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March 13, 1998 - Art Bell

02:48:01

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Seth Shostak - SETI

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	Unites at 9 on AM 1500 KSTP at 9 on AM 1500 KSTP
	at 9 on AM 1500 KSTP at 9 on AM 1500 KSTP
	at 9 on AM 1500 KSTP And she has only whispers of some quiet conversation
	From the Kingdom of Nigh, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell
	First time callers may reach Art at area code 702-727-1222 702-727-1222
	Now, here again is Art Once again, here I am, good morning everybody
	It's great to be here We're about to enter the world of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, with one of its scientists.
	And I'm going to have a terrible time with his name.
	He's Seth Shostak, I believe.
	Hope that's right.
	So I'm looking forward to that.
	That's coming up here in a moment.
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	All right.
	Seth Shostak, check a while, folks, is the public program scientist at the SETI Institute in
	Mountain View.
	It's in California, of course.
	He has an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.
	For much of his career, he conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies, has published about 50 papers, which I guess you have to do in professional journals.
	During more than a decade, he worked at The Astronomical Institute, one of them in the Netherlands, using the Westerbork Radiosynthesis Telescope.
	We'll have to ask what that is.
	He has also written several hundred popular articles on various topics in astronomy, technology, film, and television for more than 30 years.
	Seth has been producing his own films, many of them popular science pieces used for TV.
	He founded and ran a computer animation firm in Holland that made leaders and short films for networks and other video producers.
	He now lectures on astronomy and other subjects at the California Academy of Sciences and elsewhere.
	He gives about 50 talks annually at both educational and corporate institutions and is a distinguished speaker for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
	His book, yes he has one, Sharing the Universe.
	It is a book, Berkeley Hill's book.
	It appeared in February of 1998, so it's just out.
	Here is Seth Shostak.
	Is that close enough?
	That's better than I could do, Art.
	Seth, welcome to the program.
	It's a real pleasure.
	I have long wanted to interview anybody who worked with Jodie Foster.
	I wish I had, actually.
	In spirit.
	In spirit, yes.
	Perhaps the best way to begin would be to give a history of SETI as you know it.
	What SETI is?
	It's a modern day study.
	Of course, you know, the idea of looking for a cosmic company is a pretty old endeavor.
	Sure.
	And there were efforts made, certainly in the last century, or at least proposed.
	I mean, you may have read of Carl Frederick Gauss.
	He's a famous mathematician.
	And a mathematician in the middle of the last century, he suggested that what we ought to do is plant a triangle, a wheat field triangle, in Siberia.
	And border it with trees in the shape of rectangles to signal our friends on the moon that we were intelligent and trying to get in touch and knew the Pythagorean Theorem, and obviously worth talking to.
	There was another scheme, actually, in the last century, too, to dig long, straight canals in the Sahara, fill them with oil at night, and, you know, set them on fire to signal our buddies on Mars.
	I've got to say that that scheme was also never carried out, although I guess you could say Saddam Hussein has tried it in Kuwait.
	As far as I know, the Martians haven't responded to that.
	Well, the pattern was too difficult to decipher.
	Maybe that's the problem.
	But, you know, that was all sort of talked about, and that sort of represented the cutting-edge technology of the time.
	But modern study really goes back to 1959, 1960.
	In 1959, some physicists at Cornell University and MIT pointed out that radar Just radio waves, such as we generate here on Earth, and in particular the microwave frequencies used for radar, could easily bridge the gap from one star to the next.
	I mean, you could use them to send a message from one star to the next, and it wouldn't take an enormous amount of power to do so.
	Well, alright, let me stop you right there.
	For years, people have said radio transmissions All of them, television, radio, all of our electronic stuff, goes firing out into space, and just keeps on going.
	Now, that's really only partially true, isn't it?
	In other words, parts of the spectrum, indeed, keep going, but parts are reflected, for the most part, by the ionosphere, reflected back to Earth, and don't really do a lot of space travel.
	Isn't that true?
	Well, that's certainly true.
	Unfortunately, AM radio, for example, It's good for your listeners, of course, that it's refracted by the ionosphere and doesn't make it out into space, because that means they can pick up an AM station at great distance.
	That's right.
	I've got a lot of 50,000 waters, believe me, that do a great job of getting us all around the country.
	But they do.
	They are reflected back to Earth, thankfully.
	That, of course, for example, is not the case with a shorter wave.
	Oh, for example, in the FM band.
	That's absolutely right.
	So television, which of course is in the FM, does just go straight out into space.
	That's why you don't get the, you know, the TV programs from the next town over if it's 100 miles away.
	Sure.
	Because those signals are going out into space.
	And what that means is, of course, that, you know, the early episodes of I Love Lucy have gone out 40 or 50 light years, so that means they've
	reached on the order of a thousand nearby stars.
	Have they done it fairly efficiently? In other words, would you need more than a pair of
	rabbit ears on Mars or Jupiter as we go on out? By the time you get to Pluto, would you need a real
	array? How far out could you legibly discern our TV signals?
	Well, that depends entirely on how much money you want to spend on the rabbit ears.
	A simple pair of rabbit ears isn't going to do you very much good beyond maybe the moon, possibly Mars.
	But if you were at the distances of the nearest stars, you know, Alpha Centauri or something, a couple of light years away, you could still, in principle and in practice, you could pick these things up.
	I mean, you could pick up Mr. Ed.
	Uh, at Alpha Centauri, if... Has Mr. Ed already reached Alpha Centauri?
	You bet!
	Yeah, Alpha Centauri's only about four and a half light years away.
	Sure.
	In fact, if anybody's watching, uh, you know, maybe they're trying to figure out whether it's the four-footed or the two-footed guys that run the planet down here.
	I don't know.
	Well, if anybody's watching and it's Mr. Ed that made it, maybe that's why there's been no contact.
	Well, that's a possibility.
	But, you know, it would take a pretty big antenna to pick up the TV, uh, at the distances of the stars, because it's, as you say, it's not...
	Intended to be broadcast to the stars, so the energy's not very well directed.
	In fact, I worked out how big an antenna you'd need from, say, ten light years away to pick up I Love Lucy, and you need to cover a couple of thousand acres of your farmland with rabbit ears in order to pick it up.
	So that would be a bit of an investment, but you could do it.
	Well, you remember the opening scene in Contact, so dramatic, so well done, as they pull away from Earth with the sounds Going back in time and traveling.
	You did see Contact, didn't you?
	You bet.
	Good, good, good.
	And so as we pulled away until finally entire galaxies were just all kinds of things were going by and then of course there was dead silence.
	Yeah.
	Is that realistic?
	Well, it is.
	I mean, there's sort of an expanding ball of information about us which that film was, I guess, trying to portray showing this cacophony of FM music and early TV broadcasts and so forth going out into space, but if you go out beyond, you know, roughly 50 light years, there's nothing more because it's only been in the last 50 years that we've been broadcasting.
	That we've been broadcasting with really powerful high-frequency transmitters.
	I mean, there hasn't been radio for a hundred years, but... Sure.
	So it's the last 50 years and, you know, that's something to think about for people who think that the aliens might be trying to get in touch because That means they'd have to be pretty nearby to have any real reason to get in touch.
	Because if they're more than 50 light years away, of course, they won't know we're here.
	Actually, let's assume they're 50 light years out.
	That means...
	At 50 light years, the first signals from Earth are just arriving, if I've got this correct.
	That's correct.
	Alright, so if they wanted to answer us, their signal back to us, assuming they could generate one, would not yet arrive for another 50 years.
	Also correct.
	Now, take the case where they're only 25 light years away.
	After all, there are stars that close.
	Sure.
	Okay, so they picked us up 25 years ago, and they sent a message back, say, And we could be picking that up today.
	In fact, I think that was more or less the premise in contact.
	By the way, the premise that got you here was somebody sent me a fax saying that Wolf 359 or something or another, a very popular science fiction star, I understand, had sent you a signal that you had received, that you had a hit at SETI, what is called a hit.
	And that was totally false, right?
	It was false.
	In fact, if we had a real detection, you and I wouldn't be on the phone now, Art.
	I'd be on the Côte d'Azur, and my picture would be on the cover of the Rolling Stone, or my boss's picture would be on the cover of the Rolling Stone.
	I mean, everybody would know about it.
	Well, we have yet to discuss that aspect of your work.
	I have certain questions about that, but let's stick with Sort of, you know, the whole concept, before we get down to the specifics.
	So, 50 light years.
	We're out about that far right now.
	It is reasonable that there could be life.
	Why do we presume... Is it reasonable, Seth, to presume that any intelligent species that would have evolved somewhere else would evolve eventually using Well, that's really a good question.
	I mean, that depends on, well, in the end, it depends on physics.
	We use radio not simply because we have the technology, as they like to say on TV, but because it's a cheap way to send bits, to send information from one part of the universe to the other.
	And, in fact, there don't seem to be any other ways of doing it that are more efficient.
	Of course, we might be missing some physics.
	I mean, that's always possible.
	Maybe the aliens have physics that we don't know about, and radio looks kind of archaic to them.
	What about light?
	In other words, if you look at the entire spectrum, once you get above radio, you begin to enter the spectrum of light.
	What about lasers, for example?
	Well, that's a possibility.
	Ordinary light, the kind we see with our eyes, of course, it goes at the same speed, of course, as radio.
	Radio moves at the speed of light.
	Right.
	So does light, of course.
	The trouble with visible light is that you have the confusion from your own star.
	I mean, if you're trying to see a signal from the Earth, for example, from far away, and it was just somebody was flashing a big flashlight at you, you'd have the confusing light from our sun.
	But in the infrared, the sun and other stars are often much dimmer, so powerful infrared lasers could be used to signal across interstellar distances.
	That's a possibility.
	And maybe it's one we should be considering, and maybe it's something we will consider.
	It hasn't been looked at too hard up until now, primarily because if you make a big laser, for example, it tends to be very beamed.
	And, you know, if you're going to pick up somebody else's beamed laser, then they have to have some reason to beam it at you.
	Otherwise, the chances that you're going to be in their beam are pretty small.
	All right.
	We are listening now on How are we doing it these days?
	In other words, we're listening on discrete single frequencies, and many, many, many of them, maybe even millions.
	I think you've got some new technology that allows you to listen to gazillions of frequencies at once.
	Is that correct?
	Well, except for the gazillions part, yeah.
	You're right.
	Of course, you know, ET hasn't sent us a fax telling us where on the dial he's going to be, so we're compelled to to monitor as much of it as we can.
	The receiver we use listens to 28 million channels simultaneously, and there are other SETI experiments being run besides the one we run, which, by the way, is called Project Phoenix.
	Other experiments which listen to even larger numbers of channels and... Wait, wait, wait, wait.
	Why is it called Project Phoenix?
	Phoenix, of course, implies a raising from the ashes.
	Well, that's why the name was chosen.
	This used to be a NASA program.
	Up until 1993, the project I'm involved with was a NASA program.
	It was federally funded.
	Right.
	But then Congress killed it, 1993, and... I think you were due to receive like $100 million or something like that.
	Well, the total cost of the project over time might have amounted to that, but in fact it was running at about $10 million a year.
	And, you know, to put that in perspective, That was less than, you know, one-tenth of one percent of the NASA budget.
	It was something like four cents per year per taxpayer.
	That's... Why did the budget get killed?
	Well, I mean, that's politics, really.
	I know, but it's something that I want to try and understand.
	Why?
	Why do you think it got killed?
	Was it because... Everybody can relate to the movie Contact.
	And you remember Jody's boss?
	Yes.
	Is Jody's boss the one that killed SETI from a government point of view?
	Well, not entirely.
	He was perhaps the cipher for him.
	But in fact, it wasn't a NASA official that killed SETI.
	NASA isn't against SETI at all.
	In fact, NASA was involved with SETI, of course.
	Well, when I said Jody's boss, I meant it metaphorically.
	Yeah.
	No, not so much that.
	It was really, to be honest, it was a congressman from Nevada.
	What?
	Yes.
	What?
	Senator Richard Bryan.
	Oh, no.
	Senator Bryan, really?
	Yes.
	Oh, I hang my head.
	Well, there you have it.
	And, uh, it was in the time of budget reduction.
	And, of course, SETI is an It's kind of an appealing target for budget reduction because... It's an easy target.
	Exactly, and you don't have, you know, 3,000 aerospace workers who will be out of a job the next day.
	It's a very small program, so it's kind of a painless target in some sense.
	How big was the program prior to the cancellation?
	Well, as I say, the very last year it was running, which was 1992, fiscal year 1992, the budget was the greatest it had ever been, and it was $12 million a year.
	So as I say, it was less than a nickel a year per taxpayer and my next door neighbor, when
	he heard he was going to save a nickel, of course was quite happy about that.
	But it meant that we weren't doing the search.
	Now the SETI Institute, which is just a private non-profit organization, of course, was able
	to at least look for some private money to keep some of this going.
	And they found that money.
	There's some heavy hitter gentleman who found it interesting enough to write personal checks
	to keep this thing going.
	Then again, that's just like the movie.
	Yes, that is.
	That's right.
	That is just like the movie.
	And, you know, these are people like Bill Hewlett and David Packard and so forth.
	And so the project was named Phoenix because it was rising from the ashes of the old NASA program.
	Ideal.
	All right.
	Now I understand.
	I thought it might be something like that.
	So you've got some sugar daddies out there.
	I guess you could call them that.
	Some well-heeled people who believe in your work.
	Yes.
	Are they standing behind you solidly or even today?
	Or what do you expect?
	In other words, are you going to be able to continue?
	Well, we certainly hope to be able to continue and that depends, to be quite honest, I mean let's just be brutal about this, that depends on our success and getting people to continue to give money to this program.
	Some people would say, if there is a signal that has been coming our way for a long time, that by now we should have heard it.
	How much of the sky Uh, has actually been, uh, surveyed thus far.
	Can you tell me that?
	Well, only in very general terms, because when you say survey, you know, the question is, well, how carefully have you surveyed it?
	And even if you have looked in the direction of a particular star and, you know, spent a day looking at it... Right.
	Well, that star got its day.
	But, you know, it could be that E.T.
	had the transmitters off that day.
	Or the planet was rotated so the wrong side was facing you or something like that.
	Yeah, the sun was creating the noise that you were hearing and anything that might be
	coming from a planet would be completely blocked.
	Well, that's not quite so likely because something like the sun usually makes what's called wide
	band interference, the kind of stuff you were talking about earlier in your program tonight.
	Oh, you heard that, good.
	I want the audience to understand a little bit about what spread spectrum is.
	I did a probably poor job of explaining it, but... Listen, I understood it, and if I understood it, you know, anybody could have understood it, so... Okay, so, but again, the question, how much of the sky have you actually surveyed?
	Very small amount.
	In this particular project, Project Phoenix, we have a list of a thousand star systems on our hit list, if you want to call it that, okay?
	You better be careful with that word.
	Oh, okay.
	Targets.
	Targets.
	Maybe that's a bad word, too.
	But anyhow, that's the official word.
	Candidates.
	There you go.
	Candidates.
	That's better.
	Yeah, I'm not sure.
	Okay.
	Candidates.
	We've gone through about a third of the list.
	But even when you've gone through a thousand candidates, you know, a thousand nearby stars, There are on the order of a half trillion stars in our galaxy.
	This has been likened to trying to find a needle in a haystack.
	And, you know, we've taken maybe a teaspoonful of hay so far and not found a needle.
	And so it's kind of early days to say that maybe we should give up.
	Can you focus specifically on one star?
	I'm asking you a question about beamwidth now, in effect.
	In other words, can you be that narrow so that you're looking at one particular star or system?
	Well, not really.
	These antennas, these are big antennas.
	I mean, these are your satellite dish on steroids.
	These are big guys.
	All right, hold on.
	We're at the bottom there, and I'm going to ask you about exactly that.
	I want to know what kind of antennas you're using, as a matter of fact.
	A million questions.
	Seth Shostak is my guest.
	He is from the SETI Project in Mountain View, California.
	You know, just like in the movie Contact, except for real.
	We'll be right back.
	It's time to get ready To realize just what I have found
	I have been on this path all my life It's all clear to me now
	The station that launched her broadcasting empire 50,000 watts at Wynn Cities Radio
	You're listening to AM1500 KSTV, St.
	1500 KSDB, St. Paul, Minneapolis.
	♪♪ Call Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nye on the Wild Card Line
	at area code 702-727-1295.
	That's area code 702-727-1295.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	It is, and I want to talk to you for a second about accuracy.
	How do you feel about it?
	Personally, I am and always have been, perhaps, It's not such a good thing, but I've been consumed by accuracy, particularly when it comes to time.
	I talk a lot about time.
	The ZEIT radio-controlled clock is here.
	When I say radio-controlled, what do I mean?
	This is a 12-inch wall clock, operates on a single AA battery, and six times every hour, it receives a signal from the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado.
	They transmit it there now at about three times the power they were, by the way.
	I've got one on my wall, and because they're transmitting from the National Bureau of Standards, their clock, the atomic clock, and your clock, the one on the wall, are going to read exactly the same.
	Put another way, your clock will be accurate to within one second in a million years.
	Ain't technology wonderful?
	Now, Uh, this brings an additional benefit.
	For example, when daylight savings time comes, your clock on the wall, happily sitting there ticking away, will suddenly get a different signal, and like the H.G.
	Wells time machine, it'll start going around like crazy until it reaches the correct time, so that when you wake up in the morning, you don't have to touch your clock.
	That's how accurate and how interesting this clock is.
	Traditionally, only scientific laboratories could afford to have this kind of a clock around, because they cost too much.
	But guess what?
	This German-made Zeit clock is now $79.95.
	It is some of the best money you could spend.
	See, Grain Company has got them.
	Call them in the morning, at 9 o'clock, 9 to 1, Saturday, and then 7.30, Monday morning, and get one on the way, because they are going fast.
	The number is 800-522-8863.
	1-800-522-8863.
	My guest is the real thing.
	He is Seth Shostak, and he is a program scientist at SETI in Mountain View, California.
	My guest is the real thing.
	He is Seth Shostak and he is a program scientist at SETI in Mountain View, California.
	Now I say the real thing because actually he has a doctorate, so really he's Dr. Shostak, aren't you doctor?
	Yes, but please call me Seth, Art.
	Seth, alright, well I'll try.
	Uh, Seth, you were starting to talk about antennas, and again, because so many Americans have seen the movie Contact, I think they can relate to what we're going to discuss.
	Uh, the movie opened, uh, down in Puerto Rico, with a big Arecibo dish.
	And our heroine, Jodi, had access to Arecibo for at least periods of time.
	That's a gigantic dish.
	How big is that thing?
	A thousand feet across.
	Wow!
	Is it really a thousand feet?
	It's by far the largest radio antenna in the world, radio telescope.
	That's astounding.
	In fact, it's so big that If I understood what I saw correctly, the dish itself does not move, but the feed horn moves?
	That's what happens, indeed.
	The dish sits there and the receivers move back and forth at the focus.
	That's remarkable.
	Now, I suppose there's a slight sacrifice because you're not always at the center of the parabolic point, is that correct?
	That's right.
	In fact, this is an endless discussion, of course, but the Alright, but you obviously are not in Puerto Rico.
	Where are present SETI efforts concentrated?
	the way, to try and minimize some of these problems that you're alluding to.
	The whole thing has gotten a factor of two or three times better because of that.
	Wow.
	All right, but you obviously are not in Puerto Rico.
	Where are present SETI efforts concentrated?
	Where is your antenna farm?
	Well, our antenna is ... Unfortunately, we cannot afford our own farm.
	We have to use somebody else's farm.
	I see.
	We're using an antenna at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in lovely Green Bank,
	West Virginia.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	That antenna is 140 feet across.
	It's a pretty big thing, but ... Good size.
	It's good size.
	Now, we'll be using that through the spring.
	No, we're going to go down there.
	In fact, uh... You're going to get, uh, you're going to get into, you're going to get to use Arecibo?
	Yes, well, when this was a NASA program, that's where we began observations was at Arecibo.
	Right.
	So, it's not the first time this equipment has been there.
	It's the first time it's been there.
	Oh, I, I understand.
	Uh, but what, how in the world have you suddenly Well, we, you know, make a request.
	There's a long history there, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that this was a NASA program.
	But, you know, we, generally speaking, rent time on these telescopes.
	We pay the observatories for the time.
	Just like Jody.
	Just like Jody.
	Um, that's exciting.
	That's very exciting.
	Now, getting use of Arecibo with the improvements that you just mentioned, how much of an improvement over your present 140-foot dish does that represent?
	Yeah, I mean, you know, minute for minute, the Arecibo telescope is much better simply because it's a bigger ear, if you will.
	I mean, it's a big hunk of metal.
	It's something like 18 acres of Twice as good as you have now?
	Now, very crudely you could say, look, it's a thousand feet across.
	The one we're using now is 140 feet across, so that's six times the diameter and that's
	36 times the area.
	So depending on how you want to look at it, you could say it's 36 times better or put
	it another way, you could hear the same transmitter six times farther away.
	So depending on what you think ET is doing, you can get some idea.
	Got you.
	That's remarkable.
	Alright, now, I'm going to try to keep it technical but non-technical because I am familiar with the field.
	Now, remember I asked you could you look at a specific star system?
	Yes.
	This relates to what's called bandwidth.
	In other words, how narrow an area can you look at?
	When you point at a star system, say, 50 light years out.
	Or Alpha Centauri.
	When you point at that, which is close, how much are you hearing?
	You're hearing Alpha Centauri, and how much more?
	Well, you can look at it this way.
	It depends on, you know, which of these antennas you're using, of course.
	That's right.
	Where on the dial you're listening, because it also depends on the frequency and so forth.
	But, typically, the system we're using now, for example, that antenna is Looking at it, it sort of has a target area, if you will, on the sky that's something like a quarter of the full moon, if you will.
	You can picture that.
	That's, for the listeners, that's like taking a dime, having somebody hold a dime 15 feet away from you and see how much of the sky that covers.
	Another way to look at it, it's sort of like looking at the sky through a cocktail straw, if you will.
	Now, you can imagine, if you're pointing that at a nearby star, of course, You know, you'd be sensitive to any signals coming from the star, but nobody expects E.T.
	to be on a star, of course.
	It's a little toasty.
	Let me try another approach.
	Quasars emit very powerful radio signals, right?
	Uh-huh.
	So you could focus generally on a quasar, correct?
	You could, sure.
	All right, and you'd hear this whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh sound.
	Yeah, that's a pulsar.
	Yeah, I'm sorry, pulsar.
	Right.
	How far, how many, how many degrees would you move the dish you've got right now before you lost that signal?
	Oh, well, you just, see those things are all like little pinpricks and you're covering it with a big splot of a beam if it were, as it were, so you have to move them sort of the diameter of your own beam.
	So what that means is the antenna we have now, if we were to pick up a signal now, suppose we picked up a signal that we thought maybe this is it, maybe this is the big one.
	Some, some, some.
	We want to know, so we move the antenna, well, a half a degree.
	And then the signal should go away, because if you move it a half a degree, it's no longer in the beam.
	Ah, so that finally answers my question about beam width.
	It is really rather narrow.
	Very narrow.
	As I say, it's like looking at the sky through a cocktail straw, so you don't have to move that very much before you see a different part of the sky.
	There would be two schools of thinking here.
	One would be to use a very, or relatively, I shouldn't say very, a relatively low gain, wide beam antenna, searching over many, many frequencies, looking for
	something interesting, versus the argument of getting something like Arecibo, which would be very
	specific. I mean, you'd be looking for a long time.
	That's right.
	And I guess you folks have thought that one through. Do you listen both ways?
	Well, the old NASA program was going to use both strategies, actually, but, you know, we don't have enough money to do
	both.
	So we have what's called this targeted search.
	In other words, I mean, you might look at it this way.
	It's sort of like trying to find life in the Sahara.
	You know, you're going to look at the whole thing, the whole desert, or you're just going to zero in on the oases on the assumption that there's maybe more happening there.
	Makes sense.
	So, you know, there are SETI experiments that sort of scan the whole sky, that just systematically sweep the whole sky.
	And, but our experiment actually just sort of zeroes in on the Oasis, as it were, the nearby stars, and who's to say which strategy is the better one, because nobody really knows where E.T.' 's hanging out.
	Though, uh, there are people who speculate, uh, frequency-wise, there are places more likely than others.
	And I've heard it said, I don't know why, maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, that somewhere in the two, 21 gigahertz, uh, range, no, two gigahertz range, There's a high likelihood.
	Three and four gigahertz in those areas.
	Is there any area that more likely would accommodate a long-distance signal?
	Well, Art, I hope you're right, because two gigahertz is right smack in the middle of where we're looking.
	I figured that.
	Yeah.
	You know, the argument goes something like this.
	The microwave frequencies, those are the frequencies you're talking about.
	Now, you know, most people will know microwave frequencies as the ones they use to You know, eat up old meatloaf and so forth.
	But they're also used for radar, and it turns out that radio waves at those frequencies penetrate the gas and the dust hanging between the stars without any difficulty.
	So they are, you know, they're a pretty good way of getting messages across really long distances.
	I mean, really DX.
	Gotcha.
	Okay.
	Now, where in that dial would you put the signal?
	Well, I mean, that's a little tougher.
	There are literally billions of channels in there that you might have to Check out.
	And that's why we have a receiver that listens to so many millions of channels at once, because we don't know which one's better.
	But there are some natural markers between one and two gigahertz, in fact, that, you know, they're just caused by gas between the stars.
	Now, we know about those because we have radio astronomers that study them.
	I was one of them.
	And E.T.
	will know about them, too.
	So you might say, well, gosh, maybe that's a universal hailing frequency.
	Sure.
	I'll turn from Star Trek.
	The aliens will use to get our attention, so it's worth looking near those frequencies.
	And that is, in fact, then, where you are looking.
	Now, what technology allows you to listen instead of on one frequency?
	For example, we were talking about KOMO on 1000 on the dials, right in the middle, so I picked that.
	What allows you to listen instead of just to KOMO to every single frequency in the broadcast band all at once?
	How does that get done?
	It's, you know, it's a big hunk of digital electronics, of course, is the way you actually do that in a practical sense, but you could think of it conceptually as essentially building lots of receivers and sort of connecting them all together, and each one is tuned to the next channel up the dial.
	It really amounts to that.
	It's sort of having a multi-filter Receiver that has, you know, it's 28 million receivers in one.
	That's really what it is.
	So it's not like a scanner, which is running through a lot of frequencies, scanning through them, but rather actually looking at all these frequencies simultaneously.
	All the time, simultaneously.
	Wow.
	And the reason you do that, by the way, I mean, you could build a scanner, but if you're going to cover a couple of billion frequencies, and we do, we cover two billion channels for each star.
	Wow.
	And if you, you know, if you were to listen to each channel for a few minutes and then move on to the next one, Well, I mean, your scanner would be sitting there for thousands of years before it got through the dial once, and you'd get bored, so... You know, in the movie Contact, Jodie Foster has a pair of earphones on to pick up the signal, but really, she'd be wearing tens of millions of pairs of earphones, so that would mess up her cough here, no doubt.
	Well, although, I suppose from time to time, your computers cough up an interesting sound or signal, And that gets a human being's attention, doesn't it?
	That's true.
	Yeah, that's true.
	In fact, you pick, I have to say, we pick up signals all the time, Art, because, you know, you've got this, one of the world's largest antennas connected to a receiver that's listening to 28 million channels.
	So, of course, you pick up signals.
	And in fact, it's a big problem because they've all been man-made so far.
	I mean, they've all turned out to be man-made, but you have to sort out All this chaff from the wheat you're looking for.
	Yeah, what are the problems?
	In other words, I would presume in West Virginia, even though it's a fairly rural area, there's still a lot of RF flying around in the air.
	And so you've got to worry about that.
	And then you've got to worry about noise out there, like bulsars and that sort of thing.
	Yeah, well the natural noise emitters you don't have to worry about too much, because even pulsars, which have this very strange signal, you've imitated it well, it's a click, click, click, click type thing, or whoosh.
	But, you know, they're, in fact, they're what are called broad spectrum sources.
	They're spread out all over the dial.
	They're like the static you get on your car radio.
	Right.
	So, we're not looking for those kinds of signals.
	We're looking for a squeal that's a very narrow band of, you know, Hertz or so.
	The kind of signal that's called a carrier here on Earth, and that accompanies all these AM radio stations that are broadcasting our voices right now.
	Now, nature doesn't make a signal like that.
	So, that's not such a problem.
	But the problem that you do have, even in West Virginia, which as you point out is pretty secluded, is telecommunications satellites.
	I mean, they're overhead all the time, and everybody wants to have their cellular phone,
	so they keep putting up more of these telecommunications.
	All the time, and if anybody doubts that, go outside on a nice, clear night,
	just before sunrise, about a half hour before sunrise, and just look straight up, and keep looking straight up,
	and you will soon see all of these satellites crossing and crossing and crossing.
	How many are up there? Do you have any idea?
	Yeah, well, there are on the order of 10,000 active satellites up there now.
	They're not all telecommunications.
	Some of them are.
	Who knows?
	But it's thousands.
	And some of them are just making weather maps and others are DOD projects.
	Who knows?
	But there are literally thousands of these things and every three days or every two days they launch another one.
	You know, really, the best thing to do for SETI is to move the whole project to the far side of the moon, but that requires a big check.
	So, the more they put up, the more unknowns that you have to worry about encountering.
	That's right.
	In fact, this is such a problem that we've resorted to a fairly clever but somewhat complicated scheme where we have a second antenna, a second telescope, a few hundred miles away from the first one, and when the first one finds signals that look, you know, pretty suggestive, It sends the information on those signals to a second antenna, which checks things out within 10 minutes.
	And by using that second antenna, you can get rid of virtually all the interference.
	Oh, that's remarkable.
	That's interesting.
	All right, and then there's this.
	There have got to be a lot of In other words, you certainly know about a lot of the major telecommunications satellites, but you and I both know that the Department of Defense has a lot of satellites up there that are transmitting on all kinds of frequencies, probably a lot of the ones that you're listening on, that they won't tell you about.
	That's true, that's true.
	So how do you deal with that?
	Do you identify The fact that it is a satellite, even if it's unknown and unreported, you say there's a satellite and try to establish the inference for it?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	In fact, you know, we pick up this signal and it turns out it's a satellite.
	We just add it to the database of known interference, but of course, we don't know what it's taking pictures of.
	We don't see the pictures or anything like that.
	All we do is get this signal.
	You know, all cats in the dark are gray, I guess, and it's just another cat we added to the list.
	You know, it may be a top-secret satellite, it may just be a weather satellite, it may be a commercial telecommunications satellite.
	So actually, in a way, a lot of the information that you have compiled would be of interest to other nations, actually.
	Well, I think it's possibly, but they could do the same experiment as far as that goes.
	I suppose.
	Put an antenna in their backyard and get that kind of information.
	It is of some interest to other radio astronomers, of course, because they're troubled by the same interference.
	So do you share your information?
	Yeah, that we do occasionally.
	It mostly comes the other way around.
	When we get a signal that's looking really good, we'll sometimes call up our friends, radio astronomer friends, and say, hey, have you ever had interference at this frequency?
	Just try and nail it down.
	Find out whether we're getting the real thing or just, you know, yet more interference.
	Now, there are two different sorts of satellites to worry about.
	One would be exemplified by the NOAA series.
	I monitor the NOAA satellites here.
	I've got an antenna and get the weather photographs.
	And there are polar satellites.
	They cover different territory all the time.
	They're all over the place.
	You can track them, but it takes a lot to track them.
	And they're constantly going to be changing.
	Then there are geosynchronous satellites that sit out there relative to Earth stably and above the equator.
	So, you have to deal with both, right?
	You do.
	The geosynchronous ones aren't quite as much trouble because they're, to begin with, they're all along the equator, as it were.
	They're all in one spot on the sky, or a big circle across the sky, so you know where they are.
	They're also, they're there all the time.
	They're like transmitters on giant phone poles, if you will.
	22,000 mile high phone poles.
	But because they're there all the time, you get the interference all the time.
	So you can just, you know, put that in the database and tell the computers that are scanning, you know, they're scanning or listening to these 28 million channels, they say, hey look, if you get a signal that's at this frequency, that's, you know, a known source of interference and just kick it out of the queue.
	Almost like a lockout on a scanner, just locking that one out.
	You got it.
	So, the satellites you really have to worry about are these polar orbiters that are all over the place, and the defense satellites, and no doubt Russia's and China's and everybody else's satellites that are crisscrossing all over the place.
	That's the trouble.
	Yeah, those are the kinds of things that, the ones that come and go, those are the hardest ones to discriminate against.
	Although, as I say, with this two antenna scheme, we've been fairly successful.
	In fact, unlike The early experiments that used to be done in this field, we don't end up after a year of observing with a drawer full of interesting candidates, you see.
	We check everyone out and we've been able to do that.
	Everyone?
	Everyone.
	Everyone.
	Is this going 24 hours a day?
	No, I wish it were.
	It's not.
	It goes 24 hours a day when we're on the telescope, but there in Green Bank, we can only afford to pay for about a quarter of this.
	Well, that's a good question.
	I have really no answer for that.
	I think that people are interested in this.
	Oh my.
	Every couple of months we get a couple of weeks worth of observing time.
	Oh my.
	Oh my, I say again.
	Why as a society, a civilized technological society, are we not looking full time with
	the best we have, Seth?
	Well, that's a good question, Art.
	I have really no answer for that.
	I think that people are interested in this.
	I think they're possibly misinformed in the sense that they think that that is happening,
	Well, I thought it was happening.
	And you're telling me you can only afford to buy about a quarter of the antenna's time.
	Now, when you do, you're at it 24 hours a day, but this is not an ongoing everyday 24-hour day process by a long shot, huh?
	Not yet.
	Nope.
	Wow.
	Live and learn.
	All right, Seth, hold on.
	When we get back, we're going to talk about What hits they have had.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	AM 1500 KSTV.
	AM 1500 KSTV Yeah
	If you have a fax for Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nine Send it to him at area code 702-727
	702-727-8499.
	Please limit your faxes to one or two pages.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	Now, here again is Art.
	Sorry, Ross.
	My guest is the real thing, SETI.
	Just like in Contact, except My guest is the real thing.
	Seth Shostak is his name.
	He actually has a doctorate, so we should be calling him doctor.
	Undergraduate degree from Princeton University, a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.
	And it's Project Phoenix, that which actually rose from the ashes of the NASA SETI program.
	Although is now limited to, it was shocking to find out, about a quarter of the time on a large dish in West Virginia.
	Although the good news is they're going to soon have access to that gigantic telescope you may have seen in the movie Contact, Arecibo, down in Puerto Rico.
	Very, very exciting indeed.
	And so we'll get back to Seth in a moment.
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	Now it's hovering around $300 as the stock market is starting to make up its mind which way it's going to go.
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	Market goes up, gold goes down, it's a good time to buy.
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	They're offering you gold bullion at their cost.
	That means they don't make a dime on the transaction.
	I guess, you know, it's like a loss leader.
	And they're only gonna be doing this for a little while longer.
	But it does apply whether you buy an ounce or 100 ounces.
	They just wanna get you into gold, I guess.
	What a good opportunity.
	The number is 1-800-359-4255, North American Trading at 1-800-359-4255.
	Now, there are obviously some people it will not work for.
	Though so far, the majority have been very happy.
	But if it doesn't work, if you perceive it doesn't work, you get your money back.
	Period.
	The number is 1-800-232-5665.
	Alright, back now to Seth.
	Seth?
	Yeah?
	I've got a letter here for you, a fax, from Jodie Foster's boss.
	It says, Dear Art, I think this guy, read you Seth, is a liberal, money-sucking dog.
	Ask him if there are any other scientific benefits to his, in quotes, research.
	Well... It's from Mike in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
	Well, it's, you know, Mike has a point of view there, and one could say that Until we succeed, benefits are going to be simply the spin-off technology that might be developed here, and in fact there has been some spin-off of benefit in terms of diagnosing cancer and things like that.
	So there's some technological spin-off, and Mike might find that interesting and possibly even worthwhile, but you have to look at it this way.
	Imagine talking to Chris Columbus a week after leaving Spain and asking him, Well, Chris, you know, you've been on this trip for a while and have you found anything new?
	And Chris would say, well, just water.
	And well, you know, maybe it wasn't worth the money that Isabella, you know, put into these three ships here.
	We're not getting much benefit out of this.
	And that's going to be the case with SETI until you succeed.
	And after that, the benefits, you know, the sky's literally the limit.
	All you need to do is find one real signal.
	That's correct.
	There are rumors all the time about SETI, and you will occasionally hear, oh, SETI's had a big hit, or SETI's had a hit.
	And in fact, SETI has had hits, hasn't it?
	Well, we've had signals that have looked interesting for a while, that's for sure.
	And in fact, I think the most dramatic of those was less than a year ago now, it was last June, late in June, and we were observing using the telescope in Green Bank, In West Virginia, and a signal came in that was looking good to the system.
	In other words, it was passing all these sort of automated tests that are designed to throw out the interference that we get so often.
	Unfortunately, our second antenna down in Georgia was not working that day.
	There were some mechanical problems, and that would have saved us a little bit of, well, heightened blood pressure anyhow.
	But it was interesting to see what happened, because it took 24 hours to find out that this was, in fact, the SOHO satellite.
	Now, SOHO satellites, A European research satellite designed to study the sun.
	And it's a million miles from where you're sitting in the direction of the sun.
	So, in other words, you knew that it was not a geosynchronous satellite.
	Yeah, right.
	You eliminated that.
	You eliminated anything that was polar because it would have been there and gone real quick.
	Right.
	And, you know, we did a simple test that we kind of talked about in the last hour.
	After all the automated tests, the computer begins to beep at you.
	When a source is looking good, as it were.
	How frequently does that occur?
	Well, every couple of days you get a source that, you know, passes a lot of the tests.
	And, in fact, it kind of sets the threshold of sensitivity for the experiment, because if it was too much more often than that, you'd probably go batty.
	So, you know, you kind of crank up the sensitivity until it beeps at you that often.
	But it happens every couple of days.
	And then what the telescope does is it moves Off the source.
	In other words, you're pointing at some star system, right?
	Some nearby star, 50 light years away, right?
	Right, right.
	And you're getting this signal, so you say, well, now, if that's E.T., then I can prove that by moving the antenna half a degree or a degree away and make sure that the signal goes away.
	Exactly what Jodie Foster did.
	Right.
	Well, and that's not coincidence, of course, because, you know, Warner Brothers spent a lot of time talking to us, but then you would move the antenna back.
	onto the star system you're scrutinizing and trying to reacquire the signal and try and reacquire it
	and in this case in late June the signal came back and then we moved the antenna off again
	and the signal went away we moved it back it came back and we did that half a dozen times
	what was the nature of the signal modulated carrier what was it well you have to keep in mind that we
	averaged the signal over 10 minutes We, what they say, we integrate it.
	It's sort of like making a time exposure with your camera.
	Gotcha.
	Okay?
	Because, you know, that builds up sensitivity, but then you lose all the short-term information like flashing lights or moving cars.
	You know, you just get this, they all turn out to be streaks.
	So, that's what we do in the radio.
	We sort of average the signal for 10 minutes to build up the sensitivity.
	Right.
	So, okay, but if you have this signal, it's passing all these tests, everybody gets very excited for about 24 hours.
	Then it turns out it's this satellite, which, as I say, is a million miles away.
	It has a 10-watt transmitter on board, which is more than enough to get into our system, even though we weren't pointed anywhere near its direction.
	Well, were you reading a data stream coming from it?
	Well, if you actually look at the output from the computers, you know, you're sitting there in front of a bunch of computer workstations, a bunch of video screens, if you will.
	And they're just covered with mostly numbers and text.
	They don't change very fast.
	It's not like in the movies where it's very dramatic because, you know, who could take that after all?
	So it's slowly changing text, but it does beep at you when it finds something.
	And it remembers it too, so if you're out getting a tuna fish sandwich, you won't miss E.T., you know?
	Nevertheless, if you're sitting there, and it's only a once-in-two-day event, I'm sure when it starts beeping, there's a slight rise in blood pressure?
	There is.
	There is.
	Not so much, you know, after it's happened to you a couple of times, the rise is pretty minimal, but this thing last June survived all these tests, you see.
	So you thought, you actually thought you had it?
	I was, I have to say, I personally had seen something similar about a year earlier, so I was a little more skeptical, perhaps, than some of my colleagues, but I was sitting there all night long until 8 in the morning, along with everybody else.
	We were just crowded around those terminals, getting quite excited.
	And, you know, an interesting thing happened about 8 or 9 in the morning.
	I got a phone call from one of the science writers for the New York Times who called
	up to say, hey Seth, I understand you guys are following an interesting signal there,
	you want to tell me about it?
	And my first reaction was, well, how the heck do you know?
	Well, yes, right.
	And indeed, you know, that's sort of interesting because I think a lot of people feel that
	if we do get a signal that turns out not to be the Soho satellite but really ET, that
	somehow that information will be buried, it will be covered up, that sort of thing.
	But, you know, this shows you there's no secrecy in this business.
	There's no policy of secrecy.
	Well, I'm not sure that shows us that.
	In fact, how did he find out?
	Well, the way he found out was, in fact, that one of the people that work at the Institute, one of the support people, had called a friend and said, hey, you know, we got this interesting signal.
	And that person had called the New York Times.
	That didn't take long.
	You have to picture it this way.
	I mean, you're sitting there.
	It's late at night.
	Maybe you're the only guy on duty, right?
	Yeah.
	And, you know, you're sending emails to your girlfriend or whatever, and the signal comes in.
	Beep, beep, beep.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Now, you're not sure whether this is just more interference or maybe this is a big one.
	So you send an email to your girlfriend.
	Hey, you know, Matilda, don't tell anyone, but we got a signal here.
	Now, why do you do that?
	You do it because, you know, you want to establish a paper trail.
	If it turns out that this is the signal from space that you've been waiting for, You want history to remember you as the guy who found it, right?
	Right, so you document it.
	Exactly.
	With your girlfriend.
	Yeah, for example.
	And she has a, you know, a cousin who was always interested in astronomy, so she sends him an email and, you know, within two hours, and I've seen this happen, and I'm sure you have as well, it's all over the net, all over the web, and there are thousands of people that know, so it's, you know, even if there were a policy of secrecy, it would be hard to keep it quiet, but in fact there is no policy, so it'll be very confused.
	That information gets out there right away.
	And if you find something that's looking good, what you do in the end is you call up somebody at another observatory.
	Sure.
	You call up somebody who's maybe in another country.
	They have their own telescope, and you tell them, look, we got something here that looks interesting.
	Will you look at it?
	We won't tell you the exact frequency because we don't want to bias you, but here's the range of frequencies.
	Tell us if you find something.
	Because you want to rule out the possibility that it's just a prank or a bug in your system.
	So now people in two countries know about it.
	Did you do that with the Soho thing?
	We were getting close.
	We'd actually made some phone calls.
	Yeah.
	But as it turned out, in the end, it wasn't necessary.
	Mm-hmm.
	Is there... Should you get a signal?
	A real one?
	E.G.?
	Is there a specific procedure?
	Yeah, there is.
	would follow. Now I understand you've already given us some of it. You would eliminate as
	much as you could. You would contact another facility or two or three. Once you had all
	those confirmations and you realized you're listening to the real thing, is there a procedure?
	Yeah, there is. In fact, this is another one of those documents that people think must
	be top secret, but in fact I think it's on our website, SETI Institute.
	Oh, by the way, we've got a link to your website, and I hope your website can handle a lot of traffic because, folks, if you go to my website right now and just scroll down to Seth's name on the guest list and click, you will go bouncing over to the SETI site.
	So get ready for a lot of traffic.
	Well, we can torture test our computers over there.
	There you go.
	Yeah, well, there is this document.
	Now, it's called the Declaration of Principles for, you know, following the detection of an extraterrestrial signal.
	I'm sure I'm leaving out ten or twenty words there.
	And it's, you know, this is not a legal document.
	I mean, there's no body of law behind this or anything like that.
	It's just about a five or six page document that all the people who are doing sort of professional SETI experiments have signed on to and said, yeah, okay, this seems reasonable to us and we'll do what it says here.
	Now, if you read through all that thing, what you find is that most of it is concerned with how you confirm the signal.
	How you make sure that it's not just a University of Nevada undergraduate prank or something like that.
	Gotcha.
	Okay?
	So that's what a lot of it is.
	And then the rest says, if you find it, what you do is you notify the astronomical community, let the astronomers know so they can all get their telescopes aimed in the direction of this thing.
	Right.
	And notify whatever government is You know, whatever country you're in, notify the local government, and then notify the public.
	Now, and then there's a little bit about what happens, you know, should you reply.
	We could get into that, but... Well, let's hold on the reply for a moment.
	I like your chain of command, in effect.
	The public, of course, would be at the end.
	Yeah.
	Now, what a lot of people, including me, believe is that, again, just like in the movie, once you confirmed you had the real thing, Seth, And you got to the government notification part.
	I don't think there's any question about it.
	You would have military guys all over you.
	Well, I know that a lot of people do think that, but... Sure, and why shouldn't they?
	It would be a matter of national security.
	Possibly, but you know the fact that... Possibly.
	I mean, the fact that I pick up Art Bell on the radio, for example, if I'm driving in my car, doesn't mean that I've got something to fear from Art Bell and he's going to jump into the back seat of my car.
	I mean, he doesn't know that I've picked him up.
	So it's not really a... Not all my listeners feel that way.
	Well, it's not such a threat to pick up somebody's radio broadcast.
	Not all of my listeners feel that way either.
	But okay, anyway, so you would notify the government before the public.
	And Seth, it is realistic to assume that the government has their own what-ifs for this situation, assuming you would call them.
	And I doubt, you know, the highest on their list would be, oh quick, call the New York Times.
	Probably not, but our experience has been that the people that find out about it first are, you know, if not the New York Times and the local papers here.
	I honestly think, in fact, not only do I think this, but I've even said it in publications, that the real scenario isn't going to be anything like this document.
	It's not going to happen this way.
	I saw what happened when they found out that the Hubble Space Telescope was flawed, for example.
	The news of that spread like wildfire.
	Everybody's wired, see?
	Everybody's connected together now.
	Just as we saw last June 23rd, I mean, we weren't telling the astronomical community or the government or anybody else about our signal, because we were still trying to determine whether it was even real.
	Let me tell you what blows a hole in this, though.
	Our government, for so many years, maintained all kinds of secrets very well, and they still do today.
	I mean, they had plutonium experiments.
	That's so scandalous, you would think one whisper of it to anybody would have gone around the world.
	Even 10 years ago, almost instantly feeding plutonium to children and pregnant women and all the, you know, the horrid little stuff they've admitted to now.
	How did they keep that secret, Seth?
	Well, I don't know, but I'll tell you.
	What can I do?
	I can bet you a cup of coffee it isn't going to happen that way.
	that doesn't sound like enough for you but if you really think that they could keep it secret one, the
	government would have to pay some attention to what we're doing and they don't pay
	any attention to what we're doing that's point one
	but the second thing is the people involved
	would at some point be told hey look you're not supposed to tell anybody about this
	and they're told quite the opposite there's no secrecy there's another point here
	and that is that the americans aren't the only ones doing SETI of course
	in particular now there's a new experiment being fired up in australia
	which is a darn good one and they've got half the universe to themselves down there
	because they're the only guys doing this in the southern hemisphere
	Sure.
	They might find it first, and, you know, it would surprise me if the Australian government was also nefarious, as it were, and shut this all down.
	And the other thing is, if you want to confirm this signal, if you want to be sure it's real, you need telescopes on the other side of the world because you know
	the earth is rotating and for 12 hours a day probably there's This signal is going to disappear, and you don't want it to
	disappear You want to monitor it 24 hours a day, so you've got to
	involve somebody on this other side of the world and I?
	just think it's going to be hundreds of people involved right away and
	To shut them all down shut them all up seems to be not likely okay
	So the the most excitement you've had has been so ho and then you mentioned an incident some months earlier
	Yeah, there was one when we were observing in Australia.
	We had our equipment down there ourselves, actually, in 1995, and that was a false alarm that was mostly a matter of pilot error, as it were, but the people down there got very excited.
	They had a signal that looked good again.
	It was one of those signals where you could move the telescope around and the signal would go away and then come back.
	Right, right.
	And I got a call from my boss at the Institute at about 10 o'clock at night, and normally when you get a call from your boss at that hour, you know, it's usually not good news.
	That's right.
	But in this case, he said, look, you know, the Australians are reporting something here, and it was interesting.
	My reaction was that I couldn't sit down.
	I just kept pacing around, kept pacing this.
	I understand.
	In fact, if I didn't have the job I have now, I would like to have yours.
	What a great job you've got.
	I love it.
	Anyway, so you were that excited?
	I was.
	And it turned out that what happened is that the star they were looking at at some point set.
	You know, it just went below the horizon.
	Sure.
	As a lot of stars do in the evening.
	Yes.
	At some point.
	And although the star set, the signal was still there.
	So that told them that, well, this is... Uh-oh.
	Yeah.
	Interference.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	I guess...
	I guess I'm going to soon turn you over to the audience, but I've got several more questions.
	For example, here's a faxer who says, perhaps the strongest evidence for the reality of the alien presence on planet Earth is that they have made no effort to contact us.
	Now, strongest evidence of alien presence on Earth, there are a lot of people who believe They are here now.
	So what are we doing looking out at the stars for some weak, pounding signal of evidence when they're already here?
	I take it you would take issue with that?
	Well, I would, yeah.
	Now, it's true that, you know, something like half of the American public, a little more than half actually, does believe that the aliens are, you know, they're here.
	That's right.
	And in that case, You know, we're kind of barking up the wrong tree looking for them a hundred light years away now, aren't we?
	But it's true.
	I don't believe that.
	I mean, I would like to believe it.
	If it were true, it would be, you know, hard.
	It'd be job security for me.
	So I'd be the first one to be excited by that idea.
	But I don't see the evidence myself.
	Nobody provides me with physical evidence.
	And to be honest, in the astronomical community, I know very few, very few people who give that too much credence.
	A British astronomer who said to me, and a fairly eminent one actually, who said, you know, if I thought there was a 1% chance that they were here, I would spend 100% of my time working on that, because after all, that would be the most important thing I could possibly work on.
	And by the way, he's not.
	Okay, fairly said.
	Hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour.
	We'll be right back.
	I'm Art Bell, and this, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
	SETI, here's the topic.
	I keep hearing your concerns about my happiness.
	But all I thought you'd given me is conscience again.
	If I were walking in your shoes, I wouldn't be wearing them.
	Are you now friends with a world without me and having less fun?
	Got a couple hours on the law that don't bother me at all.
	Playing solitaire no don't, with the jack of 51 Smoking cigarettes and watching catfish
	Hang through, now tell me I'm the...
	Playing solitaire no don't, with the jack of 51 Smoking cigarettes and watching catfish
	Hang through, now tell me I'm the...
	Playing solitaire no don't, with the jack of 51 From the Kingdom of Nye, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art
	Bell From east of the Rockies, call Art at 1-800-825-5033.
	West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, at 1-800-618-8255.
	First time callers may reach Art at area code 702-727-1222.
	First time callers may reach Art at area code 702-727-1222 and you may fax Art at area code
	702-727-8232.
	We've got the real thing with us tonight.
	Seth Shostak.
	Actually, Dr. Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
	to Coast AM with Art Bell. Now again, here's Art.
	Once again, here I am. We've got the real thing with us tonight.
	Seth Shostak, actually Dr. Seth Shostak, from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
	And just so you know, though we're not using the formal manner of address,
	he does indeed have a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.
	So as I said, you're listening to the real thing.
	The parallels so far to the movie Contact are absolutely remarkable.
	And I've got some news for Seth in a moment.
	All right.
	Back now to our guest.
	Seth, I've got some rather remarkable news for you, even though you've got that very mean fax.
	I've got a million faxes sitting here that are supportive.
	Moreover, we do a guest credibility poll on our website.
	And you're scoring the highest of any guest we've ever had so far who has taken this test with like an 88.
	So I mean, they really, really like you a lot.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	I'm sure that my mom appreciates it as well.
	So there's all of this public support, Seth, for what you're doing.
	uh... and the whole idea of steady by even
	crippled in a sense as it is uh... at the moment the public wants you to be doing it
	the public pays taxes
	why why says
	uh...
	aren't we taking some of that money and doing what the public obviously would like done
	well i think you hit upon a good point there are denied i'm afraid i don't have the answer
	to that because that requires somehow
	discerning the inner workings of politics what goes on inside the beltway what's politically
	possible what's not I will say this, you know, NASA has its own budgetary problems, of course, for the past couple of years.
	The NASA budgets have really been going down and you've got this International Space Station coming up and running over budget.
	Way over.
	Yeah, taking a lot of the money that should be used for other projects.
	And the public, meanwhile, is showing a lot of interest in things like the possibility there may be life on Mars or was life on Mars.
	Maybe there's life under the ice of Europa.
	Yes.
	People are interested in that.
	And the NASA administrator, Dan Golden, he realizes that.
	He makes speeches about building telescopes that can be fired off, you know, beyond the orbit of Jupiter that could find Earth-like planets around other stars.
	Right.
	He paints his picture.
	Look, we're going to do this.
	We can't do it next year because we don't have the money or the year after that.
	But sometime in the next 5, 10, 15 years, we're going to find Earth-like planets.
	And if you can analyze the light coming from those planets, maybe you can see a little bit of ozone or methane or something that might tell you there's life on those planets.
	But he's got a story without a punchline because in the end, What he wants to say is, and we might actually find that we have some intelligent cosmic company, too.
	And he can't say that because Congress said, NASA, you don't do SETI.
	And I, and with you, I think it's a nutty situation.
	All right.
	You're an astronomer, much like Jody was depicted of being.
	And the other astronomers, even at Arecibo and elsewhere, had a rather No, actually not.
	view of Jody, oh she's the one looking for the little green guys. Do you, Doctor, suffer
	the same sort of, I suppose it's polite ridicule from your colleagues?
	No actually not. You know, SETI in the past, particularly when it was a NASA program, was
	kind of reviewed by these...
	these panels of professional astronomers that decide, you know, what should the government
	be sponsoring in terms of astronomical research?
	Because the government does sponsor a certain amount of research.
	And it's always scored well, if you talk about scores.
	You know, a lot of them say, well, I don't know if you'll succeed or not.
	But it's well-grounded.
	I mean, the basic ideas are good.
	So then there is pure support.
	And the real problem, then, is political, not scientific.
	I think it is.
	I mean, there are people who, you know, obviously don't support it, but they're a distinct minority.
	Yes, they are.
	I mean, they're distinct in many ways, but they're a small minority.
	Put it that way.
	So, you know, the science is good.
	It's a long shot.
	Let's face it.
	It is a long shot.
	We might succeed tonight.
	We might succeed next week.
	And we might not succeed for 500 years.
	But if you do succeed, the consequences of that are, you know, it's worth the bet.
	Are you familiar with the name Dr. Michio Kaku?
	Yes.
	Yes, I am.
	He's at New York City University.
	He's a theoretical physicist and he is a frequent guest on this program.
	And he's commented on SETI in a somewhat derogatory manner in the sense that He feels that any civilization that was trying to communicate with us would not do so on any discrete frequency.
	Even looking at billions of them at once, he views it almost as a waste of time because he thinks for a signal to get here, it would almost have to come using what I described earlier as spread spectrum technology.
	That that would be much more powerful It would have a much better chance of getting here intact, going by other noise sources effortlessly and so forth and so on.
	How would you respond to that?
	Well, I mean, there's some point to that.
	You've already pointed, you yourself have noted that spread spectrum is a better deal for your, you know, your cellular phone or portable phone or for lots of communications on Earth.
	We're going that direction now.
	Absolutely.
	ETs, the ETs we're likely to hear are not going to be at our level.
	They're going to be ahead of us.
	Presumably done this centuries, maybe millennia ago.
	And, you know, if ET's broadcasting spread spectrum, the experiments we're running today aren't going to find them.
	It's that simple.
	I mean, I'll admit it right up front.
	But, you also pointed out something, and that is that you need sort of the algorithm, the key, So, the way they would probably do it is to put up some sort of beacon frequency or pilot frequency that would be transmitting the key to the algorithm.
	For example, yes.
	That's the kind of strategy we hope is being used.
	It's a little dangerous to, you know, kind of second-guess strategies from a civilization that might be, you know, 500,000 years more advanced than we are.
	Sure.
	And, you know, maybe you can't do that, but it's true that the simplest kind of signal to get is, in fact, the kind of narrowband signal that we're looking for.
	And if E.T.' 's not helping us out, as it were, by saying, hey, look, here's the hailing frequency and the hailing signal, and all it does is tell you where to find, you know, the real info.
	If he's not doing that, then it's going to be very hard to find him.
	Alright, what do you think would be the most likely kind of signal?
	That you would find.
	Again, I'll go back to KONTAKT.
	It was that KWUNK, KWUNK, KWUNK.
	Which was only, what you and I were just discussing, essentially the pilot frequency.
	Then they found, oh my god, there's television, oh my god, in between the scanning lines, there's more information.
	Is that how you think, if you discovered the real thing, that it would develop?
	That you would be only at the surface level, and then you would dig deeper and deeper and deeper and find more and more?
	I think so.
	Yeah.
	Now, it probably won't be like in contact.
	I mean, that was a great sound effect.
	It sounded to me like a pile driver hitting a pod of whales.
	You did.
	That's true.
	But, you know, it's really dramatic.
	But, you know, we don't hear sounds or anything like that.
	We just, you know, we get numbers.
	And mind you, if you get that hailing signal, I mean, I think the scenario is most likely to go like this.
	If you do get the hailing signal, as it were, let's call it that, there's not much information there.
	It may be very Very slow changes, sort of like a ham radio operator with a slow fist.
	Okay, very slow changes, but as soon as you get that signal, money is probably not going to be your big worry anymore, and you'll be able to go back and build the very much larger antennas it would take to pick up the modulation, the message, right?
	Yes.
	So then you go back and you begin to look at the signal in detail because you've got the antennas to do that, and at that point you begin to worry about well are we ever going to be able to understand
	this, is there some real information here or is it just you know the output of ET's modem and we're
	never going to understand it, you know that kind of thing. But it sure would be a lot of
	fun to start trying to dissemble some real signal wouldn't it? Oh it would.
	It would.
	People occasionally will ask me, well, you know, what does your cryptographer do during the day?
	On the assumption that we have a cryptographer, he's just sitting around waiting to decode these signals.
	Waiting for a phone call, probably.
	Waiting for a phone call.
	We don't have that, obviously.
	We don't have that because the kinds of signals we can find are so simple.
	You don't need to All right, here's a better way to ask it.
	Let's say that you weren't SETI listening, but you were a well-funded government project transmitting.
	If you were to transmit the ideal signal to space, what would you transmit?
	Well, I think we're probably biased by the experiment we're doing, and we probably transmit the kind of signal that we can receive.
	I mean, let's be honest about it.
	Well, I'm with you there, but I mean, would you transmit an interrupted carrier?
	Would you transmit prime numbers?
	What would you transmit as a beacon?
	Well, as a beacon, I think you would just send, you know, maybe a picture, as it were.
	That happened in contact.
	Because a picture everybody can decode.
	It's just a bunch of bits that you turn into what's called a bitmap.
	People who do graphics at home know what that is.
	Bitmap?
	Sure.
	Bitmaps?
	Sure.
	So you might send that, and the contents of the bitmap would be to tell you how to get more message, as it were.
	It's sort of the key to the time capsules, which is somewhere else.
	It might be at infrared frequencies or somewhere else.
	Other radio frequencies, maybe even spread spectrum, whatever it is.
	That this signal is merely to get your attention and to tell you how to unlock the rest of it.
	So that's what you would transmit?
	I think so, that's what I would do.
	Because you know, and probably a lot of the listeners know, that you can get a lot more information, a lot more bits per second, at higher frequencies, like infrared, for example.
	We sent out a probe long ago, and I can't remember, was it Voyager?
	Well, we've sent out the Pioneer and the Voyager.
	Pioneer.
	One of them had a CD on it, I think, or maybe not a CD, but no, a record.
	Yes.
	And it told a whole bunch about us.
	Yeah.
	Do you think that was a wise idea?
	Oh, I think it was a very interesting thing to do and, you know, it didn't cost much money or anything.
	The Pioneer, 10 and 11 plaques.
	Uh, we're the first to go out, and they have these, you know, these sort of license plates glued onto the side, sort of a greeting card.
	Yes.
	To any aliens, you know, hey, look, this is what we look like.
	There's a picture of a couple of nudie cuties on there and so forth.
	But wouldn't it, in effect, uh, I guess we have to back up a little bit.
	Uh, in the movie Contact, you may recall that there was, um, a debate raging about Whether anybody with technology sufficiently advanced to make us look like we're an anthill would be, by definition, a friend or foe.
	Is it fair to conclude that with scientific advancement far beyond ours, there would be social advancement In what we would consider a positive direction.
	Is that reasonable to conclude, or is that unsafe to conclude?
	Yeah, that's... I don't know.
	A lot of people have said that.
	Carl Sagan himself has said that, but it may just be whistling in the dark.
	I mean, I think that a lot of people of the 19th century, for example, if you could suddenly transport them to the end of the 20th century, you know, contemporary times, they might be amazed by our technology, but they would probably think that our our manners and general cultural behavior were considerably
	inferior to their own.
	Yes, indeed.
	Yeah, and so...
	We're talking about the days of the family unit and children supporting their parents
	and doing all the things that you would think would be civilized.
	Yeah, so I'm not sure that they get more civilized, but I think maybe what you're getting at is,
	you know, maybe it's dangerous to send greeting cards into space.
	That's what I'm getting at, yes.
	In other words, if you were to assign a probability, would you say the odds of them being friendly, if they're far advanced, are 50-50?
	Well, I think that there's probably a range.
	I'm sure that there are aggressive people.
	The trouble is that when you meet them, if you ever meet them... See, we're not in the business of meeting them here.
	We're just trying to pick up signals.
	Understood.
	But in the movies, You know, the aliens always come here, and of course a lot of folks think that they have as well.
	The ones you tend to meet are usually the aggressive ones.
	I mean, think of the Incas in 1532 when they met their first Spaniards.
	They didn't meet your average friendly Spaniard selling fish on the streets.
	They met the very aggressive guys who got into ships to come over and, you know, check out their gold supplies.
	So, I think that you have to keep in mind that The aliens that might come to you probably aren't the typical aliens.
	So there's that, but we're not in that business and we're just trying to pick up radio signals and I think that signals which have to be deliberately sent for you to hear are more likely to come from a sort of an enlightened society.
	Boy, one would hope so.
	But if you look at all of our world's history, every time a very advanced civilization has encountered a very much less advanced civilization, they have either killed them, enslaved them, or in some other way done harm to them, or ruined their culture, or absorbed them, or... In other words, not much good historically has occurred in that arena.
	That's true.
	And people have occasionally made that point that, you know, contact with another civilization, even if it is only over the radio, might be devastating.
	I mean, suddenly you're in contact with a civilization, say, that's 100,000 years more advanced, and, you know, your job is to work on some research problem here.
	And suddenly they come in and they say, oh, yeah, well, We got the answer to that.
	I mean, it kind of demoralized you, right?
	Yes, and then there's the Brookings Report, and I should get your take on that.
	I mean, that report generally suggested that if contact were made, religious, particularly even scientific institutions, all kinds of institutions, socially, politically, would be perhaps disrupted to the point where we would have anarchy.
	And so that information then should be, under those circumstances, with that conclusion withheld from the public.
	Yeah.
	Well, let me give you my take here on this, Art.
	I think there are two points.
	One is, I personally think that if we pick up a signal, I doubt that we'll be able to get a heck of a lot of information out of it.
	I mean, I think it's going to be pretty much like giving a television signal, a modern television signal, to the Neanderthals.
	They got the signal, but that's about it.
	They can't really do much with it, and that may be our circumstance.
	So in that case, you know, there's not a heck of a lot of danger, but there's a lot of knowledge in the sense that you know that intelligence is out there, and that's kind of important.
	But the other thing is, you might consider the example of Japan.
	I mean, you know, in the 1860s, Japan was opened up to the West, and Japan is still Japan.
	They've kept their own culture, and yet they've adopted The science and the technology and many other things.
	Oh, they certainly have.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, leaping 100,000 years into the future might be a good thing for us.
	I think that... Have you ever been to Japan, Doctor?
	I have, yeah.
	Recently?
	Last October, I think.
	There you are.
	All right.
	I was there about two years ago.
	And strange things are beginning to occur in the Japanese culture.
	I can tell you.
	Looking around Tokyo is like looking around New York City or any other major world capital.
	I mean, it's as modern as modern can be.
	In fact, per capita, they probably have more people walking and talking on cell phones than we do.
	Yes, that was my impression, too.
	And their family structure is now beginning to change.
	The old rule of jobs for life, that's beginning to change.
	So, with modern civilization, though it has been a slow process, is now beginning to speed up, and the Japanese, socially, are on a line that will intersect at some point with our society.
	Fair enough.
	Well, that may be, but, I mean, I just offer that as a, you know, that's another way of looking at things.
	The Japanese are still there.
	They're doing very well.
	Oh, yes.
	And their fate has been somewhat different than that of the Incas, for example, in their contact with And outside civilization meant that their culture really went away.
	But in the case of the Japanese, they were able to import what they wanted and, you know, they're importing more and more.
	That may be our situation.
	But, you know, all of that assumes that we can understand what the extraterrestrials are saying and we can somehow fit it in.
	I don't know that that's true, but, you know, I, for one, if they got on the radio and told us, look, here's how you can cure death and here's how you can get along and stuff like that.
	I'd listen.
	You are well aware, though, that there is a slice of the religious world out there that views humanity as the only intelligent life out to the 15 billion year starting point, or the Big Bang point, and they would be extremely disturbed by information that there were others.
	You do well understand there is that group.
	There is.
	But, you know, There are more stars we can see with our telescopes than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth.
	And there are some people who like to think this is the only grain of sand that's got anything interesting going on around it, but gosh darn, that would be mighty dull.
	Doctor, we're right up against the clock here, but recent discoveries with regard to planets that we have found, Around some stars extended out, multiplied.
	What then are the odds?
	How many Earth-like planets are there out there within the look-back distance we can presently see?
	Well, probably, you know, you've got to make an estimate of what fraction of... Never mind.
	I'll cut to the chase.
	The chase is this.
	Probably in our galaxy, the number is tens of billions.
	And... Good Lord.
	For those who care, there are at least another hundred billion galaxies.
	Oh, my God.
	All right, that'll do it.
	Stay right there.
	We'll be right back to you.
	AM 1500 KSTP To talk with Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nights
	from east of the Rockies, aisle 1.
	West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, 1-800-618-8255.
	including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.
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	To recharge from outside the U.S., first dial your access number to the USA, then 800-893-0903.
	This is Coast to Coast AM, from the Kingdom of Nye, with Art Bell.
	All right, we are blessed with an astronomer this morning.
	Dr. Seth Shostak, and we are, for the purposes of allowing you to communicate with him, are going to call him Seth, but make no mistake about who he is and what he does.
	He's a scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and we're about to get the lines open.
	So if you have questions about SETI, about what Seth does, and what SETI does, and where it's going, why, we're about to get to it.
	Back to Seth.
	Are you there, Seth?
	I am.
	All right.
	I've actually waited years and hoped for years to be able to interview somebody for SETI.
	When you got involved in this program, it must have been pretty exciting for you.
	How long have you been in SETI?
	Well, I've been working for the Institute for about eight years now, but I have to say that I did a SETI experiment in Europe when I was at a university there with Jill Tarter, who, by the way, is the A prototype for the Jodie Foster character in Contact.
	Really?
	Yeah, I think we did the only experiment ever done in the Netherlands.
	There's a big radio telescope there and we used it to look at the center of our galaxy thinking that any really sophisticated aliens might put a beacon down there.
	Sure.
	So it's been a long time now for you.
	It has, yes.
	When you first got in it, were you wide-eyed and very excited and thinking probably next month or at least the month after You're going to hear that signal?
	Well, it's hard to look back that far, but sure.
	But I think I'm still wide-eyed.
	Maybe that's naivete.
	I don't know.
	But in this business, the equipment keeps getting better.
	It's like the computer on top of your desk there.
	Sure.
	The one you've got there now is as powerful as all the previous ones put together, probably more so.
	And the same thing is true in SETI.
	The equipment you're using today is better than all the equipment That was used previously put together, so it's always a new experiment and you can stay enthusiastic.
	Are you a ham?
	I am actually.
	Oh, you are a ham.
	All right, so am I. And I can remember when I was about 12 years old and got my novice license, the first one you get, and I had my first CW, read code contact here, folks, and it was magic.
	It was magic that almost can't be described, hearing from somebody two or three states away.
	It was, it was incredible, and I still, I still feel a good portion of that magic, either when I'm operating ham radio, or when I'm even on the air here, because your voice is winging its way all the way around the world, courtesy of all kinds of mediums.
	And it's magic!
	And there's some sort of adrenaline thrill to it.
	And I think there always will be for me.
	And I guess it's the same for you?
	Yeah, I think that's true.
	In fact, I was observing, uh, we were on the telescope, well, I was on the telescope, uh, what was it, the day before yesterday?
	Or maybe it was yesterday morning.
	I'm a little bit confused at what morning we are, we're on here.
	But, uh, and it, you know, the signal didn't come in.
	I was telling the engineers I was hoping it was going to come in on my shift.
	It did not, but it's still interesting to do.
	There's still that appeal that this might be the big one.
	All right.
	We're going to go to the phones now.
	I've hawed you long enough.
	I've got to ask you to stay good and close to that phone and yell at us, because for some reason we don't have the best of connections.
	Okay.
	Oh, that's better.
	That's better.
	Here we go.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Art and Seth.
	Where are you, please?
	Honolulu, Hawaii.
	Yes, sir.
	Totally amazing.
	I got the inner voice told me, call now.
	Yep, and here you are.
	Bingo.
	Okay, Seth, this is Jonathan.
	I've previously had personal meetings with Stephen Greer of Seasetty, and I'm familiar with their protocols for going out to actually make contacts directly and physically on this planet, and I'm also aware of their situation relevant to funding for their field groups that are going out all over the planet to actually have contact with Do you realize that you're talking to somebody in the SETI Project, not CSAT?
	Yes, absolutely, and here's the link, or here's the comparison.
	Can I ask you Seth, how much dollars have been spent on the SETI Program, and engage you in a response as to why some of those dollars aren't directly going into programs such as Stephen Greer's?
	Well, I can tell you, the amount of money that we spend, we're by far the biggest of the SETI experiments going on now.
	And it's between four and five million dollars a year.
	That's what it costs.
	You have a couple of dozen people, engineers, scientists, you've got this expensive telescope, you've got some sophisticated equipment.
	And how many field investigation teams do you think that would fund for one year, and how many points of the planet could be covered?
	Well, I don't know the answer to that.
	You may know better than I.
	Uh, well, look.
	First of all, in the world of budgets for scientific work, four to five million dollars a year, despite what that caller might have thought, is a trivial, uh, insignificant amount of money.
	Well, of course, that's right.
	Oh, I'm starting to lose you again.
	Are you away from the phone?
	No, I'm not.
	I'm not.
	I'm here.
	Oh, you're okay.
	Yeah.
	You almost got to stay right on there and touch it.
	It's just one of those things.
	I'm about to swallow it, aren't I?
	That's good.
	All right.
	So it's not a lot of money.
	And, you know, there are going to be a lot of people, no doubt calling like this man, who thinks that they're already here and that we ought to be listening to signals here on our own planet.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, I've already said that I don't think they are here.
	And I think perhaps more to the point, the people that are supporting SETI kind of concur with that.
	And so they're voting with their checkbooks, as it were.
	They think that this is a better bet.
	But there are other people who believe that, gosh, we just have to Look in the backyard or someplace like that, and they're free to do their thing as well, of course.
	Right.
	And here's what I would say, that you are an incredibly important portion of the bet.
	And without you, it wouldn't be much of a bet at all, in my opinion.
	In other words, SETI is very, very important, and I don't think we can conclude that contact will occur in any specific way, and listening for contact seems to me to be a no-brainer.
	I mean, whatever else you do, optically looking for things, even assuming they might be here, looking for them here, you still... Listen!
	Why would you do only one thing, to the exclusion of others?
	Wouldn't make sense, would it?
	Nope.
	I agree with you 100%.
	All right.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Seth and Art.
	Good morning.
	Yeah, okay.
	I hope I'm loud enough.
	Hi, Seth.
	You're fine.
	Where are you?
	New York.
	Upstate New York.
	All right.
	Not to say downstate New York.
	Upstate.
	There's a difference there.
	I understand.
	And Art, I had gotten those flowers for my wife.
	They were all over the house.
	I know.
	Fantastic.
	Great deal.
	Okay.
	Well, you know, if Well, your program would be looking for, if they're already here, you'd be, they'd be talking back home, wouldn't they?
	Yeah, well, you wouldn't pick them up if they were broadcasting from Earth because their antennas are in the sky.
	No, but they would be broadcasting back to them on Earth.
	So there's one way to look at it.
	Yes, I suppose that's right, yes.
	So by finding a signal to them, you know.
	But my question is, two questions I have.
	One is on the receivers you're using and the other is on the frequencies.
	Alright.
	Now, if you're looking in the 2 GHz range, if I'm not mistaken, in fact we're all hams talking here by the way.
	Okay.
	There isn't an awful lot of stuff on 2 GHz that's not point-to-point communication on this planet.
	Correct.
	Other than some deep space probes and so on.
	Now, if you're looking at other planets, and they would be having to direct their signal on that frequency to us, which means they would be looking to contact us, wouldn't some lower frequencies be better?
	Yeah, I think if you're not too low, you get into a lot of, you know, junk and noise and everything else.
	You're talking about UHF frequencies?
	Yeah, more in the UHF, at least below a thousand megs.
	Alright.
	Seth?
	Well, there may be something to that.
	I think the caller's point is that, doggone it, at these frequencies, you know, it's really a very tightly beamed transmission and you just might not luck out and be in E.T.' 's
	beam, and why not go to lower frequencies where there's less of this beaming effect,
	where the broadcast kind of spreads out a little bit, you know, more on the directional
	signals.
	Sure.
	Right, exactly.
	Well, there may be something to that.
	It's just that at the microwave frequencies, there are these natural markers, these natural
	emissions that nature has made that sort of draw everybody's attention.
	And you can imagine ET could beat the beaming rap by either having a really powerful transmitter,
	you know, pumping out the kilowatts there, and thereby being able to spread it over a
	big chunk of space.
	Or you might have a rotating beacon, for example, that just sort of sweeps along the Milky Way
	and, you know, sweeps out tens of millions of stars every...
	Kind of like a radar sweep.
	Yeah, you could do that too.
	So... Yeah, but that would be so quick that...
	Yes, but it would be... Probably wouldn't be noticeable.
	Yes, but it would be repetitive.
	It would be repetitive, and you could just average it if there's enough power in it, the fact that it's quick.
	It's sort of like, you know, those xenon flashing lights on the wingtips of airplanes?
	Yes.
	You know, you can see them from great distance, and they're not on very long.
	They're on for maybe a thousandth of a second every second, and yet you have no trouble seeing them.
	So, you know, that's a possibility.
	There are some SETI experiments that have looked at lower frequencies, by the way, but do recall that once you get way down the dial, You have problems with your own ionosphere and so forth, and E.T.
	might want to make things a little easy for you.
	Yeah, because I've seen signals all kinds of... I mean, you're getting down, whatever frequency you're looking at, there's so much junk floating around today, I'm just surprised you can get by with that.
	So many... even a TV booster can be oscillating, you know, on somebody's rooftop.
	Well, you're right.
	That's why the antenna's in West Virginia.
	Yeah, but I'm out in the country where I am, and I...
	Occasionally hear all kinds of crazy things, but what kind of receivers are you using?
	I think you touched on it, but I didn't quite understand.
	For all these frequencies, is there one central oscillator and different IFs, or...?
	Well, no, what you do is, it's all digital, in fact.
	You sample the incoming signal in time, and then you do what's called a Fourier transform on it.
	And that produces a spectrum.
	You can go into the stores and buy what's called a spectrum analyzer.
	Okay, sure.
	And that's really what this is, and it works very much the same way.
	Okay, you answered my question.
	All right.
	Thank you very much, and take care.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Seth and Art.
	Where are you, please?
	I am phoning from Hawaii.
	My name is Scott.
	Hi, Scott.
	Hi.
	Yeah, well, I guess you guys kind of answered my question.
	I had originally wanted to know why our ears weren't pointing towards the Earth.
	So I guess I'll carry it a little further and you know with all the evidence that our government and I know there's no genuine proof but it seems like there's so much talk nowadays from people like you and me just the average Joe who lives on planet Earth who's seen things and you know talk of abduction.
	Why are we not spending this great amount of money On listening and viewing and honing in on planet Earth where all the action is supposedly going on.
	Well, just speculatively.
	I mean you said abductions and the rest of it.
	Sure.
	If you were to put together a program of the kind you're talking about, how would you go about looking?
	How would you spend your money?
	I'm not sure I'm following the question.
	I don't know anything about radios or anything like that.
	I'm saying, you obviously believe that there's something going on on Earth now, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so my question is, if you had a budget and you were going to try and uncover whatever you think is going on, how would you spend your money?
	Jeez, that's a good question.
	I first think I would like to investigate more thoroughly the government and its cover-ups.
	If I was going to use something like SETI, I think I would tilt it more towards the Earth.
	Well, all you would hear is a bunch of Earth noise.
	Man-generated noise.
	I thought about that.
	I didn't know if there was a way to separate all the mumbo-jumbo, because there sure is a lot of noise here on Earth.
	The answer to that is no.
	I mean, if you want to, buy a good communications-grade radio and start listening.
	Buy a scanner that goes up to do gigs and begin listening.
	You'll hear so many birdies and signals that you'll soon be utterly out of your mind.
	So maybe they're communicating with us.
	Maybe they're not.
	As you know, I believe they are.
	So maybe their approach is never going to be the way that we think that it is.
	We have, let me answer it this way, and then I've got to go.
	We have researchers that are doing hypnosis, a regression, that are looking into the abduction syndrome.
	We have researchers that go out every time there's a crop circle, and lots of people looking at things that occur here on Earth.
	That should not take the place of looking for a signal from out there where it is so likely.
	Point well taken.
	All right, thank you.
	And again, Seth, let's cover it a little bit.
	There are, in the observable look-back time, in the inobservable look-back time, there are how many stars, perhaps, best guess?
	Well, within 15 billion light years, which is as far as you can see, it's a number called 10 to the 22.
	That's one followed by 22 zeros.
	Wow!
	Stars.
	Yeah, stars.
	And we now believe that Planets are a common rather than uncommon thing.
	Is that correct?
	Yeah, that's right.
	Common, of course, is a relative term, but even in the limited searches that have been conducted so far, 3% or so of the stars looked at have planets.
	So if you say, well, maybe the real number is 10% or something like that, that's still, what is that?
	That's a thousand billion billion planetary systems in the universe.
	Wow.
	Um, yeah.
	Okay, um, very quickly, first time caller line, you're on the air with Seth and Art, hello.
	Hey, how you doing tonight, Art?
	Okay, where are you?
	I'm in Tennessee.
	Okay, you're gonna have to speak up good and loud, too.
	Okay, okay, sorry about that.
	Do you have a question?
	Yeah, hey, uh, Seth, back in the 70s, we had the Voyager series, the spacecraft there.
	Okay, I'm gonna have to take your credit.
	Can you hear him, Seth?
	I can, I can barely hear him, yeah.
	Okay.
	Okay, you know, we had those, we watched those Voyager series back in the 70s, Yes, we discussed that a little while ago.
	Oh, that's an interesting question.
	In that data, was there any suggested contact frequency?
	Yes, we discussed that a little while ago.
	You did? Okay, did we implant, put some kind of data in there where, um, to have the ETs
	transmit on predetermined frequencies?
	Oh, that's an interesting question. Um, in that data, was there any suggested contact frequency?
	If there wasn't, why not?
	Well, in fact, those are, you know, as I said, kind of greeting cards.
	And do keep in mind there in Tennessee that those things are about six billion miles from Tennessee right now.
	They're about one and a half times as far as Pluto.
	But the time they will take to get to the nearest star is about 70,000 years.
	And by the way, they're not aimed at the nearest star.
	So, you know, don't expect them to actually establish contact.
	But at least on the Pioneer Plaques, now you're talking about the Voyager records, but the Pioneer Plaques I did have a reference to the hydrogen atom, and that implies a natural radio frequency, which turns out to be at 1.4 gigahertz, just the frequency that Art named earlier in the program.
	1.4?
	Yeah, well, that's where it is.
	I said 2, so you're looking between roughly what?
	1 and 3?
	1 and 3.
	1 and 3.
	You're right in the middle.
	Alright, very quickly, maybe we've got time for one more before the bottom of the hour.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Seth and Art, hi.
	Hi.
	Where are you?
	New Orleans, Louisiana.
	All right.
	Do you have a question?
	Yes.
	What about a beaking in the solar system that would take and retransmit a signal back to the Earth?
	I understand that perhaps back in the early 20s when radio was just being Invented that they found something like that?
	Oh now, this man just suggested to me, if I'm interpreting correctly, he set a beacon.
	But Seth, wouldn't a natural extension of the SETI program be to launch something that would in fact set down on the moon or who knows where else, and set up a listening post that would then repeat its results to you?
	You would, in the best of all worlds, all right, you would move all these antennas to the far side of the moon where you wouldn't have all this terrestrial interference and you'd send that data right back to us.
	But that would take a hell of a budget.
	All right, we'll be right back.
	Seth, stay where you are.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
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	Alright, back now to Seth, and Seth, I know you have a book.
	You have written a book called, um, Sharing the Universe?
	That's the name.
	What's it all about?
	Well, it's sharing the universe's perspectives on extraterrestrial life, so it gives my take on things like what E.T.
	might be like, is he really out there, and how we can find him.
	So it's a lot of what we've been discussing tonight, but also things like what might motivate the aliens, can he say anything about what they might physically look like, and stuff like that.
	And a lot of it is kind of compared with what we see in the movies, so that people have a frame of reference.
	Wow, that sounds like a very interesting book, and is going to provoke more questions from me almost immediately, but in the meantime, where can people get your book?
	Is it in general release, or is there a phone number?
	Well, yeah, it's, I'm told, now mind you, I haven't been to the bookstores here this last week, and it's sort of come out more or less now, but I'm told that it's at the major chain, so people should check their local bookstores, and of course there are a number of And I presume there is information on your website?
	That's easy enough.
	That's right.
	It would be a non-profit organization, so it's .org.
	And I presume there is information on your website?
	Also, yes, they can always go to the CETI website at www.ceti.org.
	That's easy enough.
	That's right, it would be a non-profit organization, so it's .org.
	Right.
	At any rate, we also have, folks, a link so you can go to my website and jump right over
	and take a look now at the CETI website.
	And sharing the universe.
	It's out on Berkeley Hills Books.
	Uh, and I suggest you grab it now.
	Is there a phone number?
	Do you have any phone numbers set up people can call and order it?
	Hey, I'm afraid that, yes, boy, you got me at a bad time, Art, because I don't know that phone number.
	There is a phone number for Berkeley Hills Books, but I just recommend that people call their local bookstore, and they should be able to find it.
	Yes, almost all of them have computers, and if they know your name, that's going to be hard.
	Right.
	Better they should ask for Sharing the Universe, so they can look it up by title.
	That's absolutely so, and they could also, in fact, look up Berkeley Hills Books on the web as well, and they have links to The various web distributors of books, but all the big ones have it.
	All right.
	A very sort of 101 on what E.T.
	might look like.
	I guess you have considered that.
	What E.T.
	might look like physically would determine, would be determined by the planet and the conditions on the planet that E.T.
	came from.
	Do you imagine life forms evolving in very unearth-like And I speak now, of course, of intelligent life forms on very unearth-like planets.
	Well, there's no doubt in my mind that life could probably evolve in habitats that we personally wouldn't, you know, want to claim as a vacation spot, for example.
	I mean, you know, you can see that in our own solar system.
	There may be life, for example, under the ice sheets of the moon Europa around Jupiter.
	And if there's life there, it's in the dark.
	It's pretty dark underneath that ice.
	It's probably pitch dark.
	And it's quite cold.
	That water is just above freezing.
	And it's a very special kind of life.
	It obviously, you know, doesn't use photosynthesis and so forth and so on.
	I mean, that's a habitat that might have life, but probably not intelligent life.
	You're not going to have swimming intelligent life there.
	So there are probably a lot of weird places where life could get started.
	But if you talk about intelligent life, the kind that might ultimately build a radio transmitter so that we can hear them.
	Sure.
	Then, you know, there's a tendency to be fairly conservative and say, well, that's most likely to happen on a planet that's not too different from our own.
	Certainly won't be identical, but it won't be too different.
	And that tells you something about E.T.
	right away.
	E.T.' 's probably going to have eyes.
	I mean, he's going to have a star in the sky, a sun, that's not too much different from ours because stars that are very much different from our type of star aren't really great for spawning, for cooking up life.
	So, you know, you could make all those arguments, but, you know, that's As I say, that's pretty conservative.
	Maybe that's the way intelligent life gets started.
	But once it gets started, who knows what it does?
	I mean, it could spread out.
	We're probably going to spread out.
	We're not going to stick on this ball of Earth for very much longer, I don't think.
	And they probably won't either.
	They'll spread throughout their solar system and stuff.
	Would transmission through the air be a natural evolution of civilization?
	When you say, you mean... Transmission through the air of radio, television, RF, Would that be a natural evolution?
	Well, I think so, insofar as, for example, science is.
	I mean, you know, not everybody on this planet invented science.
	There's a lot of, there was a lot of civilization around that never got around to science.
	But if one society on a planet does do that, they're going to find radio, because it's in the physics of things.
	So I think it is natural, yes.
	I would like to ask you the question they asked Jody Foster, the $64 gazillion question.
	If you were sitting in that chair, the machine was already designed long after the signal had been intercepted, and you were a candidate, and they asked you, as they asked her, do you believe in God?
	Right.
	Well, I personally do, yes.
	Yes.
	You know, that's a question that comes up a lot.
	God of the Bible?
	Pardon me?
	The God of the Bible?
	Well, yeah, I'm a member of one of the Adamist religions.
	But I don't take the Bible very literally, I have to tell you that.
	I think it was written by humans.
	Now you have just lost your seat.
	And I guess one machine is going to have to blow up, then maybe you get the ride, I don't know.
	All right, let's go through the phones.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Art and Seth, hi.
	Hey Art, this is Dave in Tampa, Florida.
	Hi, hi there.
	Hey Seth, how you doing?
	Fine, Dave.
	I got two real quick questions for you.
	One was, I remember back in the late 80s, maybe early 90s, there was a really large radio telescope in West Virginia when I was staying up there.
	I remember seeing an article in the paper down here in Tampa that it had literally collapsed upon itself, but they had never found out why that happened.
	And my other question was, I also remember reading an article in the paper in the late 70s, maybe early 80s.
	I think it was Houston, Texas.
	A very large area of their televisions had received television transmissions from about 15 or 20 years before.
	It was complete with commercials and everything.
	It was about 10 or 15 minutes of programming.
	I heard about that.
	I heard about that.
	Both grand questions in their own way.
	Do you know anything about a dish in West Virginia that literally collapsed on itself?
	Yes, Dave.
	I think I can help you there.
	That was the 300-foot telescope.
	You know, radio telescopes always have these really romantic names, like 140-foot telescope.
	This one was a 300-foot telescope.
	In fact, I used to use that one a lot.
	And when it collapsed, it was actually being used by a guy I used to share an office with.
	But they know why it collapsed, in fact.
	A fish plate gave way.
	In other words, it was metal fatigue.
	That particular telescope was built kind of on the cheap.
	It was sort of an afterthought to the telescope we're using, which was built for $30 million.
	This thing was built for about $300,000.
	And it collapsed very slowly, so the operators and everybody had plenty of time to watch it happen and get out of the way.
	But they later asked the guy who designed that telescope, a guy by the name of John Finley, they said, Finley, what do you think about the fact that your telescope collapsed?
	Right.
	You looked at the reporter and you said, I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.
	All right, now, you know what?
	He mentioned Houston and a bunch of people picking up a broadcast that had been made many, many, many years earlier.
	I vaguely remember that story.
	Have you heard stories like it?
	I haven't heard that particular story, so I'm not going to be able to help Dave there very much.
	True that in particular, you know, guys like Nikola Tesla, a hundred years ago, exactly a hundred years ago, was picking up signals that were coming from what he thought was Mars, and these were ionospheric effects, you know, whistlers, things like that.
	There are such things as long-delayed echoes.
	You may not like that.
	Now I'm going to stop you.
	We're both hams, so I'm going to discuss something that I hope doesn't go too far over the head of the audience.
	Okay, bring it on.
	But I spend a lot of time talking to some regional friends of mine on 75 meters.
	And I've got a big antenna, Seth, like 175 feet out each side of the desert, you know, way above the desert floor here, so I've got a lot of wire out there.
	And I run a kilowatt.
	And so it's a pretty big signal on 75.
	And there have been a half dozen times since I've been a ham on 75 meters, an unlikely frequency for this, when, you know, when you'll say something and you'll let up on the microphone, and I'm telling you, Seth, I have heard my last syllable and the key click come back at me like 10 and 20 over 9.
	Absolutely incredible.
	How can that, how can that Well, I think that you know that at those frequencies,
	The ionosphere, the upper atmosphere, is reflective.
	Yeah.
	That's right.
	It's like a mirror.
	So here's a signal.
	I mean, the listeners can consider this as a signal sort of bouncing between the ground and this mirror in the sky.
	Right.
	And it bounces around the Earth a couple of times, and it can be delayed by, you know, a fraction of a second or even a second if it bounces around.
	Pretty unusual conditions in the 3.8 megahertz range.
	That is, yeah, 3.8 megahertz.
	That's right.
	That's pretty unusual, but that's what comes to the top of my head.
	There are such things as moon bounce and stuff like that.
	You know, it goes to the moon and comes back.
	That's three seconds.
	But I mean, we're talking here, Seth, we're talking here about a signal that would be delayed.
	I would guess the totality of it would be at least A half second after I un-key that I hear the last of the echo at 10 or 20 over 9.
	Now, that's not something that's gone around the world on that frequency.
	I don't think so, anyway.
	Yeah.
	Well, all right.
	Maybe we got a mystery there that's going to require a little bit more thought and investigation.
	Have you ever had that happen?
	I have not.
	I have not, I have to tell you.
	But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Seth and Art.
	Hi.
	Good morning, Eric.
	Good morning, Seth.
	This is Tom from Streamline Illinois.
	Hi, Tom.
	I have an astronomy-astrology question for the doctor.
	All right.
	I was wondering how Pluto and Charon related to the Oort Cloud, and how the Oort Cloud gave rise to that theory on our sister's supposed star Nemesis, and if it was possible, or if you think so, find any planets that orbit two celestial bodies, namely Zacharias Hitchens' 12-planet or Planet X.
	All right.
	Well, that last one's probably got me stumped, but I can maybe attack some of the others.
	Yeah, Pluto, you know, of course, is the ninth planet.
	It's the farthest one out there, and it's got this big moon, which is almost as big as it is.
	Carry on.
	Those, you know, we call them planets, and you could say, well, maybe they're just big asteroids that got captured into an orbit that makes them pretty much like a planet.
	The orbit of Pluto is a little bit unusual compared to the other planets, so there's some possibility that Pluto, I mean, it's even been suggested it was an escaped moon from Neptune and so forth, but let's call it a planet.
	If you go out beyond Pluto, there are other big rocks out there, okay, and something like a dozen have been discovered in the last 15 or 20 years.
	When I say big rocks, they're on the order of the size of a football field or a couple of miles across.
	Now, are you going to call those planets?
	Yeah, it's almost a matter of definition.
	We don't.
	We call them asteroids.
	If you go further out, you hit the Oort Cloud.
	Now, you can't really see the Oort Cloud, but you know it's there.
	This is a big cloud of comets.
	When I say big cloud, I mean there are like maybe a hundred trillion comets out there.
	It's small things to big things.
	This comet that was visiting us last spring...
	Hey, oh, Bob, that came from the, you know, pretty far out, probably not the Earth cloud, but occasionally things will come from the Earth cloud.
	Now, there's one more point here, and that is, it seems, when you look in the historical record here on Earth, that just about every 30 million years, you get a big extinction of animals on the Earth.
	You know, 65 million years ago, the dinos bought it, and 75% of all the other species did, too.
	Right.
	That seems to happen on a regular basis, and people have speculated that, well, That's because something is out there shaking up this Oort cloud and kicking comets in our direction every 30 million years, and some of those hit the Earth and caused these extinctions, and they've proposed, for example, a companion star to the Sun called Nemesis that might be doing that.
	You know, the trouble is, when people look for that star, they never find it.
	So, there's still some mysteries there.
	Okay.
	East of the Rockies, you're on air with Seth and Art.
	Hi.
	I started listening to you in April 1997, and in 11 months I finally hooked up with you.
	You made it in.
	Where are you?
	I'm Richard from Freeport, Illinois.
	Yes, sir.
	Yes, sir.
	I'd like to ask your study astronomer, is there some possibility that perhaps what we see as the Northern Lights here on Earth could be a special type of artificial space beacon in our galaxy?
	Actually, I would translate that question a little bit.
	You can go ahead and answer that if you wish, but that would make me ask you about crop circles.
	Sure.
	Well, I'm willing to... Well, let's take them one at a time.
	Richard, the northern lights are a pretty local phenomenon.
	They're particles that are shot out of the sun, because, you know, the sun's a big, hot body.
	It boils off these small particles, bits of atoms and things like that, that fly through space, and some of them get trapped in the Earth's magnetic field.
	They spiral on down that magnetic field like dirt going down a bathtub drain.
	But when they go down, they don't go quietly into that pole there.
	They light up.
	And that's the northern and southern light.
	So that's just a phenomenon right here on Earth.
	It's unlikely that it's any signal from aliens.
	I think it's just particles from the sun.
	They are beautiful.
	Now, crop circles, not so easily explained.
	Certainly not Doug and Dave with chains and boards.
	They did, you know, a few of them.
	But there have been some staggering, remarkable, obviously not human-made crop circles that have appeared in all sorts of areas in the world.
	And you look at them and you just know you're looking at either a natural phenomenon or something that has been done by somebody, not us.
	Well, I've got to see those, Art.
	Oh, then you've got to get to my website.
	Okay, I'll check that out.
	I do recall when the BBC sent a camera crew with some low-light equipment up onto a hill and, you know, just filmed fields of wheat every night until one day a crop circle appeared in one of them.
	And then they got some of these crop circles, these seriologists as they're called.
	Right.
	Wanted them to come in and say, all right, now is this one of these Doug and Dave Boards and Ropes FACO crop circles or is this the real thing?
	Right.
	And the guys, you know, looked at it and they looked at it some more and then they said, this is the real thing.
	And then they ran the videotape and showed some guys with boards and ropes that had made it the night before.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	But, I mean, you might want to consider this.
	Just imagine this scenario on some planet a hundred light years from here in their parliament where the guys are considering a motion on the floor to spend a hundred zillion galactic cruceros to send a spacecraft this way.
	So what's this motion again?
	We're going to send this spacecraft at an enormous cost to this distant planet.
	When we get there, we're going to have our crew carve patterns in their wheat.
	Now, everybody in favor of this idea, raise your hand.
	It seems pretty far-fetched to me.
	I know.
	I know it does.
	But is it not at least possible that we're dealing with a natural phenomena of some sort?
	A magnetic anomaly?
	Some sort of... You know, it takes a lot of energy to knock down weed.
	I mean, you know, I can imagine some sort of weather conditions might be able to do things, but they wouldn't make those in the planet.
	Well, I interview frequently Dr. Levengood.
	Yeah.
	You know that name?
	I don't.
	He examines at the molecular level We're at the top of the hour again.
	In other words, the actual crops themselves.
	And the only way he can duplicate in what appears to be a real crop circle is by microwave.
	And even that doesn't quite duplicate the molecular changes that occur in this wheat
	that's laid flat.
	So there is the distinct possibility of some sort of natural phenomenon.
	Listen, we're at the top of the hour again.
	I said I'd let you go, but I would really love to keep you for one last hour.
	It's okay by me, Art.
	Is it really?
	Sure.
	Okay.
	There's just so much to talk about, and you're such an interesting person.
	How far out in look-back time with Hubble can we look back now?
	Well, they just discovered, it was in the papers today, they found a galaxy that's about 90 to 95% of the way back to the Big Bang.
	Oh my gosh!
	And you're estimating that to be what, about 15 billion years?
	That's a good number.
	Yeah, somewhere between 10 and 15 billion years.
	So, this is 95% of the way back to that.
	And if we could look past that big bang point, which someday I presume we'll be able to.
	I'll hold that one until we get back.
	Stay right there.
	I'm Art Bell and this of course is Coast to Coast AM.
	The Talk Station I'm going to be a famous man.
	Oh, playfully.
	Watching me.
	But then they send me away.
	Teach me how to be sensible.
	Logical.
	Oh, responsible.
	Practical.
	And then they show me a world where I could be so dependable.
	Oh, clinical.
	I could be so dependable, or clinical, or intellectual, cynical.
	From the Kingdom of Nye, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	From east of the Rockies, call Art at 1-800-825-5033.
	West of the Rockies, including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, at 1-800-618-8255.
	First-time callers may reach Art at area code 702-727-1222.
	First time callers may reach Art at area code 702-727-1222.
	And you may fax Art at area code 702-727-8499.
	Please limit your faxes to one or two pages.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	Now again, here's Art.
	Thanks for watching.
	Yes, indeed.
	My guest is Dr. Seth Shostak, and he's a scientist at SETI in Mountain View, California.
	The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
	It is indeed a rare opportunity and very much of an honor for me to speak to him.
	And now you can speak to him.
	We've got the lines open, though they are utterly jammed.
	If you can get in, we'd love to hear from you.
	And we'll get right back to him.
	Are you zero?
	You want the ignition system Art Bell has on his Hot Rod Metro.
	It's like a heart transplant for your car.
	That's 1-800-627-8800 and check out their webpage at www.jacobselectronics.com.
	If you are fascinated by what you are hearing, intrigued, then go on up to my website right now.
	Make it on up there.
	It's www.artbell.com.
	Scroll down the list until you get to the guest area.
	You will see the name Seth Shostak there.
	Click on it.
	Go ahead and click on it, and you will go whizzing over to the SETI website.
	And there you can read about and learn much more about what SETI is doing.
	It is certainly a fascinating endeavor, and as I said earlier, if I wasn't doing this, that definitely would be my second choice.
	So, you've got a good job, Seth.
	You said that we just looked back about 95% of look back time.
	That means 95% of the way to about 15 billion years, roughly.
	Yeah.
	If we were able to look back past the first, or the, excuse me, well, I guess the first object, which, or you could think of it as the last object that could be seen, what would be there?
	Well, we can see farther back than that galaxy that was reported in the news today, yesterday, whenever.
	We can look back to the glow left over from the Big Bang.
	You know about that.
	That was found in the 1960s.
	And when you're looking at that, you're looking at the universe when it was only 300,000 years old.
	And given the fact that it's, you know, on the order of 15 billion years old now, that's a lot more than 95% of the way back.
	It sure is.
	But, you know, there's a limit to how far you, in principle, could look back.
	Well, you know, I said I'm familiar with, but only vaguely.
	You said a glow.
	Yeah.
	That implies, uh, that that was the glow from the explosion?
	Well, something like that, yeah.
	When the universe was very young, I mean, you've got to imagine, you know, the universe is a big expanding, uh, Well, I have a very hard time comprehending the whole explanation of how the Big Bang occurred.
	in your mind, sort of like, maybe like a hand grenade explosion, or just bits of shrapnel.
	You could imagine, so I think what you want to get at is who pulled the pin, perhaps.
	Well, I have a very hard time comprehending the whole explanation of how the Big Bang occurred.
	I just read a really neat book by Richard Preston entitled First Light, which is kind of a
	love letter to Palomar Observatory. It was all about Palomar, its construction and use.
	It was suggested in there that at one time there was nothing, and that there was something smaller
	than the size of a cork, which then exploded into everything that now is, that we can see.
	Yeah.
	I, I just, I just can't buy it, Seth.
	I just can't buy it.
	It's not something you see every day.
	Well, let me just, I don't know.
	I guess the question is, how do you buy it?
	Well, all you can do is, you know, in astronomy, astronomy is an old science, but it's a peculiar science in one sense in that it's mostly observational.
	You can't go out there and bring all this stuff into the lab and try it there, a lot of it, so all you can do is go buy what you see.
	What you see is the universe expanding.
	You can run that backwards.
	You can run that film backwards in your mind.
	That you can do, right?
	Right.
	Okay, so you run it back seven billion years or so, and how is the universe different?
	Well, all the galaxies are more or less half as far away as they are now.
	So it's crowded.
	It gets a little more crowded.
	Not a heck of a lot more crowded.
	I mean, if Andromeda were half the distance it is now, instead of being two million light years away, it'd be one million light years away, and that's not a big deal.
	And then you run the film back a little farther, and things are getting more crowded, and you run it back to the point where the galaxies begin to intersect.
	You know, well, that isn't going to happen.
	They're going to get formed in reverse, as it were.
	You can just imagine running this picture backward.
	You can run it backward till the universe is the size of a grapefruit, and you still understand what's going on, because physics tells you what the universe would be like if you squished it into the size of a grapefruit.
	You can run it back farther than that, till it's about the size of an atom.
	You can run it farther, a little bit farther back than that, but there comes a limit when the universe is very tiny, very young, when the old uncertainty principle comes into play, and the physics doesn't work anymore.
	Right.
	And now, that turns out to be about a number, I'll give you the number, it's 10 to the minus 43 seconds after the Big Bang, so that's a decimal point, 42 zeros, and then a one second after the Big Bang.
	Anything earlier than that, the physics doesn't work anymore.
	Okay, so we're kind of stuck.
	We're up against a wall there.
	And, of course, a lot of people are kind of interested in what happens at zero, of course.
	Of course.
	Or a millisecond before.
	So this is where you either embrace the concept of a creator or wait until physics finds out something that it doesn't know now.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	Okay.
	Art, I know we are listening.
	Seth and his colleagues are listening.
	But does Seth know whether we are actually sending any signals out trying to contact anybody from Tom and Austin?
	That's a good question from Tom, actually.
	We don't broadcast deliberately into space, actually.
	Now of course, you know, the TV stations do, but that's not a very easily found signal.
	You need a big antenna to get that at the other end.
	Plus there's a lot of collective noise.
	There's a lot of noise and the TV signals, you know, go on and off.
	The station is on a rotating earth, so for 12 hours a day you don't see it at all, and
	so forth.
	We don't deliberately broadcast, although there have been occasional attempts.
	There was one in 1974 using that big antenna down in Puerto Rico, the Arecibo telescope,
	and it was a message sent for three minutes into space, but it was sent to a big star
	cluster in our galaxy, a globular cluster called M13.
	Why M13?
	They must have had some great, interesting suspicion about M13 as a prime candidate.
	Well, I suspect it was more just the fact that M13 has a lot of stars in it, and it was easily, the Arecibo telescope could point at it.
	It has about a third of a million stars in it, but it's darn far away.
	It's about 21,000 light years away.
	And, you know, just for comparison, that's... What is that?
	That's... How long ago did we send it?
	That was in 1974.
	Seventy-four.
	So, it's going to take 21,000 years, minus 24 years, to get there.
	Darn.
	And if there's anybody there who deigns to reply, that's another 21,000 years for the answer to get back here.
	42,000 years will go by before we get any answer from those guys, and by then, you know, my personal interest in the project will be... Yeah, that's very depressing.
	Yeah, so, you know, All right, but that was just to show that it could be done.
	You could broadcast to the nearest stars, and then the round-trip time for an answer might only be 10 years or 20 years or 30 years.
	But even then, nobody's interested in success 50 years from now.
	They want success next week or next year or something like that.
	So that's why we don't broadcast.
	It isn't a matter of it being dangerous or anything.
	All right.
	And one last, then we'll go back to the phones.
	It is as follows.
	I'm seeing all sorts of traffic on the Internet.
	Suggesting that people with home computers can actually participate in some way in SETI.
	What can you tell me about that?
	Well, that's a... Yeah, it's something called SETI at Home.
	And this was a proposal by, in fact, a fellow I know up at the University of Washington.
	And the idea was that you would buy a screensaver for your computer.
	And when you're not using the computer, the screensaver takes control, as it were.
	And dials up a phone number somewhere and downloads some SETI data into your computer and crunches away at it and sends the results back, and you can participate in the search.
	That's the idea.
	But I have to say, at the moment, it's vaporware.
	They have to find some money for somebody to develop the software.
	So there is a website, www.bigscience.com.
	People can go check it out, but it doesn't exist yet.
	Okay, so it's not running yet?
	It's not running yet.
	Is it a good idea?
	I think it's a very intriguing idea.
	If for no other reason, it gets people involved in the search.
	They want to be involved.
	Is it a practical idea?
	In other words, with that much additional computer power, would there be an advantage?
	Well, there would.
	You would be able to look for signals of a type that you just can't look for now, simply because you don't have enough crunch power in your computer.
	Uh-huh.
	And then this is a very important question, then I promise back to the phones.
	If you're a non-profit organization, and you're starved for money, and you're only using a portion of the telescope's money in West Virginia, and it's probably going to cost a lot of money to use Arecibo soon, You can use donations at SETI, I would imagine, can't you?
	Oh, absolutely, yeah.
	We depend on, you know, the public's interest in this.
	If everybody loses interest, this project just goes away.
	Okay.
	So if somebody wants to contribute to SETI a few bucks, whatever they can afford, how would they do it?
	Well, the easiest thing to do is, you know, just look us up on our website.
	And there are, you know, the phone numbers and addresses and email addresses and all sorts of things like that.
	That's the easiest way to get hold of us.
	If you have a computer.
	But I mean if I wanted to sit down right now and write a check.
	Right.
	To SETI.
	There must be an address.
	There absolutely is.
	I'll give it to you right now.
	Alright.
	It's the SETI Institute.
	And that's at 2035 Landings.
	As in aircraft landings.
	Drive.
	And that's in Mountain View, which is two words.
	Mountain View, California.
	94043 The zip code again?
	9-4-0-4-3.
	94043 Alright, I'm going to repeat it. Folks, if you want to put
	a few bucks in an envelope or send a check.
	SETI Institute, 2035 Landings Drive That's a great address, Landings Drive.
	Mountain View, California.
	Zip code 94043.
	Correct?
	That's it.
	Alright, I hope you get a lot of money.
	Well, but it's a very good use.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Good morning, Art.
	This is Steve in Juneau, Alaska.
	Juneau, Alaska.
	The capital of Alaska.
	It's a very real honor to speak to your guest there.
	I think you were up here last summer, Art.
	I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to meet with you then.
	About seven years ago, I received a letter from Carl Sagan, and I must say that I feel the same way tonight that I felt when I opened that letter because of the honor I feel being able to address your guest there.
	I do have a couple of questions.
	The first, I would refer to the movie Contact when the galaxies were colliding back into a single point.
	That's always impressed me as being very illustrative of the principle of what is within is without.
	And I wonder if your guest could elaborate on that.
	I know Carl Sagan had mentioned at one point he theorized that the entire observable universe could actually be a single oscillating electron.
	Also, we hear a lot about the Drake equation.
	Wait a minute.
	One, one.
	Hold it, sir.
	Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it.
	Hold it, sir.
	Hello.
	Hello, sir.
	Hello.
	He's not listening.
	I wonder if Seth could elaborate on that equation and if there's been any recent update to that calculation.
	Sir, can you hear me?
	Yes.
	All right, please pause and let him answer your first question, all right?
	Okay.
	Okay, Seth.
	Well, I'm already on to the second question there, Steve.
	But the first question you were asking about You know, what does it all mean?
	I mean, could all the whole universe be somehow part of a simpler entity like a giant oscillating electron?
	Well, heck, you know, you could conceive of models like that.
	People often note that atoms look like solar systems.
	And so maybe our solar system is just an atom in something larger.
	But, you know, the physics is a little different between solar systems and atoms.
	So I think that, well, that's a kind of a fanciful idea.
	It doesn't get you very far with the science.
	But your second question was, I heard it right there about the Drake equation.
	Frank Drake, who was the first guy to do modern SETI, and he's the president of the SETI Institute, by the way,
	he did formulate this equation.
	The idea is to just try and estimate how many civilizations are out there on the air right now.
	Okay?
	I mean, we know that, you know, parts on maybe 400 stations right now.
	Well, how many alien stations are broadcasting right now?
	And that depends on things like how many stars there are out there, for example,
	but also what fraction of them have planets, what fraction of those planets have life,
	what fraction of that life has got intelligent life, and so forth.
	And the bottom line there is that nobody knows the answer to that equation
	because what you don't know is how long do they stay on the air.
	Right?
	I mean, even if there are 10 million civilizations that have been born in the galaxy
	that built transmitters, maybe they all blow themselves up right away,
	and you'll never hear them because they're not on the air long enough.
	So nobody knows.
	But if you ask Frank himself, he would say the number of broadcasting civilizations right now
	is maybe 10,000 in our galaxy.
	One more question, Seth.
	What would be your thought in terms of being able to send or receive a signal faster than the speed of light?
	I imagine that we're hung up on the speed of light and I think advanced civilizations are using a technology that would be far more advanced to being limited by the speed of light.
	Alright, now that is a really good question.
	There are many physicists who think that space and time, Seth, could eventually, with enough power, Uh, be either bent or warped so that, in effect, you jump across, not really traveling faster than the speed of light, but sort of jumping across so you would seemingly be arriving at faster than the speed of light.
	Now, you talk about that in the physical form, but translate that to communications.
	Anybody thinking about that?
	Well, yeah, there are people thinking about that.
	So far, you know, let me just say that Jerry's kind of out.
	We don't have any physics that suggests that we can, for example, build some sort of super-duper radio that can communicate faster than the speed of light, even using these quantum effects.
	But there is the possibility of... I guess they're called wormholes, is the term I'm looking for.
	That's right.
	Like you saw in Contact.
	You know, in the end, that's what Jodie Foster did.
	The aliens told her, build this machine.
	She built it.
	Somebody built it.
	He gets into it and she can, you know, jump from one part of the galaxy to another in essentially no time.
	And it is true that the equations of relativity suggest that if you really do warp space and time the way you do around a black hole, for example, that maybe that provides a wormhole to another place in time or another place in space.
	You might jump to the other side of the galaxy or maybe even jump to another universe.
	That's what the equations say.
	But whether there's physical reality in that or whether you could actually ever do that, those questions are still open.
	All right.
	Because that kind of communication, if you could ever discover that medium, might be a very busy place indeed.
	We might be surprised.
	Well, that's right.
	And if that's the way to do things, then we're, of course, barking up the wrong tree.
	We'll say that.
	All right.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Seth Ennard.
	Good morning.
	Good morning, Art.
	Thank you very much for having the good doctor on.
	And Seth, I'm not going to refer to you by your last name because that's too hard for me to say, but thank you.
	And I want you to know that it's an honor and I appreciate all your diligence and effort in this setting.
	It means a lot to all of us, including myself.
	My question is a basic one that I thought of when I first heard you speaking.
	That is, when you run into signals from spotlights that you have Basically either programmed in to skip over because you know what they are or distant traveling voyagers such as that that you've run into.
	Don't you often wonder or are you concerned that maybe because they are so close as opposed to what you would be looking for that they could be taking up such a wide spectrum that It might be doubling over many other signals that that might be covering.
	Is that a valid question?
	Oh yes, I can tell you it is, Seth.
	Yeah, yeah.
	QRM from satellites.
	That's right.
	Interference.
	Well, actually, I'm sorry I didn't get your name, caller, but it's not such a problem because in fact the satellites might indeed block out, at least for a few minutes, a channel or two, or even three or four.
	But remember, we're listening to 28 million channels, so the chances that that signal happens to block out E.T.
	for those few minutes are pretty small.
	When you lose a couple of channels out of 28 million, you're not really losing very much.
	All right.
	We'll be right back.
	Her hair's a ton of gold Her lips sweet surprise
	Her hands are never cold She's got Betty Davis eyes
	She'll turn her music on You won't have to think twice
	She's pure as New York snow She's got Betty Davis eyes
	Betty Davis eyes Send your camel to bed
	Shadows paint in our faces, traces of romance in our hands Heaven's holding our hands, moon, sun, shining just for us
	Let's slip off to a sad new place, a kick up a little dive Come on, can't you see the way we're falling?
	To Trump with Art Bell in the Kingdom of Nine From East of the Rockies, Dial 1-800-825-5033
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	First time callers may reach Art at area code 702-727-1222.
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	To reach Art from outside the U.S., first dial your access number to the USA, then 800-893-0903.
	This is Coast to Coast AM from the Kingdom of Nye with Art Bell.
	Well, I never thought I would see it, but we have a sale on the Beijing Radio.
	Actually, we have a sale on both forms of the Baygen radio.
	The Baygen is an AM-FM shortwave radio.
	It covers seven shortwave bands, weighs seven pounds, full-size portable.
	It doesn't use batteries and doesn't plug into the wall and doesn't have solar panels.
	So, how in the world then does it work?
	Well, It's got a remarkable device.
	The Baygen has something called the Bayless Clockwork Generator, invented by a man named Trevor Bayless in Great Britain.
	It is manufactured in South Africa, and the bottom line is as follows.
	There's a crank on the side.
	You turn the crank for 30 seconds, and this radio plays at full room volume for 30 minutes.
	I repeat, 30 seconds gives you 30 minutes.
	That is Bayjen A. Usually 119.95.
	Right now, and for a short time, 109.95.
	109.95.
	Then there is Bayjen B. This is the Bayjen with a light.
	And they have done a remarkable conversion on this radio.
	That's a sea crane company.
	There's a little receptacle on the back.
	And when you buy the B size radio, you get a mag light with it.
	And inside this mag light are LEDs.
	Actually three LEDs together.
	Light emitting diodes.
	And now when you plug this in and crank the radio for 30 seconds, you get 30 minutes of radio and 30 minutes of light.
	Enough light to light a room and to read by.
	So, this is a serious no-brainer.
	If the power goes out, and we're getting a lot of storms lately, huh?
	El Nino-driven storms.
	And we've had hundreds of thousands of people without power.
	Believe me, you run to the Beijing right away, I think it should be in every single American home.
	If you want one, call the Sea Crane Company between 9 and 1 on Saturday, or very early Monday morning before they're all gone at this price.
	It's at a remarkable price.
	The regular Baygin now $109.95.
	And the Baygin with a light $139.95.
	That's one I recommend, by the way.
	The number to call in the morning is 1-800-522-8863.
	That's 1-800-522-8863.
	The Sea Crane Company.
	The magic bullet.
	You got the signal.
	No doubt about it.
	You've got it.
	is 1-800-522-8863. That's 1-800-522-8863. The C crane company. The magic bullet, you
	got the signal. No doubt about it, you've got it, you've confirmed it. You said the
	protocols would suggest that you would first confirm, which I'm assuming you now have already
	done, then you would contact the government.
	You would contact the public.
	Well, yeah.
	Actually, first you contact the astronomical community.
	Sure.
	Which, in fact, probably means that the public knows it before the government, because the astronomers will simply tell everybody they know.
	That's my take on it.
	Um, but let's say the secret was held and no astronomer wanted to go and announce to the press that you all had found E.T.
	They didn't want to be the first.
	I mean, that is a possible scenario, so they'd keep their mouths shut.
	Um, who would you call in the government?
	Well, I'm not sure who I'd call.
	You know, I really don't know.
	I suspect that I would call NASA headquarters and leave it up to them, but that's my personal take on it.
	There may be people who are better connected with the government than I am.
	And, you know, there's another question.
	Suppose you're not observing it, you know, in West Virginia, but you're observing in Australia or, for that matter, even Puerto Rico, although Puerto Rico is part of the United States.
	But, you know, if you're observing in Australia, well, call the Australian government.
	What do you do?
	I suppose you just, well, I mean, you'd call somebody in Washington, you'd call your congressman and tell them.
	You'd certainly want to be really sure before you made a call to the press.
	That's right, and that's why I think that the scenario depicted in these protocols is probably unrealistic, because it takes time to be really sure.
	It takes, you know, a couple of days worth of confirmation.
	I mean, we've seen that.
	It took 24 hours to track down that signal we got last year that was due to a satellite.
	And, uh, you know, it may take a couple of days before you're really sure, and you don't want to cry wolf, you don't want to say you found it and it turns out you haven't, but you can see what's going to happen.
	You know, halfway through that confirmation process, some paper's going to decide, well, this looks close enough, we're going to run with it anyhow.
	Take the Soho incident, uh, since it's such a good one.
	You were a couple of days before you decided that was SoHo, and for a while you thought, well, it could be ET.
	Assuming that confirmations had continued to come in, and that it wasn't SoHo, how much more time, how much more time than two days would have gone by before there would have been a general sort of announcement?
	Well... An official announcement, how about that?
	Yeah, well, an official announcement, okay.
	Actually, it wasn't two days, it was only one day, alright?
	It was a half a day into it that I got a call from, as I say, the New York Times saying, hey, we heard you guys are following a signal.
	Now, what are you going to tell them?
	You're going to say, you know, you can't lie to them and say, no, we're not following the signal.
	What you have to tell them at that point is just the truth, namely that, well, yeah, we're following a signal.
	Now, we don't know whether it's E.T.
	or a satellite, as it turned out to be.
	But now the ball's kind of in their court.
	What do they do with that information?
	They say, well, We're going to run a story or not.
	And, you know, it's a reputable newspaper.
	And they say, all right, well, give us a call back in a couple hours and let us know what the situation is then.
	As it turned out, within a few hours of that call, we knew that it was most likely a satellite and they could, you know, kind of relax.
	But suppose your scenario took place.
	Yes.
	And, you know, the signals continue to look good.
	I think that what would happen is that long before we had gone through the procedure of making sure that somebody Boy, would that be big news.
	Really, really big news.
	And it's hard to even imagine how the world's press and then the people who would read that press and hear it in broadcast medium would handle it.
	our first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.
	Boy, would that be big news.
	Really, really big news.
	Yeah.
	And it's hard to even imagine how the world's press and then the people who would read that press
	and hear it in broadcast medium would handle it.
	Okay, first time caller line, you're on the air with Seth and Art.
	Good morning.
	Hi, good morning.
	Is this Art and Seth?
	Yes, it is.
	Where are you?
	This is Donna from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
	Hi, Donna.
	And it's raining, of course.
	It's raining here, too.
	Well, my question is extremely pragmatic.
	I'm going back to funding and money.
	Seth, I heard you say that you're working on a budget of four to five million dollars a year.
	Is that correct?
	That is correct, Donna.
	Okay, I'm wondering what your two major sources of your funding are, and is the government involved in funding your research?
	Right.
	Can you kind of see where I'm going with this question?
	Well, the second question is no, the government's out of it now.
	It's private funding, and I don't know if Seth wants to identify the... Well, I don't mind.
	I can tell you the major funders.
	Obviously, there are many people who send us money.
	But the people whose names you may have heard of and who have contributed a lot of money
	are Bill Hewlett and David Packard of obvious affiliation.
	You've heard of those guys.
	Oh yes.
	Gordon Moore who is the co-founder of the Intel Corporation.
	You've probably heard of the corporation.
	And the fourth guy up your way actually got the name of Paul Allen, co-founder of the
	Microsoft Corporation.
	So those are four big hitters if you will that think that this is worth writing some
	The money does not come from their companies.
	It comes from them personally.
	Do you think they have some ulterior motive in funding your projects?
	I don't.
	I really don't.
	But, you know, I... You think it's just curiosity?
	I think that, yes.
	Good heartedness?
	Indeed.
	I think that these people who are, you know, are interested in sort of the big picture kind of experiments people can do and that they see that this is something, for the first time in the whole history of humankind, we might be able to answer the question of whether we have cosmic company.
	They find that an interesting question to answer.
	You don't think somebody like Paul Allen is going to go to his best buddy Bill Gates and say, hey, Bill, guess what?
	Well, yeah, I don't know.
	Maybe let's go back to the movie Contact.
	You remember, of course, the very aged benefactor that ended up on the Russian satellite where he croaked?
	Yes, the John Hurt character.
	Yes.
	Do you have anybody like that?
	That you don't name?
	No, we don't.
	We don't.
	That's the ultimate sugar daddy, indeed.
	And if there's somebody listening tonight who would like to be the John Hurt character... The address is... And yeah, let me give it again.
	The address is the SETI Institute at 2035 Landings Drive.
	As in whatever kind of landing you might imagine.
	Mountain View, California.
	Zip code 94043.
	And my guest has a book.
	And if you've been intrigued tonight, you're certainly going to want to read his book.
	It's available nationwide.
	If it isn't demanded, it's called Sharing the Universe.
	Sharing the Universe.
	It's Berkeley Hills Books.
	And that should do it for you if you go into a bookstore.
	If they don't have it, they can get it.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Seth and Art.
	Hi.
	Hello?
	Is this East of the Rockies?
	Well, only you know that for sure.
	I presume you're East of the Rockies.
	Okay.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm a first-time caller.
	That's about right.
	Where are you?
	I'm Dave from Goshen, Indiana, between South Bend and Fort Wayne.
	Okay.
	And I would like to say, first of all, that you have a very interesting show, and I've been listening off and on for about two years now.
	Thank you.
	And you have a very interesting guest tonight.
	Yes.
	Astronomy, physics, and geology are three of my favorite sciences.
	And I have four brief questions for your guest.
	Alright.
	First of all, although you're not discussing this subject in detail tonight, I'm just curious.
	I'm a Christian, and you mentioned a while back, you alluded to the fact that you believe in God.
	And that you were religious, but I was just wondering what the name of your religious system or philosophy, your belief system is.
	You don't have to answer that.
	Well, I don't mind.
	I'm Jewish.
	Oh, I see.
	Okay.
	Okay, next.
	Next, I was wondering, has there ever been any kind of attempt to Send a radio signal, a beam out into space using like a tachyon, you know, a tachyon pulse type source.
	Well, Dave, you know, tachyons were sort of hypothesized.
	Tachyons, for those who don't know, is a kind of particle that would go faster than light.
	So they would be great if you could find those guys and somehow harness them for transmitting messages.
	The trouble with tachyons is, as far as I know, nobody's ever found a tachyon.
	And they stopped the accelerator that might have.
	Yeah, so tachyons are not in the picture at the moment, Dave.
	Are you referring to the Super Collider?
	Yes.
	I see.
	Okay, and my next question is, if you had an unlimited budget, and if you, since NASA just found ice on the Moon and the North and South Poles, if you had an unlimited budget, and so money was no object, And you were put in charge of establishing the first lunar colony, base, whatever you want to call it.
	What would you put up there and what would be your order of priorities as far as, I know you'd want to have a radio telescope up there, you mentioned that earlier, but what do you think about also like having a big Optical telescope that would be as big or bigger than Mount Palomar or that one in Russia that has like a 270 inch mirror.
	All right.
	Well, all of that sounds good.
	I'm going to try and twist your question a little color.
	And it is, if you had an unlimited budget, wonderful words, I'm sure music to your ears, Seth, and you could apply this unlimited budget toward SETI.
	Where would you pour the money?
	Well, you know, it depends on how limited, unlimited it is, I guess.
	Unlimited.
	Unlimited.
	Well, if it's really unlimited, you would build a very large collecting area on the back side of the moon.
	That's the first thing you'd do.
	And maybe you'd build it out of these small satellite dishes that are made in such enormous quantity now because they're inexpensive and you can just, you know, cover acres and acres Square miles worth of real estate with those things and make a huge antenna that way.
	That's an obvious thing to do.
	It's true.
	And again, referencing the movie Contact, Jodie Foster was using such a lash-up with large, larger dishes.
	Well, she did.
	She moved from Puerto Rico, actually, to a real telescope in New Mexico called the VLA, the Very Large Array.
	And although that was pictorially a good move, it was, in terms of the science, not such a good move.
	All those 27 antennas put together would get lost in the Arecibo telescope, so they moved her there mainly because it made pretty pictures.
	I see.
	I can only imagine the problem though with having 10,000 10-foot dishes trying to coordinate in azimuth and elevation.
	All those motors trying to operate together would be a nightmare.
	Well, yeah, that's probably not even...
	The big problem, you have to lash them all together electronically, too.
	You know, electrically, if you will, to add up all the signals.
	But, you know, you could do that.
	You said unlimited budget, so I didn't make it easy.
	But you could also build... There are other kinds of antennas that are made out of little tiny pieces, so they're kind of omnidirectional.
	They're pointing in all directions at once, and you just sort of cover your backyard with these things, and then use computers to connect them all together, and then sort of steer them electronically, the way the military sometimes does with radar.
	And that way you might be able to look at the whole sky at once, and that would be really very good for SETI.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Seth Ennard.
	Good morning.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	I've been waiting a long time.
	Well, here you are.
	Where are you?
	I'm in Flagstaff, Arizona.
	Okay.
	This is Lynette.
	And my question for Seth was... This is really an amateurish question, I'm sure.
	But couldn't an extraterrestrial civilization transmit a...
	A message or a signal via one of the quasars or pulsars, kind of like piggybacking that signal, a natural signal?
	Yeah, you know, that's not such a crazy idea at all, actually.
	I mean, the quasars are really distant galaxies.
	They're typically billions of light years away.
	They're just galaxies that are eating things in their central regions, but the pulsars aren't so far away.
	Pulsars are just stars that have blown up and died in our galaxy, so they're just sort of corpses sitting around.
	And they're very natural things, but you can imagine that a sophisticated civilization might say, hey, look, we want to get somebody's attention, so why don't we send a space probe over to this pulsar over here and put a big transmitter in front of it And we know they're going to be looking at this pulsar because it's an interesting astronomical object.
	It's like a lighthouse.
	It's like a lighthouse.
	It's a tourist attraction for astronomers, so they'll be looking at it, and we'll just put our signal there on top of it, and so they'll see us by looking here.
	You know, that's a good idea.
	Maybe we should be looking in the directions of pulsars.
	Are you not already?
	It hasn't been done too often, no.
	In fact, in my mind, there really hasn't been a systematic search in the direction of pulsars, but it has been suggested.
	I think it's a good idea.
	Well, how about that?
	There you go, Lynette.
	Well, thank you.
	That was it.
	It was a pleasure listening to you this evening and talking to you, and I thank Art for that.
	Well, thank you, Lynette, and good night.
	East of the Rockies, without a whole lot of time, you're on the air with Seth and Art.
	Hello, this is Art.
	I'm calling from Georgia.
	Hi, Art.
	I recently read a book called The Serious Mystery by Robert Temple, I think his name was.
	I was wondering if If the doctor had ever read that book and, uh, what he thought about it.
	Well, I have an art, so give me, give me a one-sentence synopsis.
	Yeah.
	Uh, he, he just talks about the, uh, star system, uh, Sirius, and about an African tribe that knew about the, uh, star companion, like, thousands of years ago.
	The, uh, Sitchin thing, I, I think is what he's talking about, and that, uh, postulates that there is a rogue planet that every so, uh, often ten or twelve thousand years, or whatever it is, Returns, bringing with it great changes and disasters here on Earth and all the rest of it.
	And there are people that have theorized that there may be such a planet on a very long return cycle.
	Well, that's fairly similar to this nemesis hypothesis.
	Right.
	There's something shaking up the comets in our own solar system, causing a couple of them to slam into the Earth.
	Reap havoc and destruction here and ruin your whole day, particularly if you're a dinosaur.
	How frequently, Seth, do you make the trip from where you are in California back to West Virginia?
	Well, it used to be a couple of times a year, Art, because, of course, when we're observing, you know, we would go there.
	But the wonders of modern technology, we now can observe by remote control.
	So when I was observing here, what, 48 hours ago, whenever it was, I just had to walk downstairs Right here in Mountain View, California, and we can do it by remote control now, so we don't go to the telescope quite as often as we used to, and while that's convenient, it's also much less romantic.
	Will that be possible when you get your access to Arecibo?
	It will be, yes.
	Yeah, you always need somebody at the telescope, but, you know, there are telescope operators at all these observatories, and they can handle most of the routine stuff and take care of a lot of the repairs that are always necessary as well.
	It is, in fact, a very, very romantic job that you have.
	Do you see the funding and the interest continuing at a level that will let you continue your romance?
	Well, I think so.
	Maybe you should just call me Pollyanna, but I honestly do see that.
	I think that the American public realizes, I think they're way ahead of the Congress on this sort of thing.
	They realize that this is the first generation that has a chance of answering this question.
	It's a question that everybody's interested in.
	And so I'm saying that I'm optimistic that we'll continue to get that support.
	I certainly hope so.
	Do you think there's at least a fairly healthy percentage chance that this question will get answered in your lifetime, Seth?
	I do.
	Now, mind you, most study scientists will say that things are going to be answered in their lifetimes for obvious reasons.
	But, you know, Art, the equipment is so much better now that I think that to say that we'll hear a signal within the next 5, 10 to 10 years is not totally without basis.
	I think it may happen.
	Wow.
	Listen, what an honor it has been, my friend.
	I really thank you for sticking with us through the morning.
	It's been a pleasure, Art.
	Take care, Seth.
	Okay, thanks a lot.
	Bye-bye.
	Alright, that's it, folks.
	I am sorry.
	We are flat out of time.
	There may be a very interesting debate next week between Jim Dilotoso and An old nemesis of mine.
	You're going to want to look forward to that Tuesday if it occurs.
	Right now, that's it.
	From the high desert, good night.
	The Talk Station.

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