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Feb. 24, 2000 - Art Bell
02:40:27
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - SETI Project - Seth Shostak
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Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from February 24th, 2000.
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 great 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, this is Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell.
Well, how did it go for you last night with the Ghosties, huh?
That was some program, wasn't it?
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 Contact.
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, and 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 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 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 Beats 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 Betty Lou Beats is history, at least here.
I wonder how she's going to 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 uh... 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 uh... 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 course it's Elizabeth Taylor so they've got to listen right?
Calling himself a proud Reagan Republican, John McCain touted 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.
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.
Dateline 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.
So, 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, then 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 third, baby, 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, its four little, four little feet into the air on its rigid little back better 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 ShowStack 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, 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 Santana.
I am so proud of Carlos Santana 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 wampum 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 Santana.
He attributes his current success and big-time comeback to divine intervention in the form of an angel named Metatron.
M-E-T-A-T-R-O-N.
Who shows up during his meditations.
I thought I just dropped that in.
It sure would make an interesting interview, wouldn't it, Carlos Santana?
I'd love to interview him anyway, but with that added little bonus of why he thinks he's doing so well, I 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.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
I wanted to say five things.
Five things?
Yes.
I'll go quickly.
First, I want to say good luck to John McCain.
Yes.
Second, I wanted to explain what you were saying about the leap year.
Can you explain it in a way that makes sense?
Yes, I'll give you a very simple explanation without telling you about Pope Gregory and the like.
Every four years, as you know, there's a leap year.
There's February 29th.
You said the exception to the exception.
Yeah.
Every hundred years, though, there's no February 29th.
There's no leap day in every year ending in 00, except if that hundredth year is also a multiple of 400.
So there was a leap year in 1600, and there was a leap year in 1996.
and there was a leap year in nineteen ninety six there was no week here in nineteen hundred
you understand and...
Maybe.
Okay, let me put it to you another way.
Alright.
Every fourth year that happens to end in 00, it's a multiple of 100, lacks that February 29th, unless that year, which is a multiple of 100, is also a multiple of 400.
Alright, well, so anyway, how do you figure it'll go?
Well, I thought there would be problems akin to Y2K.
I think I called you in December.
Yes.
And said people checking compliance should look for January 1st, should also check for February 29th compliance.
And I suppose... Most of the software actually that checks for Y2K, if you used it, also checked for leap year compliance.
I was afraid of Y2KF, but since there's been no Y2KF, I don't think there'll be any February 29th problem.
All right, listen, I want to hear the rest of your five, so hold on, all right?
All right, I'll hold on.
All right, stay right there.
I'm Art Bell.
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 the name of his latest flame.
He talked and talked, and I heard him say That she had the longest, blackest hair,
The prettiest green eyes anywhere, And Marie's the name of his latest flame.
Though I smiled, the tears inside were a-burning.
I wished him luck and then he said it's fine He was gone but still his words kept returning
What else was there for me to do but cry?
Would you believe that yesterday This girl was in my arms and swore to me
She'd be mine eternally and the reason ain't Probably this way
Tell me what a heartache every day is What a heartache, yes, I'm all the way
Because she has a ratty side, but don't say She drives me on, why can't I get him?
Tell me what a heartache every day is What a heartache, yes, I'm all the way
Because she has a ratty side, but don't say She drives me on, why can't I get him?
I got a lot of those heartaches I got a lot of those tear drops
Heartaches, tear drops, all the way Tell me what a heartache every day is
Tell me what a heartache every day is Tell me what a heartache, tear drops, all the way
Because she has a ratty side, but don't say She drives me on, why can't I get him?
I got a lot of those heartaches I got a lot of those tear drops
I got a lot of those tear drops It certainly is.
Top of the morning, everybody!
Glad to be here!
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 Shostak, 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 has both on at the same time.
That would be a first and that'd 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.
It fades.
Anyway, we'll get back to open lines.
All right, back to my caller, and I think we made it through about three of five.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Art.
One of the things I wanted to say was that I give you credit for taking unscreened calls.
Well, I've always done it, so to me it's normal.
I like your style.
Thank you.
All right, as I said, I wanted to say good luck to John McCain, and I wanted to clear up this business with the Weep Years for you.
Do you have a pen and paper, Andy?
I do.
There are three kinds of leap years, so write down 1896, 1900, and 2000.
I'll try to make this easy to understand.
1896 is a fourth year, and a conventional leap year.
It was a February 29th.
Just like 1996 was, right?
1996 was yes okay okay in 1900 there was no leap day because even though 1900 is
Yes.
a multiple of four 1900 is a multiple of a hundred So, there are two exceptions.
The first exception is every fourth year that's also a multiple of 100.
Okay.
Okay, you're with me so far?
Yes.
Because 1900 ended in 00, because it was a multiple of 100.
There was no leap day that year.
Okay.
2000 is a multiple of 4.
So, 2000 is like 1996.
However, 2000 also is a multiple of 100.
That's right.
But there's a second exception.
Because 2000 is a multiple of 400 also, that every hundredth year exception doesn't apply.
So it's like triple witching.
I suppose so.
1996 was conventional.
well nineteen ninety six was conventional nineteen hundred was a multiple of a hundred
there was no weekday in nineteen hundred and even though two thousand multiple hundred
because two thousand multiple four hundred it's just the regular actually have it
I'm glad you understand.
It's very weird.
The next question is, since this snuck up on everybody, again I ask, what do you suspect will occur?
I suspect what occurred on January 1st will occur on February 29th.
Not much anything.
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.
I went to DrSky.com.
I wanted to say two other things as well.
I went to DrSky.com.
I'm planning to be a physics major.
Even though I'm not a great astronomer, I like astronomy for its artistic beauty.
Things fit together, and while it's easy to understand second derivatives and hadrons
Astronomy.
Science on a large scale.
I can really see how science is applied to the world through astronomy.
Gravity.
Well, maybe you'll be the guy who will begin anew the study of near-Earth orbiting, orbit-crossing objects and save the world.
I don't know what can be done to save the world.
Well, I mean, noticing it enough ahead of time You know, allows you to do whatever you're going to do.
You're right.
I suppose you're right.
You're right.
Alright, well thank you, and have a good morning.
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, it's 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, identified 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.
A really bright flash in the sky.
That's what I think.
But that's me.
Well, to the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
Yes.
The last guy with the explanation for the leap here.
Yes.
Well, here is an easier one for you.
It's a mathematical thing.
Well, I got that much.
Well, but not the way he said it.
The Earth doesn't travel around in exactly 24 hours.
Right.
You're explaining the reason for the leap day.
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.
Okay.
So it's a mathematical thing.
It's pure and simple.
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.
uh... because you can only have so many times every four years and then every hundred years and then it
goes to four hundred 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
uh... any thoughts on what's going to occur on this day uh... in other words
our computers ready Will they mess up?
Will it be bad for one day?
Would they potentially go down and stay down?
Nah, I don't think so.
There's another date, though.
There's another date in March, I think, that's even more compelling, but I can't remember which one, what date it is, but this I don't think is going to be a problem, any more than the Y2K was.
It's certainly interesting, anyway.
Alright, well, I guess we'll all see, like Y2K.
But I suppose we can be surprised in one way, we can be surprised in another.
Y2K not being a problem, and then all of a sudden some stupid thing like this coming along and getting us, or whatever it is, coming in March.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Art?
Yes.
Hi, this is Mike from Encino.
Hello, Mike.
How are you?
Okay.
Good.
I'm a regular listener.
Yes, sir.
I sent you a fax today.
Regarding the debate demon?
Yes.
And did you get it?
Well, I don't know, Mike.
I got a lot of faxes about the debate demon.
I got, to give you some rough idea, about 950 emails on it.
Okay.
And I got faxes until I finally had to turn off the machine to save it.
Well, I'll tell you what it was about.
Stars.
I was listening to the show last night.
I'm a regular listener, as you know.
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 a picture on my computer, which was a little 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.
Believe it or not, Art, if you will look very closely at that image.
Yes?
It is actually five stars on the flag.
Yeah, I know.
You know this?
Oh, yeah.
I know that.
But it doesn't change a thing.
In other words, it's so clearly there.
You can call it an accident of the stars combined with the background and the lighting.
And you'd be correct.
But you'd also be correct if you stood back and looked at it and said, hey man, look at the demon.
But that's not the beauty of it, that's the irony of it.
Although it is comprised of physical stars on a flag, it does make up a demon.
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!
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.
Yeah, it's one of those things.
Thank you.
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 in 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 mean, there it is.
There's the picture.
It's startling.
It's demonic.
And then you can get down into being a pixel person and arranging the stars and all the rest of it.
Well, sure, true.
Absolutely true.
But awfully coincidental.
I mean, really coincidental.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello, Art Bell.
This is Tawasi calling from west of the Rockies, and I'm fumbling for my... Radio.
Turning it the wrong way, too.
Okay, I got it now.
Alright.
I was calling to talk to you about the death penalty.
I would like to explain to you why I stand in my position.
What is your... Well, first tell us what your position is, actually.
Alright.
I am against it.
You're against it.
I feel that it is inherently evil to kill someone.
Regardless of the reasoning, taking someone's life is wrong.
The whole golden rule, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.
So I would like to know... 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.
Right.
And I got caught, and I was charged with murder.
I would expect the death penalty to be levied upon myself.
I see.
Because you killed him.
That's right.
Okay.
So, argue with that one.
Well, you did, and you did invite it on yourself to do unto others.
I'll tell you what I think borders on evil, and you can agree or disagree with this.
you you as you will
as long as you are not i'll tell you what i think borders on evil and you can
agree or disagree with this
they have now you know adopted uh... the
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 for you know i think that no matter
how you want to talk about this if it's if it's cruel
if it's a uh... painful death then i think it's wrong
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 put 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 a justice involved yes revenge behalf of the 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.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hello, Mr. Art Bell.
Yes, sir.
Hey, my name is Wally.
I'm calling from Olive Branch, Mississippi.
Yes, sir.
I was calling about something that I'm kind of excited about in my life.
I have a mental illness and I'm treating it with shamanism and magic and things like that.
Is it working?
Yeah, it works real well.
I called a few weeks back and talked to Barbara Simpson about it.
See, I had a show about divination, and anyway, I've had a lot of real bad problems in my life.
I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenic when I was about 15.
How old are you now?
I'm 43, and I'm married now, and I have two stepchildren.
I have a full-time job, and I'm celebrating four years sober on AA Sunday.
Well, congratulations.
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.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, you know, it's just something that is hard to deal with.
One thing is, you know, when they talk about it on TV and stuff, a lot of people don't have a lot of sympathy for it.
They, um, they don't understand it a lot.
They seem to... Oh, sir, nobody understands it a lot.
That's the point I was trying to make.
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, alright?
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 Jodie Forster did in the movie, and look at that dish, and think about the world.
That's something I'm gonna do.
You're listening to ArcBell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 24th, 2000.
This is a teaser for the new episode of the Coast to Coast AM.
The episode is titled, The Coast to Coast.
The episode is based on the original episode of the Coast to Coast.
The sight of a touch or the scent of a sound or the strength of an oak when it 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?
To have all these things in our memories?
Or from the useless to countless?
To fly!
Why, why would you go, take his place, on this trip, just for me?
Right, they can be right, take a glimpse, have a seat, it's all free
I've worked hard in the state of the years, worked so hard just to end my fears
Had to end my life to call my friends, but by now, by now, I'm shivering
I'm shivering, I'm shivering, I'm shivering Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time
Tonight's program originally aired February 24th, 2000.
We are about to try something really new.
My guest coming up shortly is Dr. Seth Shostak.
He is the fellow who runs the SETI program.
We'll sort of do an in-depth request for a short Biographical... 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 doggone-est 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 in 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 Shostak'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 don't know.
We're going to try.
That's the plan, and we will see how the plan goes in a minute.
Alright, I can now see, I'm looking at the SETI cam from Puerto Rico, and I think I'm seeing Seth.
Seth, welcome to the program.
It's good to be here, Art.
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.
All right, I'm going to tell you what I see.
I see you, I believe.
Do you have a green shirt on and jeans?
I definitely have a green shirt and jeans.
Okay, that's you.
I see you from behind, and then I see a lady next to you in one frame.
In the other frame, I see a kind of a... Well, I wouldn't call it a frontal view.
I'd call it a kind of a side view of you, and you look great.
And then I see the lady next to you in a, oh, what would that be, kind of a blue coat, it looks like?
Exactly right.
Or even almost purple, I would say.
Exactly.
Okay, well, you've got both views, so there's nothing more to be seen.
So, in other words, this is amazing.
It's amazing for me.
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, this is really cool.
I should explain who this second person is, by the way.
Yes, please.
This person sitting behind me is Jill Tarter.
For anyone who saw the movie Contact, and I'm sure you have because you often ask people if they want to take a ride.
Maybe ten times, fifteen times.
Well, ten times.
They should give you a bulk discount for that, Art.
But Jill is very much the person Well, this is absolutely cool.
I mean, it's really neat.
airway is based upon a fact he's a showing her shirt he's wearing a contact shirt tonight
so uh...
you when you when you think jody uh... playing the young radio astronomer who wants to make
contact with our cosmic brethren there she is not there she is he's right
here and i think that's actually her shift from midnight to
six a m i think the early shift from six to midnight well this is absolutely
i mean it's really neat i'm i guess i'm experiencing what the rest of my audience
well alright so what i see you sitting by
are three gigantic of monitors and computers all over the place
Computers, computers... Oh, I heard a beep.
Computers everywhere.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, that's the way this is done.
Not to make too many allusions to contact, but you may recall that the way Jody got in touch Well, let's be fair.
I mean, that was a scene, right?
sports car with a pair of earphones on and all she had to do is wait about thirty
seconds and the alien checked in with a signal now well let's be fair i mean that that was a scene right
she'd been at it for a long time after all well okay i think that you're right we
have got 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 right as jody jody was doing but twenty eight million pairs
channel simultaneously.
So, of course, we told Warner Brothers that they really ought to have put 28 million pairs of earphones on Jody, but they refused to do that, saying that it would mess up her coiffure.
Well, listen here now.
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 dollars.
Who knows?
Tremendous amounts of money.
Doesn't happen very often, but it does happen.
Well, okay.
Fair enough.
She might have been able to do it with one channel, but you know, we figured that's a bit of a long shot.
So that's why we try and monitor as many channels as we can.
28 million It's not a magic number or anything.
It just happens to be the number that this equipment can handle.
But the consequence of that is we don't sit around with earphones because there's no way you could do that to keep tabs on that many channels.
So that's why you see all the computers here.
They're actually doing the listening.
Well, you're not going to believe this.
And you never know what has happened.
But guess what's come up on the SETI cam?
I don't know.
Has it gone bonkers?
Let's see.
It says, forbidden.
Your client is not allowed to access the requested object.
Is that right?
Yeah.
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 SETI cam, I guess we now know what happens.
I think we do, Art.
I was sort of wondering how you had done this, whether you had simply sort of copied our Steadicam on a regular basis over to your site, or whether you just sent them to our URL.
It sounds like you did the latter.
Yes, we're sending them to your URL so that we could watch you live.
Well, I noticed that we have a system here monitoring Steadicam as well, and it seems to be hung up with half a picture being displayed, so this has been a good test.
You know, maybe the rest of this conversation will be done blind on this side.
I don't know.
Well, listen, Seth, we've done that to a lot of sites in the past, including our own.
Is that right?
So we'll just hope that, you know, maybe you can do a reset on that end.
Maybe your internet provider is currently bleeding out.
I don't know.
This is done from a series of computers back at the SETI Institute, which is located in California, of course.
And unfortunately, it's about 11 o'clock at night there, so I don't know what's going to happen, but as you say, it's a good test.
So in other words, we might have destroyed what's in California.
Well, it was great for about 10 minutes, I'll tell you that.
Well, it was good.
Yeah, well, Jill is not worried that all the computers back in California have been brought to their knees.
Oh, no, these are not the same servers, I hope, that That do other important things for SETI.
Well, it's not for analyzing the data.
That's all done right here on the site, actually.
That's something that many people don't realize.
All the data are analyzed right here, real time.
So, you don't have to worry about that.
What else is on the server that would be important if the server is potentially not working anymore?
Well, I think it did.
Stop Jill's email.
Put it that way.
And so your communications back there are gone.
That's right.
We're isolated.
This place is pretty isolated anyhow.
The movie, of course, depicted it virtually in the middle of a jungle, or with a jungle very close by.
Is that accurate?
It's pretty accurate.
In fact, people often wonder why the world's largest radio telescope is located here.
Yes.
Now, the first thing I have to mention is that Puerto Rico is the most densely populated country.
It's not a country, it's a commonwealth, of course, in the United States, but the most densely populated area in the world.
It's equivalent to the population density of Holland.
Wow.
Yeah, it's a small island.
This island's maybe 100 by 60 miles or something.
Something like three million people, if I remember correctly, that live here in Puerto Rico.
So, sure, we're in the jungle, but jungle is kind of a relative term, because there are houses all around, of course.
Right.
Right, but still, the jungle, where the houses are not, you are in that country.
It's tropical.
We are.
We're in a part of the country that's sort of, it's sort of a pockmarked topography, a bunch of hills here, see?
Puerto Rico's just a bit of limestone, some ocean bottom.
It's been tilted up because of, you know, tectonic activity.
And so you've got this sea bottom topography, if you will, that gets washed away.
It's just limestone.
It gets washed away by rain.
So you've got all these hills here.
And, uh, you know, about 40 years ago, somebody was flying over these hills in a private airplane.
They looked down and they said, you know, there's one valley down there that's pretty much a perfect bowl.
And if we just cover that bowl with chicken wire, We have one heck of an antenna.
Covering the bowl with chicken wire.
Is that in fact, because when you look at the Arecibo dish, it looks like more than chicken wire.
It looks like it has, it looks solid.
It is.
It is?
Yeah, it is.
The original incarnation of the thing, the first telescope they built, was made in a fairly simple way with fairly clean mesh.
You know, something like chicken wire.
It wasn't chicken wire, but it was, you know, a better grade of chicken wire.
In other words, they were just probably trying to prove the concept at that point.
Yeah.
And you know, you're a radio amateur.
You know that at low frequencies, the surface doesn't have to be that perfect.
Right.
But this telescope has been continually upgraded.
And in fact, the dish now, the big reflecting surface, the big radio mirror, if you will, is aluminum panels, 18 acres of them.
And they're pretty darn accurate.
You know, you're not allowed to skateboard on this antenna.
Eighteen acres, did you say?
Eighteen acres.
Yep.
That's almost impossible for me to comprehend.
Eighteen acres.
I really want to come to Puerto Rico and see it.
I want to stand where Jody did up there and look down.
Is that possible?
Well, you should definitely do that.
Actually, I recommend to anybody who comes to Puerto Rico, of course, Given our experience here with the SETI cam, maybe we should invite the listeners to do too much here.
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.
You know, it's a 26 football field in size, more or less.
And then you really get some sense of how mammoth this antenna really is.
Can I ask you a sort of a technical question?
Sure.
With an antenna that size, how much gain is there?
Well, the gain, you can work it out, but at the frequencies that we use, we look at microwave frequencies, which are... Near hydrogen.
That's right, that's 21 centimeters, so that's at 1420 megahertz for the propeller heads in the audience.
And this experiment runs between 1000 and 3000 megahertz, so hydrogen's kind of right in the middle there.
Anyhow, at those frequencies, the gain of this antenna is about 70 dB, which is to say 10 million.
Wow!
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.
That's right.
Either in transmitting or in receiving.
So every 3 dB, you double the power.
And you said 70 dB.
That's right.
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, the signal that would be radiated would be the equivalent of using a transmitter of 10 million watts, okay, if you were just broadcasting in all directions.
Effective radiated power.
Right.
That's right.
Exactly right.
Wow!
That is really impressive.
So if you were to put a serious transmitter up, With, oh, I don't know, about 100,000 watts, say, you would have a really strong signal, wouldn't you?
That'd be the equivalent of 10 billion watts.
But in fact, there is a transmitter here.
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, Uh, to, to do studies of the upper atmosphere and so forth.
So they, they have a... You can actually, you can actually, you can actually radar map Venus?
Yeah, you can do that.
You can do it with incredibly, uh, fine detail, believe it or not.
Incredible accuracy with this thing.
Ah, that's unbelievable.
Uh, Seth, listen, uh, hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour, uh, so you've got a break coming up.
Um, you're not even on camera, so just relax.
Okay.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
And we've broken another one.
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.
The Coast to Coast AM concert was held on February 24, 2000 at the San Francisco International Airport.
The concert was held on February 24, 2000 at the San Francisco International Airport.
Love is good, love can be strong We gotta get right back to where we started from
Do you remember that day, that sunny day When you first came my way
The concert was held on February 24, 2000 at the San We gotta get right back to where we started from
I said no one could take your place And if you get hurt, if you get hurt
By the little things I say I can just set my back on your face
When it's all right and it's coming home We gotta get right back to where we started from
Somewhere in Time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 24th, 2000.
Good morning, everybody.
I guess for most of you, it's morning out there.
My guest is Seth Shostak.
And he has a program called SETI.
We're going to be talking all about that tonight, and the big dish down at Arecibo.
And now you may have an idea of how really big the dish at Arecibo is.
When you're talking about the number of acres of reflective... It's just astounding, and I am definitely going to go see it.
We'll get back to Seth in a moment.
Here we go again.
My guest is Seth Shostak.
He's at Arecibo.
Actually at Arecibo right now, and I am now getting a picture again.
So if just a few of you would go up there and take a look at a time, I'd be very thankful.
Kind of stagger it, you know?
Think that somebody's doing it now, try it in ten minutes and maybe we won't kill it.
But I am, indeed, getting a photograph again.
Which is really cool of Seth.
Which will probably result in it getting killed again.
But I think I'm getting a live photograph again, Seth.
Welcome back.
It seems to be working.
Well, good.
Yes, oh indeed.
Yes, the picture is changing and All right, so here I am looking at these computers, which are, I guess, actively processing data as it's being received?
That's what they do, in fact.
We get these, you know, we get signals all the time here.
As you can imagine, people often ask me, got any signals?
Well, we got signals, you know, at the rate of a few every minute.
Right, but you occasionally, let me tell everybody how this show got planned.
As usual, I got what seemed to be a really authentic message announcing to the world that SETI got a hit.
And so, as I usually do, I wake you up in the middle of the night out there in California and ask you if it's the real thing.
And you always tell me, uh-uh.
But when I called you this last time, you kind of paused like something had happened, but it wasn't what they were saying.
Well, that's true, Art, because what I was trying to remember Was the name of the star you were referring to and it was HD 51 blah blah something.
Right.
And I can see I can't remember it now, 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 telecommunications 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 A-E-T, it was A-T-N-T.
Okay, so, but this fellow wrote up the story, you know, he made it somewhat dramatic in the first half of the story, described how everybody was getting excited that it really looked good.
And then the last paragraph of the story said, but, in fact, it turned out to be yet more Earthly interference.
Right.
Okay, well what happened in the fall, this last fall, around November, December, was that some online newspaper in New Jersey re-ran that story.
Okay, because it had been put on the wire service by Gannett.
And let me guess, they left out the last paragraph?
Yeah, they left out the second half of the story.
Exactly!
So that's how that one happened.
That's how that one happened.
All right.
Well, I've got something I really have to ask you about.
SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
And you guys, I guess, have to rent time.
You pay for time on that gigantic dish down there.
Is that correct?
Well, more or less.
We actually don't have to pay.
We were granted time.
If you want to use this telescope, you can use it if you put in a proposal that meets scientific criteria.
Oh, really?
It's a nationally funded facility.
This telescope is funded With tax dollars.
So it doesn't cost the astronomers money to use the telescope.
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.
That's true.
Although I have to say the time on this telescope was granted back in the day when our project was still part of NASA.
You know that was ended in 19...
Ninety-three, when a senator from your home state there, Nevada, killed the NASA SETI program.
Yes.
This time had been granted under the aegis of NASA, and that time was still ours, so we're using it.
I see.
Well, maybe he just hasn't gotten around to that part yet.
That could be.
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, in all there is, Seth.
You heard about that?
I did.
In fact, I know what you're referring to.
This is a book written by two fellows at the University of Washington, as a matter of fact.
Peter Ward and Don Brownlee, I believe.
Right.
And they've written this book, I think it's called Rare Earth, not to plug their book, but in any case, Uh, in which they do exactly what you've said.
They say, look, if you examine carefully the properties of Earth and 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, uh, you know, we can sit here till 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.
Based on what?
Well, what they did was they sort of made a laundry list of things that are special about Earth.
For example, I'll give you a couple of examples.
They point out that Earth has a big moon, something you've no doubt noticed.
I've seen it, yes.
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.
No.
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.
Yes.
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, Earth's spin axis would, you know, constantly be flopping back and forth, ruining the weather and, you know, kind of making Earth somewhat uninhabitable.
For life as... for our life.
Human life.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm accepting so far.
I understand that.
It would be not acceptable for human life.
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.
Well, I happen to agree with that.
Actually, there are two points here.
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, you know, 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 hunk 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.
Well, that's not an asteroid.
That's a collision of planets.
Well, you could call it that.
That's right.
It's kind of a semantic argument at that point, but that's right.
And the consequence of this May I ask a question?
Stupid one, probably, but one that a lot of the audience would ask.
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.
May I ask a question?
Stupid one, probably, but one that a lot of the audience would ask.
If something that big smashed into Earth, okay, a big piece of Earth kind of breaks
off, I guess, and it becomes a moon.
But the moon is round.
And it doesn't seem logical to me that something smashing into the Earth, blasting something out into space to orbit the Earth, would be round.
It would be really irregular.
Quite right.
In fact, it's more than irregular.
What you get is bits.
You get bits and pieces.
There ought to be all kinds of bits and pieces.
Yeah, it's mostly sort of like dust.
I mean, it's, you know, it's like sand grains.
But what happens is that these sand grains can go into orbit around the Earth, and then they begin, 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.
Alright.
You may have noticed all the planets in the solar system are spherical, but, you know, little things like asteroids and so forth often are not.
Right.
Okay.
So, their argument was, look, you gotta 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.
Alright, with me so far?
Yeah.
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, 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.
Right.
And 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.
Right.
You've got plenty of time to adjust.
So, you know, that doesn't strike me as a very strong argument.
So this is one of the many arguments they have in the book.
Okay, so, yeah, there are many arguments.
It would be, personally for me, really sad to start to buy into that argument and imagine that we are all that is.
I don't know why I'd be sad, but I would be very sad if I thought that was true.
So you read the book?
I haven't got the book yet, no.
Everybody at the Institute ordered it en masse, I think.
Yeah, I can imagine.
I can imagine.
I'm sure in some future funding hearing, that book's going to come out, isn't it?
That's a possibility, 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, I mean, it's an interesting discussion and maybe you could
sell a few books about it too.
Yes.
But in the end, somebody ought to build the ships and do the experiment and that's what
Chris Columbus did.
And so in a sense, that's what we're doing.
Look, nobody is going to know the answer to this question unless we try and experiment.
And that experiment is?
To look for the signal because it's really impossible to prove that we're alone.
I mean, I don't know how you would do that.
How could you possibly prove we're alone in the universe?
But what you can prove is that we're not alone.
That we have company, and so that's what SETI's really all about.
Sure, it's a long shot, and maybe, maybe there are reasons to think that we're the smartest things in the universe.
I know a lot of my neighbors would agree to that.
But, in fact, you know, the purpose of SETI is to prove that that's not true by finding that intelligent life isn't extremely rare.
How much of what is to be surveyed has legitimately been surveyed?
Can you attach a percentage to how much of, again, the only way I can phrase it is, what could be surveyed has been surveyed?
Well, it's a little tricky because it depends on how, you know, sensitive an experiment you want to do.
Now, this particular experiment, Project Phoenix, does the most sensitive search of any of them.
I mean, it's by far the most sensitive search ever been done.
We've looked at 500 nearby stars.
And, you know, that's a pretty impressive number until you consider that there are 500 billion stars in our galaxy.
And, by the way, there are 100 billion other galaxies.
You looked at 500 stars out of 500 billion?
Yeah, that's about the size of it.
So, this is early days to say that... Yeah, it really is.
It really is.
And how long have you been In the more modern terms, since you've had good computers to look at multiple frequencies, how long have we been looking?
How many years?
Well, the first modern experiment was done almost exactly 40 years ago by Frank Drake in West Virginia.
But, you know, these experiments keep getting better because they're largely based on developments in computer technology.
It's kind of like, you know, that PC you've got on your desktop there.
It's probably more powerful than all the previous PCs that have ever sat on that desktop, right?
Oh, sure.
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, that's in, will be better than all the previous ones.
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 a thousand nearby stars, like we're trying to do now, but will look at a hundred thousand, or maybe a 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 bandied about by scientists would indicate that at that rate, you really are going to run into something.
Or you should run into something, right?
Absolutely.
It depends on how many civilizations you think are out there.
And of course, we don't know.
But if you think there are 10,000 in our galaxy, then examining a million good stars nearby should turn up one or two of them.
It would only take one, Seth.
Right.
It would only take one.
Oh, why are we not actively transmitting?
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.
It's dangerous.
Right.
Well, yeah, there's 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 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 units and asteroids.
I've got on my lap here a Take care 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.
Well, actually, we will talk about that.
But I mean, I'm talking about, let's muster up billions of watts, if we can, and just blast out near hydrogen and see what happens.
What is the argument?
Actually, we're coming to the top of the hour.
So when I come back, I want to ask you what the argument is against doing that.
OK?
All right.
All right.
Stay right there.
Seth Shostak is my guest.
And again, I'll have him go over his background for you, but he had SETI, that program that you saw in the movie, Contact.
And he's down in Arecibo, right now, sitting inside the control room.
You can actually see his picture live, if not too many of you go see it at once, on my website.
Just scroll down into the guest area, you'll see Seth Shostak's name, and you'll see the webcam link listed.
Use it sparingly, but do by all means go take a look.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 24th, 2000.
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In a flash Seth Shostak is at Arecibo.
to our bell somewhere in time. Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 24,
2000. We've got the real McCoy with us this morning. Seth Shostak is at Arecibo. You can
see him there on a webcam if you want to. 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 marshalling billions of watts on this giant, giant dish.
this dish on steroids and calling others all right actually before we ask the big billion what
question here uh...
that's we've got seth shostak from uh...
aris evil in puerto rico on the line with us.
And we've got video pictures refreshing now every two minutes.
Thank goodness.
It's working again on the website.
It's amazing.
It's really kind of cool to be able to sit here and watch Seth.
But a couple of things I want to get to first before the billion watt question.
It's this.
Somebody just sent this, and he says, you know, I saw this in a cartoon some years ago.
It was simply two Native Americans standing on a beach.
One says, we have watched the horizon for many moons and seen no smoke signals.
We are alone in the universe.
And the camera, I guess, pans back.
Barely visible on the horizon is the mast of an approaching ship.
I thought that was kind of cute.
Well, we're hoping to see those masks pretty soon.
That's what you're looking for.
Would you give everybody a short biography of yourself?
Tell us a little bit about yourself, your educational background, and how you got involved doing what you're doing.
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 three 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 Shlossky, 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.
Very.
Well, then in 1980, I think it was, either 80 or 81, this woman who's 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 study experiment where we looked at the the center of our galaxy and that's what got me started in
this uh... and uh... something like ten years later when i moved
to california i got a phone call from uh...
the city institute in a city interested in a job here that's more or less the way it went
you began working for said the uh...
not at the top but no doubt
rebooting computers or something well uh... no but i think i don't like that low on the uh...
on the food chain Your educational background is roughly what?
What did you graduate from?
Well, I have a physics degree, an undergraduate physics degree from Princeton and a Ph.D.
in astronomy from Caltech.
Okay, so you're Dr. Shostak.
I am.
Professor Shostak.
But only my mom seems to use that title.
Really?
Pretty much.
Well, when you earn it, it should be used, in my opinion.
So, Professor, you are.
Alright, 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, Why not send a signal out?
What's the downside to that?
Well, in fact, I guess the downside was revealed when the very experiment you're describing was actually tried.
And it was tried in 1974.
They had just completed one of the many upgrades of this instrument.
Right.
And they decided as sort of a, kind of almost a stunt, but in any case as part of the celebration, they would Attached one of the million-watt transmitters that they got here.
Hmm.
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 ten-trillion-watt transmitter.
Ten-trillion watts.
Yeah, it's a lot of power.
I hope no birds were flying over the telescope when this thing was on, because... You'd roast them.
Yeah, you'd catch them on rye bread and put mustard on them.
Anyhow, this thing was used for three minutes, this transmitter was turned on, and a message was beamed to a star cluster.
That was in 1974.
Out of curiosity, what was the message?
The message was a picture, actually.
I mean, it's kind of a question of what sort of message you should send.
I mean, unlike in the movies, I don't expect that the aliens are going to speak perfect, uninflected English, as they always do.
Right, I know.
Yeah.
So the message is just what you call a bitmap.
You know, people who are computer literate know what a bitmap is.
Sure.
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, do you think that this would be regarded as some indecipherable
code by another intelligence
not necessarily uh... similar to ours or would it absolutely be recognized
as an artificial signal well i think it would be absolutely recognized as an
artificial signal because
uh... 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, uh, that's harder to say.
The fellow who put together this message, uh, was Frank Drake, the very same fellow who really started the whole SETI business in 1960.
Right.
And I believe that Frank actually sent this message to, uh, and out his fellow academicians at the university of santa
cruz or where he was with cornell
and uh... apparently none of them could figure that probably need to be smarter than your average college
professor i think that maybe both left in here i don't know or are awful
all was the in in view of that then
in the movie contact uh... 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?
Does that make sense?
Well, it may.
People have suggested that maybe what we'll pick up from the aliens is the value of pi.
You know, that would identify it as an alien signal, right?
But I'd be really personally very disappointed if they sent us the value of pi.
I mean, I learned the value of pi in junior high school, or maybe earlier.
I don't know.
If that's the best they can do.
Yeah, but I mean, just something as sort of a headline to grab you and say, yo-ho, artificial.
Yeah, that's true.
Now, you might do that, but some people have thought about this, actually.
It may be 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, you know, prime numbers, the value of pi, maybe, you know, some mathematics, or as in contact, where they kind of start with algebraic equations and, you know, 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, you know, here's your word, and here's the picture that it refers to, Well, you know, 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.
All right.
There are those that... Well, before I even get into that, this signal that was sent out, how far out is it now, and how far does it have to go, or has it already arrived at the target?
Well, it has not arrived.
Oh, really?
No.
Probably, for political reasons, it was aimed at a star cluster called M13.
It happens to be a big ball of stars in our own galaxy, but M13's roughly 21,000 light years away.
21,000 light years.
You know, that's a heck of a distance.
That's farther away.
That's more miles than I have on my Honda.
Let me put it that way.
21,000 light years.
Now, that signal, of course, is... It was broadcast in 1974, so what is it?
That's 26 light years away.
Oh, no!
So it's still got, you know, 20,000, you know, 974,000 years ago.
Oh, no!
So, you know, don't hold your breath on that one.
Oh, I didn't know it was going to take that long to get there.
Well, you see, part of the deal here was not to get anybody upset.
Well, that certainly definitely doesn't upset me.
No, no.
Of course, there are stars, you know, sort of along the path that maybe it'll intercept.
And you never know whether, 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.
Yes.
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've abducted our women.
So, he tried to get the International Astronomical Union to forbid this kind of transmission.
Oh.
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, you know, the chances that it's really dangerous are very, very small.
But the consequences, if that were to happen, might be very large.
Well, let me ask you this.
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?
Well, that's a good question.
I'll tell you one suggestion that's been made, which I find kind of interesting.
Well, I'll give you a simpler thing.
Sort of send it 180 degrees away from the direction to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Away from?
Aim it in the opposite direction from the direction to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
You might say, why?
Why?
I do say why.
Well, okay.
There are going to be some civilizations behind us, farther away from the center than we are.
But, but, but... We're not quite in the boondocks.
We're near the edges of the city, as it were, in our galaxy.
So there are going to be some guys farther out.
Right, but fewer though.
Many, many fewer.
Well, sure, but there's still billions, so, you know, billions and billions even.
So that's, you know, not such a small number.
Now, the thing is that you're 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.
Oh, oh!
So now you get it.
Yes, now I get it.
In other words, they're going to be pointed past us, toward the center, because that's the most interesting, likely place to find a signal.
Well, it's certainly one of the most interesting places to study in our galaxy, you know, for natural phenomena.
And, of course, they might pick up our signal.
Hey, we're here!
What interesting reasoning.
You're absolutely right.
Is there, are there any interesting star systems that we would reach before 20,000 years doing that?
Oh, yeah, well, if you just aim, you know, blast it 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, you know, it's so big it has a really, really narrow beam, so it'd be like shining a laser.
A laser, kind of.
Yeah, when you really want a big Hollywood searchlight.
So, it depends a little bit on the technology, but you could reach many millions, if not billions of stars this way, and some of them might be interesting indeed.
But there is that political consideration, and really, when you think about it, it is a diplomatic act, isn't it?
Well, I guess you could make that argument.
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, you know, hundreds of light years, maybe 1,000 light years away.
This, folks, just simply means if you were to try to travel there, It would take you going at the speed of light 1,000 years to get there.
That's right.
And it also means that our signal would take 1,000 years to get there.
And if those aliens deign to reply, it'd take another 1,000 years for their answer to get back here.
Right.
So now 2,000 years have gone by, and my personal interest in the project will be somewhat less.
Yes.
And who knows what the funding will be like.
So nobody's interested in winning the Nobel Prize 2,000 years from now, of course.
So that's another reason it's not done.
And then there's a third thought, and it's a bit more philosophical, so I don't know how this is going to strike you, but it's that, look, we've had radio for roughly a hundred years.
Yes.
So we're kind of the new kids on the block.
Very short time, yes.
And there are going to be civilizations out there that are way ahead of ours.
I don't mean a hundred years ahead of us.
I don't mean a thousand years.
They're going to be way ahead of us.
Right.
Maybe millions of years.
Why not let them do the heavy lifting?
They've had radio for millions of years.
Let them create the signals.
We'll listen.
Alright, but there is this.
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.
Yeah.
So you say, everybody's sitting around waiting for the other guy to call them up.
Yeah.
Actually, you know, let me tell you something interesting.
I am a ham operator.
And a lot of times, on 10 meters, which is a worldwide band when it's open, the whole band is dead.
It's deader than a doornail.
I mean, you can't hear a signal.
There's nobody there.
And you call CQ, and about a million people answer you.
They were all sitting there, listening, and when you made that one transmission, they all heard you, and they all replied, but there's no way they'd have known that the band was even open, except for the fact that you made a transmission.
Doctor, hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour.
All the hams out there know what I'm talking about.
We'll be 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.
Press into the town I'll find some crowded avenue Though it will be empty without you You can't get used to losing you No matter what I try to do Gonna live my whole life through Loving you Called up some girl I used to know After I heard her say hello Couldn't think of anything to say
Since you're gone it happens every day Can't get used to losing you no matter what I try to do Gonna live my whole life through No woman's gonna settle me down, I just gotta be travelin' on, a-singin'.
Green screen, it's green day today, on the far side of the hill.
Green screen, I'm goin' away to where the grass is greener still.
Now there ain't nobody in this whole wide world, gonna tell me how to spend my time.
I'm just a good-lovin', ramblin' man.
Say, buddy, can you spare me a dime?
Hear me cryin' at the... Green screen, it's green, baby.
I'm the far side of the hill.
Green screen, I'm goin' away to where the grass is greener still.
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired February 24, 2000.
It is indeed, and Seth Shostak, who is talking to you from Arecibo, in the control room, the very same Arecibo you saw in the movie Contact.
And his partner has, oh no, there she is!
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, Art, I think that 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 should be directed at nearby stars, and all that sort of stuff.
Something the Defense Department could use!
Right.
Well, there could be truth in that.
I know what it takes to get funding.
Yeah.
Now, I hear you, what you're saying about ten meters.
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, 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.
May I please ask your partner's name again?
It's Jill Tarter.
Jill Tarter?
Jill Tarter.
Okay, everybody, you can see Jill in the photograph with Seth, and actually the movie was modeled after Jill.
How long has Jill been doing this?
Jill's been doing... How long have you been doing this?
She's embarrassed to say 20 years.
I think he's being modest there, but he's 25.
It's going up.
25 years?
Yes.
Wow!
All right.
He has, I believe, done more steady observing than any other humanoid.
Well, please tell Jill it's a real honor to even be talking to you with her being next to you.
Okay, I'll tell her that.
It's a real honor, Jill, that you're in this thing with me.
It's obviously an honor for me.
You'd have to transmit forever, she said.
Well, see, that's another problem here.
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?
Right.
They go, you know, QTH or something, and turn off their transmitter for a while.
We're never going to find transmitters like that.
It's sort of like flashbulbs popping off all around the galaxy.
The chances that you're looking in the direction of a flashbulb when it fires are pretty darn small.
Well, that tells you and everybody else how much of a chance our great big three-minute transmission in the 70s has.
Well, that's right.
Exactly right.
So, what you have to hope is that there are some transmitters out there that are on long periods of time.
Now, that's not so unreasonable.
I mean, our television transmitters, for example, and our radio stations are on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
But nonetheless, this has only been going on for a few decades, or, you know, maybe 50 years.
Oh, and okay, and then back to the movie.
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 to nada, nothing?
Well, the only signals that really make it into space are the kind of the high frequency ones, things above about 100 MHz.
Right.
That means FM, that means television, that means radar.
That's right.
And, you know, everybody knows we started television broadcasting seriously in the 1940s.
40s.
So, that indication that we're here, the fact that Earth has not just life, but intelligent life, that's reached out, what, 60 light years?
60 light years.
Roughly.
Okay.
And that's, you know, The distance to the nearest star is on the order of four or five light years, so within 60 light years, they're on the order of several thousand stars.
All right, then this question.
Realistically, at 60 light years from Earth right now, would those transmissions be detectable, realistically?
Well, you'd have to work at it.
I worked this out actually once, what it would take to pick up the That's a pretty big antenna, of course, but it's not an impossible antenna.
Right.
Right.
Just not to see a Lucy, not to hear a Lucy, just to pick up the carrier so you know there
was a television signal there.
Gotcha.
And you'd need a couple of thousand acres covered with Yankee 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
yet some way building really large and kind of 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.
They're a lot more conspicuous.
So they'd probably notice those at 60 light years.
They would.
Or 50 or 40 or whenever we got the big ones going.
Right.
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 TV broadcast of the Olympics in Berlin to get to these aliens and for their signal to get back to us.
And so there was Hitler.
Yes, exactly.
Now, mind you, maybe the aliens are judging us by Lucy, or perhaps Mr. Ed, I don't know.
Then we're going to be wiped out.
Well, if it's Mr. Ed, maybe they'll just come down and take our horses and leave us alone.
But anyway, the honest truth is there could be signals, certainly radar, pulsing high output radar would be detectable at 60 or 50 or 40 light years out.
It's certainly detectable.
It takes a pretty big antenna.
Now, I can give you a Maybe a more interesting number.
We obviously have no idea what sort of setup the aliens have.
You know, 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.
Right.
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.
Okay.
We would be able to pick up that signal with this system that you're looking at here if their transmitter power is 10,000 watts.
And 10,000 watts is probably less power than most of the stations that are carrying your program.
That's right.
You're exactly right.
So that's within reason.
It is within reason.
That's why this experiment is interesting, in fact.
It's not so hard to send signals from one star to the next.
All right, so then the criticism that what you're doing is simply impossible is not valid criticism, is it?
Well, I certainly don't think so.
Certainly not on that basis.
The criticism usually isn't with the technology.
The criticism usually is of the kind that we were discussing in the last hour.
Things like, well, how many planets are out there that are kind of like the Earth?
Or, how many of those kinds of planets would have life?
Or, even more controversial, just because you have life, are you going to cook up intelligent life that's going to build radio transmitters?
That's, you know, a pretty unanswered question.
And we don't have a lot of insight into that.
It happened here.
But, you know, keep in mind, if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out 65 million years ago, there'd still be dinosaurs in Puerto Rico and not people.
Well, maybe.
I don't know.
That's a whole separate argument.
But at least it certainly is possible.
And the fact that we are here says it's possible.
I guess I've got to stand by that argument.
We are here.
We are doing it, therefore, in my mind, it should be happening somewhere else if life is out there.
And I really err on the side strongly that life is out there.
I believe it is.
Yeah, well, obviously I agree, and everybody who does this sort of work also agrees we wouldn't do it otherwise.
If astronomy has taught us nothing else in the past 450 years, it's taught us that every time we thought we were special, we were wrong.
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?
That's correct.
Alright, 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.
Do you all consider that kind of thing?
Well, yeah, it's an interesting possibility.
Now, where it founders, I mean, indeed, what you're saying is, could you build a rocket that instead of just, you know, blasting propellant out the back end, for example, somehow warps space in front, sort of contracts space in front and expands space behind it.
Correct.
And, you know, get somewhere in a great hurry.
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.
And unattainable right now.
Yes, yes.
Now, who's to say?
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 a hundred years later you can do it.
Exactly, 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, it may be.
It may be, but it depends.
You know, there may be some limits on how much energy you can get together in one spot.
I don't know.
The sun does a pretty good job, but you need more energy than the sun produces, for example.
The sun's pretty heavy-duty.
It's, what, a million billion billion watts?
Well, Dr. Kaku from the 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 0 that he says we are now, to a Type 1, you begin Type 1, Type 2, to control the power of the sun, and then even more.
Right.
Yeah.
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.
Yes.
You know, this idea of various civilizations, I think Michio Kaku may have been referring to the work of a Russian physicist by the name of Kardashev, He said, look, there are probably three kinds of alien civilizations out there.
Yes.
There's Type 1 that uses the resources of its planet.
That's correct.
That's where we are.
We burn coal, we burn gasoline.
We use the resources of our planet.
Type 2 uses the resources of its sun, of its star.
It uses all the resources of its star.
Yes.
Those hundred 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 and try and harness that energy.
Right.
Okay, so that's a Type II civilization.
Then the Type III civilizations, which we're talking about, well, you might be talking about Type II, but there's also a Type III that Kardashev proposed, and those were the aliens or whatever, that could harness the energy of an entire galaxy, right, with a hundred billion stars in it.
So you could virtually create a wormhole, do whatever you wanted, If you could marshal that kind of energy, yes.
I think you could.
And so the question is, if civilizations are out there that have gotten to that stage, shouldn't we see the evidence?
Oh, not necessarily.
Not yet.
You never know when that signal might arrive.
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 gone around all the targets yet.
Well, that's true.
That may be, 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 sometimes herded up all the stars, or did something, or put a big shell around a lot of stars.
Yes.
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 is 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.
Occam's Razor.
That's right.
Well, okay, fine, but still a possibility that, in other words, that one day a signal that you would hear Instead of traversing 20,000 light years, you hopped across in some spectacular manner and got here very quickly.
It is within the realm of possibility that you could get that kind of surprise.
It's certainly possible.
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.
You know, even the farthest star in the Milky Way galaxy, on the other side of the galaxy, right?
The other side of town, as it were.
The other side of town is 100,000 light years away.
And, you know, that's a bit of a distance.
That's 100,000 years to get there, at the speed of light.
Yeah, it took 100,000 years to get here.
So it's kind of old news.
But for us, it's still new news.
It'd be like reading Julius Caesar.
It's not old news, but it's still interesting.
But this is 100,000 years old.
But that's okay, because the galaxy It's a hundred times that old.
So, you know, there's been plenty of time for that, for those guys to have developed and sent that signal.
I mean, you don't have to worry about that.
Right.
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, and you repeat that.
Hello there.
Yes.
It would be very disappointing, wouldn't it?
Obviously more would be sent, or I guess it would be.
Now, if we were to receive a signal, and we always talk about this, the politics of reception, 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.
I guess you have thought about that, haven't you?
We have thought about that, in fact.
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.
I believe that.
Okay.
I'm sorry, I believe that.
It wouldn't be that much different than the movie.
You'd have guys in there with guns.
Yeah, well, they don't know the difficulties of the local roads, that's for sure.
But, see, the reason I don't believe that is because, to begin with, remember, this is not like hiding It's like hiding some sort of evidence, right?
Isn't that what we've got?
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
It's like hiding some sort of evidence.
Yeah, but this evidence is up in the sky, see?
Well, sure.
And that means that anybody else with an antenna can go find it, too.
Well, if they know where to look.
I mean, you've been looking for a long time, unless it were the big chrysumper that Jody found.
Darn it, it's the top of the hour again, so hold on, Doctor.
Professor, we'll be right back.
Seth Shostak from SETI, actually at Arecibo right now, is my guest, and there's lots more to do.
You're listening to ArcBell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from February 24th, 2000.
And the monster that just jumped in, it's our love. Where would you be now? It's our love.
Where are those happy days they seem so hard to find?
I tried to reach for you, but you have closed your mind.
Whatever happened to our love?
I wish I understood.
It used to be so nice, it used to be so good.
Can you hear me darling?
Can you hear me?
It's the way The love you gave me Nothing else can save me It's the way When you're gone How can I even try to go on?
So I try, how can I carry on?
You flew so far away, though you were sending me You made me feel alive, but sometimes I feel like I'm dying
I really tried to make it out You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time, on
Premiere Radio Networks Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from February 24th, 2000.
There is never gonna be another Abba.
Never.
You know, they recently turned down one billion dollars.
That's right, with a B, a billion dollars to go on a world tour.
And I think, frankly, wisely so, because they wouldn't sound like this, they wouldn't look the way they did, they wouldn't be ABBA.
Except in name.
What an incredible group.
Anyway, my guest is...
The Honorable Professor Seth Shostak.
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.
He's got, looks like, a cup of coffee in his hand, and walking away from one of the computer consoles.
And in the other photograph, I can see, uh, actually two people.
Seth and, uh, 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 down to uh... puerto rico all the way to puerto
rico and professor show stack up
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 they're just unsatisfactory.
But I must say, yours is spectacular.
Somebody really went to a lot of trouble to get that webcam setup just right.
Well, I hope they're listening, Art.
There are a couple of engineers connected with the project who indeed set everything up with it.
Now, there is a little creature extending from the top of a computer directly above your head in one of the photographs.
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
the lighting fixtures here in order to improve the lighting so much and make
the photography look a little bit better so we've tried now there is a little
creature extending from the top of a computer directly above your head and
one of the photographs what is that yeah that's it figure here
That was put in by one of the software people.
I think it's a mascot, but occasionally it sticks out of the top of my head and then I start getting e-mails of some alien growing out of my scalp.
By the way, how do people e-mail you?
Is that something you wish to give out or wish to avoid giving out?
No, I've done that actually before on your show, two years ago I think.
You asked about my e-mail address and as an experiment I just gave it out to see what would happen.
What happened?
I got a lot of email.
But I'll be happy to give it out again and see whether it works again.
Oh, it'll work.
Well, it's Seth, S-E-T-H.
S-E-T-H.
At SETI, S-E-T-I.org as organization.
Okay.
Seth, S-E-T-H, at SETI, S-E-T-I.org.
That's easy.
Well, I'm sure you're going to get lots of mail with lots of comments.
Look, we were talking about the politics of reception.
Let's finish that one up.
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.
Now, disabuse me of that notion.
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 E.T., 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.
Okay, fine.
So then maybe England, maybe Australia, but not Beijing or Moscow.
Quite right.
But suppose we call up our buddies in Australia.
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 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.
Uh-huh.
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 e-mail systems.
Sure.
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 or some other nation or group of people or whatever.
Potential adversary.
Right, potential adversary, that you found this, but the word's already out.
That's point one.
Okay, I've already got a counter for it.
Let's take them one at a time.
Okay, fine.
The story breaks.
I'm with you.
It would leak out.
But we've already had, I don't know, lots and lots of those because I've had to call you in the middle of the night.
So I can imagine a story would get out and then, like many other stories, it would suddenly die.
Oh, it was a satellite.
The reason that these stories have died in the past is because they deserve to die.
Because it was a satellite.
Because it was a satellite.
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, it's an interesting idea, Art, but the thing is we've got to convince all those people at the other observatory.
To do exactly the same.
And how are we going to do that?
Remember, they've already told all sorts of people.
I mean, I can give you an example of how... 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.
Uh, you will keep this quiet for a while, and all your funding is at stake.
Well, it wouldn't worry you.
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, uh, say, at the observatory down in Australia, I've been there, of course.
There are like 100 people at the observatory.
Now they're all getting excited.
They've all been 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, OK, 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.
I thought I should give you an example of what actually happened, because thanks to the movies, people have the impression that the way discovery is made is that you're sitting here, as we're sitting here, and suddenly the signal comes in, and ten minutes later we're You know, calling up the airlines to get our tickets booked to Stockholm so we can, you know, not meet ABBA, of course, but just collect our Nobel Prize.
But that's not the way it happened.
That's not the way it happened.
In 1997, there was a signal that we picked up, not with this telescope in, I guess, yeah, it was 97.
We were using the telescope in, a telescope in Green Bank, 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.
But that's a technical point.
Never mind why it was looking good.
It was looking good.
You really thought you had something?
Or potentially had something?
We did.
I can tell you, we sat around the computers back there in California.
Nobody went home.
Nobody went to sleep.
I was about to ask, how long does it take?
For a scientist of your stature and the ones you work with to really get excited.
I mean, I know you guys are really cool and you check this out and check that out.
But I mean, at some point the adrenaline pumps.
Yeah.
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.
Okay?
But this went on much longer than that.
This went on for almost a day.
A day?
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.
That's right.
Okay?
So that's gone for about 12 hours.
And so you've got to sit there and chew on your fingernails for 12 hours, waiting for it to come back up and continue looking at it.
So that happened?
Uh, that will happen unless you call somebody up on the other side of the world.
But I mean, to that signal that we're talking about now that you thought was so exciting, did it in fact go away?
Did you track it to the horizon and then lose it?
Yep.
Yep, we did.
Oh man.
Okay, so people weren't going to the local burger places to get something to eat, they were just... Yeah.
...glued.
Yeah.
It turns out that in the end, what this was, was one of a European research satellite, the SOHO satellite, which you may have heard of, actually.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, it studies the sun, and it's a million miles away, more or less, and it's got a transmitter on board which is about 10 watts.
It's really QRP, if you will, but... That means low power.
It's low power, but 10 watts for us is a lot of power, of course.
Sure.
It's only a million miles away, and 10...
And watch, that's a whopping signal for us.
And so this signal was sort of leaking in, you know, sort of coming in the side of the telescope, coming in what are called the side lobes.
Right.
And it was causing us confusion.
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.
We moved it away.
It went away.
We moved it back.
It came back.
Okay?
Yes.
Well, that's why everybody's getting excited.
Sure.
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.
All right.
Now, as I say, it turned out to be the southern satellite.
This went on for close to a day.
Now, the interesting thing, Mark, was that, clearly, People in our organization knew about this.
We weren't calling up the local radio stations, or we didn't even call you about this.
Because, of course, we weren't 100% sure.
Even after a day, we weren't sure.
Right.
Or half a day.
And another telescope was down that you would try to call so you couldn't get a confirmation.
Well, it's a telescope we normally use.
We always use two telescopes for our observations.
We're using this one here in Puerto Rico, which you can't see on the webcam, is our other telescope in Jodrell Bank, England.
Okay, so that's running at the same time that we run this one.
So we always use two because that allows you to sort out a week from the chaff.
Sure, sure.
Okay, well our second telescope was down and that was Really the reason we got confused for so long, but that's not the point.
The point is that we thought it was real.
So I'm looking around, looking for those guys with the black fedoras and the narrow ties, right?
Waiting for some government officials to show up and say, what are you guys up to here?
Meanwhile, you were emailing all your friends and associates.
Well, actually I wasn't.
Well, some people were.
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've found so far has been interference, so, you know, we'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 are 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 ah-ha, we've got it.
How did the New York Times find out about it?
They got a phone call from somebody in our office.
So that's the way you feature it, Whitaker?
I think what will happen is, yeah, if you ask me how it's going to happen, now, mind you, this is a personal opinion, so take it for what it's worth, but it's clear to me that because it takes a long time to really confirm a signal, it's going to take on the order of a couple of days.
Because that's the amount of time it takes to get somebody at another observatory to stop what they're doing and check it out and then confirm it.
And you've always got this problem that, you know, maybe for 12 hours a day, you can't see the star system because the Earth is rotating and all that.
So it's going to take a few days before you're sure.
And during those few days, you're going to get more and more confident that this is the big one.
All right.
If I got my normal email message saying that 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.
I recommend that 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.
So that's what you would tell me if I called you?
That's what I would tell you.
I'd just be straight up with you.
All right.
Hold on, Seth.
We'll be right back to you.
Seth Shostak is my guest, and we're long past where we should be getting to the phones, so we'll get to the phones coming up next.
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.
Come down you better take care if I find you've been creeping round my back bed.
I find you've been creeping round my back bed She's been looking like the queen in a sailor's dream
You've been looking like a queen in a sailor's dream and she don't always say what she really means.
And she don't always say what she really means Sometimes I think it's a shame
Sometimes I think it's a shame when I get feeling better Sometimes you better take care
When I get feeling better when I'm feeling no pain Sometimes I think it's a shame
When I get feeling better Instrumental
A-hey-yo-hey-yo You're listening to Arc Bell, 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?
It was.
That was Hurricane Georgian.
It actually did a bit of damage up here.
And so you packed your bags and got on an airplane and beat it out, I guess.
I got out of Dodge.
Uh-huh.
Wise.
Alright, well, I have a million questions.
I could go on all night, but if I don't answer phones, they get angry.
So, let me do some of that.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Seth Shostak.
Hi.
Yes, Seth and Mark.
This is Larry in Waterloo, Iowa on KCNZ.
Hello, Larry.
Hi.
And I just got off work a half an hour ago and got the website up and looked first and then had to shut it down to call.
I just have one line here.
I see.
Kind of primitive, you know?
Anyway, a couple of points.
Maybe we have already seen signals and don't recognize them.
Maybe that intelligent life is farther out if we send a signal out farther.
But maybe the older systems are farther out because they've been going out longer.
And, you know, so maybe more intelligent life will be looking this way.
And maybe some of these UFOs that we've seen don't recognize our signals from an intelligence that's a little bit farther advanced than us.
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 Gersten, 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 out and say, look, they're already here.
What are you looking for?
Right.
Well, first off, just a technical point, Art.
I don't know if it's possible for you to turn up the gain On what I hear, because you're about five by three at this end, and that's okay with your voice, but I can really hardly hear the callers.
Oh, actually, it's not possible.
It's not possible, okay.
I can make callers yell, though.
Okay, get the callers yell, if necessary.
Maybe you can just sort of relay the question.
But what I hear Larry saying is that, you know, how does this fit in with the possibility that the aliens are already here?
Did I get the question right?
Absolutely.
Well, as you know, I don't think they are here.
It would be great if they were, from my point of view, because, after all, it would make the whole job a lot simpler.
I mean, this is a pretty tough experiment here, and it's a difficult thing to do, and if we thought that maybe the extraterrestrials were nearby, buzzing the countryside, That would, in many ways, be a much easier experiment.
I mean, you just build a lot of radars.
Sure.
In fact, those radars kind of already exist.
And you look for them that way, or just look at satellite data and, you know, sort of look down on them.
So, you know, as you know, my take on this is that I don't find that evidence compelling enough.
I mean, nobody really does walk into our offices with the bumper from a UFO.
That would certainly get my attention.
But it hasn't happened so far.
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?
Or other numbers on your side?
No, I don't know on what side the numbers are, because unfortunately, you know, this is pretty hard to predict.
It's kind of like You know, asking Chris Columbus what do you think the numbers are that you're going to run into a continent before you get to Japan, and there's no way he can really know that.
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.
It cannot be accounted for.
Well, it's true that there's always some residue of sightings and observations for which there aren't explanations.
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, so I'm not an expert in that, and I can't afford to fly there anyway, and besides, if you try to do that for 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, you know, 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.
Sure.
The whole list of things.
Sure.
And 10% of them cannot.
The 10% of them, they just come up empty-handed and say, well, we don't know what it was.
10% still represents, using your language, a pretty large number.
Yeah.
Yeah, 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.
Right.
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 to just 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, it'll be the big one.
But more than that, you can check it out for yourself, or anybody with a big antenna can go check it out.
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.
Like a scientific experiment, if you claim success, immediately ten other teams will run out into the field and check it out and prove you right or wrong.
But 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.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with that, actually.
I mean, it would be, you know, pretty pig-headed to say, you know, let's just ignore it all.
That's not the way science works, either.
Well, it shouldn't be, but that's the argument people are always using against what you do.
Shouldn't be doing it at all!
What a waste of time!
I get that.
You get that occasionally, right?
On occasion, but yeah.
But usually the reasons are for personal philosophy, reasons are for 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 can set up some equipment or something like that, but it doesn't seem to work that way.
I mean, it strikes me as a tough problem.
It is.
And that may be one of the reasons that there aren't that many scientists who get seriously involved with it.
Right.
No, you're absolutely right.
All right, let's see what we can do with the phones here.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Professor Shostak.
Hello.
Yes, this is Myra from Texas.
From Texas.
Okay, you're going to have to really yell at us.
Okay, can you hear me a little better now?
Yes, I can hear you.
Okay, great.
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'll definitely believe that it's there, and it's very real.
All right.
Well, listen, I'll back that up.
I have seen what she's talking about, Seth, 150 feet above me.
Defying gravity, floating, massive, blotting out the stars and the moon.
I saw that, Seth, personally, along with my wife.
We both stood there and watched the damn thing float right above us.
Now, could it be our own?
Of course it could be.
But if it is, that means that we have technology that, by your definition, couldn't be kept secret.
I mean, we would have anti-gravitic technology, and I don't see how we could keep that secret.
Yeah, well, I don't think you'd want to keep it secret.
I mean, something like that, you'd want to let it loose on as many experts as you could, of course.
Oh, Seth.
Oh, Seth.
You know, I'm out here near Area 51, as you know.
The valley right across from me is where Area 51 is.
That is a little naive from my point of view, that you'd want to let as many people know about it as possible.
Hey, we've got anti-gravitic technology.
World, here you go Chinese, here you go Russians.
I don't think we'd do that.
I don't think our government would do that.
In fact, I know they wouldn't, Seth.
They'd keep it secret as long as they possibly could.
I don't know.
I'm not sure I want to take on that particular point, Art.
As far as these big things go, I mean, if they're really there, why is it that I just never seem to see them in these satellite photos from up above?
Now, mind you, there are occasionally instances where 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, I don't want to scare some people by zooming in close and turning on the bright lights and stuff like that.
Yeah, sure.
That kind of thing.
You've got to watch out for that.
I know.
But these big things, if there really were such big alien objects sort of cruising through the atmosphere... Alien as in?
They are there, Seth.
It's not if.
I'm telling you they are there because I saw one.
The only question is, to whom does it belong?
Right.
Well, exactly.
That's the next point.
And there, I'm afraid you've got to, you know, 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, you know, 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, Occam's Razor, which says, you know, take the simpler possibility first, suggests, well, you ought to consider all the possibilities there are.
And I am willing to do that.
In fact, it is demanded that you do that, perhaps even as the first most likely option.
But the problem here is that if that's true, then again, we have a really, really big secret that we're keeping really well.
Well, let me ask this.
I mean, it's not my task here to ask the questions.
No, you can ask whatever you want.
Alright, I'll put one to you.
If this technology came from outer space, then why is it that only the Americans have it?
I mean, wouldn't the aliens also be interested in the nightlife in Rio, for example?
And maybe the Brazilians have it, or maybe the Iraqis have it, or maybe the Chinese have it.
I can't imagine that they can find their attention to us, although we like to think that, but it just doesn't make much sense to me.
So I would think that there would be a lot of countries that would be having these sorts of experiences and profiting from them.
Well, that's true.
We're talking about movies a lot.
Did you ever see a movie called At Play in the Fields of God?
I did not, no.
Really, really interesting movie.
It was about some missionaries, Seth, who went down into Amazonia.
And they contacted a tribe that had never been contacted by human beings before.
And, of course, they wanted to turn them into rice Christians.
But what they actually did was carry a flu virus down there and kill them all.
Well, I suspect that what you're suggesting is that that may be our fate.
Well, I'm suggesting that if we're being observed, Uh, being observed is at least a possibility.
Yes.
If you assume that somebody could get here, or somebodies could get here, we would be observed for a long time before actual contact was made.
Yes.
That's certainly a possibility, and it doesn't even require that they get here.
They could just, and people have suggested this, that maybe they send a probe, right?
Right.
That they just sort of look.
Now, you know, the probe itself could be pretty small.
Because that's something we would do.
You possibly would.
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, it 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 That's good, that's as far as I've heard you go.
imagine the probe sends information back to the home planet you can imagine a
scenario like that you bet and and so
that could happen and and maybe that have happened and maybe we're being
reported on but help what did i tell us i mean
right out of the world and that's good that's as far as i've heard you go
listen up study
is not funded by our government as you pointed out thanks in part to the
actions maris senator here in nevada
So, it operates, I guess, on donations from what?
Industry?
Individuals?
How do you guys eat?
Right, well, down here rather 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 from 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, a hundred 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.
We wouldn't have had the technology to do that.
That's right.
And so this is a special moment in time, the first moment in time in the whole history of this planet, We could do this experiment.
And so, some people say, you know, that's an interesting point.
It's sort of like 1492.
It's finally possible to build a wooden ship that maybe can cross the Atlantic.
Sure.
So, you know, they say it's worth a little bit of money.
The government isn't funding this.
And so they make donations to the SETI Institute to help us do this experiment.
Seth, I think it's worth a lot of money.
And I think that if we can talk anybody out there into leaving you their estate, or just sending you ten bucks, or whatever it is, I really, really, really would like to get an address where people could make a donation.
Well, I would recommend, first off, of course they can go to our website and find out, you know, a lot about us, and also how they can join up with our Team SETI group if they want to do that, or if they just want to send a donation.
But I'll give you the address.
I mean, it's not such a big deal.
Yeah, please.
First off, the website is www.seti.org.
Could be simpler.
If you type SETI.org into your browser, you'll come to our website.
Gotcha.
The address is the SETI Institute, and that's at 2035 Landings, as in aircraft landings, Drive, and that's in Mountain View.
Two words, Mountain View, California, 94043.
Right here.
9-0-4-3.
Right here.
9-0-what?
9-4-0-4-3.
9-4-0-4-3.
All right.
The SETI Institute, 2035 Landings Drive, Mountain View, California, 9... I can't even read my own handwriting.
9-4-0-4-3?
That's it.
All right.
So, all donations, obviously, are welcome.
Right?
That's for sure.
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 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 and what we all believe it's it's that big a deal so you'll have my support that what a pleasure as always will do it again you name the time I'm I'm always yours
Great, Art.
It's actually been my pleasure and I always enjoy it.
Take care, Seth.
Okay, bye-bye.
Good night.
That's all the time we've got, folks.
That's it.
That was great.
Professor Seth Shostak.
And my advice to you would be, if you can, contribute.
The SETI Institute at 2035, 2035 Landings Drive, in Mountain View, California, 9-4, 043.
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