Seth Shostak, SETI’s public program scientist and Caltech-trained astronomer, traces the institute’s origins to 1959–60 Cornell/MIT microwave proposals, dismissing fringe claims like alien crop circles or delayed TV signals as misinterpreted natural phenomena. Project Phoenix, using Green Bank’s 140-foot dish and Arecibo’s 1,000-foot-wide telescope, scans 28M frequencies near star systems but faces interference from 10,000+ satellites. With $4–5M annual funding—mostly private (Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft)—SETI prioritizes global collaboration over secrecy, though Shostak speculates a signal could arrive within five to ten years, reshaping humanity’s understanding of cosmic solitude. [Automatically generated summary]
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 Shossack, I believe.
I hope that's right.
So I'm looking forward to that.
That's coming up here in a moment.
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Seth Shostak, take 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 Radio Synthesis 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, is a book, Berkeley Hills book.
It appeared in February of 1998, so it's just out.
Of course, you know, the idea of looking for a cosmic company is a pretty old endeavor.
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 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 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.
But as far as I know, the Martians haven't responded to that.
But 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.
1959, some physicists at Cornell University and MIT pointed out that radar, you know, 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.
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.
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 distances.
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.
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 at Alpha Centauri You bet.
Yeah, Alpha Centauri is only about four and a half light years away.
Sure.
In fact, if anybody's watching, 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.
But, you know, it would take a pretty big antenna to pick up the TV 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 is not very well directed.
In fact, I worked out how big an antenna you'd need from, say, 10 light years away to pick up I Love Lucy.
And you'd 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.
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 with really powerful, high-frequency transmitters.
I mean, there has been radio for 100 years, but 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.
By the way, the premise that got you here was somebody sent me a fact saying that Wolf359 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?
Well, we have yet to discuss that aspect of your work.
I have certain questions about that, but let's stick with sort of the whole concept before we get down to the specifics.
So 50 light years, we're out about that far right now, and 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 the RF spectrum, radio, television, something?
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.
But, 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.
But the trouble with visible light is that you have the confusion from your own star.
I mean, if you were 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.
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 that 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 nonprofit 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 gentlemen who found it interesting enough to write personal checks to keep this thing going.
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 spent a day looking at it, 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.
Well, that's not quite so likely because something like the sun usually makes what's called wideband interference, the kind of stuff you were talking about earlier in your program tonight.
Now, 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.
That's just our galaxy.
So 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.
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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.
Seth, you were starting to talk about antennas, and again, because so many Americans have seen the movie Condact, I think they can relate to what we're going to discuss.
The movie opened down in Puerto Rico with a big Arecibo dish.
That's correct.
And our heroine, Jodi, had access to Arecibo for at least periods of time.
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?
Well, you know, very crudely, you could say, look, it's 1,000 feet across.
The one we're using now is 140 feet across, so that's six times the diameter, and what's that 36 times the area.
So, you know, 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.
unidentified
So depending on what you think E.T. is doing, got you.
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 a, 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 ET to be on a star, of course.
Oh, well, you just, see, those things are all like little pinpricks, and you're covering it with a big splot of a beam, 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 a big one.
One would be to use a very, or relatively, I should 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.
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, 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.
Though there are people who speculate, 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 21 gigahertz range, no, 2 gigahertz range, there's a high likelihood, 3 and 4 gigahertz in those areas.
Is there any area that more likely would accommodate a long distance signal?
Well, 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.
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.
And the reason you do that, by the way, I mean, you could build this scanner, but if you're going to cover a couple of billion frequencies, and we do, we cover two billion channels for each start.
And 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.
And, you know, in the movie Contact, Jodi Foster has a pair of earphones on to pick up this 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?
In fact, I had to say we pick up signals all the time, Art, because you've got one of the world's largest antennas connected to a receiver that's whistling 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, 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, a click, click, click, click, click type thing or a whoosh, whoosh, 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.
We're looking for a squeal that's very narrow band of 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 telecommunication 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.
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.
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 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.
There have got to be a lot of, in other words, you certainly know about a lot of the major communications, 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.
When we get a signal that's looking really good, we'll sometimes call up our friends at the radio astronomer friends and say, hey, have you ever had interference at this frequency?
Just try and nail it down to find out whether we're getting the real thing or just yet more interference.
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.
But they're also, they're there all the time.
They're like transmitters on giant phone poles, 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 put that in the database and tell the computers that are scanning, 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 a known source of interference and just kick it out of the queue.
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.
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 checked everyone out, and we've been able to do that.
It goes 24 hours a day when we're on the telescope, but there in Greenbank, we can only afford to pay for about a quarter of the telescope time that's available on that antenna.
So that means that every couple of months we get a couple of weeks worth of observing time.
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, though 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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Yeah, there's some technological spin-off, and Mike might find that interesting and possibly even worthwhile.
But we 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 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.
Well, every couple of days you get a source that passes a lot of the tests.
And in fact, that 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 kind of crank up the sensitivity until it beeps at you that often.
But it happens every couple of days.
unidentified
And then what the telescope does is it moves off the source.
So you say, well, now if that's ET, then I can prove that by moving the antenna half a degree or a degree away and make sure that the signal goes away.
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 so that, 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 is only a once-in-two-day event, I'm sure when it starts beeping, there's a slight rise in blood pressure.
Well, 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?
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 E.T., that somehow that information will be buried, it'll be covered up, that sort of thing.
But, you know, this shows you there's no secrecy in this business.
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.
And she has a cousin who was always interested in astronomy, so she sends him an email, and 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 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.
In fact, you know, this is another one of those documents that people think must be top secret, but in fact, I think it's on our website, the 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.
Now, it's called a Declaration of Principles for following the detection of an extraterrestrial signal.
I'm sure I'm leaving out 10 or 20 words there.
And 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.
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.
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, you know, sure, and why shouldn't they?
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 I picked him up.
Well, It's not such a threat to pick up somebody's radio broadcast.
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.
Everybody's connected together now.
And 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 ten years ago, almost instantly feeding plutonium to children and pregnant women and all the horrid little stuff they've admitted to now.
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 it's, as I say, 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, you know, if they don't pay any attention to what we, 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.
Now, there's another point here, and that is that the Americans aren't the only ones doing SETI, of course.
In fact, 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.
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, 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 there's going to be hundreds of people involved right away.
And to shut them all down, shut them all up, seems to me not likely.
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 factser 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?
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.
And in that case, you know, we're kind of barking up the wrong tree looking for them 100 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, you know, 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.
There was a British astronomer who said to me, and a fairly eminent one actually, who said, you know, Seth, 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.
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.
3572.
All right.
Back now to our guest.
Seth, I've got some rather remarkable news for you.
Even though you 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's taken this test with like an 88.
Well, I think you've hit upon a good point there, Art, and I'm afraid I don't have the answer to that because that requires, you know, somehow discerning the inner workings of politics, what goes on inside the beltway, and what's politically possible and what's not.
I will say this.
You know, NASA has its own budgetary problems, of course.
For the past couple years, the NASA budgets have really been going down, and you've got this International Space Station coming up and running over budget and 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.
So 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 beyond the orbit of Jupiter that could find Earth-like planets around other stars.
So he paints this 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.
You know, SETI in the past, particularly when it was a NASA program, was kind of reviewed by 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.
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.
You've already pointed, but you yourself have noted that spread spectrum is a better deal for your cellular phone or portable phone or for lots of communications on Earth.
So that 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.
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 the real info, if he's not doing that, then it's going to be very hard to find him.
What do you think would be the most likely kind of signal that you would find?
Again, I'll go back to contact.
It was that 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?
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 capsule, which is somewhere else, 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.
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.
Well, 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 were the first to go out.
And they had these, you know, these sort of license plates glued onto the side, sort of a greeting card to any aliens, you know, Hey, look, this is what we look like.
There's a picture of a couple of nudity cuties on there and so forth.
But wouldn't it, in effect, I guess we have to back up a little bit.
In the movie Contact, you may recall that there was 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?
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, contemporary times, they might be amazed by our technology, but they would probably think that our manners and general cultural behavior were considerably inferior to their own.
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.
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.
In other words, not much good historically has occurred in that arena.
And people have occasionally made that point that 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 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 kind of demoralizes you, right?
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.
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.
And their fate has been somewhat different than that of the Incas, for example, when their contact with an 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 they're importing more and more if you will.
But that may be our situation.
But 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 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.
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?
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, 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.
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 prototype for the Jody Foster character in contact.
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.
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?
unidentified
Well, God, it's hard to look back that far, but sure.
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 incredible.
And 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.
In fact, I was observing, we were on the telescope, well, I was on the telescope, what was it, day before yesterday, or maybe it was yesterday morning.
I'm a little bit confused about what morning we're on here.
And 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.
I've previously had personal meetings with Stephen Greer of CSETI, 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 of fourth, fifth, and sixth degrees.
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?
First of all, in the world of budgets for scientific work, $4 to $5 million a year, despite what that caller might have thought, is a trivial, insignificant amount 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.
Now, if you're looking, you'd be 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 it's too low, you get into a lot of junk and noise and everything.
I think the caller's point is that, doggone it, at these frequencies, it's really a very tightly beamed transmission, and you just might not luck out and be an EP'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 on these original solutions?
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 E.T. 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.
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?
I mean, if you want to buy a good communications-grade radio and start listening, buy a scanner that goes up to two gigs and begin listening, you'll hear so many birdies and signals that you'll soon be utterly out of your mind.
unidentified
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.
Yeah, well, in fact, those are, you know, as I say, kind of greeting cards.
And do keep in mind there in Tennessee that those things are about 6 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 did have a reference to the hydrogen atom, and that implies a natural radial frequency, which turns out to be at 1.4 gigahertz, just the frequency that Art named earlier in the program.
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.
Well, yeah, 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 companies that sell books via the web.
So people who are wired into the web can find it without too much difficulty.
They should just look for sharing the universe and they'll find it.
I guess you have considered that what E.T might look like physically 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 want to claim as a vacation spot, for example.
I mean, you 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 doesn't use photosynthesis and so forth.
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, then, you know, there's a tendency to be fairly conservative and say, well, it's most likely to happen on a planet that's not too different from our own.
It 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.
I would like to ask you the question they asked Jody Foster, the $640 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?
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 in upon itself, and that they had never found out why that happened.
And my other question was, I also remember reading an article in the paper in the, I believe it was late 70s, maybe early 80s, about, I think it was Houston, Texas.
The whole, a very large area of their televisions had received television transmissions from about 15 or 20 years before.
You know, radio telescopes always have these really romantic names like 140-foot telescope.
This one was a 300-foot telescope.
That guy 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.
The 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, and said, well, Finley, what do you think about the fact that your telescope collapsed?
And he looked at the reporter and he said, I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.
I haven't heard that particular story, so I'm not going to be able to help Dave there very much.
It's true that in particular, you know, guys like Nicholas Tesla, 100 years ago, exactly, 100 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.
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, but I spent 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.
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 the Earth.
I was wondering how Pluto and Charon related to the Oort cloud and how the Oort cloud gave rise to a theory on our sister's supposed star Nemesis, and if it was possible, or if he thinks they'll find, any planets that orbit two celestial bodies, namely Zacharias Sitchin's 12th 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, it's 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.
But 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, you're 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.
unidentified
Now, you can't really see the Oort cloud, but you know it's there.
That came from the, you know, pretty far out, probably not the Oort cloud, but occasionally things will come from the Oort 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.
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 cause these extinctions.
And they've proposed, for example, a companion star to the sun called Nemesis that might be doing that.
The only trouble is, when people look for that star, they never find it.
I'd like to ask your SETI 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?
I do recall when the BBC sent a camera crew with some low-light equipment up onto a hill and, you know, just film fields of weed every night until one day a crop circle appeared in one of them.
And then they got some of these crop circles, these serologists, as they're called, one of 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?
And the guys, you know, look at it and they look 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.
Just imagine this scenario on some planet 100 light years from here in their parliament where the guys are considering a motion on the floor to spend 100 zillion galactic cruise seros to send a spacecraft this way.
And so, you know, so what's this motion again?
unidentified
We're going to send this spacecraft at an enormous cost to this distant planet.
My guest is Dr. Seth Shustak, and he's a scientist at SETI in Mountain View, California.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence 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?
Tell them 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, button-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, 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 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, 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.
And it was all about Palomar, its construction and use.
And, you know, 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.
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 by what you see, and what you see is the universe expanding.
It gets a little more crowded, not a heck of a lot more crowded.
I mean, if Andromeda was 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.
But, you know, 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 until the universe was 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 until it's about the size of an atom.
You can run it 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.
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 this software.
So there is a website, www.bigscience.com.
People can go check it out, but it doesn't exist yet.
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?
It's a very real honor to speak to your guests 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 guests 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.
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.
Now, your second question was, if 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 forgiate 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, Art's 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 Crank himself, he would say the number of broadcasting civilizations right now is maybe 10,000 in our galaxy.
unidentified
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 that I think advanced civilizations are using a technology that would be far more advanced to being limited by the speed of light.
There are many physicists who think that space and time, Seth, could eventually, with enough power, be either bent or warped so that in effect you jump across, not really traveling faster than the speed of light, but a 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 forum, but translate that to communications.
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 superduper 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.
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.
She gets into it, and she can 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.
Wildguardline, you're on the air with Seth and Art.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, Art.
Thank you very much for having the 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 diligent 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 satellites 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 aren't 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?
Well, actually, I'm sorry I didn't get your name, Carler, 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 ET for those few minutes are pretty small.
When you only lose a couple of channels out of 28 million, you're not really losing very much.
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 Beijing Radio.
The Beijing 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 Beijing has something called the Bayliss 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 Bajin A. Usually 119.95.
Right now, and for a short time, 109.95.
109.95.
And then there is Bajin B. This is the Bajin with a light.
And they have done a remarkable conversion on this radio at the Sea Crane Company, this 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, 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 called the C-Crane Company between 9 and 1 on Saturday or very early Monday morning before they're all gone, it's this price.
It's at a remarkable price.
The regular Beijing now, $109.95.
And the Beijing 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.
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.
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.
Take the SOHO incident, 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 E.T. Assuming that confirmations had continued to come in and that it wasn't Soho, How much more time than two days would have gone by before there would have been a general sort of announcement?
And 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 that 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 and, you know, the signals continued to look good.
I think that what would happen is that long before we had gone through the procedure of making sure that somebody somewhere else had checked it out, some even reputable newspaper would say, FETI scientists are following an interesting signal, which they think may be our first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.
I think that these people who 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, and they find that an interesting question to answer.
unidentified
You don't think somebody like Paul Allen is going to go to his best buddy, Bill Gates, and say, hey, Bill, guess what?
Astronomy, physics, and geology are three of my favorite sciences.
And I have four brief questions for your guest.
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 or belief system is.
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?
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 opticals telescope that would be as big or bigger than Mount Palomar or that one in Russia that has like a 270-inch mirror?
I'm going to try and twist your question a little, Caller.
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, 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 cover acres and acres, square miles worth of real estate with those things and make a huge antenna that way.
You have to lash them all together electronically, too, 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 my question for Seth was: this is really an amateurish question, I'm sure, but couldn't an extraterrestrial civilization transmit a message or a signal via one of the quasars or pulsars, kind of like piggybacking that signal, a natural signal?
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.
The Sitchin thing, I think, is what he's talking about, and that postulates that there is a rogue planet that every so often 10,000 or 12,000 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.
unidentified
Well, that's fairly similar to this nemesis hypothesis.
There's something shaking up the comets in our own solar system, causing a couple of them to slam into the Earth and wreak havoc and destruction here and ruin your whole day, particularly if you're a dinosaur.
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.
Now, mind you, most SETI 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 five, ten to ten years is not totally without basis.