Dr. Paul Shuch, "Dr. SETI," explains how amateur 3–5-meter dishes (like Art Bell’s 3.8m) with $100–$200 L-band converters could detect faint signals in the galaxy’s "microwave window" by scanning 5,000+ stations globally—Project Argus’s 70 current stations pale compared to professional telescopes costing $100M each. While Project Phoenix’s targeted searches near sun-like stars (up to 200 light-years) remain fruitless, Shuch argues all-sky surveys are critical for catching rare, powerful transmissions or incidental radio pollution from distant civilizations, with verification protocols requiring independent checks and public disclosure. Ancient star charts prove irrelevant due to stellar stability, but listeners can join by emailing radio@setileague.org or calling 1-800-TAWSETI, turning backyard tech into humanity’s best chance of hearing cosmic signals. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, or good morning, as the case may be, wherever you are in this great land of ours.
From the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands, out west eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, blanket commercial coverage, south into South America, north all the way to the pole and worldwide on the internet.
It's called Thank you.
And I'm Mark.
And by the way, that worldwide on the internet is thank youbroadcast.com.
And of course, with our new streaming video setup, Intel as well, what a combination.
These people know what they're doing.
It's getting better every single day.
So if you have not yet enjoyed the video feed, all you've got to do is all free.
All free.
You go to my website, download the G2 player.
Brand new G2 player.
It's free.
You're going to love the software anyhow.
Then you come back to my website, click on the streaming video, and there I will be.
One form or another.
And it's almost TV.
Almost TV.
Anyway, in the next hour, we're going to be interviewing a very, very, very interesting person.
And he's something of a cross between Carl Sagan and Tom Lear.
He sings like Sagan and lectures like Lear.
It says he's a really interesting guy.
And the doctor and I have a great deal in common.
Going back to the early TVRO days, I was also in that business in the very early days.
What does the SETI League do?
Well, they do what SETI does.
They're looking for anybody, somebody, an entity out there in that vastness.
When you go outside and you look up at the night sky, and oh, it's some night sky out here in the desert, believe me.
As Jodi Foster said in contact, if there's not someone out there, it's a terrible waste of space, and it is.
There's almost got to be somebody out there.
There's got to be another race.
There's got to be another civilization.
And listening for it is as good an idea as any.
Because at some stage, albeit perhaps even a small one, in any race's evolution, there would be a period of time, one would imagine, when they would discover electromagnetic energy, radio, television, microwave, all the things that we have here.
And so it makes sense that we would look for them.
And he looks for them.
And it's even more interesting because he can involve you in looking for them.
So that'll be next hour.
Right now I would like to welcome a brand new affiliate.
Actually, they're an affiliate that has been with us for some time now, and we just found out about it.
They'd be affiliate number 431.
They would be CHML in Hamilton, Ontario, 990 on the dial in Hamilton, Ontario.
And it's nice to know you guys are aboard.
Now, they carry the first two hours of the program in Hamilton.
Not exactly.
Where is Hamilton?
That probably, let's see, one, three, seven days.
That's probably east, I would imagine.
Hamilton's east, isn't it?
I'm trying to become more familiar with Canadian geography, but I'm not exactly sure about Hamilton.
So if you folks in Hamilton would like more hours, I would suggest you give CHML a call and tell them you would enjoy hearing more of the program, and perhaps that's something they can work out.
Now, I saw, in its entirety, the Monica Lewinsky interview, as I know a gazillion of you must have out there.
What were my impressions about this thing that has kept our nation locked up for how long now?
A year?
Seriously locked up for about a year?
Has taken the attention of government?
Has threatened a presidency?
Has probably disturbed a personal life of the president?
This sordid I just guess I ended up at the end of watching the interview with Barbara Walters just saying to myself, good God, you mean to say this virtually crippled the government of the United States for a year?
This sexual infatuation between the president and this intern crippled the nation for a year.
We're idiots.
Absolute idiots, in my opinion, to have allowed this to occur.
Enamored, no doubt, with the salacious details of it all.
And they were salacious, too.
Monica Lewinsky, how do you comment on her?
She seemed genuinely naive, without much of a sense of self-worth, and that's how she was led into all of this on the President's part, just one of many.
But I tend, in my mind, To separate what the president does politically and what he does down the hall in the White House.
Frankly, I have never cared that much.
And now that I have seen Monica Lewinsky for two hours interviewed by Barbara Walters, to use a phrase that is not proper though it fits, I could care less now.
I think it's disgusting that a nation would allow itself to be drawn away from really important business for some stupid little sexual dalliance.
It's just beyond all reason to be.
So, you know, I watched it.
I did as I should do, I suppose, and I watched the whole thing, and I thought it was sickening.
Again, my quote, every normal man, said H.L. Mencken, every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
So that was my comment.
I'm sure a lot of you have comments.
A violence against women is helping to spread the virus that causes AIDS.
It's according to the UN.
Marital abuse, sexual coercion, rape, trafficking of women and children in forms of violence that lead directly to HIV, all of that going on, and the World Health Organization and the UN say the whole thing is spreading AIDS.
No surprise there.
By the way, this is a little tip for all of you out there from a photographer in my audience, Kevin, who's got a good idea.
He says, Hey, Art, on last night's show, when you were discussing the UFO sighting in Nevada, in Laughlin, at the UFO conference, you asked those fellows if they had taken any pictures.
They said no.
And you agreed that photographing the night sky is indeed difficult.
I've tried.
It is.
He goes on, I've been an amateur astronomer, astrophotographer for about 20 years, and I'll let you know how it can be done simply.
Things you need before you begin, an SLR camera with a B, as in boy, setting.
This lets you lock the shutter open for an amount of time.
A good lens to have is the typical 50 millimeter lens.
Nothing special so far.
2.
A tripod, because of course you cannot, there's no way that you can hold the camera steady.
3.
A cable release.
And 4.
ASA 400 film.
Set up the camera to the B setting.
Set the lens on infinity while opening the camera's aperture fully.
Usually to the F1.6 setting.
Attach the cable release and set the camera on the tripod.
Some releases have an automatic lock, while others you must turn the little set screw.
You are now shooting the sky.
Leave the shutter open for a minimum of 12 seconds.
That ought to be good enough to capture many stars.
This is very interesting.
You may leave the shutter open longer, but the stars may then trail or become streaks on the film.
One rule of thumb is that the closer to the pole star you are shooting, the longer you can leave open the shutter, and vice versa.
Once you have the stars as points, or even slight ovals, is acceptable, any object such as a plane, satellite, meteor, or any other object will appear as a streak on the film.
Being in a rural area, you should have no trouble recording many faint stars and objects.
One thing though, always keep a log of your photographs, such as what constellation you're pointed toward and how many seconds you're leaving the shutter open.
This way, you'll know where you are and how to repeat your results once you have your prints or slides back.
Hope this helps.
Kevin.
Kevin, it helps a lot, and I'm going to call those instructions and pass them to anybody who would be helped by them.
I'm the first.
Now, I've got a whole bunch of different kind of news for you right now.
From the Associated Press, this is very interesting.
Dateline St. Louis.
Missouri and other parts of the Midwest were sprayed with fluorescent particles in the late 1950s under a secret Army biological weapons research program, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Wednesday.
Did you hear me sprayed?
The newspaper said that the particles, zinc cadmium sulfide, are the same as those sprayed from St. Louis street corners in 1953 in a clandestine test program.
No biological organisms were released in any of the tests.
The Army claims the microscopic particles were harmless, but some scientists warn they do indeed present a potential chemical health hazard.
Now, why did they do that?
House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt made the information public Tuesday last summer.
After revelations about the St. Louis program, Gephardt asked the Army for more information about its biological weapons tests.
The aircraft test was one of more than 24 Cold War tests using zinc cadmium sulfide.
The tests were designed to determine the dispersal patterns of biological warfare agents.
The Army wanted to learn if it was going to be feasible to contaminate a large area and if so, what logistics would be involved.
Parts of the test report remain to this day classified.
So for those of you out there who think that spraying the public is something that this country would not do, I'm sorry.
The Associated Press reports that in fact we actually did it.
Now, here's a neat little article entitled, it's from the Hearst newspaper group, entitled, Pentagon Defends Oakland Invasion.
Marine and Navy officials are defending a planned mock invasion of Oakland, Monterey, and Alameda next month as a great opportunity to try out new military equipment and tactics in an urban setting.
You guys in Oakland, Monterey, and Alameda?
Ready for an invasion?
The Marine Corps says the war games, which have provoked strong local opposition, will help the service prepare for urban battle spaces of the 21st century.
Anybody remember Seven Days in May?
At one point, I think it was a colonel in Seven Days in May who said, I would like to know why our troops are preparing for a seizure, apparent seizure of American cities.
Not defending them, but rather seizing them.
Do you recall that?
That's an old movie.
If you've never seen it, you would enjoy it.
Anyway, war games, and coming to the Bay Area sometime soon.
Very soon.
Next month.
So good luck.
It'll be interesting hearing what went on.
And down in Texas, of course, they had an invasion of a little Texas town, and they used, in that case, live ammo.
And they burned down a portion of a building.
And the poor people in this little town had absolutely no idea this was about to occur, if you can imagine that.
No idea at all.
They were awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of grenades going off, live ammunition being fired.
And I can only imagine coming out of a rather sound sleep, looking out your window, seeing helicopters with those big blades, and, you know, guys in Star Wars-type outfits rappelling down ropes, the sound of explosions, and automatic weapons fire.
Now, that would get your attention in the middle of the night, wouldn't it?
That would really get your attention.
You'd probably think, oh my God, the Russians?
It's actually occurring.
So there you are.
Otherwise, we're about to open the line.
Oh, there is one thing here.
A gal named Gwen called me, actually called me, faxed me today the following.
Mr. Bell, this past weekend I went to purchase American Eagle silver dollars, one ounce size, and gold coins, one-tenth ounce.
Dealer told me something I found very interesting.
He said they, I assume he meant the government by they, are beginning to ration these particular denominations because of Y2K.
Have you or any of your sources out there heard or been told similar stories?
Well, of course we have.
That's exactly what Gary North said last time he was on the program.
So they're actually rationing these things.
Can you imagine that?
It has already begun.
A fact is a fact, and now I've got another source on this.
Why would they ration points?
Rationing?
That's a pretty stiff word.
It sets off a lot of alarm bells.
I've got one more little...
You know, I get regular bulletins from my libertarian friends because I am now a libertarian, have been for some time, and their latest release is...
We'll be right back.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 3rd, 1999.
Coast to Coast AM from March
3rd, 1999.
Coast to Coast AM from March 3rd, 1999.
There are fears and breeze that are fires, there is laughter.
Today's the sun for the sun.
The sun is the sun.
The sun is the sun.
Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 3rd, 1999.
Those of you in the morning, and the evening, for those of you in the evening, good evening to you.
This was sent to me.
I am now an official member, as you know, of the Libertarian Party, have been for quite a while.
And they send me news bulletins all the time.
This one takes the cake.
News from the Libertarian Party.
Libertarians urge pull the plug on silly Alabama law that bans vibrators.
Should politicians decide what orgasms are government approved?
Dateline, Washington, D.C. Now listen to this.
A judge should strike down an Alabama law that bans the sale of vibrators and other sex toys, according to the Libertarian Party, because America doesn't need politicians deciding what kinds of orgasms are government approved.
This law is giving us bad vibrations, said Bill Witter.
Fact is, the government has no business interfering in any private, consensual, sexual activity between one person.
It goes on invitingly, what's the buzz here?
A court in Alabama is currently weighing the constitutionality of a law, state law, that prohibits the sale of sex toys and makes the crime punishable by get this, get caught with a vibrator in Alabama, and it's a $10,000 fine and up to one year of hard labor.
A lawsuit to overturn the whole thing was filed by a group of women, including the owner of an adult shop, a saleswoman for the saucy ladies line of sexual novelties, and a Jane Doe, who said she uses a doctor-recommended vibrator to overcome sexual dysfunction.
A hearing was held in mid-February, and the judge could issue a ruling any day now.
So the Libertarian Party is urging that vibrators be released in Alabama.
Now, with last night's interview in mind, a device of this sort could have saved this nation one year of horrible trauma.
The End All right, I am informed by one of my listeners that Hamilton, Ontario is about 40 miles north northeast of Niagara Falls and 40 miles southeast of Toronto at the eastern point of Lake Ontario.
Well, that answers why, let's see, they're three hours ahead.
They could still fit another hour or two in there, I suppose.
You might give them a call.
But they are, of course, East Coast time.
All right.
Let's go to the phones and see what, of course, unscreened, and see what waits for us out there.
In other words, I think that William Thomas is definitely on to something.
I think that there is a tendency, once you hear a program like that, to unfortunately look up at contrails and imagine the worst every time you see one.
Well, I don't think every contrail that's cut is a chemtrail.
Do I think there is some spraying going on?
Yes, that's why I read you the story about St. Louis.
And they've done it elsewhere.
So I guess I would caution everybody, don't attach something evil or ominous to every contrail you see cutting across the sky.
But on the other hand, keep an open mind about the information that William Thomas has given us because it's happened.
I'm sorry to say it has occurred.
So, I don't know.
We'll have William naturally back on the air to talk more about it.
And I know a lot of people kind of complained because they thought it was kind of, some of it was set up.
And, well, yeah, I guess maybe some of it might have been, quote, Set up, but I'm sure they had to go and look at those places first, number one, to make sure things were in there and to make sure it was safe.
I appreciate your call, sir, and let me say this about Richard.
Richard is a driven, articulate dapper individual who has been on this program on and off for years and years.
Why?
Does he go off the deep end every now and then?
Hell yes.
Is he out on the cut edge, as I'm prone to calling it?
Yes, he is.
Richard is.
However, is a lot of what Richard says good science?
You bet it is.
Is a lot later recognized by mainstream science as being legit?
You bet it is.
Has Richard done a lot of good things?
You bet he has.
Is a lot of his research valid?
You bet it is.
And that's why you've heard him again and again on this program, because I found over the years, knowing Richard, and he's a very good friend, that every time you think Richard has gone off the cliff, and you know me, I'll say it.
There's lots of times I've told Richard, I think, Richard, you're going over the cliff here.
What are you doing?
Every time you think he's off the cliff, about two days later, you find out, wow, look, he's really on to something real here.
And so Richard is one of those guys who's on the edge, and this program is on the edge, and so it's a match made in heaven.
I just wanted to share that with people, you know, as far as that goes.
You know, I think it's something that, you know, practicality-wise, it's something that I've been looking for a long time in a book because it's just, I mean, there's just, you know, there's so much fluff out there.
All these little human interest stories and the Monica Lewinsky things, you know.
In other words, if something else like it cropped up with this president or a future president, would we really allow ourselves to be diverted for that kind of period of time again?
unidentified
You've got to wonder.
But you know what the really interesting thing about this is, too, that I saw a survey recently that says that now 90% of the American populace say they would vote for a woman.
And the speculation is that somehow Monica is responsible for this.
I don't understand how this plays out, but I guess they see her as a woman who, I don't know, could not be able to do that.
I would vote for a woman, but I wouldn't vote for Monica.
unidentified
Oh, I would, too.
Oh.
that.
No, no, yeah, that's You know, I don't know if you ever got to that webpage I sent you, the messages from the time travelers, but it says a lot about things she does.
Boy, I'll tell you, you know, that web page is pretty bizarre.
And Eleanor Roosevelt has done, you know, obviously history will show that she's done some, you know, probably good things, but I think that overall, I have a suspicion that Eleanor Roosevelt is not someone who is a heroic individual.
Anyway, I was phoning concerning the Monica Gate thing.
And earlier you had said that you didn't think that Made America looked too good in the eyes of the world.
And I was just comparing it to, say, France, perhaps, when their prime minister died and they had a state funeral.
They not only invited his wife, but his lover, his mistress to the funeral.
And I think it has more to do with a perception of the country you're in, with the moral minority that you have there, and they're so voiceful that to them it's a big deal.
Whereas somewhere else in the world, it wouldn't be.
I think Canada, they'd still, and Britain also, rather conservative countries, and it would be scandals there, too.
And after watching the interview tonight, I could just say to myself, what idiots we are for allowing ourselves to be diverted for a full year from things that were really important for this idiotic, teenage-like sexual diversion.
unidentified
Well, it seems to be the way things have been going ever since the Gary Hart-Donna Rice thing.
As it went on, the American people really, I think, agreed with me in that they wished the subject would simply go away.
They wished that our elected representatives would begin concentrating on what we elected them to do, which is to improve our lot in life, to pay attention to what ought to be going on in the country, to address our overtaxed butts.
I mean, there's a lot of things they could be doing that they didn't do because of Monica Lewinsky over the last two hours of watching Monica.
It should be driven home to you what a profoundly horrible thing she put us through and how completely, truly insignificant the whole damn thing really was.
In the end, anybody is going to lie about the kind of thing the President and Monica did.
They're going to lie about it.
And that's that.
And yeah, he's right.
You know, the French.
I know the French people.
I love France, as a matter of fact.
I love Paris.
It's my favorite.
One of my favorite cities.
I think Paris and Bangkok are my two favorite cities in the world.
And the Parisian people are wonderful.
And they are very open-minded, non-plussed.
You know, they just sort of take everything in stride.
And if the Prime Minister has a mistress and the Prime Minister dies, the mistress gets to come to the funeral.
What they should have done is send out their little news truck with a bottle and tried to gather up some of what may have fallen from the sky and analyzed it before it turned into a mist and disappeared.
unidentified
Yeah, I couldn't actually see anything falling, but I can't imagine somebody spending all...
We have coming up in a moment Dr. SETI, as his intimates call him.
He's actually Dr. H. Paul Schuck, known to his intimates as Dr. SETI.
It's something of a cross between Carl Sagan and Tom Lear.
PBS is Tom Leary.
Sings like Sagan lectures like Lear.
The aerospace engineer, accredited with the design of the world's first commercial home satellite TV receiver.
Wow, that's something.
He made the first home satellite TV receiver, now directs his microwave interests toward the search for life in space.
Dr. Shuck received his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley before joining the SETI League as its executive director.
He served as an engineering professor on various campuses for a total of, get this, 24 years.
Within the New Warrior Movement, Paul's teaching background earned him the name Patient Owl.
Paul is the author of more than 200 publications.
His honors include the National Space Club's Dr. Robert H. Goddard Scholarship, a Hertz Foundation Fellowship in Applied Physical Sciences, the Hertz Doctoral thesis prize, rather, and the Central States VHF Society's John T. Chambers Memorial Award.
He serves as a fellowship interviewer for the Hertz Foundation, a manuscript reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals, has been an advisor to the National Science Foundation, and a military program evaluator for the American Council on Education.
Born in 1946, among the first of the baby boomers, Paul lives on a radio-quiet hilltop just north of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, with his biologist wife, Muriel Heights, I hope I have that right, and five of their DNA experiments.
Combined DNA experiments.
He air commutes, get this?
He flies his own plane about 200 miles every couple of days, I guess.
Is that every couple of days?
To the Setting League's New Jersey office, last two days a week, in his much-modified 1970 Beechcraft A24R Sierra.
Recognizing that the most dangerous part of lying is the drive to the airport, Paul tempts fate by riding there on his trophy award-winning 1989 Honda PC-800 Pacific Coast.
A Vietnam-era Air Force veteran, an active instrument flight instructor, Paul serves as an FAA Aviation Safety Advisor, has been an airport commissioner, was once voted Flight Instructor of the Year by his FAA District Office, and is part owner of the Fraser Lake Airport in Hollister, California.
Holy mackerel, he designed the patented BIDCAS Aircraft Anti-Collision Radar, oh yes, which won the Experimental Aircraft Association Safety Achievement Award.
He's also an extra-class radioameter, first licensed in 1961.
N6TX, that's his handgole, has been operational in all 20 handbands, between 1.8 and megahertz and 24 gigahertz.
Paul has chaired the VHF-UHF Advisory Committee of the Amtrak Radio Relay League and served as technical director and board chairman of Project Oscar Inc., a predecessor to AMSAC.
He has served as a director of the Central States VHF Society and is currently membership officer for Central Pennsylvania Menza.
Paul was banquet speaker at the 1996 Dayton Ham Mansion.
Dr. Chuck is listed in a whole bunch of Who's Who publications.
and in a moment you're going to get a real treat and we're going to talk to dr shock about what might be out there and how we can find it uh...
That was in 1978, Arch, and those were wonderfully exciting days for amateur microwave because in those days, the only real use of satellites for television was to relay network programming to network affiliates or to relay premium programming to cable TV companies.
And the communications industry was using $100,000 Earth terminals.
And a bunch of hams got together and said, we can do this better.
We can do this cheaper.
We can have fun.
We can do this ourselves.
We can rip off programming.
Well, of course, we weren't setting out to rip off programming.
We're on, right now, 432 affiliates scattered all the way across North America, you know, in Canada and the U.S. And so it's the biggest ham station I've ever had fun with.
Ah, but the AM that bounces off the ionosphere is not a very good candidate for interstellar communications because it just doesn't punch through into space.
Seth Shostak and his organization, the SETI Institute, are a wonderfully complex and well-thought-out and well-executed search for intelligence signals from beyond.
And we can talk a bit more about what they're doing because it's great research, but it has some interesting limitations.
Yes, and unfortunately, Arecibo went off the air for a few days, and there was some minor property damage.
Not much damage to the telescope, but sadly, I have to report that several of the workers down there had their homes destroyed in that hurricane.
They're rebuilding and regrouping now, and they are, of course, back on the air doing wonderful science.
But it's the sorts of science that they're doing which requires the kinds of facilities which only governments can afford.
And in fact, for many years, the government did SETI.
NASA had a modestly funded SETI program.
They were appropriating about $0.05 per American per year, which is pocket change.
It's down in the noise level of the federal budget.
Nevertheless, cumulatively, it does amount to about $12.5 million per year, and that's enough to raise the eyebrows of some of the budget balancers.
So about five years ago, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, canceled the NASA SETI program in its entirety.
In the process, they saved, they actually did help to reduce the federal deficit by 0.0006%.
So that's good economics, I suppose, and SETI was off the air for a while.
In fact, we discovered that perhaps SETI required the kinds of facilities which not even governments can afford.
But SETI is the science that refuses to die art.
It just keeps coming back.
And the first incarnation, the first reincarnation of SETI was Fetch Shostak's organization, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
The SETI Institute was the first organization to privatize a piece of the NASA SETI program.
Now, NASA SETI involves actually two distinct, different complementary searches.
And one of those searches, called the targeted search, is what the SETI Institute is continuing now through their program called Project Phoenix.
The Phoenix search looks with high power, very sensitive, huge telescopes for hours on end at a handful of nearby interesting candidate stars.
They pick the nearest sun-like stars out to a couple of hundred light-years, and they have about 1,000 stars on their candidate list.
The stars are well chosen.
They are very good candidates because these are stars that are about the right age and the right temperature and the right size to probably have habitable planets orbiting them.
And if they happen to get lucky looking at these thousand stars, they may indeed detect another radio-polluting civilization such as our own.
Because when I talked to the good doctor, he said he admitted at the end of the day, after really pressing him, that ambient communications, for example, FM stations, television here on Earth, all the rest of it, would be rather unlikely actually to be heard at a great distance.
And about the only way you would actually hear anything through light years would be if there were an intentional transmission, a transmission actually intended to traverse light years.
Certainly a beamed beacon would make our job all that much easier.
Leakage communication is not impossible, however.
It's just incredibly challenging.
And with leakage communication, that is the incidental radiation coming from another civilization's radio, television, and radar, it's very likely we would be able to impart any sort of meaning to the transmission.
The very best we can hope for is that we can detect something which is clearly artificial, which exhibits those hallmarks of artificiality which say to us, this signal is not produced by any natural occurring mechanism.
There had to be some intelligence behind it.
Beyond that, we really don't think there's any message to decode in the leakage radiation, even if we're lucky enough to detect it.
ten or twenty or a hundred light years out well truthfully art not well we're talking because when we're talking when we're modulating that f_m_ radio generating its power is distributing its power all over the spectrum over two hundred killer bandwidth in many many sidebands when i stopped to take a breath those sideband stop and all the power for a very brief interval as sure it up on one frequency on the carrier and that's our best chance for interstellar detection fascinating well
you're absolutely of course right about that uh...
f_m_ deviates outward from the center and when you pause there would be this same of the strong signal but to somebody listening light years away they'd probably want to be able to pull out the the the key the five and because they are spread to white that's right whenever we pause for a breath that carrier pops up unfortunately would be the inner spectrum analyzer unfortunately though that would be completely at random yet another was you would pause or i would pause at random and they would be sitting out there getting the
signal trying to make some sense out of it finally determining that what they were hearing was random what they would determine probably our planet is inhabited by a race of very sloppy studio engineers and we transmit a lot of dead air uh...
unidentified
uh...
well you really think they come to that conclusion only if they have a warped sense of humor that we do uh...
what is the best shop that we've got if we imagine a civilization roughly
in the same period of development as we are in right now with regard to radio and television and microwave communications the best shop would be what our most detectable signals during the fifty years or so that we have been radiating suitable signal for interstellar detection our best candidates where our cold war over the horizon search radars they were the strongest signals that had
the maximum leakage into space you mean like that stinking woodpecker the russians had yes and a whole flock of other similar radars so what we have to hope if we wish to detect other civilizations is that they also go through a cold war period well you know some of the nation's uh greatest theoretical physicists uh have decided that not too many civilizations would make it past the discovery of element 92.
Of course, I hope they're wrong, but that's a sobering thought, absolutely.
If other civilizations have self-destructed early in the stages of their technological development, as we very nearly did, Art, if that's happened to other civilizations, then although our universe may be teeming with life, the number of potential communications partners for us out there would be extremely limited.
On the other hand, if other civilizations have somehow learned to solve their economic and political and sociological problems and to build lasting empires that can last as long as stars burn, then there are literally millions out there waiting for us to discover.
And the FETI League is one of the ways that we hope to discover them.
We'll talk in great depth about how we plan to do that.
Before the break, we were talking about Project Phoenix, which was the first element of the late NASA SETI program to rise from the ashes of the budget balancers.
The name I think was very aptly chosen by our friends in California.
The limitation to this wonderful science is when you do a targeted search, you're looking at only specific individual stars with very high-gain, very narrow, narrow beam-width antennas.
And that means that if you guess wrong, if you're looking at a star and there's another star right next door with signals emanating from it, you'll miss those signals.
That's inevitable.
So you go through your list and you hope you picked right.
And when you're done, when they're done with their list of 1,000 stars, they will have looked with great sensitivity at 1 millionth of 1% of all the good candidate stars in our galaxy alone.
The founders of the SETI League said, we don't have the millions of dollars that it's going to cost to rent time on these huge telescopes to do targeted searches.
And besides, someone else is already doing that anyway.
What can we do that's productive?
What can we do that nobody else is doing?
Well, we can actually survey the entire sky slowly, tediously, meticulously, and patiently.
And we can do so using a resource that has never before been tapped for CETI.
And that is the world's cadre of microwave experimenters, ham radio operators, citizens band radio enthusiasts, satellite tinkerers, the non-professionals who can indeed be taught to do very good, credible science.
Our prototype for all of this was looking at what happens in optical astronomy.
Of course they're real science, but they're the sort of real science that cannot produce predictable results.
And when you're working for grant money, when you're working on a budget which requires showing publishable results, comet hunting is not necessarily the best game for that.
But the amateurs, people like Alan Hale, who, although he is a trained astronomer, does his comet hunting in his spare time with his 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.
People like Tom Bock, who doesn't even own a telescope, but discovered the comet that bears his name with one that he borrowed from his local astronomy club.
These are the people who are discovering the comets because they have the time, they have the resources, they have the inclination, they have the interest, and it's not a 9 to 5 job for them.
This is something that becomes a passion for you when you get involved in astronomy.
And yet in the world of astronomy, after Alan Hale, I interviewed Alan, he's a great guy, discovered this comet, it was the biggest astronomical news for quite a period of time.
It depends upon which of the two theories you personally hold with regard to the sorts of signals that are out there.
See, I can envision two different possibilities, Art.
One, there are a lot of civilizations out there that are radio-using, that are going through their radio-polluting phase, just as we do, that are generating incidental radiation.
If that's true, those civilizations could well be detected by the targeted search.
We probably wouldn't see them doing the all-sky survey.
Possibility too, there are a few civilizations, let's call them super-civilizations, that are transmitting humongously powerful, deliberate beacons.
And those signals may be highly intermittent, they may be highly dispersed, they may be separated by thousands of light-years, they may be incredibly rare.
And if that is the case, then the all-sky survey has the best chance of detecting those kinds of signals.
Frankly, I think both kinds of signals are a possibility.
There are two astrophysicists up in Canada right now who wrote to the Prime Minister in Canada and said that they too thought that amateurs should not be allowed to go around with this sort of thing because they might well engender an invasion of Earth.
They're having a big controversy about this up in Canada.
Yvonne Dutel's letter was an interesting one because it was intended to be read by politicians.
But of course it got leaked to the press, so now the whole world is commenting on it.
What Yvonne was saying, as I understand it, is that if Earth is going to transmit, it should be done in a disciplined manner.
It should be an international project, and people should have a voice in what's being said.
His fear, which may indeed be a valid one, is the question of who speaks for Earth?
If any individual can transmit his personal agenda to space, what kind of a message are we sending to our cosmic companions?
On the other hand, to have an organized, unified planetary response requires big government.
And when big governments get involved in science, the inevitable result is that the project ends up costing twice as much, taking twice as long, and working half as well.
So we have a kind of a dilemma here.
Nevertheless, at the moment, international policy prohibits deliberate transmission into space.
Frankly, it's a little late for that.
Our calling card is already in the mail through programs such as this that are going out right now at the fastest possible speed.
You see, our spaceship of choice is the photon, the particle, if you will, of electromagnetic radiation.
The photon is the fastest spaceship known to man.
It travels relatively unimpeded throughout the interstellar medium at the fastest possible speed, and there's no stopping it.
There's no turning it back.
And that means that we've already given our position away.
The exact frequency was around 2.8 gigahertz, which is in what we call the microwave window, the quietest part of the sky, that range of frequencies where we are most likely to be able to work our way through the interstellar medium.
The transmission was only, I believe it was something on the order of a minute and a half.
It was a very brief transmission, or maybe in a couple of minutes.
I'd have to look that up.
The signal itself was wonderfully elegantly designed, in part, by Dr. Frank Drake, who is now the president of the SETI Institute, our friend organization in California.
And the signal itself provides a wealth of information about Earth, Earth's life, and Earth's technology.
But the chances of it being detected are rather slim.
If we want to transmit beacons, we've got to do a lot better than that.
Beacons, by their very nature, stay up all the time waiting for propagation Conditions, as you well know, in ham radio or whatever else, a beacon is a beacon.
It's not a one and a half minute to two minute transmission.
That was a shot in the dark, and the transmission that Dr. Dutill in Canada is involved with is also a shot in the dark.
But you have to start somewhere.
What we're trying to do with transmissions like these is not send information to our cosmic companions.
Those messages are intended for humans here on Earth.
They are a way of saying to our population on Earth, we believe in this, and because we're willing to do some transmitting, there's hope that maybe others are as well.
It's going to mean that they've got to be listening on that frequency at that time for one and a half to two minutes, because that's all it's going to hear, is one and a half to two minutes, huh?
There are those who say that the Arecibo transmission was little more than a publicity stunt.
And it's true that it was timed to coincide with the rededication of the Arecibo Radio Observatory after they put a new surface on it.
Two years ago, they did another re-engineering of Arecibo.
They did another major upgrade.
They added a Gregorian seed and did some improvements to the surface and put a skirt around the antenna.
Some very good engineering was done at Arecibo.
I asked Dr. Paul Goldsmith who was the director of the Arecibo Observatory, are you going to do another transmission when Arecibo goes back on the air after this refurbishment?
And his answer was basically we're not allowed to.
So indeed, in scientific circles at least, the international legal ramifications are well understood.
The actual language is a little more complex than that.
Of course, lawyers were involved, so you know the language will be complex.
But it says that any deliberate transmission has to be done with full international cooperation and collaboration and full agreement.
Now, trying to get all the nations on earth to agree to say gazunte when I sneeze is nigh unto impossible.
That's right.
So I really don't think we're going to be seeing any official transmissions.
On the other hand, the technology is already out of the bag.
Anybody who seriously wants to transmit to the stars can do so.
It's really hard to stop them.
It's impossible even to detect it.
If I beam energy straight up, if I'm doing amateur moon bounces, if I'm bouncing my microwave signals off the moon at 1,296 megahertz, my energy is going up and is carefully focused to hit the moon.
Unless the FCC happens to have a monitoring station on the moon, how can they know?
Art, I do not think that the amateur five-meter dish is going to give you interstellar communications capability.
The project that's being proposed right now that actually is in the working phases to do another transmission, this private project that Dr. Dutil was talking about in Canada, that project is renting time on a huge radio telescope facility in the former Soviet Union.
It's not quite as big as Arecibo, but it's one heck of a lot bigger than my five-meter backyard dish.
The small antennas that we have, however, are not useless because they're very well adapted to listening.
You see, if we're very lucky, the guys at the other end will produce the power.
More power than we could begin to imagine.
And if they have their multi-megawatt transmitters going into their Arecibos, over interstellar distances, we can pick that up with our backyard dishes.
All we have to do is be pointing the right way, tuned to the right frequency, at the right time.
Now, this is the limitation with the targeted searches.
Those antennas only look at one part in 10 to the 6th of the sky.
That's one millionth of the sky at a time.
That's wonderful for sensitivity, but it's terrible for detecting those random, highly intermittent signals that we hypothesize might be out there.
Because, after all, with an antenna of that sort, if you've got your receiver on on exactly the right frequency, at exactly the right instant when the call comes in, there's still a 99.9999% chance you'll be pointed the wrong way.
Well, there is a possible solution.
You could build a million of these antennas and coordinate them so they're pointing in all directions at once.
Cover the whole sky with these great radio telescopes.
But at $100 million apiece, Art, we've just exceeded the gross planetary product.
Fortunately, there is a cheaper way.
Small antennas, like our 3, 4, and 5-meter backyard satellite TV dishes, our old C-Bands TVRO dishes.
You're going to build a SETI station with it, because those antennas may not have the sensitivity of the big monsters that the targeted searches use, but they have an interesting advantage.
Their beam width is about 200 times wider than the so-called research-grade radio telescopes.
And that means that it only takes 5,000 of them, properly coordinated, to cover the whole sky, all four paister radians of space and time.
5,000 hams, 5,000 experimenters, can do something that NASA SETI never contemplated, and that is see in all directions at once.
And let me emphasize, this is listening.
This is SWLing.
You don't have to have a HAM license.
No government has to authorize your transmission because we're not transmitting.
At least, well, even worldwide, many people in many countries now, we have 1,000 members in 52 countries and growing all the time.
We have, we're just in our infancy because the SETI League is just starting to develop this network, our Project Argus as we call it.
But our Project Argus network has right now 70 stations on the air.
Now, that's just a drop in the bucket next to the 5,000 we need, but that's more HAM SETI stations on the air than all the professional radio telescopes in the world combined.
Now, everybody with a home satellite dish, listen closely.
You might need a little bit of technical expertise, and we're going to give that to you as best we can tonight.
My dish, like other people's satellite dishes, is in what's called a polar configuration, so that as the dish turns, it tracks the Clark belt and sees the various television satellites in the Clark belt.
Well, you might probably want to move the antenna just a little bit up and down off the Clark belt to your elevation, only because the Clark belt is pretty heavily noisy.
We've got a lot of stuff out there.
Sir Arthur Clark is one of the technical advisors to the SETI League, and bless him, he told me you're going to have to give up watching the Clark Belt satellite.
And he was willing to make that concession.
Because if you crank the antenna away from the Clark Belt, all of a sudden, the noise level drops.
And the beautiful thing about looking at the sky is that you will find stars, no matter where you point.
In any direction, there are stars.
And anywhere there are stars, we now know there are planets.
And anywhere there are planets, there's a chance that one or more may be habitable.
And if there are habitable planets, one or more of them may harbor a radio-using civilization.
If you want to listen on 3.7 to 4.2, you've got a shot at It but we believe, and this is highly speculative, we believe there are better frequencies slightly lower in the microwave spectrum in the region from 1.3 to 1.7 gigahertz, and that means you're going to need to use a different feed horn and a different LNA, and we can help you with that.
All right, and that's exactly what we'll talk about when we get back.
We can do it, and maybe we should.
Stay tuned.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 3rd, 1999.
It's good enough to be strong.
We gotta get right back to where we started from.
You remember that day?
It's sunny.
When you first came.
You remember that day?
You got me running, going out of my mind You got me thinking that I'm wasting my time Don't bring me down No, no, no, no, no I'll tell you what's wrong before I get off the floor Don't bring me down You wanna see I live your fancy friends I'm telling you
it's gonna be the end Don't bring me down No, no, no, no, no I'll tell you what's wrong before I get off the floor Don't bring me down Don't bring me down Don't bring me down Don't bring me down
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from March 3rd, 1999.
The SETI League's executive director is with us, Dr. Paul Chuck.
And some people call him Dr. SETI.
You can do that or call him Dr. Paul Chuck.
I believe it's Dr. H. Paul Chuck, actually.
But if you'll listen very carefully, and if you have a satellite dish out in your backyard, instead of junking it, which I would never do in a million years, I love my satellite dish, always have.
There's a good use for it.
See, I've got little dishes now, and I get digital television, so I don't need my old dinosaur anymore.
But do I keep it in working condition?
You bet.
Why?
I don't know.
Nostalgia?
Or maybe, just maybe, I knew something like this was going to come along one day.
So in a minute we're going to tell you how to take a dish like the one I've got and turn it into something that might change history.
You know that slogan I'm so fond of lately that I've been repeating so many times?
H.L. Mencken said it, quote, every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
Well, when daylight comes today, I am going to find the man or the woman who changed my phone company during the day today without telling me, and I am going to slit them ear to ear.
You have no idea what's been going on tonight with my telephones.
So if you are disrupted in any way, I apologize.
I can't imagine they've done that to me.
They actually switched phone companies on me.
You know, breaking up AT ⁇ T was the worst end thing we ever did.
they are beautiful they they are absolutely there's a and of course i guess you've got to be a technical person to admire mine is a This is a good dish.
Well, you have a slight dilemma, Arch, because you see, the optical astronomers have it easy.
Even in my little sleepy town of Cogan Station, Pennsylvania, I can walk into a shop and buy an optical telescope off the shelf.
I can give them my credit card and walk home with something that I might just discover a comet with.
But you can't walk into your local Radio Shack store and buy a radio telescope, at least not yet.
We're trying to change that.
But for right now, the people who are doing serious radio astronomy, amateur radio astronomy, the people who are involved with the SETI League's Project Argus Sky Survey, have to be willing to do some of the work themselves.
And it's kind of like the early days of satellite TV.
You remember when you couldn't buy a satellite TV system?
You went out and you acquired a dish, and then you had to buy a seed horn.
And then from somebody else, you got an LNA.
And then for my old company, Microcom, you bought a receiver.
And then from somebody else, you got a modulator.
And you put it all together and plugged it into your TV set.
And you washed all those sparklies, and they were absolutely wonderful.
Well, that's kind of the state of the art for amateur radio astronomy today.
There are no turnkey systems out there, at least not that the hams can afford.
But if you're willing to piece things together, and if you know which end of the soldering iron is the handle, and how to put a connector on a hunk of coax, you can probably put together a radio telescope that would rival the very best that NASA had just 20 years ago.
You see, we're making up in digital signal processing power, in computer horsepower, what we lack in antenna capture area.
And today's computers, Today's home computers are incredible.
You know, I have sitting on my desk right now an old, ancient 486, and it outperforms by a factor of a thousand the computers that NASA used to put men on the moon.
Only we're not trying to go to the moon, we're trying to reach much further out.
And these computers, even the cruddy old computers that we've replaced with our Pentiums, do a wonderful job of sifting through the cosmic status, looking for patterns that the human ear or eye could not detect.
And when that's over, as a little present, they are leaving me with the 450 megahertz computer that's doing the job on this end, and so it's available.
At the focal point of your DISH, there is a little feed horn right now used to scoop up those C-band photons falling from the sky for satellite television.
Let's assume for just a minute that you're interested in doing radio astronomy, doing SETI in the L-band, the range of frequencies that many of us are operating at.
It's not the only place to look because there's only one wrong setting for your SETI equipment, and that's off.
Within that quietest part of the sky, there are a couple of naturally occurring noise sources.
The most prominent of them, at a frequency of 1420.40575 megahertz, there is a very loud interfering signal.
There's loud QRN, if you will, from interstellar hydrogen.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in interstellar space.
There's about one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter out there.
Now that's not a very high atmospheric pressure, but there's a lot of cubic centimeters, so there's a lot of hydrogen.
And hydrogen atoms every now and then spit out a photon on a very well-defined, very specific frequency, 1420 megs.
Those hydrogen photons were one of the first natural interstellar radiation lines that were studied by radio astronomers back in 1951 at Harvard University.
And it's certainly not a good place to try to listen through for signals.
But if I'm already tuning the hydrogen line to do natural astrophysical observations, there's a chance that I might pick up something tuning off to one side or the other.
Well, the folks who first proposed Modern SETI thought so.
In 1959, Phil Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi at Cornell University wrote an article, a short paper in Nature magazine.
That article was titled Searching for Interstellar Communication.
And they were proposing how we might go about looking for other civilizations.
It's a wonderful article because it was a seminal article that started CETI.
In that article, they proposed listening on the hydrogen line.
They proposed using the largest radio telescope then in existence, the 250-foot dish at Jodrell Bank, the Manchester University facility in England.
And they went through their calculations, figuring what it would take in terms of transmitter power to detect over interstellar distances signals on that frequency with that dish.
And what they came up with was amazing.
They picked a dozen nearby stars, all out to about 15 light years, and they showed that using Earth-style transmitters, we could, even then in 1959, have a good chance of detecting signals if they emanated from those dozen stars.
Incidentally, the dozen stars, the candidate stars in the Cocooni and Morrison article, they're still on the SETI Institute's list of good targets.
They still, 40 years later, look like very likely possible candidates.
At any rate, if we're going to be listening on 1420, we don't want to stick to just one channel.
We want to tune around a bit.
So if we look across the radio band, we look for other signposts.
And as we tune up this quietest part of the microwave spectrum, going up from 1420, the hydrogen line, the next signal that we encounter is radiation from interstellar hydroxyl.
That's the OH radical for the chemists out there.
And the hydroxyl radical transmits a very distinct signal at 1667 megahertz, plus or minus a little bit.
And that's just up the band a little bit from the hydrogen line.
So we've got the hydrogen line down on the left-hand side and the hydroxyl line on the right-hand side In the two loudest signals in the quietest part of the spectrum.
In fact, one of our members, Dan Fox in Indiana, who I hope is listening tonight.
Hi, Dan.
One of our members has developed software to actually map the hydrogen line with his SETI system.
And he's put some beautiful graphics together, which are on the SETI League website, which incidentally I have to plug right now, www.fetileague1word.org.
Yep, and you'll find about 1,500 documents, about 50 megabytes of information.
So happy browsing, folks.
If you don't have web access and you want further information, drop us an email if you have those capabilities, radio at FETILeague.org, and send us your postal address.
We believe that nature might have put those markers there for us as a way of saying, look, here's where we're going to have the interstellar communication band.
There's another nice coincidence.
Hydrogen and hydroxyl are the disassociation products of water.
Or, to run it backwards, if we put hydrogen and hydroxyl together the right way, we get water.
The hydrogen line and the hydroxyl line are out there as pointers.
We believe that life, at least life as we know it, requires liquid water.
So any other water-based life might recognize some significance to the hydrogen line right next to the hydroxyl line, and they may say, here's a good place to look for other water-based life.
But if it doesn't, well, the converter, as I say, outside, worst case, if you don't feel like building it yourself, $200.
In fact, I must confess, we're recommending that most of our members probably ought to buy the converter already assembled because most of us don't have microwave test equipment or the expertise to tune things up and check them out.
And for the few bucks more, you can get something that you know is guaranteed working.
And you can find those at flea markets these days.
Sure.
You're actually almost home now because what comes out of your two-meter receiver is audio.
When you point at the stars, what's going to come out of your receiver is noise.
Lots of random, chaotic noise.
If you're incredibly lucky, buried in that noise somewhere might be ET calling home.
But you'll never hear it.
What you need is high-power computing to be able to sift through the noise, looking for that elusive needle in the cosmic haystack, trying to find the cosmic weed amongst the galactic chaff.
Well, listen, if you're with us tonight and saying, gee, this is kind of technical, I don't know, just bear with us because there are a lot of people out there for which this is definitely not too technical.
People who will join in the effort, and I'm making very careful notes in case you wondered, yes, I am going to be one of those people.
No question about it.
An L-band feed, bead horn, that's easy.
An LNA, easy.
A converter, easy.
And the analog to digital converter is nothing more than the sound blaster in your computer.
Once again, easy.
And the software is available on the SETI League site.
Again, easy.
So once we have all that set up, I guess the next logical question, the one I'll ask in a moment, is what does that software do?
What does it, how does it do it?
And who does it report to, in essence?
Do we do data dumps on a daily basis?
Or does the software sort of go beep, beep, beep when it finds something really interesting and report back to headquarters?
That's where we're going next.
unidentified
The End And now we take you back to the night of March 3, 1999 on Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
By the way, when I get off the air tonight, in about two hours and 20 minutes, I think it is.
21 minutes, two hours and 21 minutes.
I tried it last night, and the band was so noisy.
I'm going to crank up the rig, the kilowatt here on 3830, 3.830, way down in the 75-meter band, and talk to any of you who happen to be awake at that hour.
That would be 6 a.m. Eastern Time, or about, I don't know, five minutes after 3 here on the West Coast.
So I'm going to do that again.
I tried it last night, but oh my, the band was noisy.
I am a very, very active ham doctor, and I'm going to be doing all of this.
Now, let us continue.
We've got an analog to digital converter in our sound blaster.
That's exciting, so I'm not spending any money there.
A lot of hams wouldn't be.
Then we get the software, and I've got about a million questions about that.
Once I get the software installed, and it's listening, does the software listen across that spectrum, or is it listening to specific frequencies?
Right now, Arch, the software is set up to scan the audio spectrum coming out of your receiver.
Depending on what kind of a two-meter receiver you're using after your converter, you may only have about 3 kilohertz of bandwidth or as much as 22 kilohertz.
So you'll be scanning an audio band.
Later, of course, this is tomorrow's technology.
We'll be scanning the entire waterhole region, the entire 1.3 to 1.7 gig region.
But that's going to come later.
You have to start off in small steps.
Let me backtrack for just a second, though, and we'll come back to the software and see what the computer does.
Because we've been talking technical quite a bit tonight.
So drop us a line or an email, and we'll get the membership brochure off to you.
And once you've become a member of the SETI League, you'll be one of, right now, about 1,000 people around the world who are supporting this kind of research.
And you don't have to be a rocket scientist.
That's the first thing we learned.
And the second thing we learned is that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that it doesn't take a rocket scientist.
These are ordinary people.
We have members from all walks of life.
Who's building SETI stations?
Well, I'll tell you.
We've got a fellow in Canada who is a construction contractor, a builder.
We've got a woman in Hawaii who is a physician.
We've got a man in Germany who is a nurse.
We have people from all professions, all technical abilities.
And with the help that's available off the website and from our regional coordinators, these folks are finding it's not all that hard to build a very credible research-grade radio telescope around surplus bits and pieces.
So in other words, the average person with their old C-band dish, even if they're not a ham, with the right kind of help, could put it together and be part of all this.
And a lot of people are doing that right now, but we need a lot more to make this work.
And that's why we're pitching it to the masses, as you will, through this wonderful radio network of arts.
We're trying to tell people that they can be part of it.
And if enough people will work together on this, we can accomplish something that no government could accomplish.
The beauty of privatized science is that when you have thousands of people in dozens of countries around the world working together collaboratively, no matter what we discover, it will become public knowledge.
Well, I'm sure we'll get to talking about that in a moment, but let's come back for a second now to, okay, we've got all this working, as you described.
Because with enough stations on the air, if everybody takes a slightly different elevation, and we'll help coordinate that when we reach critical mass, we're not there yet.
With only 70 stations on the air, we're still in the shakedown phase.
We're still learning how to do this.
But at some point, when we've got 1,000 or so stations on the air, we at headquarters will help to coordinate exactly where everybody should point.
The Earth is a wonderful azimuth rotor.
And somebody else was paying the electric bill on that one.
If the software should detect a signal, it would come and it would go.
And unlike the SETI operation where they can bring the ditch off point, bring it back on point, and try and decide if they've got a real signal, Art Bell with his ditch pointed at the sky, who gets the signal, it's going to come, it's going to go.
And the software will detect it.
And how do we then check, first of all, how do we know what Art Bell was pointed at when the signal was received?
And then how do we get somebody to go back and look at that point to see if it was really what we hoped?
Now, from this, you get two important numbers from all of this.
Your longitude, when you're pointed due south, equals your right ascension, which is the right-left direction in the sky.
Your longitude equals your right ascension.
Your latitude plus, actually it's 90 degrees minus your latitude plus your elevation, there's a formula on the website, equals your declination, which is the up-down coordinate in the sky.
And now the only additional piece of information you need is time.
Well, the bottom line is, if you know the time, and you know your grid square and you know the elevation of your antenna and it's on a north-south line, you know exactly where in the sky you're pointing all the time.
I take those numbers intentionally because that was the location of the most famous SETI candidate signal ever, which we can talk about if you'd like, the Ohio State University WOW signal.
So now if a day later, minus four minutes, if the signal appears one sidereal day later, now you say, hey, it's steady and it's really coming from that star or that region of the sky.
So even in standalone mode, if the signal is persistent, you've got a shot at verifying it.
But I don't wish to discourage you, Art, but I don't think the signal is going to be that persistent.
Well, they determined that there was a carrier that was Doppler shifted at the right rate.
And they determined that it was coming, Because the signal rose in amplitude and then fell in amplitude in a pattern that exactly fit the pattern of the antenna, they determined the signal was really coming through the main lobe of the antenna, not off to the side.
It wasn't equipment malfunction or terrestrial interference.
It wasn't jamming.
And because of the Doppler, it wasn't an aircraft.
It was coming from very near the galactic center in the direction of Sagittarius.
But it was coming from a piece of that portion of the sky where there were no especially interesting known stars.
In other words, it was not pointing at one of the stars on the candidate list for targeted searches, which underscores the importance of doing all sky surveys.
The nearest stars that it could have possibly come from are a couple of hundred light years away.
There are about a dozen alternate hypotheses that have been explored.
And with 21 years of follow-on analysis, we've managed to rule out most of them.
You can never disprove a theory.
All you can do is assign it a low probability.
So we've assigned incredibly low probabilities to all but two possible explanations.
Those two explanations that are still equally likely are it was somebody else's radio leakage or beacon, or it was a previously undiscovered natural astrophysical phenomenon.
Either possibility art boggles the imagination, but what frustrates us is we just don't know which is the true interpretation.
You want to help perhaps even be the one to find the next WOW signal?
Dr. Paul Chuck is my guest.
He heads the SETI League.
He's their executive director.
And he'll be here for the remainder of the hour.
If you have questions about the SETI League, getting involved yourself, helping out in any way at all, or just general questions about what might happen if we did find the signal, he's your guy, and he'll be right back.
The website, of course, www.fetileague, S-E-T-I-L-E-A-G-E-E, one word.org.
For email, drop us an email to radio at CETILeague.org and be sure to put your postal address in there because my brochure doesn't fit in the floppy drive.
And Dr. Shook, I just wanted to say that I think this is all just incredibly fascinating, and I would like to graduate up to this someday, but I'm just getting started in shortwave listening, and I've ordered my first shortwave radio.
I'm waiting for it to arrive right now.
But I've read a couple books, and I'm having a hard time.
I want to become a ham, and I'm having a hard time finding some information at the entry level.
And I was wondering about your book.
I looked at it through the website on Amazon.com.
Most of the books I've looked at are just way over-the-top technical.
It's my understanding of, you know, if there's a specific frequency, it seems that people talk about a specific frequency with an upper or a lower sideband.
Wouldn't that be a completely different frequency?
And even built the LNB at that time, or LNA, I should say.
What I want to take issue with is the frequency.
You know, like, we're not transmitting anything in particular other than, of course, I guess we could say our satellites now are, well, we have uplink stations aiming at every satellite up there, multiple ones.
Okay, but what he did say was that the 3.8-meter dish, which would yield a certain amount of gain at 3 or 4 gigahertz, would yield considerably less gain down where you want to look.
That's true, that you have more gain as you go higher in frequency.
But you know, as you go up in frequency, you also have more free space path loss, and they almost exactly cancel.
They end up being pretty much invariant of antenna size, or of frequency for a given antenna size.
When you double the frequency, your antenna gain goes up 6 dB and your path loss also goes up 6 dB, so you're right back where you started.
unidentified
If the sweep point isn't reached someplace between 2,000 and 3,000, given, of course, the accuracy of the dish, if you're going to use a big dish and it's not accurate and you're going up to 10 gigahertz or so, it's just not going to work.
However, you cannot rule out the possibility that the communication that might eventually come, inevitably may come, may come in a manner that we don't expect.
Including microwave, certain frequencies, and all the rest of it.
It could come in the way he was just talking about.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Paul Shaukai.
unidentified
Hi, this is Marty in San Diego.
And if the WOW signal had been repetitive and determined to be intelligent, is there a procedure to find out if the civilization is actually still in existence, or is it impossible to find out if it's gone, like our signal is going out, and if we were destroyed?
Hugh, we have the capability to probe deep space, but of course, if something nearby flies through our antenna beam, we cannot discriminate against it.
unidentified
Okay.
Second question.
I had another guest on Zachariah Sitchin, who talked about a planet on a long orbit of 3,600 years.
That orbit has, I believe Dr. Tsitchin determined where that orbit theoretically could be.
Has any effort been made to direct an antenna or a beam in that direction?
So in other words, a probe, an incoming probe, or a probe headed toward us, Doctor, we would detect the Doppler shift of that if it were transmitting a signal as we would from a planet, only it would be a lot more reliable, wouldn't it?
Well, the Doppler shift would tell us that this is a probe coming toward us and not a planet orbiting a distant star, so we would know that we have something unusual here.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 3rd, 1999.
Music
And in the springtime of the year, when the trees are crowned with leaves, When the ash and took and their birch anew, And dressed in ribbons here When outskirt,
The breathless moon in the moving of the night The shadows The
breathless moon in the moving of the night
Oh, rolling and riding and slipping and sliding It's magic You and your spirit desire to hide You and your spirit Higher and
higher, baby It's a living thing It's a terrible thing to lose It's a given thing What a terrible thing to lose
You and your spirit listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight's an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from March 3rd, 1999.
A lot of our members are getting their hands on dishes for free.
And here's how you do it.
You drive around to the countryside, you look for a house that's got an old C-band satellite TV dish in the backyard.
And you look for a house that also has a little KU-band direct satellite broadcast dish, one of the little 18-inchers, up on the roof.
Now, if you look closely, if they've got the little 18-inch dish on the roof, the cables are probably cut and hanging off the C-band dish, and it's probably in disarray and quickly rusting.
So you walk up and down our door, and you ask, would you like me to help you get that scrap metal off your hands for free?
And 9 out of 10 people will say, please take it away.
What's going to happen is that your computer will upload selected signals to a central data storage facility, and it's that hard drive that everybody will be able to access.
There's also a tech manual available in hard copy for those who don't have access to the web.
To get information about the hard copy tech manual, you can email radio at fetileague.org and send your postal address and we'll give you that information.
Or you can also write to P.O. Box 555, Department R, Little Ferry, Small Boat.
And okay, so that tells you about all the cables, and then I assume that there's RCA connectors of some kind coming out of the converter, the 23 centimeter converter that would go into the analog, into your PC card?
I have a lot of fun with on C-Band before it became a math technology.
When there were only a few of us intercepting C-Band, we used to watch the network feeds and have a great deal of fun seeing what was going on when people thought they were off-camera.
Firstly, well, the question to you is going to be obviously contained within my question to him.
It involving spread spectrum technology.
Now, what I wish to point out is an article I read, well, it was actually in a column by Don Lancaster a few months ago.
The point he was trying to make was that intelligent communication is going to be spread spectrum digital, which is going to, which is virtually, if you're trying to detect it, hold it, hold it.
It would be efficient communications, but not necessarily intelligent, because the person on the other end wouldn't be able to discern that it was there unless they have the key.
Well, let me interject something here, because there is a common misconception that spread spectrum cannot be detected unless you are in the know or have the code.
In fact, this is not entirely true.
It cannot be decoded, it cannot be interpreted, but it still stands out as something artificial.
And the proof of that is available on the SETILEAGE website.
We know that the GPS satellites, the global positioning satellites, transmit direct sequence spread spectrum.
To the ear, it sounds like noise.
To our computers, it looks like very clearly artificial lines on the screen, which we know are coming from an intelligent source.
Right, but it certainly stands out as being a clearly discernible artificial signal.
So even if extraterrestrial civilizations are using spread spectrum, we may not be able to read their mail, but we can certainly see that it's in the post office.
unidentified
Oh, way cool.
I just like that.
I mean, it seemed like the point Don was trying to make in his column was that, hey, give it up, guys.
There is another SETI program going on right now that's very appealing to people who don't have the radio interest or expertise and don't want to put up dishes and don't have microwave receivers, but who do have computers.
Our friends at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Washington are in the middle of a project that will make Arecibo Radio Telescope raw data available on the web.
The idea is you download their software, you download a chunk of Arecibo data, and then you become part of a distributed computing network.
Your computer during its idle cycles can sift through the Arecibo noise looking for coherent patterns.
It's got some limitations.
It's still under development.
They're still having some problems with the software.
I know that's because I'm one of their beta testers.
But it is coming together, and you can find information on the SETI at Home project on the SETI League website.
Just go to the alphabetical index and click on SETI at Home.
unidentified
Right, well, that's the main reason I mentioned it is that I want to make sure that other people knew about it.
Well, they already have their 100, and they wanted to keep it a small group.
unidentified
Yeah, because the neat thing about it is it's a screensaver so that when you're not using the computer, then it goes off and does its thing about the SETI project.
I run an Aries Races Information Net down here in Orange County every Monday night.
And one of the things that I've been mentioning to them periodically is about the SETI at home project.
And I would like to get information from you people that I could also include in that net because it's on the repeater on top of San Diego Peak, which covers most of Southern California.
I'm just wondering, Dr. Schook, with all the ancient history and the archaeology that's going on in Egypt and everything, has anybody ever tried to, you know, locate star charts from ancient Egypt or ancient Greek or Chinese and focus it toward any of these constellations?
Mike, that star charts from the ancient days are remarkably similar to the star charts of today.
And that's because although the universe is expanding, our galaxy is pretty stable in the short term.
Human history is pretty short, and you really can't see any significant changes from then to now.
So today's star charts are just as good as theirs, and it's today's star charts that are being used to make the target lists for the targeted searches.
unidentified
Okay, I was just wondering, you know, there must be a reason that ancient people, you know, kind of tapped these things on stone tablets or absolutely.
That was Dr. Paul Schuck, the executive director of the SETI League, with kind of a different plan to look for them.
And pretty good plan, too.
As I listen, I get more excited.
And I hope you did too.
And I hope if you're a ham, I hope if you have any technical expertise and you can lay your hands on a C-bandish, certainly the rest of it is within reasonable limits.
And then who knows, you might be the one to find them.