Seth Shostak of SETI discusses the 1974 Arecibo message—a 1,679-bit transmission to M13—and Project Phoenix’s survey of just 500 stars among billions, despite 40 years of searching. He argues Type 3 civilizations might leave detectable galactic signatures but dismisses UFO claims as unverifiable, citing 90% of sightings as explainable. Shostak counters suppression fears by noting signals would be confirmed globally via observatories like Jodrell Bank. With SETI relying on private donations after NASA’s 1993 defunding, he urges support, framing discovery as humanity’s next existential leap. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning, wherever you may be across this great land of ours.
It is good indeed from the Tahitian and Hawaiian Islands commercially, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the Pole and worldwide on the internet.
Well, how did it go for you last night with the Ghosties?
That was some program, wasn't it?
But tonight, if we're lucky, we're going to be talking with Seth Shostak.
And he's down at Arecibo in Puerto Rico.
And if we're really lucky, you see, there are two live webcams down at Arecibo.
You know what Arecibo is, right?
You saw the movie Compact.
You saw the big dish built into a canyon in Puerto Rico.
The world's largest radio telescope built literally into a canyon.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
It's almost like one of the wonders of the world.
And there, Seth Shostak, who heads SETI, is listening for you-know-who from you-know-where.
It's the real SETI program, and they are collecting data that is, by the way, used in the SETI at home project that we have going as well.
And we'll be interviewing Seth, I hope, if we can get through.
And we might even talk him into getting in front of a camera and maybe, better yet, giving us a little tour live of Arecibo inside.
Now, obviously, it's dark at this hour, and so we're not going to get to see the big dish out there unless he has some JPEGs he can send along.
But it should be pretty interesting.
And so maybe that next hour, at any rate, we now have at this moment the twin, that's right, two of them, live webcams from Puerto Rico up on the website.
If you go to my website and you go down into the guest area and you see tonight's schedule with Seth Shostak from SETI, you'll see the webcam, live webcam there, and by gosh, you'll get twin webcams, and you can even manipulate them around a little bit.
It's really pretty cool.
So that's coming up next hour.
This hour, a couple of things.
For example, Betty Lou Beetz, known as the Black Widow, has departed this world with no final statement.
She had the shot, made an 11th-hour appeal for a reprieve, but George W. decided not to do it.
She smiled as she slipped into unconsciousness.
So she went out with a smile after taking out several husbands, a couple of which they found buried in her yard.
So Baylou Beeps is a history.
At least here.
Gotta wonder how she's gonna be greeted on the other side.
If she should get to the tunnel, you gotta wonder who'd be waiting for her and what their attitude would be like of her husband's.
I saw a very interesting interview yesterday morning on ABC's Good Morning America.
Really interesting.
It was with Elizabeth Taylor, and I had no idea that Elizabeth Taylor had actually had an NDE and a big one, too.
All vital signs stopped, heartbeat, respiration, everything for many minutes, and she had a real whopper of an NDE and met, as a matter of fact, one of her ex-husbands during that NDE, and I probably ought to interview Elizabeth Taylor about it.
I had no idea.
But when she was interviewed on ABC's Good Morning America, she told the whole story, and they seemed quite fascinated.
Of course, it's Elizabeth Taylor, so they've got to listen, right?
Calling himself a proud Reagan Republican, John McCain counted his endorsement by San Diego's GOP mayor today.
That's an important, a very, very important endorsement from the mayor of San Diego.
So it may well be that Mr. McCain is making some pretty big inroads on the Bush lead in California.
But boy, this could actually be an interesting political year if this keeps up.
Now, don't ask me to explain this, please, because I cannot.
I called Keith when I got this story from Reuters, and I talked to him about it, and he tried to explain it to me, but I don't understand.
You know, I watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
I really like that show, as a matter of fact.
And one of the questions they had the other day on Who Wants to be a Millionaire is, when was the last leap year?
And the last leap year was four years ago.
They occur, I think, every four years.
But listen to this Reuters story.
Dayline, Washington.
The United States and about a dozen countries are going to work together to track any automated system failures sparked by a leap year day next week that occurs only once in 400 years, said the U.S. government on Thursday.
Once in every 400 years.
Quote, it's a real issue that we feel obligated to keep track of.
This is President Clinton's chief aide for the year 2000 technology challenge.
It is a Y2K issue.
He said he did not expect any major system failures, largely because organizations typically checked for leap year compliance while troubleshooting the so-called Y2K bug.
The part that I don't get here is that it occurs once, only once every 400 years.
And I called Keith and he tried desperately to explain it to me.
And he said, well, it's the exception to the exception.
In other words, there's a leap year every four years, except at the millennium.
But I don't get that because every 400 years every 400 years, well.
I don't know.
It doesn't make sense to me.
That seems like more frequently than every millennium.
So it's some sort of exception to some sort of exception to a rule.
Now, the following appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times yesterday, and I wonder if anybody noticed.
The headline is as straightforward as you can get.
It says, climate is warming at steep rate, study says.
Weather effects could be severe, federal researchers warn.
Scientists still debate if man or nature is to blame.
A new analysis by government scientists indicates the Earth's climate is now warming at an unprecedented rate, suggesting that the future impact of global warming may be more severe and sudden, underline the word sudden, than predicted.
Such a steep warming rate was not expected to occur until well into the 21st century, according to Tom Carl, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climatologist who led that study.
Such a trend would probably mean a continuation of the recent three-year string of steamy summers and mild winters.
Well, have you seen the forecast for New York?
I believe earlier today it got well up into the 60s in New York.
In fact, as you look across the nation, with the exception of something that has dipped down into the Western 3rd, maybe it's warm out there.
I think we tend to forget and we take it a day at a time, but this is January and February, right?
And we're having temperatures that are simply unheard of.
Absolutely unheard of.
And so I know it's nice if you're sitting out there in the middle of a winter somewhere and you don't like snow and cold.
Not too many people do.
It feels good.
But what do you think will happen when summertime comes?
And what do you think will happen to all the storms that will continue to get more severe?
And what about those islands that are going underwater?
These, ladies and gentlemen, are signs.
You know, like the canary that keels over while you're down in the mine in its little cage, it's four little feet into the air on its rigid little back deader than a doornail.
Well, maybe our canary is not yet quite dead, but it's certainly twitching and not looking very well at the moment.
Anyway, those are a few things that I wanted to get out for you.
And I've got a little more, and then we will do open lines until we try and get Seth at the top of the next hour at Arecibo.
In the meantime, if you want to see the webcams at Arecibo, and they show the control room inside, we've got that link up right now.
As I said, you go to my website, then you go down to where it says Seth, Shostak, and SETI, and you'll see the webcam link.
It's dual webcams.
Talk about fancy.
They've really got it together, so you might want to take a look at that before we get on the air, because then the website will jam up.
And yes, not to forget, oh my God, the Democrat debate photo.
Yes, I know.
A million of you have sent me emails saying, Art, it's the arrangement of the stars and some of the background.
And it's this, and it's that.
Well, sure, yes, I know.
I mean, everything is something.
But if you look squarely at that photograph between Mr. Bradley and Mr. Gore, there is one evil-looking son of a gun of an entity right in the middle.
Now, if you don't want to think that, that's fine.
But I think to a reasonable, even casual observer, that's one mean-looking entity.
It's got everything but red glowing eyes.
Well, depending on your age, you may or may not be familiar with the original Carlos Santena.
I am so proud of Carlos Santena and what he's done.
It was such a pleasant shock to see Carlos Santana, whose music I loved, come up at his age and whomp them big time.
I mean, he just walked away with the awards.
And it's kind of a neat thing to see, and I wonder if any of you feel the same way.
And by the way, something you might not know about Carlos Anton, he attributes his current success and big time comeback to divine intervention in the form of an angel named Meditron, a mediator, who shows up during his meditations.
I thought I just dropped out of the name.
It sure would make an interesting interview, wouldn't it?
Carlos Antonio.
I'd love to interview him anyway, but with that added little bonus of why he thinks he's doing so well, it really would make a good interview, as would Elizabeth.
How does one go about interviewing Elizabeth Taylor anyway?
I had no idea that she had an NDE, but she did, and it was a whopper.
And you're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks, tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 24th, 2000.
And Marie's remain of his latest plan.
He talked and talked, and I heard him say that she had all this watching hair.
The prettiest pretty doll anywhere.
and the reason ain't of his latest fame though I smiled the tears inside were burning I wished him luck and then he said goodbye he was gone but still his words kept returning what else was there for me to do but cry
Would you believe that yesterday's go on?
She'd be mine.
And the reason they come late is fine.
Tell me what a heart is, everything is.
Tell me what a heart is, yeah, that's all the way.
Tell me what a heart is, I'm such a sin, yeah.
Tell me what a heart is, everything is.
Tell me what a heart is, I'm such a sin, yeah.
Tell me what a heart is, I'm such a sin, yeah.
Tell me what a heart is, everything is.
Can I get him?
I got a lot of those hearties.
I got a lot of those teardrums.
Hearties, teardrums all the way.
Nothing but a heart is, everything is.
Nothing but a heart is, everything is.
But I'm not a heart is, everything is.
I'm such a sin, yeah.
I got a lot of those hearties.
You're listening to our bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 24th, 2000.
And if we're lucky, at the top of the hour, we're going to do something we've never done before, assuming we can connect with Seth Jostak, who runs the SETI program, who's at Arecibo right now in Puerto Rico.
They've got webcams up, and we might even finagle something where we could get my webcam up and his webcam up and get him on camera, have us both on at the same time.
That would be a first in the, that would be an actual broadcast first to have both up side by side.
Or maybe a second.
I think we did do that once before.
I don't know.
Memory fades.
Anyway, we'll get back to open lines.
All right, back to my caller, and I think we made it through about three or five.
How are you doing?
unidentified
I'm doing well.
Art, one of the things I wanted to say was that I give you credit for taking unscreened calls.
Actually, I was watching a Super Bowl commercial in January 1999, and Apple ran a commercial about Macintosh systems being Y2K compliant while the rest of the world went to hell.
The commercial was humorous, not apocalyptic.
So I actually found out about this every hundred year business in January 1999.
Maybe I've seen too many movies, you know, but I have this vision in my mind of this, and I think the movies have put it there, even NASA's put it there, of this giant, tumbling black rock about the size of Manhattan.
That's what the movies have done to me.
Of course, they've got that new little thing in an orbit around one of these black rocks, and that's what it looks like, is a giant black rock.
Tumbling through space, coming head-on for Earth.
Since we've now recognized, they say what, about one out of ten of these things that would potentially be headed for Earth, identify their orbits and so forth, what are the odds?
Well, they're not in our favor, if there is one tumbling in our direction.
The first we'd probably know of it would be when we looked up and saw a bright flash in the sky.
The Earth doesn't travel around in exactly 24 hours.
It's either...
Well, but the same thing goes for every 400 years.
Every 400 years, they have to add in a little bit more time because it's not enough to do it every four years over the span of all that time.
So this leap year is the leap year, again, where they have to add more time than normal to make up for all those hundreds of years that they've only taken or added on only so much time.
I don't even understand all those ways that he was trying to figure out how you do that.
And I read this in the newspaper.
It's you do it because you can only add so many times every four years and then every hundred years and then it goes to 400 since that's when they first did it.
And looking back, they say now this year we have to have more time to make it right.
And it rather freaked me out listening to that about a demon between the two candidates.
And this morning I woke up and brought up the picture on my computer, which was a little bit distorted, because I don't have a real high-resolution computer.
So I took it.
I went to a customer of mine and had her bring it up on hers.
Very high-resolution.
And believe it or not, Art, if you will look very closely at that image, it is actually five stars on the flag.
Well, doesn't it strike you as odd that the stars would arrange themselves so in the middle of two candidates for the presidency?
I mean, of course, we can sit here and we can say it was laid over this way and that way and this way and that way.
And, you know, all of this came together to produce the face of a demon.
Or we can look at the picture and say, yo, that's the face of a demon.
unidentified
Well, no, I completely agree.
You know, there are also pentagrams turned on their side that make up the face of a demon, which has to lend itself to some thought about what's really going on here.
It's one of those things where you can believe what you wish to believe and what you are comfortable believing.
But explain as you will about the stars and the lighting and the background and all the reasons that you think that image is apparent to people who see it, you've still got to sort of sit back and say, yeah, but that happened.
I feel differently about the golden rule than you do.
In other words, argue with this.
If I went out and, I don't know, robbed a 7-Eleven, right, and killed the guy behind the counter as I left, sort of for good measure, And I got caught and I was charged with murder.
I would expect the death penalty to be levied upon myself.
I'll tell you what I think borders on evil, and you can agree or disagree with this.
They have now, you know, adopted the needle instead of the electric chair.
I think that when you are aware that the method of death or a life for a life or you know no matter how you want to talk about this, if it's cruel, if it's a painful death, then I think it's wrong.
In other words, I believe in a life for a life.
I believe in that.
Even down to my very own self, should I do something that awful, I believe in a life for a life.
Or the golden rule extended that far.
But I don't believe the difference I think there should be between a criminal who kills and takes a life wantonly and perhaps in a very cruel manner.
I don't think society needs to repay in precisely that manner.
We don't need to make somebody suffer with cyanide or the electric chair or whatever.
You know, putting them to sleep is sufficient in my mind.
And it's not a big line between what society does and what the criminal does.
Both take lives.
But in one, there's justice involved.
Yes, revenge.
On behalf of those left and the person departed.
There are those aspects.
But there's also a slight difference, and that is that, in my opinion, society simply does not need to torture people.
The taking of the life is enough, and it'll be sorted out on the other side.
I'm firmly convinced of that fact, that it will be sorted out on the other side.
I'll tell you, as difficult a time as modern medicine has with paranoid schizophrenia in terms of treating it, if you are doing anything at all that's working, then you're doing something that medical science is not having a lot of luck with otherwise.
unidentified
Yeah, that's right.
Well, you know, it's just, it's something that is hard to deal with.
One thing is, you know, when they talk about it on TV and so, I mean, a lot of people don't have a lot of sympathy for it.
Modern medical science doesn't really understand very much about it.
Or, let's put it this way, enough to, in many cases, actually successfully treat it.
There are some really new, good new drugs they're trying, but it's a tough one, all right?
So if you're having luck yourself, then you may be on to something.
All right, in the next minutes, we're going to try to connect to Arecibo in Puerto Rico and Seth Shostak, who directs the SETI program.
It's really something.
I'm going to go to Puerto Rico, and I am going to see that dish.
I really want to stand there, where Jodi Foster did in the movie, and look at that dish and think about the world.
That's something I'm going to do.
unidentified
You're listening to Arkbell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 24, 2000.
Music Music Music Music Music Music Music
I can be shy my way in my dreams.
In the ocean dark, I'm a virgin youth, I'm trapped in ribbons here.
Be inside of the sand, the smell of the touch, there's something inside that you need so much.
The sight of a touch, or the scent of the sand, or the strength of an oak moves deep in the ground.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again, or to fly to the sun without burning a wing, to lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing.
All these things in our memories we saw, from the used-men to come to fall.
Fly, fly, take it home, take it away.
I'll be afraid of me right, I'll be.
It's all free I've been holding a swing for years It's so hard to do with my fears And to end my life in all my life But by now, by
now, I'm a shivering cross Oh, oh, oh Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight's program originally aired February 24th, 2000.
We'll sort of do an in-depth request for a short biographical sketch here in a moment.
And you know what SETI is, right?
And you know what Arecibo is, don't you?
That great big dish that you saw in the movie Contact built into the side of a, well, between, I don't know, between two hills and a giant valley.
It's the dog-gaundest thing you've ever seen, the largest radio telescope in the world.
And you know what they're looking for.
And you know what they're listening for.
And we have made connection with Puerto Rico.
It was quite a job.
It's like I got it done the last three seconds before I had to come back on the air.
So we'll see how the audio is here in a moment.
But we have webcams up, or I should say, Arecibo has twin webcams up right now so that during the course of the interview, if you go to my website at www.artbell.com and scroll down to the guest area, you'll see Seth Shoztak's name and SETI, and you'll see the webcam there.
You click on that, and I think, now I say, I think we've got Seth seated in front of one of the webcams or in front of one of the webcams.
I'm not sure.
I'm seeing a little boy there, and I'm seeing a fellow in a green shirt and a pair of Levi's and a whole bunch of computers.
And now the photograph is changing a little bit.
Ooh, that must be Seth, because now he's on the telephone.
So in other words, we're going to have live webcam available for you on the website, not just from Seth, but from myself as well.
You'll be able to see both sides of the interview underway, and we can even arrange it perhaps so it's done at the same time.
I'm sort of curious, actually, which of the SETI cams you're looking at, because there's one sort of a frontal view, and there's one sort of a back view.
I guess my audience has done it a lot because, you know, they've been watching me on the webcam for years, but I have never been able to sit and watch the person I'm interviewing.
Not to make too many allusions to contact, but you may recall that the way Jodi got in touch was by sitting on the hood of her sports car with a pair of earphones on.
We ought to give her credit for perseverance there.
But in fact, of course, this system that you're looking at here is monitoring not one pair of channels, as Jodi was doing, but 28 million pairs of channels simultaneously.
So, of course, we told Warner Brothers that they really ought to have put 28 million pairs of earphones on Jodi, but they refused to do that, saying that it would mess up her coiffure.
You know, I understand how that makes it sound, but remember that people come here close to where I am in Las Vegas and they hit megabucks and they walk away.
It does happen with millions and millions and millions of dollars, maybe $50 million.
And I imagine what's happened, Seth, is that, well, you tell me, Seth, when hundreds of thousands of people, potentially, at one time try to access your SETICam, I guess we now know what happens.
I was sort of wondering how you had done this, whether you had simply sort of copied our SETICAM on a regular basis over to your site or whether you just sent them to our URL.
Actually, I recommend to anybody who comes to Puerto Rico, of course, given our experience here with the SETI cam, maybe we shouldn't invite the listeners to do too much here.
But the next time that anybody comes to Puerto Rico, they should take the hour and a half drive that's required to come on up here.
They have a wonderful visitor center, and it's an impressive thing.
But I have to say, Art, curiously enough, when you sit up here in the control room, we have a view of the antenna.
But it just doesn't look that impressive when you're up here.
You have to walk down to the edge of the dish, and then you look over this thing.
It's 26 football fields in size, more or less, and then you really get some sense of how mammoth this antenna really is.
People need to understand that every time, when you're talking about dBs, we're talking about measurement of gain, every time you have a 3 dB additional gain, you essentially double the power either in transmitting or in receiving.
And for people in the audience for whom decibels are not their cup of tea, what it means is that if you were to put, say, a one-watt transmitter here, it would be the signal that would be radiated would be the equivalent of using a transmitter of 10 million watts if you were just broadcasting in all directions.
Because one of the reasons they built this antenna was not just to listen, but also to broadcast.
Now, not to broadcast to aliens, although that's been done on one occasion, but to do radar mapping of Venus, to do studies of the upper atmosphere and so forth.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM, and we've broken another one.
unidentified
You're listening to Arch Bell somewhere in time on Premiere Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 24, 2000.
Coast to Coast AM
Coast to Coast AM
Coast to Coast AM from February 24, 2000.
And you better take my baby.
There's no one to take your place And if you get hurt, if you get hurt I'm a little bit baby.
I can put that smile back on your face.
When it's all right and it's coming on, we've got to get right back.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks, tonight An encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 24th, 2000.
But that had been an issue earlier this year when we started getting all sorts of emails from people saying, hey, what about a hit on this particular star system?
And it took me a while to recall what the story on that thing was.
It's unfortunately a fairly prosaic story.
There was a reporter here when we were observing last March, and he was writing stories for the Florida Today newspaper, but it doesn't matter.
In any case, he wrote some story about how one signal came in, and for a while it was looking like a good candidate, but after a couple of minutes of checking, it turned out to be just another telecommunication satellite or some other source of interference.
It kind of looked like a satellite, actually.
But in any case, it was terrestrial, not extraterrestrial.
It wasn't AET, it was AT ⁇ T. Okay, so but this fellow wrote up the story, you know, he made it somewhat dramatic.
And the first half of the story described how everybody was getting excited, getting excited, this really looked good.
And then the last paragraph of the story said, but in fact, it turned out to be yet more earthly interference.
Aha, so somebody at least in the scientific community obviously feels seriously enough about the search that you're doing to allow you time on the telescope.
So there's some pretty mainstream people that have to say yes.
I surely do hope that they fund you instead of continually defunding you.
If there's anything we're doing that's important, this is sure it.
Anyway, here's a big one for you.
I'm sure you're going to know what I'm referring to, but there was a report about a week ago, Seth, from a group of scientists who made the case that in all probability, we are the only complex life form there is.
They suggested, well, there may be molecular level stuff and very low level stuff on some planets around some suns.
But they sort of tried to make the case that we might be it.
We might be the only life in all that we can see and all there is, Seth.
And they've written this book, I think it's called Rare Earth, not to plug their book, but in any case, in which they do exactly what you've said.
They say, look, if you examine carefully the properties of Earth in our solar system and so forth, you might come to the conclusion that it's pretty darn special.
And consequently, maybe we're pretty darn special.
And if that's the case, then we can sit here until the cows return home and not pick up a signal.
That was their argument.
But needless to say, I don't really agree with that.
Well, and that's a little unusual for an inner planet.
I mean, Mercury doesn't have any moons.
Venus, no moons there.
Mars has a couple of moons, but they're so small you could walk around them in an afternoon.
Only Earth has this, you know, pretty hefty moon.
Now, it turns out that that big moon does us some good other than providing a subject for songwriters and stuff like that.
It stabilizes the spin of the Earth.
In other words, the Earth's north and south poles don't change very quickly thanks to the presence of that big moon.
If it weren't there, they point out, the Earth's spin axis would constantly be flopping back and forth, ruining the weather and kind of making Earth somewhat uninhabitable.
But what if the argument is that life is eternally adaptable and that there might be life on a planet that would be disagreeably rotating and some life form could evolve in a complex way, even under such conditions?
Who knows what it would look like, but it would be complex.
The first point, of course, to finish their argument, is to note that the moon is probably the result of a big accident that happened here on Earth on the order of 4 billion years ago.
And I doubt that many of the listeners remember this, but roughly 4 billion years ago, there was a big hump of rock, a big asteroid.
I mean, this was the mother of all asteroids.
It was about the size of Mars or larger that slammed into the Earth.
And the consequence of this ungodly collision 4 billion years ago is the moon.
Now, that was just chance, of course.
And what these gentlemen are saying is that, look, that means that planets with big moons like this, you know, rocky planets with big moons like our own, are going to be rare because this accident isn't going to happen very often.
But what happens is that these sand grains then go into orbit around the Earth, and then they begin to, you know, some of them begin to coalesce and make bigger lumps just at first by random collisions.
But once you get a lump that's about as big as the mountain outside your house there, then it's got enough gravity to pull in more of these sand grains, if you will, and make itself bigger and bigger.
Okay, and if you build a body big enough, it tries to get all of its stuff as close to its center as it can.
That's just gravity.
And the shape that has all of its stuff closest to its center is a sphere.
So anything that's big enough will be spherical.
You may have noticed all the planets in the solar system are spherical, but little things like asteroids and so forth often are not.
So their argument was, look, you've got to have this moon, otherwise you've got really awful weather on the Earth and probably not very interesting life.
And since the moon was a big accident, maybe we're a big accident.
Okay, well, as Howard Hughes would not say, I don't buy it.
Because, to begin with, it turns out that the Earth was spinning a lot faster before this big rock slammed into it to make the moon.
And so if that hadn't happened, if that asteroid had arrived at Earth 20 minutes earlier and missed our planet, so we didn't have the moon, the Earth would be spinning faster, which would be, you know, bad news for the working man because that means there would be maybe only 15 hours in a day or 10 hours or something like that.
But it means that it would be spinning so fast it would act like a pretty good top and the pole wouldn't wander very much.
So there's that.
But beyond that, in addition, your argument really comes into play.
I mean, if the moon weren't there and the Earth really had a 24-hour day, I mean, just take the worst case.
So occasionally the North Pole tips over toward the equator.
But it doesn't tip over from one moment to the next.
It takes typically 10 million years to do that.
Now, in 10 million years, if the climate's kind of changing where you are, no matter what you are, whether you're a salamander or a lobster or a human or an elephant, you can just sort of walk out of the way.
You've got plenty of time to adjust.
So that doesn't strike me as a very strong argument.
This one is one of the many arguments they have in the book.
But, you know, I mean, these arguments, to be honest, have been made in the past, and that's the nature of science.
You know, some people say yes, some people say no, but it's also the nature of science to say, look, you know, we can sit around here like sitting around in the bars of Spain in 1491 arguing about whether there might be another continent between Europe and Japan.
And that makes for an interesting discussion, and maybe you could sell a few books about it, too.
Well, the first modern experiment was done almost exactly 40 years ago by Frank Drake in West Virginia.
But, you know, the experiments keep getting better because they're largely based on developments in computer technology.
It's kind of like that PC you've got on your desktop there is probably more powerful than all the previous PCs that have ever sat on that desktop, right?
You put them all together and it wouldn't equal the power of what you've got there now.
Well, the same is true with SETI.
The experiment we're running here is really, you know, it just blows away all the previous experiments put together.
And five years from now, I'll be able to make the same statement that the experiment we're running there, it's in, will be better than all the previous ones.
So it keeps getting better in some sense.
And within five, ten years, we hope to build a telescope that can be used 24 hours a day, seven days a week for this, that will look not at 1,000 nearby stars like we're trying to do now, but it'll look at 100,000 or maybe 1 million nearby stars.
Wow.
And when you begin to talk about surveying a million nearby stars, then I think that gets quite interesting.
It really does get interesting because the other numbers that have been band-aided about by scientists would indicate that at that rate, you really are going to run into something.
We've talked about this before, and you said there was this little brief transmission made some years ago, and there's been a lot of sentiment, Canadian scientists and others, who say, ah, no, no, no, we should not be transmitting.
Well, yeah, there are several reasons why we don't transmit.
But your first point should be addressed.
There was a transmission, a famous one, from this telescope in 1974.
Before the last break, we were talking about the fact that this telescope, this big antenna, which is really it is, is what it is.
It's just a backyard satellite dish on steroids, if you will, does have a transmitter, which is used, as I mentioned, for mapping things like asteroids.
I've got on my lap here, a picture of some asteroids that have been mapped with this thing.
We might want to talk about that because it's an asteroid that's going to pass by the Earth.
Up on my webpage right now, you can actually see him live in Arecibo.
We're going to talk a little bit in a moment why we're not marshaling billions of watts on this giant, giant dish, this dish on steroids, and calling others.
Well, it's a long and fairly tedious story, so I'll just give you the three-sentence version of it.
My background's in radio astronomy, as a matter of fact, and for many years I was studying galaxies using radio telescopes.
Now, when I was a student studying these galaxies, I was sitting alone in a radio observatory in California in the Owens Valley.
And it was 3 o'clock in the morning, and as was often the case in those days, I was completely alone.
I was reading a book that had been written by a Russian physicist by the name of Joseph Schlossky, but translated into English and added to by Carl Sagan, called Intelligent Life in the Universe.
And the point of this book was that the equipment I was sitting there using in the middle of the night, amongst the coyotes and the cows, could be used to communicate from one star system to the other.
And that struck me as a pretty exciting idea.
Didn't do much about it, but it was a pretty exciting idea.
Well, then in 1980, I think it was, either 80 or 81, this woman who was sitting behind me, Jill Tarter, happened to come to the university I was working at in Europe.
81, she says.
Okay.
Just for a couple of months.
And, you know, that's what she did for a living.
Listening, trying to eavesdrop on the aliens.
And so we put together an experiment there in Holland to do a very simple SETI experiment where we looked at the center of our galaxy.
And that's what got me started in this.
And something like ten years later, when I moved to California, I got a phone call from the SETI Institute and they said, are you interested in a job here?
Well, when you were in it, it should be used, in my opinion.
So, Professor, you are.
All right, well, the billion-watt question, and that is, why not put a billion watts out in front of that dish, let it go out at, I don't know what the ERP would be, it'd be big, and we'd really blast a signal out there near hydrogen where we expect to perhaps find one.
And they decided as sort of a kind of almost a stunt, but in any case, as part of the celebration, they would attach one of the million-watt transmitters that they got here.
Yeah, a million watts.
And by the way, when you combine that with the gain of this antenna, which we discussed earlier, that means it's equivalent to roughly a 10 trillion watt transmitter.
It's just a picture consisting of ones and zeros, if you will.
So that's what the message was.
It had 1,679 bits, or maybe it was 59, but anyhow, something like 1,600 bits.
And the picture showed a schematic of our solar system and a picture of a human, very simple stick figure, something about DNA, you know, some very basic facts.
Well, I think it would be absolutely recognized as an artificial signal because of the nature of the signal, it's the kind of thing that only a transmitter could make.
You know, pulsars, quasars, they all make radio noise, but they don't make the kind of signals that this was.
So I'm sure they could recognize it as artificial.
Now, whether they would figure it out or not, that's harder to say.
The fellow who put together this message was Frank Drake, the very same fellow who really started the whole SETI business in 1960.
And I believe that Frank actually sent this message to ten of his fellow academicians at the University of Santa Cruz or wherever he was, maybe it was Cornell.
And apparently none of them could figure it out.
But the aliens may be smarter than your average college professor.
Was the in view of that then, in the movie Contact, the initial contact was a sequence of prime numbers, which one would presume would be a pretty good starting off launching point.
In other words, give them something that's absolutely unmistakable in rhythm.
A bitmap would appear to be somewhat random if you didn't know what it was and how to decode it.
So why not open up with something like the primes as they did in that movie?
Now, you might do that, but some people have thought about this, actually.
It's maybe early days to worry about what language to use if you're talking to aliens, but some people have thought about it.
And the suggestions range from things like you're discussing prime numbers, the value of pi, maybe, some mathematics, or as in contact, where they kind of start with algebraic equations and work that up into a language.
That's certainly one possibility.
Maybe it works out.
But personally, I think that the better thing to do would be just to send pictures, send a picture dictionary.
Here's your word, and here's the picture that it refers to.
And the pictures have to be pretty universal, but maybe you could build up a vocabulary that way and then forget the pictures and just send the words, which would be a much more efficient way of doing things.
Of course, there are stars, you know, sort of along the path that maybe it'll intercept.
And you never know whether they're, you know, maybe interstellar spacecraft or something that are listening, I don't know.
But even though it was aimed at this very distant object, it still caused a fairly strong reaction from the Astronomer Royal, which is the number one astronomer in Great Britain.
Who he got quite upset by this because he thought sending this message was a diplomatic act.
And after all, you know, maybe it's not a good thing to shout in the jungle, which he considered this was.
And, you know, aliens might pick it up and come down here and take all our chlorophyll or something.
I abduct our women.
So he tried to get the International Astronomical Union to forbid this kind of transmission.
Now, he wasn't successful at that, but there still is, I think, a little bit of political sensitivity here that if you broadcast something, the chances that it's really dangerous are very, very small.
But the consequences, if that were to happen, might be very large.
If you had the opportunity to make a transmission of that magnitude yourself, and you could send it anywhere you wanted to send it, where would you send it?
Now, the thing is that there are going to be, you know, astronomers on some of those planets who are going to be interested in studying the center of our Milky Way galaxy because it's a very interesting place.
Well, if you just ain't, you know, blasted out in the direction opposite the galaxy, it depends on how big an antenna you use.
This antenna might be too big for something like that because it's so big it has a really, really narrow beam, so it would be like shining a laser kind of thing.
Yeah, when you really want a big Hollywood searchlight.
So it depends a little bit on the technology, but you could reach many, many millions, if not billions, of stars this way, and some of them might be interesting indeed.
I should mention the other reason that this isn't done very often.
It's much more pragmatic.
In fact, there are two other reasons.
One is, you know, in addition to this possible diplomatic problem, the second thing is that I don't know how many civilizations there are in the galaxy.
Obviously, nobody knows.
But if there are, say, 10,000 of them, then that means that the nearest other civilization is roughly 1,000 light years away.
Maybe 500, maybe 700, but hundreds of light years, maybe 1,000 light years away.
Unless there is something in physics we don't know about yet, they are making the same calculations on the other end, a thousand light years away, and if they're intelligent, using the same deductive reasoning that you're using right now.
And so they're not transmitting because it's stupid because they'll never live to get an answer.
It is indeed and Seth Shostak who is talking to you from Arecibo in the control room.
the very same ares he will use on the movie contact and his partner has uh...
She's back in the photograph again because we've got a live webcam, actually a pair of them, SETICam A and SETICam B, looking right at them as we conduct the interview tonight, which will resume in a moment.
All right, once again, the same discussion for a second.
That is, everybody listening, nobody transmitting.
And I play around on the six-meter band too, and that has rare openings, but they happen.
And everybody's sitting there listening, waiting for a signal.
And save the occasional beacon that you can find that's on 24 hours letting you know when the band really does open if you're lucky enough to hear it.
You know, everybody's listening.
And a lot of times when you'll transmit, you'll suddenly get an answer, but only because you transmitted.
Well, I think that that's a, you know, that's a pretty good argument for transmitting.
And people have made that argument.
They've also said that one of the advantages of making a deliberate transmission is that you might learn something about how to improve your receiving experiment because you'll know some of the problems involved in building a transmitter that stays on for long periods of time, that has a lot of power, that's maybe directed at nearby stars and all that sort of stuff.
Now, I hear you what you're saying about 10 meters, and it sounds like the band's dead, but in fact, all that's happening is everybody sitting around.
I have to say, my own experience isn't quite the same.
You know, if I get invited to a party and it sounds like it's going to be pretty dull, I might suggest to my wife, oh, well, I'll go to the party, but I'm not going to talk to anyone.
And how often is it that you go to a party like that and nobody talks because they've all made this kind of deal?
So, you know, it may be the case, but remember, unlike in Jill just passed me a note here.
Wait a minute.
Transmitting makes no sense unless you're prepared to do it forever.
Well, that's another point, but we'll get on that in a moment.
I just think that there are probably lots of good reasons why you might want to transmit that we haven't even thought of.
But of course, you know, what you're doing is you're putting this burden on the aliens.
If people are, shall we say, suppose the aliens turn on their transmitters and they, you know, they beam at you for a couple hours and then they go to lunch and turn it off.
Right?
They go, you know, QTH or something and turn off their transmitter for a while.
Well, we're never going to find transmitters like that.
It's sort of like flash bulbs popping off all around the galaxy.
The chances that you're looking in the direction of a flash bulb when it fires are pretty darn small.
You remember the opening sequence was unparalleled.
I still sit and marvel at it, and it's just incredible in context, that opening sequence, as it pans back from Earth.
And so this is an honest question for you.
With our radio and our television and all this RF noise emanating from Earth, microwave, all of it, as you pan back, if the movie had been realistic, where would it finally have faded out?
And you'd need a couple of thousand acres covered with Yaggy antennas if you were 60 light years away.
So that's a pretty big antenna, of course, but it's not an impossible antenna.
I mean, if you're serious about it, or if you've got this antenna in space or something, and you have some way of building really large antennas, you could do it.
You could do it.
But you would do much better at that distance to try and look for our military radars, which began to appear in the 1950s.
And in fact, if you remember in contact, Carl Sagan put this civilization, I guess it was at Vega anyhow, at a distance that just allowed enough time for the 1936 broadcast of the Olympics in Berlin to get to these aliens and for their signal to get back to us.
Now, I can give you maybe a more interesting number.
We obviously have no idea what sort of setup the aliens have.
Since we haven't had contact with them, we can't ask them what sort of transmitter and antenna they're using the way a ham would do.
But suppose they have an antenna just like the one that's right outside the window here, the Arecibo antenna, and suppose they're 100 light years away.
Well, since you brought up possibly being wrong, everybody believes that the speed of light cannot be exceeded.
Now, if that was wrong somehow, that the speed of light can indeed be exceeded in some manner, then the Equation radically changes.
If it doesn't take, say, 20,000 years to get to your destination, but if you could do it virtually instantly or close to, then you've got a whole different ballgame, right?
All right, there are a lot of theoretical physicists right now that are talking about the possibility of if we have enough power, and it would take a very great deal of power indeed, that it might be possible to utilize the services of a wormhole, a black hole.
It might be possible to actually warp space and time and perhaps not deliver a human being, but perhaps deliver a signal.
I mean, indeed, what you're saying is, could you build a rocket that instead of just blasting propellant out the back end, for example, somehow warp space in front, sort of contract space in front and expand space behind it.
Now, the trouble is that the calculations suggest that, although you might be able to do this on paper, if you try to do it for real, yes, the amount of energy required is absolutely enormous.
I mean, arguments that say it's possible but we can't do it are usually the kind of arguments that don't hold up very well because, you know, normally 100 years later you can do it.
And so then if we are to suppose there could be a civilization millions, if not billions of years ahead of us, they would have solved that one a long time ago.
Well, Dr. Kaku from City of New York University, who's a theoretical physicist, says that there are several types of civilizations.
I'm sure you've heard him speak.
And that as you move from a type zero that he says we are now to a type one, you begin, type one, type two, to control the power of the sun, and then even more.
So that if they were able to do that, it might be possible they could virtually dump a signal in close proximity to us or to some other sun or planet that we would get suddenly.
You know, this idea of various civilizations, I think Mishio Kaku may have been referring to the work of a Russian physicist by the name of Kardashev who said, look, there are probably three kinds of alien civilizations out there.
Type two uses the resources of its sun, of its star, uses all the resources of its star.
So those 100 million billion watts of energy that the sun's pumping out instead of just going out into the night sky to make a small pinpoint of light in somebody else's star system, we try and harness that energy.
Then the type three civilizations, which you're talking about, well, you might be talking about type two, but there's also a type three that Kardashik proposed, and those were the aliens or whatever, that could harness the energy of an entire galaxy, right, with 100 billion stars in it.
In other words, if they could send the signal, and there's still lots of targets out there, and it doesn't mean they've gotten around all the targets yet.
But the thing is, the problem is only that if you say, look, I'm looking for a civilization that may have, as it were, organized all the energy in a galaxy somehow, then you would expect that if you took a picture of that galaxy, it would look a little different, that they somehow herded up all the stars or did something or put a big shell around a lot of stars.
This may be very naive, of course.
I admit it.
It may be very naive.
But it's hard to tell whether we see any evidence of really, really big astro engineering projects, which are the kind of thing you're talking about.
We tend always to interpret things we see as natural phenomena first, and only when that fails do we consider that it might be something else.
But still a possibility that, in other words, that one day a signal that you would hear, instead of traversing 20,000 light years, hopped across in some spectacular manner and got here very quickly.
You could, it is within the realm of possibility that you could get that kind of surprise.
Now, mind you, it's not such a concern to me that signals that we're looking for here, we assume, are traveling at the speed of light.
Because even the farthest star in the Milky Way galaxy, on the other side of the galaxy, the other side of town, as it were, the other side of town is 100,000 light years away.
So there's kind of old news, but for us, it's still new news.
It'd be like reading Julius Caesar.
That's old news, but it's still interesting.
But this is 100,000 years old.
But that's okay, because the galaxy is 100 times that old.
So there's been plenty of time for those guys to have developed and sent that signal.
I mean, you don't have to worry about that.
So in some sense, the speed of transmission is not a big concern, except if you want to have a conversation.
And if you want to have a conversation, and these guys are, say, a thousand light years away, you say hello, and then two thousand years you get back, you know, repeat that.
It'd be very disappointing, but um, obviously, more would be sent.
Uh, or I guess it would be.
Now, if we were to receive a signal, and we always talk about this, the politics of reception, uh the politics of transmission is interesting enough, but the politics of reception is also very interesting.
What we would do as a planet, what our societies would do, what the UN would do, whatever, whoever ended up controlling all this, how they would react if we did receive a signal.
Yeah, there's been quite a bit of thought about that.
It's an interesting subject, of course, because to begin with, there are quite a few people, at least in my experience, and polls show this as well, who feel that if we were to pick up a signal, that that information would somehow be kept from the public.
And, you know, that some nefarious federal agency would swoop down here on the control room and shut it all down.
Anyway, my guest is the Honorable Professor Seth Schosak.
And he's actually down at Arecibo, and we've got webcams up right now.
Well, that's kind of interesting.
I can see Seth taking a break.
Scott looks like cup of coffee in his hand and walking away from one of the computer consoles.
And in the other photograph, I can see actually two people, Seth, and I guess Jody.
Actually, Jill Tarter.
Now, we're talking about politics of reception.
And I'll clarify that in a moment.
We'll talk more about it.
Coming right up.
Don't touch that.
All right, back now to Puerto Rico, all the way to Puerto Rico and Professor Shostak.
Seth, I want to take a moment to compliment, you know, you see an awful lot of webcams out there across the world now, and 99% of them look awful, and they don't have the right lighting, and they're not sharp, and or they're, you know, just unsatisfactory.
But I must say, yours is spectacular.
Somebody really went to a lot of trouble to get that webcam set up just right.
There are a couple of engineers connected with the project who indeed set everything up with the framing and all the technical things that have to be done.
And actually, if you were here in the control room where you could look up at the ceiling, you would see that I've put up pieces of paper sort of taped to the lighting fixtures here in order to improve the lighting somewhat to make the photography look a little bit better.
No, I've done that actually before on your show, two years ago, I think, you asked about my email address, and as an experiment, I just gave it out to see what would happen.
Well, I'm sure you're going to get lots of mail with lots of comments.
All right.
Well, look, we were talking about the politics of reception.
Let's finish that one up.
I just.
The Cold War is over, but we're worried about secrets leaking to China.
China is building rockets.
What used to be the Soviet Union is looking more like the Soviet Union these days than less.
The leadership there is kind of hardcore right now.
In other words, if there was a signal received, I just can't believe that we wouldn't be extremely concerned that there would not be military value in that signal.
And so before we would tell the Chinese, hey, guess what, or the Russians, hey, guess what, we'd take a little time out and we'd have a talk about it at some very high levels.
Well, okay, since you challenged me to do that, there are two lines of reasoning here.
One is, first off, if we pick up a signal here, and occasionally we do, of course, before we would claim that we had found ET, we would insist that it be verified at another radio observatory.
Because after all, in the end, you know, something that might convince us could just be a bug in the software or maybe even a prank.
We say, look, we're picking up this signal here, and would you mind turning your instrument in the following direction?
We give them a couple of coordinates on the sky, and we say, look, here's a range of frequencies.
We're not going to tell you the exact frequency because we don't want to bias you.
We'll just give you a range and see if you find it the same spot we do.
All right, all very straightforward.
Now, the people we're going to call in Australia will be, you know, another set of astronomers.
Astronomers are not very good at keeping secrets.
They're not used to that, and nobody ever told them to keep secrets.
So there they are down in, say, Australia, looking at this thing, and they're finding it too.
So that means that immediately they're all on their email systems and telling all their relatives, hey, look, you know, it looks like SETI finally succeeded here.
We got a signal, and we find it too.
Okay?
Now, so my first point is that you might not want to tell, for example, the Chinese organiz some other nation or group of people or whatever.
All right, I know, but that would make it the perfect cover story to quiet things down so you could do a little quiet study about what might be important national security information.
Well, let me give you an example of how it could be done.
Washington decides it doesn't want this story to have legs.
So it calls the British government and the Australian government, which make a few quick calls to the astronomers in question and threaten all their funding.
You will keep this quiet for a while, and all your funding is at stake.
Well, it wouldn't worry us, of course, we're privately funded, but I don't think that, I honestly don't think that would work.
I think that if I were, say, at the observatory down in Australia, and I've been there, of course, you know, there are like 100 people at the observatory.
Now they're all getting excited.
They've all been, you know, emailing their friends and relatives.
And now somebody comes in from Canberra and says, sorry guys, we've got to put the lid on this.
It's either that or your job.
Well, maybe 90% of them would say, okay, I'll shut up.
But the other 10% won't.
They say, look, I can get a job somewhere else.
This is too important.
This is too exciting.
And besides, I've told my brother-in-law.
So I should give you an example of What actually happened?
Because thanks to the movies, people have the impression that the way a discovery is made is that, you know, you're sitting here, as we're sitting here, and suddenly, you know, the signal comes in, and ten minutes later, we're calling up the airlines to get our tickets booked to Stockholm so we can not meet ABBA, of course, but collect our Nobel Prize to see.
But that's not the way it happened.
It's not the way it happened.
In 1997, there was a signal that we picked up, not with this telescope, I guess, yeah, it was 97.
We were using the telescope in a telescope in Greenbank, West Virginia.
Much smaller one than this one, actually.
But in any case, there was a signal there that was looking pretty darn good.
And part of the reason it was looking so darn good is that part of the confirmation telescope we normally use was broken.
Well, this was a once-in-several years kind of event.
So it takes on the order of, I don't know, half an hour, an hour before the signal is so interesting that you're beginning to pay exclusive attention to what's going on and you're not sitting in the chair anymore.
Well, part of the problem is that when you're only using one telescope to see, which in a sense we were, the star system you're looking at, of course, is likely to drop down below the horizon.
And it came in in just such a way, it was just the luck of the draw, sometimes this is going to happen, that when we took the telescope and we moved it away from the star we were pointing at, it went away.
It went away.
We moved the telescope back toward the star, it came back.
And in fact, at that point, Jill was looking through her Rolodex looking for the phone numbers of people at other observatories, figuring whether she should call them up.
But the interesting thing was, about six or eight hours into this, I got a call from one of the science writers at the New York Times.
And he said, hi, Seth, I understand you guys are following an interesting signal.
You want to tell me about it.
Now, I think that's interesting because although the feds never showed any interest in this, the New York Times sure did.
And what we told them was, well, look, you know, everything we found so far has been interfering, so, you know, I'll call you back in a couple of hours.
And as it turned out, within a couple of hours, we began to get suspicious that this was the SOHO satellite, which it turned out to be.
But the bottom line, two lessons came out of this.
One, you can be sure that the media will know about this before anybody else.
And two, when you find a signal, it isn't like In Contact or any of the other movies where suddenly from one moment to the next, it's an aha, we got it.
If I got my normal email message saying SETI has got a hit, and I called you in the middle of the night, and you weren't yet ready to talk about it, you had not yet confirmed it.
Would you tell me, yes, we've got something, no, we haven't quite confirmed it, but we're all real excited?
Or would you say, listen, Art, call me in a couple of days, or I'll call you, or something like that?
Yeah, well, that was exactly the problem I had when the New York Times called, actually.
Should I just tell them, sorry, we haven't got anything?
Or should I just be honest about it?
And I was honest.
I said, yes, we are following a signal, but every time we've had something that looks like it might be it, in the past, it's always turned out to be interference.
So I recommend that, you know, before you get too excited and run a story, that you check with us in three or four hours because we may have some more information.
Seth Shostak is my guest, and we're long past where we should be getting to the phone, so we'll get to the phones coming up next.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 24, 2000.
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You're listening to Arkbell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 24th, 2000.
Indeed, Kingdom of Nye to Puerto Rico to Arecibo, where Professor Shostak is right now.
He's our guest.
And he has the SETI project, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
And I know you have questions because it's all lit up like a Christmas tree.
So we'll get to it straight away.
All right, once again, not only can you hear, but you can see Seth, Professor Seth Shostak, in Puerto Rico, because there are two live webcams operating right now that give you refreshed views about every two minutes, actually in the control room at Arecibo.
Very exciting.
The last time we tried this, a hurricane came along, and Seth had to pack up and run away before we could get very far.
In fact, that hurricane was really bearing down on you, wasn't it?
Well, that's the eternal question that we get when we do this show.
And it's irresistible.
And a lot of people, Seth, there's an attorney right now named Peter Gerston who is in the middle of a lawsuit with the Department of Defense on these triangular craft that have been observed.
And to be honest, Seth, there are, I know you cringe around the subject of UFOs, but man, I'll tell you, they have detected and seen all kinds of things going across the Atlantic, fast walkers, they call them, all these unaccountable craft that seem to be traveling in our atmosphere at impossible speeds, and I might add turning at impossible angles and all that sort of thing.
So inevitably, people go up and say, look, they're already here.
Well, first off, just a technical point, I don't know if it's possible for you to turn up the gain on what I hear, because you're about 5x3 at this end.
And that's okay with your voice, but I can really hardly hear the callers.
You're right in that it has not happened so far, but couldn't you do the math on it and probably come up with some sort of number that would say it's as possible as our getting a signal from 100 light years away?
Okay, but you do concede that there have been some very high-quality sightings by NORAD, by all kinds of legitimate organizations that observe this kind of thing, and they've seen things in the atmosphere that are simply unaccountable.
Well, it's true that there's always some residue of sightings and observations for which there aren't explanation.
I mean, there are thousands and thousands of these kind of reports every year, and if you look hard enough at the best of the reports, and that's usually what people will do because there's so many of them, they can't investigate them all.
I mean, I get phone calls about once a week from somebody who wants me to fly to some part of the country and investigate something they've seen.
Now, that's not my business.
I'm not expert in that, and I can't afford to fly there anyway.
And besides, if you try to do that through even half the sightings that are reported every year, I don't think you'd get very far.
But what has happened in the past is that you take maybe the 100 best cases, the ones that look most interesting, and you sort of scrutinize those.
Now, the usual result is that 90% of them, and I think Larry may be aware of this, 90% of them can be explained as atmospheric phenomena or aircraft or whatever.
Yeah, well, that's 10% of a large number is still a large number.
That's true.
But on the other hand, you know, in New York City, they probably solve 70% of the murders every year.
And all of those are committed by humans against other humans.
But what about the other 30% that they didn't solve?
I mean, could those have been committed by, say, aliens against humans?
And of course, you can't disprove that.
But that would be a big assumption, wouldn't it?
It would.
So the fact that 10% of them are not explained, you know, you could say, well, that somehow proves aliens, but I don't think it does.
I think that maybe just to be very succinct in an answer to Larry, I personally don't think that the evidence is there that they're visiting us, but the advantage of this experiment is that we don't claim success yet.
we haven't had success yet, but if we do claim success, But more than that, you can check it out for yourself.
Or anybody with a big antenna can go check it out.
And there are a lot of big antennas around.
So it isn't one of those things that it's a matter of, well, your interpretation versus my interpretation.
It's like a scientific experiment.
If you claim success, immediately 10 other teams will run out into the field and check it out and prove you're right or wrong.
But really, really, though, some scientists are in the exact same position with respect to ufology as you are with listening for the big one, you know, the signal.
There's quite a bit of, or at least some conventional science that's beginning to say, look, these reports, cumulatively, deserve scientific study.
And I'm sure you're aware of that report out of Europe.
It was out of Europe some months ago or a year ago.
And legitimate study.
In other words, there are things that are simply inexplicable, and so science should devote a little of its attention to seeing if there might be something here.
But usually the reasons are for personal philosophy, reasons are of religion or something like that.
And I think in some sense you could make that same argument for what you're talking about there.
But there's a problem, and I don't know how to get around it, and that is that it's pretty tough to predict where that next sighting is going to be if you could somehow know where these things happen, and then you could set up some equipment or something like that.
Well, I'm right in the middle of a thunderstorm here, so before I have a Danny and Brinkley experience here.
And I'll just say to the gentleman, unless you have ever seen one of those large, black, very quiet, huge things beside you or above you, you'll be a believer.
You won't know where it's from, but you will definitely believe that it's there and it's very real.
I'm not sure I want to take on that particular point.
As far as these big things go, I mean, if they're really there, why is it that you just never seem to see them in these, you know, in the satellite photos from up above?
Now, mind you, there are occasionally instances where the military craft will, and I've heard stories like this, you know, just for the fun of it, the pilots will sort of, you know, scare some people by zooming in clothes and turning off white lights and stuff like that.
And there, I'm afraid you've got to attack that beard with Occam's razor again and just say, well, there are two possibilities.
One is it's some sort of phenomenon that it's terrestrial.
It's either some sort of aircraft that I don't know about, or it's some other phenomenon that I don't understand or don't know about, or it's the aliens.
And, you know, the aliens are a pretty easy explanation because they're capable of anything after all.
But on the other hand, Hackam's razor, which says, you know, take the simpler possibility first, suggests, well, you ought to consider all the possibilities here on Earth.
You know, you have to probably send out a lot of probes.
I mean, there's some constraints here.
But sending a probe the size of a baseball or something like that, you know, that just sort of hangs around in somebody's solar system and takes pictures or listens to the radio or does something until somebody wakes up in that solar system.
In other words, until some intelligent life form appears and wakes this probe up.
And then the probe sends information back to the home planet.
Well, down here, write it carefully because there's a lot of bones in the chicken.
But in fact, the Institute SETI activities are funded by, indeed, private donations, and they're almost all, not almost all, are individual donations.
In other words, they're not from corporations in general.
They're from individuals, people who just think that this is an interesting thing to do, because after all, you know, 100 years ago we could have been having this conversation about whether there's somebody up there in space looking down on us, but we wouldn't be having it on the radio.
And I think that if we can talk anybody out there into leaving you their estate or just sending you $10 or whatever it is, I really, really, really would like to get an address where people could make a donation.
I think the work you're doing is so important that if I, you know, I might put you in my will.
I'm serious about that.
It's that important.
For all the arguments that I've given you, you know, if what you're doing turns out to be a success, Seth, then everything that mankind knows and thinks and hopes and dreams changes.
It all becomes, there's some new reality.
There's some, I think it would change the world.
I think it would change socially the entire world and what we all believe.