This is one of those fundamental mysteries

that I think is going to bother us

until we have systematically explored

every planet in our solar system and every world beyond

and either found that life or ruled it out.

Because we want to know; are we alone?

It was Fermi who first put it bluntly:

Why in a universe so full of stars we didn't see,

well, evidence that aliens had colonized the solar systems

as readily as humanity has colonized

every square scrap of land on this planet?

And the fact that we don't see life

and we're finding now, planet, after planet, after planet,

raises the terrifying possibility

that either life is extraordinarily rare

or really good at killing itself off.

How would the discovery of intelligent life

change the way we view our position in the universe?

We see, in movie, after movie, after movie,

this transcendent moment where people have this,

the universe is so much greater than we are realization.

That of course, is the grand gesture way.

Because in all likelihood,

when we do first detect intelligent life

it's going to be something so far away

we can't communicate with it, we can't go visit it,

that people are like, 'meh, that's good,'

and then they're just gonna move on with their day.

Already people see the discovery of another planet

as just another day.

What are the current, the most exciting

efforts going on right now in terms of hunting

for any kind of extraterrestrial life?

There are teams, recently a group in Japan did models

looking at what has our planet looked like

in each of its phases of evolution.

When the JWST finally is able to launch some day,

it may be able to look at alien atmospheres and say,

there be things that are like trees.

And this world, it looks like it has a bunch of people

that pollute the same way we do.

This may be the first way we discover intelligence,

is through the pollution they leave in their atmosphere.

Well, simultaneous to all this, of course,

has been China's rise as a superpower.

has been China's rise as a superpower. How has that affected the world's

How has that affected the world's

search for extraterrestrial life?

They are systematically building space stations

and looking forward to going to the Moon.

While on the ground they're building great new telescopes,

including the single largest radio dish in the world.

This is a facility that takes the idea

of the Arecibo radio dish that we've seen in so many movies,

whether it be Contact or James Bond,

this giant dish in the mountains in Puerto Rico.

They took that idea and scaled it up

to truly magnificent sizes.

And with this massive dish, what they've gained

is the ability to listen in on even fainter signals.

If it's the search for radio signals though,

China is so far out in the lead

with that big dish they've built,

I don't think any of us can catch up right now.

Would it be sensible for maybe the two nations

to be working together, or are we likely to see

a two-horse race not a million miles away perhaps

from the space race a few decades ago?

As is true of so much of science,

the scientists desperately want to work together.

And often there are people figuring out

how to find backdoor ways to do work side-by-side

that builds towards the same goal.

There's currently federally invoked

limitations here in the United States

where we aren't allowed to share technologies,

including a lot of software that we write,

with our collaborators in China.

These are what are referred to as ITAR regulations.

As long as these governmental regulations

restricting how funding can be shared,

how technology can be shared are in place,

we're gonna be forced to work side-by-side but not together.

Even more broadly than just

the search for extraterrestrial life,

but if there's one thing that somebody should immediately

go and Google, or look up on Twitter,

or search for on a website,

what should people know about right now?

We're at this really curious time

where we may or may not have our fundamental understanding

of how our universe is evolving turned over on its head.

Back in 1998, there were discoveries made

that seemed to indicate that our universe

is accelerating apart thanks to this entirely new

thing that we don't know how to describe

that we have labeled dark energy.

And this piece of research, done by multiple teams,

was based on the single concept

that exploding white dwarf stars,

the leftover cores of dead stars like our sun,

when you put enough mass on them,

they all explode the exact same way,

having more or less the exact same amount

of light being given off,

allowing us to use them to measure

distances throughout our universe.

Well, we're now getting more and more hints

that maybe that's single underlying premise wasn't true,

and that maybe this revolution we had in '98 that said

no, our universe is expanding apart, might get taken back.

And there's new work hinting that, even without that idea

that we don't understand how our universe is expanding,

it gets worse.

Because there are hints that maybe

different parts of our universe

are expanding at different rates.

We don't know who is right and who is wrong

in this current debate over fundamental questions

about how our universe evolves,

but I'm betting that we're gonna settle these questions

in the next five years

and it could be even in the next five months if we get lucky

and the right people get the right telescope time.