programming, include varying points of view, and be submitted by january 2015. grab a camera and get started today. traveledan history tv to the library of congress kluger center in washington, in. which was established 2000. the center welcomes over 100 scholars every year to pursue research interests at one of the worlds largest libraries. next, we speak with one of their 2014 fellows. >> joining us on american history tv is stephen dick, a former nasa chief historian. tell us what astrobiology is. >> astrobiology is a search for life in the universe. that involves the search for origin of life here and elsewhere. the nature of life, the future of life, the implications if we find life. it is a very interdisciplinary subject. >> that is what brought you to the kluge center? >> we have this chair in astrobiology to look particularly at the humanistic aspect of astrobiology, which is broad in itself. i looking at the impact on am society if we find life. >> what is your thinking on how human beings would respond to discovering intelligent life in the universe? >> the first thing you have to ask when you approach the subject is how you approach it at all. it is a far out subject. trying to figure out what the reactions would be would be even more difficult. we have come up with three approaches. history. there are times in the past that we thought we discovered life. you can see what the reaction was. also, the nature of the discovery, and thirdly, a culture contact in various analogies that can help illuminate what the discovery would be like. history, discovery, and analogy are my three approaches. >> can we go through those one by one? tell us about history and what there is to learn from our own history about what our possible responses might be to discovery of life. >> a great deal, although you have to be careful to say you cannot predict the future. it is an analogy itself. if you use history, you can record in detail what happened, but there is projection as to how it might affect the future. let me take three cases in past history. one of the earliest ones is in 1835, something called the move -- moon hoax which was a series of articles in the "new york sun" claiming that the famous astronomers sir john herschel had discovered life on the moon. herschel was a well-known astronomer so there were a lot of aspects that were true in the story. of course, he had not really discovered life on the moon. the series of articles described and depicted these intelligent, green creatures on the moon and how they were gesticulating, indicating that they might be in conversation and therefore intelligent. of course, no telescope at that time or even now could see such a thing, but that is not what mattered. the story is what mattered. this was meant as a satire, not a hoax. it was meant as a satire of the many people of this time who were claiming that there was life in outer space. one astronomer claimed that there were 21 trillion people inhabiting the solar system, not counting the sun. that was a satire. the reaction was not panic, because it was the moon, but great popular interest. this is in the "new york sun," which was one of the early tabloids. a fledgling newspaper but it quickly became the most highly circulated newspaper in the country. this reaction went on for quite some time in both sales of the newspaper and various spinoffs of the patients of the -- depictions of the extraterrestrials. >> was there he panic, curiosity? >> no. there was lots of curiosity. there was no panic in this case in 1835. the panic came in the next case which i will tell you about which was halloween eve of 1938, the famous "war of the worlds" broadcast. that was based on h.g. wells' novel. the war of the worlds broadcast was directed and narrated by orson welles, a very young orson welles. i think he was 23 or something like that. he had his martians invading the earth. in this case, the center was -- scenario was changed from london to grovers mill, new jersey. this was being broadcast from new york city and the martians were landing, supposedly, an hour south of new york city. this did cause quite a considerable reaction. the interesting thing here is that it is not the reaction that most people think, even today. the newspapers of the time said that there was a panic in the street everywhere because this was being broadcast nationally. scholars have shown that that was not true. there was some concern. maybe a few people who panic, cked, but not widespread panic at all. the moral of the story here -- why would the print newspapers to this? they were acting on anecdotal information and the scholars think now, these days, that they were trying to belittle radio, which was, after all, a competitor in terms of news and advertising. this fledgling new radio in the 1930's. that is an interesting reaction. many studies have been done on it. in the 1940's, the idea of the panic thing was really the main scenario of what happened. it was not that at all. >> what implications do those two stories have for a potential future? >> well, what they show right away is that the media is going to have a very big affect. in this case, these both l.ginated with the media let me tell you one more case in history, which is real science. that is 1996, when nasa announced that they had found nano fossils, very small fossils in a mars rock. mars rocks explode off of mars on their hit by a meteorite and intersect the earth's orbits and land on the earth. a dozen or so of these have been found. studying one of these, nasa scientists believe that found the blush believed -- believed they found these fossils. the reaction to that was quite tremendous. the reaction was, first of all, that there were press conferences at nasa headquarters. president clinton at the time made remarks on the south lawn of the white house. vice president gore later held a symposium with theologians and all kinds of people. what are the implications of this? congressional hearings were held. of course, this is all played out in the journals. a very controversial thing. it took something like 10 years before there was some consensus that these were probably not fossils, that they were other things, other explanations that were not biological and origin. again, the media played a big role there. even when it does not originate with the media, this is more like an event that i think will actually occur. the media will be very important and how they played that to the public, especially with social media and e-mail and all that. >> again, the second area of your research? >> the nature of discovery. it turns out discovery is not what most people think in terms of, eureka, i point my telescope and there it is. discovery is always an extended process. i have just done a book on discovery in astronomy when you discover new classes of astronomical objects. it is never you point your telescope and know what you are looking at. when galileo pointed his telescope at saturn and saw these protuberances on the body of the planet, he had no idea what they were. he did not know that rings could have existed. they had never been found before. it took 40 years before someone else determined those could be rings. it is the same thing throughout astronomy. even modern astronomy. there is a period of something that is detected, and there is a long time to determine what it really is an longer to understand what it is. the lesson i learned from that is that when we detect a signal, as the case of the mars rock shows, it will be an extended process, over years, before we know what it is. >> lastly, your third area of research. >> analogy -- it is easy to get sucked into this. analogy covers a broad area. i should say first that analogy -- a lot of people when you say analogy, they think it is a wishy-washy argument. it is not that at all. douglas hostettler, the pulitzer prize winning author has written a thick fall you monitor analogy -- thick volume on analogy as fuel and fire of thinking. that we use analogy all the time and we do not realize it. in the science part, we have to use it analogy because we do not have the actual extraterrestrial life. you have to use life on earth found under extreme conditions and things like that. if you move that to the problem of impact, what kind of analogies can you consider? of course, it depends on the scenario. all of these things depend on the scenario, whether it is microbial or intelligent life, whether it is 100 light-years years away or they land on the lawn of the white house. quite different scenarios. you have to look at analogies for all of these scenarios. one analogy you often see in this field is the analogy of culture contact, which is not a pretty picture on earth. when cultures get together, if you take just the western world, the discovery of the americas by the europeans, lots of bad things happened there. you can pick your own favorite one. cortez and the aztecs or whatever. we have at the library of congress a collection that elaborates on those cultural contexts. you can elaborate on that. they are not always bad. the chinese had treasure fleets that went around in the 15th century to different cultures and did not destroy cultures at all. although they did exact a tribute, they were looked upon as benevolent by the people they interacted with. you have to be careful which model you choose. it is probably going to be a combination of those models. i think there are other things you can learn from culture contact. in my opinion, it will not probably be a physical contact. that would be in analogy if we actually have physical contact on the earth with another culture, which most astronomers think is not very likely, although the ufo people do. the more likely scenario is something like a transmission, a radio transmission from another planet out there. there are analogs to that, too. especially if you can decipher the message and something that comes to mind here is the transmission of knowledge from the latin west, from the agent greeks by way of the arabs in the latin west in the 12th and 13th century. it eventually led to the renaissance. that is one people like because there you get new information and stimulates new ideas and you get a renaissance. we are notogy is likely to be able to communicate with them very easily. i'm not at all sanguine that we will be able to decipher the message. they will not be speaking english. it may be something more analogous to deciphering a mayan glyphs or egyptian hieroglyphs. you can see what the impact would be. >> the collections you have been researching and what exists here to help you figure out what direction human beings might go if we do discover intelligent life? >> the library of congress is a fabulous place. aside from the tens of millions of books you have on any subject you want, which i make ample use of, i make use of the collection that i mentioned, which is about american cultures and history and in particular about culture contact and drawing those analogies. i have used the photographs division because they have the prints of the 1835, that appeared in the 1835 "son" "sun" articles about the moon hoax. there are 1700 boxes of carl sagan papers in the manuscript collection. those include all of the materials related to his interest in extraterrestrial life, his writing of the book "contact," and how they work out all those things. >> this is a little bit out of the library of congress, but his -- but do science fiction movies raise any possibilities for the potential of human response? >> sure. there is good science fiction and bad science fiction. some of the best science fiction i think does raise interesting scenarios. sagan's "contact" raises those. it is the conventional i do you will get a radio signal. it is depicted in both the novel and the movie. the discovery was made by scientists but very quickly the government is involved in the military is involved in the and thingsinvolved are quickly taken out of the hands of the scientists. i think that is a likely scenario. six a fan of the polish science fiction writer who believes it will be difficult to recognize much less communicate with the other. they could be so different that we may have trouble even recognizing intelligent life, much left dealing with and communicating with it. >> how would the discovery microbes differ from the discovery of intelligent life in the way we perceive ourselves and the creatures similar to ourselves? >> a lot of people say if they discover a microbe, so what? there will be a big election. ---there will not be a big reaction. go back to history. look at 1996. those were fossils, not real life. you see the reaction. the government, the media. the theologians. there were speculations what , will this mean for theology? if there are microbes out there, especially on mars, and one of the satellites of jupiter or saturn, which is also possible, this could be a reaction which is quite important, i think. it would be not only a reaction to simple microbes, but the idea that these microbes, that there is a second genesis, might -- will indicate that intelligent life might be more likely. if you find life on two planets in the solar system, it will probably develop easily beyond our own solar system. they are finding thousands of planets beyond our own solar system. that is another reason that we are looking at this problem now because it seems more and more likely that there will be life found out there. >> did you arrive with a set of questions that you wanted to answer? >> i did arrive with a general set of questions about what the impact might be, but of course your research is guided as you learn more things. the questions that are raised here are really foundational. for example, if we find extraterrestrial intelligence, you have the question, lots of philosophical questions, like the object of knowledge. -- objective knowledge. is our knowledge objective? is how we see the universe the same as extraterrestrials would see the universe? most scientists would say yes, but philosophers have quite a different answer to that because they think that beings evolve in a different environment might have different ways of looking at the universe. i had questions when i arrived but they greatly expanded. >> what do you hope to do with your findings? >> i'm about 3/4 the way through a book on the subject. we are also doing a conference at the library of congress. i am bringing 20 people in around from world and they are experts in their own area, anthropology philosophy, , history, science, and we will look at this in a systematic way. i think it is the first time it has been looked at in a systematic way. i think you need to bring in experts from all of these areas, which i think would be the proper way to proceed if we ever discover life, or especially if we have to interact with that life and determine what to say. you need not just the scientists and government, but experts from a variety of areas to determine how we should reply. >> thank you for being on american history tv. >> you are watching american history tv. 40 eight hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. c-spanus on twitter at history to keep up with the latest history news. , reel americao rings you archival films that help tell the story of the 20th century. >> oil is scarce in many areas today. the cause of that scarcity is not a lack of reserves or production but a lack of economical distribution. supplies of the western hemisphere, the logical source of oil is the middle east. readily accessible reserves than in all of north and south america together. the reason is rapidly being .eveloped in eastern saudi arabia,

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