think everything else is fine yes all right so I worked on some code to set up some kind of filter and then we look for aliens did we find anything I don't know all right so as I said before the radio telescope they do not take images they record the signals and this is what you get this is what you get from from the recording is you can see that a bunch of noise and by performing some some Fourier transform some some kind of weird frequency time transformation we can extract the signal from those from these weird pictures which is kind of useless and we can see that did we detect an extra-terrestrial signal did we so we have to see the signal in two different scans which means that first we move to the target we take an image we move off the target take an image and then we move back to the target take an image so we have two images of the same targets and if the signal is presented at both scans or both images that means that there's some kind of potential candidates of somewhat of weird signal we detected okay and sometimes that could be due to wi-fi or satellites or or some kind of weird interference even though is a united states national product zone there's all this sometimes some other some other signals so that's why we take two separate images to confirm that we have a confidence source and at the end one of the people in the class actually found something interesting and then i finished the class so i never get any update right i i do not know if we found alien but as i assume no i assume no because otherwise it would be on the news okay yeah so there there are always something interesting out of the pool of like millions of signals because they're the base is just too high there are just two way too many signals that it's just easy to find something weird and something interesting but it's just hard to follow up on those to see that if they are actually indeed true signal so that was that part and that was this was the people that i i've worked with and a professor and that's me with the pandemic haircut here that you know okay so that was the parts about techno signatures basically looking for the the evidence of past or present technology and there's some another approach that people usually use uh many people in our media of our astrobiology friends they're looking for a biosignature which is basically some kind of molecules or some kind of fossil i mean fossil is is way too way too far but some kind of molecules or stuff substance that could only be produced by life and uh that's how we look for life in some pretty far distant exoplanets that uh just pretty far away but i'm not going to get into that today because that's going to be hopefully going to be another future astronaut talk so stay on check for that okay enough of this science thing let's get back to conspiracy okay okay i i i think that many of you have heard of this last year i mean this year so this year may 17 there was this first public congressional hearing about ufo or they changed it into ua o something unverified area yeah that that one so i don't know why they changed the name but so anyway so they have this first public talk in 50 years and they reported 400 one and 400 size things of uvfo and they have about 11 near misses with the u.s navy um airplanes or fighter jets so why did that give why was this happening in because it never occurred before in 50 years and now all of a sudden it's just like let's give a talk about ufo are they looking for more funding probably it doesn't mean that there's alien or is it a national security threat so i was actually just talking to my undergrad professor during Thanksgiving of course after the dinner after the nice Thanksgiving dinner we've got to sit down have a few drinks and talk about aliens right because that's what astronomers do okay right of course so we were just talking about this it was just some kind of funny things that we always talk about about are those ufo real or are they just some kind of weird weird um we are playing from another countries and i really like one of the argument that my my professor make just basically that if our enemies i'm not gonna i'm not gonna name the countries but if our enemies have have those advanced technology why don't they just take care i mean why don't they just take over the world already because there's no way that you have us can can uh can uh battle the uh come back against those weird flying machines because right and uh why don't we take a look at this congressional hearing video okay this is from nbc news right all right right so those those are UFO here okay yep yep the pentagon yes okay they are flying okay they are green they are triangular they are flashing so conclusion is that we have those weird size sightings of the some ua uap and oh you're right and and we don't know what the hell those are so we need more money to figure out those all right so that was the conclusion of this but one weird part of it is that they have actually recordings of those kind of flying objects that does not have some heat exhaust i mean they have infrared cameras on on the on the fighter jet for sure right so why don't they see any kind of heat getting radiated because of the engine or something from this kind of airplanes and and why can they just like levitate for a long time or why can they dive into the water because we know that our fighter jet probably cannot do that now or maybe maybe they're hiding something but those are some weird parts of those uh so-called UFO videos that we cannot explain but uh yeah i i don't know maybe you you have an answer but uh we i just want to put this on the table that it you realize that there's there's something out there and we don't understand what those are could those be aliens i don't know could those be humans i don't know but uh hopefully with the more funding they can find out soon okay oh okay all right back we are near the end of my talk so let's let's go back to the to the to the weird stuff i saw earlier in uh joshua tree national park so here was the reminder of what i observed and what are some weird confusions because some of the questions i got okay so let's let's make some educated guess see what what could those be okay first maybe it's a helicopter right because it uh it can for sure levity on the sky okay and it can flashes okay but it could not for sure it cannot fly across the sky in 20 seconds i i don't think that's the case okay so what about some airplanes because when it flew by i heard some engine sound and it flashes and it's food and it flew really fast so maybe it's an airplane okay so there's a second possibility what about a third one um maybe it's a fighter jets but it doesn't make sense that the fighter jet is so bright right you know you're not you're not going to just tell the enemies that you are here for them to attack you right okay yeah i agree i don't think that's the case which brought me to the last probable results which is not UFO might be a rocket and i think it might be the most convincing answer for what i saw first of all is kind of orange because of those combustion and then second of all it's pretty fast um maybe maybe it flashes i don't know so that is the the most plausible answer that i think about maybe it's a rocket because there are some rocket launching site near just retreat national park so yeah so i think that the one or maybe is a UFO who knows okay okay all right maybe it's a UFO so let's take a look at this this this uh this source the source is a national UFO reporting center it's pretty reliable okay we can 100 trust that okay so this is uh on the on x axis is the year number of year and then on the y axis is the reported incidence of UFO we can see that it was increasing over time and it peaked about 2013 or 14 and then the UFO just went home all of a sudden there's a there's a there's a certain job in the reported UFO cases for some reason we don't know and then we went back again went went went back up again i don't know for some reason so so as a citizen or just like not a scientist or you are a scientist how do we find that i have proposed some solution we need that okay okay okay okay so let me tell you why okay so we have been seeing i mean people have been seeing UFO for for decades but then all the videos and images they took are kind of crap why because we need this kind of lens camera on your phone all the time okay we need those technologies to to to get a good picture of your bow okay but more than that we need this we need that in front of everyone all the time so we don't we never miss them okay every time they appear we catch them we we hung them down okay so those are the three the two proposed solution i got how do we find more of the UFO and that concludes my talk thank you so much all right any questions yes all right yes the question is that do we need more money or resources for finding those UFO i absolutely agree that we need to pay we need to get more funding for the grad student to to get on those targets that's for sure yes right okay yeah the question is that are we have more telescope coming soon to uh more radio telescope to detect those signals dancers yes i think the the next generation telescope is going to call the alien telescope or the ellen telescope i think it's probably alien telescope right so it's i think it's a i i i i i was looking up today is a an array of telescope that is going to be focused on uh directly focused on satay so it was built is it is it is getting built not sure how long it takes but it's getting built so it's going to be solely focused on satay i'm not sure but if you look up like alien tells alien radio telescope and you can find them yes right yes that's a good question right so when we make those filters um to to uh filter out those false positive for our radio signals uh one group of students we're actually looking out on cross matching the satellites and that is the the the answer to that question yes there people always work on cross matching satellites and the signals so we can remove those kind of trash out of our our database uh yes autumn well if it's not the not a good one we wouldn't be using that so yes all the way back there yes okay the question is that how long does our radio signal propagate before it becomes noise that is a good question and i forgot the answer about that but there is a limits to how uh to how long how far you can propagate i just forgot sorry yes well there's you know there's also litter man well i don't know that there's just something out of our curiosity about space i mean otherwise i wouldn't be studying astronomy otherwise all the students here wouldn't be studying astronomy astral biology right it's just our human fascination about space i want to learn more okay yes last question right i think many people have make that argument before about not looking for alien life it was uh was steven hawking in one of them or not right yeah i i don't know but maybe but anyways thank you everyone for coming to the talk and have a good night next astral okay the next the next astral tap and the final astral tab of 2022 is going to be on december 28th the week after christmas here at bickersons starting again at 7 p.m and then keep an eye on our social media because we have something really big in the works for january as there's a massive uh astronomy conference being held here and so we'll have guest speakers and i think two separate events so keep your eyes on our social medias and follow them if you don't um so let's just thank our speakers one more time treta and chester everybody get home safe stay warm and if you want trivia come get your prize


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