Dr. Seth Shostak from SETI dismisses recent false alarms like GPS interference at Arecibo, explaining how optical SETI—using lasers—could outperform radio for distant signals but faces targeting challenges. He warns civilizations may silence detectable transmissions within centuries, citing fiber optics and the Drake Equation’s uncertainties, with only 1% of Earth-like planets possibly hosting intelligent life. Bell proposes a lunar-based telescope to avoid interference, though Shostak calls the $200M cost unrealistic; both agree any signal would leak globally despite protocols like Echelon. The debate ends with Shostak’s skepticism toward UFOs as alien proof, suggesting Earth might be a "zoo" or preserve, while Bell humorously muses on SETI’s limitations—leaving the question of extraterrestrial contact tantalizingly open. [Automatically generated summary]
Coming up in a few moments, one of my favorite topics of all time, SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence just back from Puerto Rico and Arecibo.
In fact, we could have interviewed him there last week, except we were booked all last week.
I had to wind up last week, so decided to do it when he got home, and he's home.
Seth Shostak.
The SETI guy is here.
All right, here we go.
Seth Shostak is an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
He has a degree in physics from Princeton University and a PhD in astronomy from Caltech.
His research interests include the study of galaxies using large radio telescopes, an activity that naturally led to becoming involved with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
These days, in addition to manning the telescopes as part of the search for signs of cosmic company, Seth busies himself with writing articles on astronomy for magazines, newspapers, and professional journals.
He also has a book, Sharing the Universe, which describes why we think the aliens are out there, how we might find them, and what would happen if we do.
You know, the Bush administration is using this energy shortage to tout the need for going up and drilling in Anwar and using more coal and everything else.
And not once, anywhere today, did anybody say anything about solar power or wind power or any other alternative energy source at all?
Well, I've got solar power here, and wind power is sufficient to power my house.
And I'm not suggesting that everybody do that.
But you know, Seth, if only a tiny percentage of people actually put in a little bit of solar power to augment what they've got now, we wouldn't have a crisis.
And anyway, I was about to express my love affair with satellite dishes.
Now, a lot of people will not understand how a person could have a love affair with satellite dishes, but I've been working with them, Oh, 20, 25 years now, something like that.
And people need to understand how it sounds stupid, but they're scientifically precise.
Every part of a satellite dish is designed to reflect signal to a little tiny area out there where the low-noise amplifier or whatever is positioned.
And so they're scientifically pure.
And I've always looked at satellite dishes and sort of felt a love.
When I was down there, I figured out how many people it would hold if you were to complete the sphere.
You know, it's part of a bowl, but only the bottom part of the bowl.
But if you were to finish that bowl, in other words, make it a complete sphere, it would have a radius of about, I don't know, 900 feet or something, so it would be like 1,800 feet from one side to the other.
That would be enough to hold the entire population of the country.
Not comfortably, but you could hold everybody in there.
It's big.
It's big.
But the thing that's interesting is that it's, as you say, very accurate.
I mean, the surface is accurate to about two millimeters, which is better than a tenth of an inch.
You know, just to follow up a little bit on that energy problem in talking about dishes, maybe the real answer is to resurrect an idea that's 20 or 30 years old now, and that is to put up these, what they call power sats.
In other words, big solar panels in orbit, collect all that free energy there, and you don't produce any waste products.
If the government has a lot of excess money and they're arguing over what to do with this excess money they have, you know, how big a tax break and all the rest, if they were to encourage solar power with money, with rebates, which they do, you know, a little bit of that, but if they were to do more of that, there would be more solar.
They could do it if they wanted to.
Bottom line, Seth, they're oil people and they don't want to do it.
Well, what we look for is what's called a narrow-band transmission, and I know you know what that means, but that just means it's a signal that's localized at one spot on the dial.
And the system is designed to look for those kinds of signals because that's the signature of something that's coming from a transmitter as opposed to something natural.
And you may recall our system down there has 56 million channels.
I'd say 28 million channels on the dial to two polarizations.
That's a technical detail.
But you've got tens of millions of channels.
And of course, we're not sitting there with earphones or loudspeakers, you know, just trying to decide well which signals are interesting and which are not.
Yeah, but when it finally when the computers say hey hey hey this looks interesting at some point you must turn on a speaker then and listen don't you?
No we don't actually I think that this the only speakers in the uh observing room there are connected to the uh audio system and uh they're mostly tell uh playing uh Celtic rhapsodies or uh how can you do that?
Normally a human being, if you listen to a signal, for example, I can listen to a signal and I can tell you, well, that's RIDI or that's high-speed data or you know, you can listen to a signal and pretty much know what you're hearing.
So once you get a suspicious signal, why not take a listen?
Well, you know, it sounds right, but it doesn't, in fact, sound right if you do it.
Because when you're listening to your radio, your radio is able to respond to changes in the signal that are happening in, you know, less than a thousandth of a second.
I mean, that's what sounds all about.
It's something that's changing thousands of times a second, right?
Okay, now, in order to build up the sensitivity of a SETI receiver, we don't do that.
We average the signal over seconds or minutes.
This is pretty much like taking a time exposure with your camera.
You know, you leave the shutter open longer, and if you can picture the city at night, then you just see the fainter lights and all that.
But the lights that are flashing on and on, or the traffic lights that are changing from red to green and back, all of those, all that temporal information, all that information that's changing with time, that all gets lost.
You just see a traffic light, and all three lights look on in your photo, right?
Red, green, and yellow.
All three look on.
So you lose that information that's changing.
Well, we do the same thing down there.
So in fact, if you listen to it, you wouldn't really hear anything.
It's much easier to look at it, and that's what we do.
We look at it on the computer screen, and you see the signals, a thin white line coming down the screen, maybe changing frequency.
And in fact, they do change frequency, particularly if they're satellites, because they're moving overhead, and that means there's what's called a Doppler shift.
Well, what happens, the way we nail those things down, and the reason they fool us is that they look like the kind of signal we're expecting from E.T. And they're probably Doppler shifting, aren't they?
They are.
They're moving down the dial usually.
And not very fast.
They go down, for the people who care about that, they go down a couple of hertz in 10 seconds or something like that.
Yeah, that's just the kind of thing we're looking for.
That's, to us, the signal of another society 100 light years away.
But we check that out two ways.
First, when we get a signal like that, we send the information about the signal to a second radio telescope that's sitting there in lovely Johnwell Bank, England, where our man, having just returned from a bad pub dinner, is manning that telescope.
And if he can't find it in England, then you can say, well, whatever it is, it's not ET, because ET signal should be just as visible to us in England as it is in Puerto Rico.
So that plus some other tests tell us, is this still an interesting signal?
Occasionally, the guys in England will find it.
We find it in Puerto Rico, and then what we do is we just move the telescope in Puerto Rico a little bit.
We move it, you know, Slightly off the star system we're looking at, and see if that signal goes away.
Now, if it's really ET, if it's really a signal coming from that star system, the signal will go away.
And when you move the telescope back to the star, the signal will come back.
I mean, just makes sense.
Right?
But if you move it away and the signal doesn't go away, then it's just some satellite somewhere in the sky, the signal from which, being so strong, just bounces around all that metal structure of the telescope and ultimately gets in the receiver.
Thought I was going to squeeze some good information out there.
But, you know, when you think about it, he does have the ability to answer that question.
In other words, he could get hold of known orbits and compare them to what he gets and eventually come up with an answer about what percentage of satellites are secret military satellites.
We'll be right back.
This is interesting.
From Syracuse, New York, I'm told by George we are in the midst of a most visual auroral display.
Are we, really?
Are we having some sort of solar storm at the moment?
Seth, it would seem to me that at some point you would catalog.
I mean, computers are wonderful things.
So you could have the orbits of many, many, many known orbiters in a computer and instantly reference where you're pointed and see if you're at one of those or not, preventing these moments of intense but short, albeit short-lived excitement.
But, you know, to try and follow satellites with it would be a bit like asking the Keck telescope or the Palomar telescope to follow meteors across the sky.
I mean, they're just not agile enough.
They can't do that.
And so it wouldn't be good for that.
But, you know, in the new telescope that we're building, Verse, it's undoubtedly something we'll be talking about a little bit later, the Allen Telescope Array, the guys that are working on that are planning to get the orbital elements, as you say, the trajectories,
if you will, of all these known satellites that produce interference so they can say, hey, look, you know, this satellite's going to be coming across the sky at such and such a time, and it'll be right where we're looking, and so we should expect interference from it.
And so those people then would know what percentage of satellites are not identifiable, hence, what percentage of satellites would be secret military satellites?
In that case, if you took a database of known satellites and you get interference from one that's not in your database, you can probably assume that's one that they don't want to put in the database.
And so I think that in some sense you're right, that that telescope, not the ones we're using now, they're really not very good at that, but the telescopes of the near future would indeed be able to say, hey, wait a minute, this is not something that I know about.
Mind you, you know, if you wanted to build something in your backyard that could do that sort of work, you probably could do that.
I've heard recent news that SETI is going to begin looking in different areas, you know, maybe in laser or light or in different areas other than just the radio search that you're doing right now.
The big sort of the sexy story out of SETI for the past couple of months has been what they call optical SETI.
And it's exactly that.
I mean, we've been doing these radio experiments now for 41 years.
Right.
And a lot of people will come up to me and say, well, after 41 years, don't you get a little bit discouraged?
You know, that kind of thing.
Well, we don't get discouraged because, in fact, the equipment just keeps getting better.
And as I say, we now have a new telescope in the works that will be coming online in four or five years, which I really think is going to do it for us.
Optical SETI is where instead of looking for, trying to eavesdrop on radio transmissions from our cosmic brethren out there, we look for flashing lights.
Now, that's an old idea.
In fact, in the last century, a guy by the name of Crowe, he was kind of a polymath.
He was a guy who was both scientifically literate, and he also wrote poetry.
He was his Frenchman.
And he proposed that we ought to signal to our buddies on Mars.
Now, keep in mind, this was 150 years ago when people figured that there'd be somebody on Mars to to watch by putting big mirrors across Europe reflecting sunlight.
And in fact, he suggested that the thing to do was to arrange the mirrors so that they would look like the Big Dipper as seen from Mars.
And so, of course, the Martians, if they didn't know anything else, they would know about the Big Dipper, and they would recognize this as some sort of signal from the Europeans.
You know, they're sending us a picture of the Big Dipper.
I'm not quite sure.
But the idea was to do it with light, with light.
There was another scheme, actually, in fact, by a guy by the name of von Littrau, who was an Austrian physicist, and it was about the same time, the 1800s.
And he said, look, just go down to the Sahara and dig out big circles and triangles and trenches of all sorts of various geometric forms, fill them up with water, then put oil on top of the water, wait for nightfall, throw a match into the whole thing, and now you've got these burning signals that our buddies on the moon or Mars can see.
I don't know any more than what you just said because he said the same to us.
He said there's some very intriguing photos that look like large life.
we haven't been able to track down the photos or quite understand what it is that he's talking about there.
And, you know, I'm right Well, okay, I should check them out.
But I have a feeling, you know, they're going to be launching a new probe to Mars in a couple of weeks.
I think you know about that, the Odyssey spacecraft.
Yes.
And that's going to have a camera on board.
It'll have a lot of instruments on board, but one of the things it'll have on board is a camera that'll be pretty high resolution, a lot better than the old Viking photos.
Not quite as good as the Mars Global Surveyor that's orbiting our little ruggy buddy right now.
And by the way, it would be rather reassuring to think that the guy actually landed on its feet because the usual predictions of what happened to that guy didn't picture such a wonderful end for it.
But it turns out that if you take the most powerful lasers we've got, and probably the most powerful laser we've got is over at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.
It's not too far from where I am here in the Bay Area.
That that laser is really designed for thermonuclear fusion experiments.
We try and heat up a bit of hydrogen and turn it into helium to produce some clean power.
But maybe the lasers are what you need to get the whole thing going.
So they've got a really powerful laser.
And then this laser, when it's on, that beam is something like a thousand trillion watts.
Well, you could imagine taking that big laser and aiming it at any nearby star.
Forget about aiming it at the experiment they got over there.
Just point it at the sky, aim it at a nearby star.
If you were looking back from that star when this flash of light arrived, it would be, momentarily, a thousand times brighter than our own sun would look from that distance, you see.
So that's an interesting number.
I mean, it turns out that this laser can outshine the sun, not continuously.
Yes, in a really short flash, maybe a trillionth of a second.
Now, imagine now you're on a planet around that nearby star, and you've got a small telescope.
It doesn't even have to be a very large telescope.
It could be something the size that an amateur astronomer might have for their backyard use.
And they're pointing back toward us.
This laser flash is they've got a little bit of high-speed electronics connected to that telescope and they can see this flash.
It's not hard.
It doesn't take a lot of equipment.
It's not expensive equipment.
And, you know, it could be that there are nearby civilizations, and I don't know how nearby is nearby, maybe a couple hundred light-years or a thousand light-years away, that are sort of pinging stars around them.
Maybe once a day they send, you know, 100 pulses to every star system that's around them.
If you're talking about relatively short distances by astronomical standards, if you're talking about, you know, a few hundred light years, I probably have a few hundred light years on my car outside here.
A few hundred light years, that's, what, you know, like a thousand trillion miles or something like that.
I think that there are several reasons why you might want to consider that.
I mean, there's a different way of doing it.
I mean, the first thing, well, everybody who knows about fiber optics knows that you can get a lot more information down a fiber optic than you can down a cable.
That's why, you know, the phone company is rewiring the country to bring TV and the web and your phone and everything else into your house.
In principle, you could put a lot of info down that kind of a pipe.
And so maybe from the aliens' point of view, if they're using this as a communication tool, that's appealing.
You know, hey, we're not going to take forever to send them the encyclopedia.
We'll do it in just, you know, a few minutes.
So that's the obvious attraction.
Beyond that, it's not so obviously attractive.
I mean, radio and light are, you know, six of one, half dozen of another if you're just trying to get in touch, if you're just trying to send a beacon signal.
But one advantage of the optical is it's a pretty easy thing to look for, and that's why it's become so popular.
People at Harvard, at Princeton, at University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Santa Cruz, and the SETI Institute, we're all building this nifty bit of electronics that you can put behind just a conventional telescope, the kind that uses mirrors and lenses, point it at a whole bunch of nearby stars and see if anybody's trying to ping us.
Even for something you can just hold in your hand, you can imagine if you have a big, powerful laser, it's going to have a beam that's a heck of a lot sharper, a lot narrower than for a radio transmitter, say a big military radar or something like that.
The good news is that that concentrates the energy more, and you don't need quite as powerful a laser if you're trying to talk to some guy 100 light years away because that beam is nice and narrow.
You've got to kind of know where the listeners are, as opposed to radio, where they could be just about any place and they could still pick up the signal.
So not only do you have to decide, well, I'm going to ping that star over there or that star over there or this star over here, you've got to make a choice.
You can't use, with radio, you could sort of target a whole big chunk of the neighborhood at once.
But not only that, you have to know something about how that star is moving through space because by the time your little hailing ping gets there, the stars moved.
Seth, I guess what I was trying to ask is, are there two, is there a schism now at all in SETI?
Are those who want to spend more money on the optical aspect, and I'm sure, probably your side that would prefer spending the bulk of the money on radio?
You know, military radars are not always aimed at Alpha Centauri or any other star.
We're not expecting aircraft from Alpha Centauri, I guess.
But the TV is a better bet because you can imagine that you're looking at our solar system just at the moment when maybe New York is coming around the horizon.
The Earth is rotated just so that New York's on the horizon.
Television is aimed at the horizon because that's where all your viewers are, of course.
So suddenly you see the Jay Leno show or something like that coming at you.
But the most powerful signals are, indeed, those radars and television.
Although it would take a pretty, you know, it would take maybe 1,000 acres of rooftop Yaggies antennas to find that television signal.
But, you know, that's not so much.
I mean, you could do that.
And, you know, there probably are 1,000 acres of rooftop Yaggies in any small section of Los Angeles.
So if you connected them all together, put them onto a receiver, you could pick up TV from Alpha Centauri.
So that's not so hard.
And as I say, those early episodes of I Love Lucy Now, which have been beamed into space for 40 years now, those first episodes are washing over a new star system at the rate of about one a day.
And in another 400 years, by the way, it'll be about one an hour.
So in other words, the length of time that any given civilization, we can set up a hypothesis here, they'd be transmitting high-powered television, radar, microwave, radio.
It'd be a pretty small amount of time, actually, wouldn't it, if they progressed technically as we have?
But, you know, the laws of physics are the same everywhere.
And they say that if you want to communicate radio and, for that matter, lasers and things like that, they're pretty good ways of doing it.
As far as we can tell, they're among the best ways of doing it.
And I just think that even though we won't be broadcasting television into space for very much longer, I think we will continue to have some high-powered transmitters.
You know, the military radar, I don't know when those will go away.
Maybe they never go away.
Maybe you always need those.
I don't know.
But you certainly would need some powerful radars to look for, for example, incoming long-period comets.
I mean, that's just a very obvious thing.
That's something that's always going to be a threat to your good health.
A long-period comet comes in and smashes into your planet.
I would say that we have indeed only scratched the surface, but that money would allow us to start really marring that furniture.
If you're looking for something at the beach, looking for a lost coin somewhere at the beach, and we're fiddling around, we're futzing around with teaspoons now.
And what you really want is a big tractor with a bunch of screens on the back that you can really sift through that beach in a hurry.
And in fact, the money could buy that now because, in fact, technology allows you to build telescopes that instead of looking at one star at a time, which is what we're doing now in Puerto Rico, with a receiver that means that we have to sort of step up the dial, as it were, tune that knob up the dial very slowly, taking, you know, 10, 12 hours just to tune up, you know, the dial for one star.
I think that the planets, the small planets, the kind that can sport a little bit of biology, probably are a dime a dozen.
But we really don't know that yet.
But I'm optimistic there.
Now, how many of them will have a little bit of liquid water so that they can get the chemistry going that will cook up that dirty little bit of that dirty little process we call biology?
Yes.
You know, it certainly didn't take life very long to get started on Earth.
And there are some indications that even in our own solar system, we're going to find some other biology.
So I say that that's a pretty sure bet, too.
Where you begin to stumble a bit is when you say, okay, suppose you have a couple of tens of billions of planets in the galaxy that have biology.
How many of them have cooked up intelligent biology, smart life?
that's very uncertain.
That's, you know, people really get into fights about that because...
And there's some evolutionary biologists who would make that argument.
They'd say, look, I mean, just take very simple things.
65 million years ago, the dinos were wiped out by this big rock from space.
Big news in the papers, right?
It also, that rock wiped out three-quarters of all the other species, by the way.
It wasn't just the dinosaurs, but the dinosaurs were the sexy guys.
But had that rock not hit the Earth, and all it would have taken is for that rock to have arrived 15 minutes earlier than it did, it would have missed the planet, and there would be dinosaurs in America today, not humans.
And so you might say, well, you know, gosh, it sounds like humans and what we call intelligence is a pretty chancy Thing.
And there are people, as I say, who argue that very strongly and say, you know, there's going to be a lot of life in the galaxy, but it's not going to be intelligent.
I don't agree with that, but that's, you know, we won't know the answer to that until we find it.
Well, it doesn't seem to be, although, you know, it doesn't seem to stop people from trying.
And there are experiments, for example, there's a woman on the East Coast in Atlanta who studies the other intelligent species we have on this planet, dolphins, whales, the other primates besides humans, things like that.
And it tries to figure out, well, I mean, how smart are they?
And it's a little tough to get a dolphin to take an SAT test or something like that.
And the way the biologists measure intelligence, in fact, is they essentially weigh the brain of whatever critter they're interested in, and then they divide the weight of the brain by the weight of the whole body.
Because in general, if you have a bigger body, you need a bigger brain.
Obviously, an ant has a small brain, an elephant has a big brain, but it doesn't mean that the elephant's necessarily more intelligent.
It's the ratio of the brain weight to the body weight.
Very crudely, that's the way it's done.
And so they do that, and they find that, well, on that sort of a scale, humans, Homo sapiens, comes out the winner.
But number two are things like white-sided dolphins or something, Pacific plank dolphins, some sort of dolphins.
We occasionally save a swimmer, but otherwise they're useless beings.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
Stay right where you are.
Back now to Seth Shostak.
Seth, welcome back.
So, dolphins, really, even though we know that the brain ratio says they ought to be fairly intelligent, and in some ways they certainly seem fairly intelligent, for the purposes of the SETI search, they'd be dumb life, right?
It takes a long time before they're ready to find their way in the world.
That's true of humans, of course.
But it's also true of dolphins.
They have some sort of altruism.
You've already mentioned the fact that they occasionally will save a diver, and they have long lifespans.
So these are all things that suggest that intelligence may have some sort of common basis, even if the species aren't terribly similar looking or similar behaving.
So the question is, really, all right, given the fact that we were kind of a chance accident, because as I say, you know, if there had been a different fork in the road taken 65 million years ago and the dinos had survived, we wouldn't be here.
You know, would you ever expect intelligence to cook up, or is it just not going to happen?
But if you had arrived on this planet two million years ago, this is a point made by Dr. Marino back in Atlanta.
You would have found that the smartest thing on the planet was not our precursors, Homo erectus, I guess, two million years ago, something Homo erectus becoming Homo habilis, whatever.
They weren't as smart as the dolphins.
Not by this measure, anyhow.
And so you would say, well, the smartest thing on the planet are these mammals living in the sea here.
And although they don't build radios yet, just give them a little bit of time and they're going to take over this planet.
Didn't actually work that way, but it seems that intelligence develops along lots of different lines here.
Dogs and cats, they're pretty smart, and they're a heck of a lot smarter than any of the dinosaurs were.
So in the last 65 million years, the mammals, many of the mammals, and birds and lots of mammals have become a lot smarter than anything that came before.
And that at least suggests that intelligence is a good thing as far as nature is concerned, and it may cook it up in lots of places.
And speaking of hearing it, a lot of people say there's not a good reason to go back to the moon, even though I think that argument's falling apart with the water found on the moon And other questions about the moon.
Wouldn't you just love to have a great big old dish on the other side of the moon that you could remotely control from here on Earth?
Then you could do some serious listening, couldn't you?
Well, I've seen drawings where people sort of filled in a whole slew of craters with antennas, and just perfectly situated there.
And in fact, there was a French astronomer, Jean Heidmann.
He just died a couple of months ago, but he spent quite a bit of time looking over maps of the moon, trying to figure out, well, which crater should we put a telescope in?
I mean, very serious.
And he found a telescope.
Oh, sorry, he found a crater.
It would be better if he'd found a telescope.
He found a crater just around the edge, one edge of the moon from here.
You don't want to put it all the way around the back side.
I mean, that would work.
But you've got to get the signals back to Earth somehow.
no good having the telescope there.
You've got to get the information back to...
Yeah, well, but then you've got to have a radio link to that thing orbiting the moon.
But he said, look, why don't you just put it just beyond the edge of the moon?
And then, you know, all you need to do is run a cable, fiber optic or whatever, a cable back a couple hundred miles to the side of the moon that still faces the Earth.
And, you know, this interference problem, it's pretty awful now, and it's getting worse.
Getting worse.
Every month down at Arecibo, you talk to the astronomers that sit around down there, and they'll tell you every month they can see the interference getting worse.
So it's probably going to come a point, and nobody knows quite when it'll be, but there's going to be some point when the interference is so bad you really can't do the experiment anymore.
I'd hate to see that happen.
I'm not sure it will happen, but it may happen, and it's certainly true that you could do a heck of a lot better if you could get to the far side of the moon.
And there have even been some investigations.
There's a fellow in Italy who has, you know, works for the Italian Space Agency, a very clever guy who has sort of worked out, well, what's the cheapest way to put a telescope on the moon?
I mean, you could send big rockets and have a bunch of construction guys go down there and bolt it all together, but that's quite costly.
Maybe the thing to do is have it all bolted together before on the rocket that's going to the moon.
Forget the construction crew.
Don't send any people.
Just send the rocket and the bolted together thing and drop it by tethers down into this crater and just sort of lay the whole thing out from the air.
All right, then there's another thing that I want to talk to you about, and that is, and we've talked about this before, there were a couple of experiments to transmit, to make incredibly strong transmissions from Earth, intended to be picked up by aliens wherever.
I mean, really giant, powerful transmissions.
You said there was one years and years ago there at Arecibo, where they took what is normally a receiver and turned it into a very powerful transmitter, but it was an extremely short burst, right?
People often ask, maybe we should be broadcasting.
And indeed, it's not so obvious what the right answer to that question is, except that the people who do SETI feel that, well, maybe this isn't the right time.
And the reasons are the following.
To begin with, of course, if you broadcast into space, the nearest civilization might be, I don't know, a couple hundred light years away if we're lucky.
So you've got to be patient.
You're not going to get a response tomorrow.
It's going to be hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years before you get a response.
So that's a bit of a disincentive right there.
Nobody's interested in winning the Nobel Prize a thousand years from now.
So that's point one.
Second point, some people think that it's a little dangerous to broadcast powerful signals into space because you don't know what's out there.
It's entirely possible there could be intelligent civilization there, and they just don't have anything to do with radio.
However, if we were to blast a big signal their way, a really you can't miss it big signal, which we could do, they might notice all of a sudden, and, you know, this far-advanced civilization might say, well, look at those upsorts.
Look at that, would you?
Where they hadn't before, and send a fleet to dispatch us before we cause more trouble.
Well, that's reason number two is to say that doesn't weigh heavily with me, but, you know, hey, what the heck?
But there are other reasons, and they're not such bad ones.
reason number three is if you're going to do this, you can't just turn on the transmitter for, say, three minutes the way it was done in 1974 down at Arecibo.
I mean, that's good for a demonstration.
But if you want this signal to have some real chance of being picked up.
got to keep doing it because, you know, the galaxy is 10, 12 billion years old and the chances that they're listening, you know, during these three years that you're on the air, I mean, you've got to...
So this is a project, I think, for a few hundred years hence when people can talk about building an automated transmitter that works on solar power and is located on Mercury or I don't know where, and that the thing self-repairs and it's going to stay on the air for 10,000 years.
And at that point, I say, hey, now you're talking serious beacon building.
And I think that that may be the attitude.
But mind you, despite these what sound like probably fairly convincing arguments, this subject comes up every time people talk about the future of SETI.
They say, you know, maybe we ought to send a signal.
Of course, we are sending signals, and there's no catching up with I Love Lucy, but those aren't very powerful signals in the terms we're talking about.
I mean, if you look at the sorts of things that are going to happen to us in the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, there are three things that strike me.
I think one of your guests, Michio Kaku, has written books on this by talking to a lot of people about what they think is going to happen in the next 100 years.
But three things strike me.
One is, of course, we're finally understanding biology, and the immediate consequence of that will be to cure a lot of disease, but also to encourage us to have designer babies and other things like that.
But that's obviously going to shake society up.
You suddenly double the lifespan of everybody.
Doubling the lifespan is not such a big deal.
But of course, if you really begin to increase the lifespan, if you increase your lifespan to 8,000 years, which is a long time, of course.
Can you imagine going to the dentist for 8,000 years?
But you wouldn't go to the local supermarket if you lived for 8,000 years, because at 8,000 years, it turns out that the chance that you'll get killed in an automobile accident are essentially 100%.
Well, by then, by the time we could extend life that far, and we are moving in that direction, by the time we could actually do that through one means or another, you would think that we'd develop safer modes of transportation and living so that the chances would go down that we'd die and some, you know, get squished.
But all I'm saying is that it might result in a very passive society.
But, okay.
Forget the 8,000 years.
That's not going to happen for a while.
But in any case, understanding biology is going to have a big impact on us as soon as, as I say, just the designer baby aspect of it is obviously socially dislocating, if you will.
That's one thing.
The second thing that may happen is a SETI detection.
We talk a lot about that.
You know, what happens if you finally pick up a signal and find out you're not the only game in town, and you're not even the most interesting game in town?
What are the social consequences of that?
The third thing is this artificial intelligence.
If you can really make a machine that can think, of course, there'll be tremendously speedy evolution of that machine.
I mean, you'll use that machine to design a next generation of machines.
Well, I guess what I'm saying is biology is rather fragile compared to, oh, I don't know, 100 generations of artificial intelligence improving upon itself.
But whenever we make that first contact, I'm willing to bet anybody a cup of coffee that what's at the other end, what's behind the microphone, is not a soft, squishy alien made out of protoplasm or anything like protoplasm, but is some sort of machine intelligence.
And it's very hard to figure out what a machine would find interesting about biology.
Indeed, a few facts might be gathered just to put in the archive somewhere for any machine that's interested.
But that indeed this is just something that is a very temporary stage.
Biology is great for getting things started, but after four million years or four billion years of biology, then you can expect the biology to produce the machines, and after that, things really get interesting.
Let's say that on Alpha Centauri, there's a bunch of machines, and they don't need to communicate by radio or television or microwave or any other thing that would reach Earth, and they may know there are signals coming from Earth and not care one whit.
If we begin to play what if, I mean, after all, there is the possibility that one of these days, that's what they're putting in all the work for, they're going to get the Kersmash signal.
They're going to lock on.
It's not going to be a satellite.
England and South Africa and Australia and whatever.
They're all going to check and they're going to say, oh my God, it's there.
Now, Seth, you and I have had this conversation any number of times.
In the movie Contact, when they got the signal, the guys with the guns came in.
Although, I have to tell you that I was told that Pierce Brosnan didn't actually want to do any of that, and he insisted that it all be shot in a sound stage.
But, sure, you can do all that.
But the point is that, yeah, we have visitors.
So there were a lot of people sitting there in the room when we were picking up this signal.
Now that speaks a little bit to this whole business of secrecy.
There can't be any secrecy because there's no policy of secrecy.
Those are just people wandering around.
And suddenly, you know, everybody's getting excited.
And of course, you're there, and then these visitors, who knows where they're from, are getting excited.
And usually the visitors include a couple of people from the media.
They tend to be people who are writing articles about SETI, or perhaps it's a TV crew that's doing a bit of a documentary about SETI.
They're there.
And in fact, when we got the signal in 1997 that had us going the longest, just as the signal was coming in, so was the TV crew.
Really?
And, you know, they weren't too happy about this signal because they wanted to get some, you know, talking head interviews.
Yeah, well, the chemical was not out of there real fast, actually.
But, you know, you can take that for what it's worth.
All I'm saying is that if you find a signal, see, one of the big misconceptions about SETI is that finding a signal is something that happens very quickly.
That you're sitting there one moment, you know, watching grass grow, and the next moment this giant weed appears.
This big signal shows up on an oscilloscope, and people jump out of their chairs and start screaming, and, you know, immediately the door busts open.
There's some guys there that you've never heard of before who are coming in and telling you to shut it all down.
I mean, you told me yourself, 15 minutes of excitement.
Well, if you went to the next step and Britain, for example, or whoever you call, confirms it's what you think it is, and you get two or three more confirmations, that would be, what, a matter of hours?
Well, to begin with, if you're doing this down at Arecibo, because Arecibo is a telescope that points pretty much straight up, you can't follow stars across the sky because of the Earth's rotation.
Of course, they move around.
You can't follow them too long.
You can follow them for on the order of two hours.
And most likely that's going to be somebody in a different country, by the way, but not necessarily.
But in any case, somebody far away.
And you say to them, hey, look, sorry to interrupt your research program, whatever you're doing here, but would you mind dropping whatever you're doing and check out this bit of sky at this spot on the dial and see if you can find a signal there because we want to rule out that this is just a software bug that we didn't know about or some sort of prank or who knows what.
Okay, so they go to work and they bolt on the right receiver and they tune it up and they spend a couple hours or maybe you figure maybe you're going to lose half a day or a day there.
Now at that point you're beginning to think this is for real.
But I can assure you at this point you're already reading it about it in the checkout line at your local supermarket because the media are all over this.
Whenever we get a signal, the media call up interesting.
Even if the media was sitting right there at Arecibo and they sat there through your confirmation of it, the point where you were calling somebody else, at the point that a call came in from somebody else, that's where I think the media would be escorted out by guys in suits or guys in uniforms, one of the two, either way.
Would it be Art Bell or somebody in the media, or would there be, I'm certain there must be some sort of protocol that you have that says we'd talk to, I don't know, Seth, the president, maybe, or the national security advisor, maybe.
Yeah, the major donors for the SETI Institute's projects are Paul Allen, who's a co-founder of Microsoft, and Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of the Intel Corporation.
Bill Hewlett and David Packard, when they were alive, yes.
Quite a bit of money.
And the fifth major donor has been a fellow who's also deceased, unfortunately, Barney Oliver.
He was vice president of research and development for Hewlett Packard for many years.
Very, very clever guy.
So, you know, these are people in the high-tech biz.
And they, you know, of course they're writing all their relatives and their friends, and their friends are writing their friends, and, you know, and that's why the media call, because there's this wave of information that goes out whenever we get anything interesting.
Well, I don't buy into that because, remember, it isn't just the guys at Arecibo.
Maybe you could shut Arecibo down.
They do that in the movies.
Now, all those people that are working there have been told from day one, look, there's nothing secret about what we do, so you don't have to worry about keeping anything quiet here.
But now suddenly, you're telling me that they're going to shut them down.
Maybe you could do that.
But remember, we call up another observatory, which might be in California, or it might be in Canada, or it might be in England, or who knows where.
It's somewhere else.
And, of course, those people haven't been told that there's anything secret about that.
The point is that if this were the discovery of the Enigma machine or something like that, or some sort of artifact lying there on the desert or on the ground there, I mean, it's conceivable you could scoop that baby up and take it somewhere and nobody could ever see it or learn anything about it.
That's possible.
That's possible.
But this evidence is right up there in the sky, and now there are two groups of people, large groups of people, who have been telling as many people as they know where it is.
Yeah, but if you had just one of those parameters, if you just knew where to point more or less, right, and you'd heard these guys found something and it's this star system, it wouldn't take you very long.
That's true, but now you've told them where the needle is.
You haven't maybe told them where on the dial it is.
Okay.
But unless you can suppress all this information that's already been spread around in confirming the signal and checking it out, anybody can say, hey, look, the government shut down Arecibo and they shut down Jodwell Bank in England, but what the hey, I'm going to buy myself 20 of these backyard dishes, wire them together, and check that part of the sky out for myself.
So that's why, you know, I think that there's just no way to hide this.
It's not something you can't hide.
There's no way of stopping evidence of this any more than there's some way of stopping evidence of the existence of Jupiter's moons.
All you need to do is build a little instrument, and you can prove that to yourself no matter where you are.
And so I think it's going to be out there.
Now, you know, I don't doubt that the government is going to take a lot of interest in this because mainly they won't know whether it's important or not.
All right, let's try this angle of attack, shall we?
It's early on in detection.
They have their wow signal.
They're really wowed.
They've got confirmation, let's say, from at least one other source, maybe two, and the information has made it to the government.
Well, I contend our government, being what it is, would send a contingent down to Arecibo, where Seth would be, no doubt, on his 25th cup of coffee since the discovery of the wow signal, and they'd come in.
And, Seth, let's pretend for a second that there you are working away at Arecibo, just excited as all can get out.
You've got a signal that looks real, and I walk in, and I'm Frank Brown from NSA.
We're going to ask you, for the sake of national security, until we get this sorted out, to issue a statement which essentially is a lie, but we're asking you to do this for national security for at least a period of time while we sort this out, because there are national security issues here.
There's no way you can shut the observatory down without a whole lot of people noticing They're going to come in and they're going to come in in a big way and they're going to have a talk with you and they're going to talk to you about national security and request your assistance.
Well, I would say to them, I'd say, it's, you know, to begin with, this is a private operation and you don't have any jurisdiction here and this, that, and the other.
It's all that, but you're probably going to tell me that that isn't going to matter much to them.
So all I'm saying is that because of all this, because of the fact that you're doing everything at this point to confirm people, because you've called that second observatory.
Otherwise, it's not worth their time.
It's not worth their jet fuel to get down there.
So that second observatory, of course, as soon as they find the signal, you can be sure that they've called their buddies at yet another observatory.
This is spreading like wildfire at this point, and I think it's tough to put it out.
I think it's impossible to put it out.
You don't agree.
Now, suppose they do put it out.
They come in and they say, sorry, you've got to do this.
And by the way, your buddies in France or wherever it is, they've got to do it too.
I'm not sure the buddies in France are going to listen.
Mr. Dr. Source, please, for the sake of national security, you're going to be in on this all the way, but we've just got to have a little time here until we figure out whether it is an urgent matter of national security.
And let's say that they managed to get their buddies in all these other countries to get everybody to make that kind of statement.
I think this is a bit forced.
I can hardly foresee this, but even in that case, in the end, it doesn't do too much good because five years later, when you have a new telescope and you're resurveying all these stars again, you're going to trip on that signal again.
As I say, the evidence is up there.
It's like saying, hey, man, you discovered this new quasar, what have we, right?
And for reasons of national security, we don't want to let the news out.
I mean, quasars aren't really so interesting for national security.
But suppose they said that.
Well, that quasar is still burning bright in the heavens.
And five years later or two years later, somebody else is going to trip on it.
But something that you've got to keep in mind is that the kind of experiment you can do at Arecibo and any other radio telescopes that's doing SETI is the kind that kind of destroys the signal in the sense that, again, we smear out the incoming information over seconds or minutes of time.
And you know that if you take a radio or a TV signal or any other kind of reasonable signal, even a ham sending Morris code, you know, at 14 words per minute, and you just average that signal for, you know, 10 seconds or a minute or whatever it is, the information is gone.
So the only way you can get that information is by building a different kind of instrument, which, of course, they could do, but they're going to need a very much bigger antenna.
So now these guys have got the problem that, well, now we've got to build an instrument that might be 100 times bigger than Arecibo just to get the message.
Well, if it's that strong, if it's strong enough that we can get the message without building, you know, without covering the state of Iowa with antennas or something like that, if that's the strength of the signal, then I think that the other SETI experiments, the other SETI experiments that just sort of sweep the whole sky, such as the one that's used for production.
Yeah, I don't think that is probable, but of course we disagree on that.
I have thought about how I'm going to react because I've, you know, kind of seen that happen.
I might cite again something that we've talked about in the past, and that is that 1997 signal that for well into one day, it was like 16 or 18 hours, that signal looked pretty darn good to us.
Well, you weren't quite, I guess, to the point where you were going to pick up the phone and get hold of somebody in the government, but you weren't that far away from it either.
But what we did think about was calling up another observatory.
We were beginning to look up those phone numbers and decide, had this gotten to the point where we wanted to actually interfere with somebody else's research and say, look, you know, drop that pulsar program you're working on or whatever and check out this signal.
We were moving that way.
And as I've mentioned to you before, by this time, the major newspaper, at least one major newspaper, the New York Times, had already called us up and said, you know, we hear you're following an interesting signal.
Suppose, unlikely as it might be, one of the other observatories were to call you and say, or to tell Arecibo to drop what it's doing and take a look at something.
You know, you're on the Nina Pinta in Santa Maria and you get there and you find some other Spanish ship tied up at the shore.
But, you know, it's perhaps a little less exciting than finding it yourself, but it's still the discovery.
And, you know, I don't have any doubt that if, for example, the Australians, who are doing a very good SETI experiment, by the way, if the Australians were to call the Arecibo Observatory and say, look, check it out, I'm sure they'd do it.
They would do it.
They would do it.
Because, you know, astronomy is a fairly collegial, sort of an academic environment.
Everybody sort of knows other people in the field, and they would do it.
And if you do it once, and it turns out that it was a false alarm and it was, you know, that's no real great harm done there.
But if you do it, you know, five times a year or something like that, then, you know, they probably don't want to hear from you anymore because you just keep interrupting what they're trying to do.
So it's got to be a pretty high threshold.
I mean, you've got to have the feeling that this has a pretty good probability of being real before you'll call people up.
Well, I'm sure it is true in some quarters, but not in the majority of quarters.
I think three quarters out of four, it's not the case because the astronomical community in the United States, once every 10 years, produces a report in which they describe what they feel are the important scientific questions to be answered in astronomy, say, for the next 10 years.
And, you know, the questions about the expansion of the universe and missing matter and all these very fundamental things about how the universe is constructed.
Those, of course, are always in there.
But so is SETI.
SETI is always in there.
And the rationale is that, you know, this is a hard-to-predict experiment.
It might take a long time.
We don't know whether it will succeed, and if it will succeed, we don't know when.
But if it does, it's so incredibly interesting that it's really worth some effort to keep this program going.
Well, if they really feel that way, though, there are lots of observatories that could be themselves doing SETI time, and yet SETI, your organization, is forced to pay money to rent Arecibo, right?
But in fact, we don't pay for the use of Arecibo because that observing time was granted to us almost 10 years ago, back when we were still a NASA program, on the basis of scientific merit.
If you want to use Arecibo, you want to go down there, you want to observe whatever, galaxies, quasars, whatever, pulsars, you, as a U.S. citizen, can just put in a request and say, I want 18 hours to study these two quasars or whatever, and that will be reviewed by a bunch of astronomers, and they'll say, okay, well, Art Bell's proposal looks okay to us.
You know, if you're on the faculty of XYZ University, you probably get looked at a little more seriously than if you're Joe Sixpack, who just had this crazy idea.
But in the end, in the end, and I don't say you're Joe Sixpack, of course.
I'm Arbell, and this is Coast to Coast A.M. All right, we're going to take some questions now for Seth Chostak from the audience.
Although there are a couple of things, a couple of interesting fast blasts that I have here.
Assuming that we received a signal that was coming from a fairly close place, Seth, and assuming that the government did somehow get short-term control over the news, would there be any discussion about sending a signal back?
Let's say Alpha Centauri suddenly big banger of a signal.
Do you think they'd be allowed to send a signal back?
That's really a good question because that's not in any of the protocols yet, although there's some suggestions there that at least for the SETI community, you know, to send a reply back, you know, you'd want to send something that wasn't just your personal good wishes, but something that reflected somehow what the whole planet thought we ought to send back.
People talk about that.
You get a signal, and it is possible to send a reply.
There is a big transmitter on that telescope down in Arecibo, for example.
There's a big radar transmitter that's about a megawatt, a million watts, and you connect that with a thousand-foot antenna, which has about 20 million.
The gain is something like 20 million, 73 dB or something like that.
Anyhow, the bottom line is that it's equivalent to a transmitter of 10 trillion watts.
Well, you know, I have no objection to what they've got.
It's kind of apple pie and motherhood.
You know, let's get everybody to agree that we're going to send them some rudimentary information about what humans are like and, you know, what our world looks like, what the conditions, the physical conditions on our world are like.
I mean, there's all that.
And that might be changed if they were really as close as Alpha Centauri.
I mean, in that case, I'm not quite sure what I do.
At Alpha Centauri distance, they could be watching our television shows.
So maybe they don't need any more information.
Maybe it doesn't matter.
Maybe it's like Indians standing around on the shores of America as Columbus' ships come over the horizon, standing around discussing amongst themselves what they ought to say to the Spaniards.
Seth, my question was, you know, since basically it would probably take thousands of years for these signals to reach us from wherever they're calling from, I was just curious about, you know, if we decided to send them back a signal, and, you know, who knows whose decision that would be to send the signal back, what kind of impact do you see that that would have on people here in the United States today when you consider that they're not really going to know anything for several generations to come?
I think you raised really the important point here because it's much more likely that they're going to be 1,000 light years away than that they're going to be just a couple of light years away like Alpha Centauri.
I mean, it'd be a big surprise if the next star over happened to be occupied.
I mean, if that were the case, then you could probably assume that just about every star is occupied.
That's right.
And I think we would know that if that were the case.
But I think what you're saying is, okay, we get this signal, but they're 1,000 light years away, so you send a reply, and now you've got to wait 2,000 years before you're going to hear anything back from your reply.
The signal that we would be receiving, Seth, would contain the technical information necessary to bridge the distance with a new piece of equipment very quickly indeed.
I think that the answer to the gentleman's question is that it probably doesn't matter too much what you say.
It's just going to, you know, for 2,000 years, everybody's going to be wondering what's going to happen, and it'll be just sort of a national pastime.
But this faster-than-light machine, you know, that was one problem I had with contact.
They tell you, build this machine, and you can come visit.
But, you know, it's going to take some pretty sophisticated science and technology to build a machine like that.
And I try and picture us somehow being in touch with the Neanderthals and telling them, look, we want you guys to build this Pentium computer.
And here are the plans.
You know, those Neanderthals weren't all that stupid, but they're going to have a hard time putting together a Pentium no matter how good the plans are.
So then if they were to send us cogent instructions, uh...
Well, wouldn't it be a whole lot easier, Seth, to build something that would communicate at faster than light speeds, perhaps using wormholes in some way or another, black holes, whatever, whatever would be done, than it would be to send a biological entity across all that?
I mean, if something is coming from, or is going to take 2,000 years to get to us, then it better have some instructions that are meaningful.
Otherwise, as you point out, 2,000 years ho-hum, you know, at best ho-hum, it would be something to idly chat about, but wouldn't mean much of anything to anybody.
Well, that's if they're sending something deliberately to instruct us.
And indeed, their first step might be, look, we've got to get around this very slow-speed communication barrier, so build this machine.
Right.
I mean, that's an intriguing idea, but that assumes that the physics actually exists to allow you to build that faster-than-light communication device.
And that's very unclear that you can actually do that.
And the second thing is, maybe you can't build the machine.
And the third thing is, what if what you pick up just happens to be their GPS transmitter for that part of their solar system and doesn't have any instructions?
Yes, there's actually people who worry about how you might encode information.
As one fellow at the SETI Institute is quite interested in the possibility of, for example, using music, not quite in the manner that you saw in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where they play this simple tune over and over, but some way of communicating that doesn't depend too much on how your brain's organized or your culture.
I'm an amateur astronomer myself, but I'm doing something else with my life other than that.
But I always dreamed about it when I was a kid.
Growing up, that's what I wanted to do.
One thing I'd like to postulate here and hear what you reply is, you know, a little over 100 years ago, I forget exactly the date Marconi discovered radio waves.
Up till that point, people didn't really imagine such things.
We've learned a lot about the universe, different rays, radiation, EM, you know, X-rays, and so on.
We're kind of at the rudimentary level, though, I think, because all that background noise from stars and galaxies, you know, is we're trying to listen to something when there's a lot of interference.
And my inclination is to think that, you know, as in Star Trek when they've got the subspace communications, that they'd be able to communicate quickly.
I think that Richard Hoagland has an idea about a parallel dimension, hyperdimension, and that perhaps we're not listening at the right level or frequency, that we have to evolve a little bit more.
I think all the civilizations like ours that are using radio waves and television waves are not going to be able to hear each other because of the interference.
But once we evolve to a point where we have that hyperdimensional communication, then we'll suddenly hear, we'll be tapping into the main vein and we'll be like hearing everybody.
Well, I mean, certainly Christopher's point is valid in terms of the possibility that new physics might give some other way of communicating.
Now, as far as radio being drowned out by natural static from stars or the gas between the stars actually makes a lot more static, that's not a problem.
In fact, if you use a radio receiver and you're, well, let's go to Alpha Centauri, and it's Art's favorite location tonight, you would find that the Earth is actually a lot stronger emitter of radio waves than the Sun is, even though the Sun's a lot bigger, and the Sun's putting out, what, something like 100 million billion, billion watts.
But the Earth in radio is brighter, if you will.
It shows up more.
That's because we build these nifty little transmitters.
So I don't think that's a problem for radio.
But your fundamental point, maybe we're barking up the wrong tree because there's some other physics that allows you to do a better job of communicating.
Always a possibility.
It would be kind of silly of me to suggest that, no, there can't be any better physics.
Well, maybe there is.
unidentified
Well, I've got to ask you this.
Is there any specialized frequency that you're using that's, say, higher or lower frequency?
Which do you think would be better, like the Lowest frequency.
There's a natural sort of spot on the dial that happens to be a very good frequency, and it happens to be the frequency at which hydrogen gas, which is just sort of floating around between the stars and the universe, emits its own natural radiostatic.
It's at 1,420 megahertz on the dial, and it's a frequency that will be marked on everybody's radios, not just ours, but also the alien radio.
Everybody will know about that particular frequency, so that may be a good hailing channel.
And in fact, it turns out that at those frequencies, and by the way, those are microwave frequencies.
Those are the same frequencies you used to heat up last week's turkey in the microwave.
Those frequencies happen to correspond to the place in the radio dial where the universe is very, very quiet.
So that makes it a good place to look, and that is indeed where we do look.
This is kind of like the battle between offensive and defensive weaponry in a sense that, you know, every day they throw up a, you know, almost every day they throw up another satellite so that people will be able to use their cell phones or whatever.
And, of course, that makes the interference environment for us worse.
When we were down in Arecibo, you know, there were certain bands there where we would just see all these signals due to these iridium satellites.
You know, there's this constellation of satellites that was put up to give everybody worldwide self- So I suppose you're clapping since the iridiums are crashing down to Earth.
Well, you know, I hate to rain on anybody's parade, but I've got to say that we're not so sorry to see those guys go, frankly.
But, you know, they didn't succeed, but some other setup will succeed.
So, yeah, it's getting worse.
But on the other hand, as it's getting worse, our, you know, people come up with clever ways to try and beat that system.
Our new telescope, this Allen Telescope Array, and it's called that because Paul Allen gave most of the money to get it underway, is being designed so that it can kind of filter those things out.
And so, you know, that's the defense.
But we improve the defense, and then, of course, the offense gets worse because they put up more satellites.
So this constant battle, and I think in the end, the offense will win, and it'll become very hard to do SETI on the Earth.
In Scientific American some months back, there was a discussion, a small article discussing that in regard to SETI in general.
And they were mentioning that most solutions of that equation would come up with the universe or the galaxy possibly being actually saturated with extant ET life forms by this time.
What are your thoughts on that?
Would we be saturated or would there be just a few scattered?
Unfortunately, it really doesn't matter what I think it is.
And that's why we do the experiment because nobody really knows what the N in the Drake equation is.
Now, for those who don't know what the Drake equation is, that was cooked up by Frank Drake, who, by the way, is the chairman of the board of the SETI Institute.
So he's still active, even though he was the pioneer in this whole field back in 1960.
He cooked up that equation in 1961.
And all it does is it tries to estimate how many civilizations, N, are out there in our galaxy blasting away with their transmitters right now.
But unfortunately, that depends on a lot of things we don't know.
For example, what fraction of planets that have life ever cook up intelligent life, and how long do they leave their transmitter switches turned on?
I mean, we don't know that.
You know, maybe they invent radio, they go on the air, and then 200 years later, they blow themselves up.
Oh, well, he says that we're on the cusp of becoming a Type 1 civilization, but he also says that most Type Zeros blow themselves to smithereens before they get to be a Type 1.
Well, whoever originated the idea, the concept is, when you're talking about a type zero, when you discover element 92, which we would assume, you know, if they're intelligent civilizations, not dolphins, that they would discover element 92 in the industrial age, somewhere in the industrial age, as we did, and that most civilizations would probably end up blowing themselves to smithereens.
Now, there's lots of evidence on the planet right now that we've got India and Pakistan and China and North Korea and countries that are hungry to get their hands on nuclear weapons and will buy them and use them if they can get them.
And there's a pretty good chance that a nuclear weapon will be used in anger and that we will end up blowing ourselves up.
Well, okay, I don't want to belittle the threat here, but I do think that these sorts of scenarios that say, in particular, as far as SETI is concerned, look, you guys are kind of wasting your time because any aliens that invent radio, so you can hear them, will invent the H-bomb at about the same time.
You know, 50 years later, they invent the H-bomb or the H-bomb.
Now, you know, it's true that maybe we could blow ourselves up.
Now, I'm looking at our own experience.
The consequence of all this is that people have been fairly pessimistic about how long a technically sophisticated civilization is going to hang in there.
But, you know, 100 years, 50 years, I mean, we're not talking real money here yet.
So when that happens, you can see what's going to happen to humans.
We're going to put some people on the moon.
There'll be small colonies at first, Mars, small colonies.
You remember these ideas from Gerald O'Neill and Tom Heppenheimer saying that, you know, what we really ought to do is construct giant rotating space habitats out of big aluminum cans, if you will, 10 miles long and 2 miles in diameter, that kind of thing.
Rotate them slowly, and we live on the inside.
So with that rotation, we get a little bit of artificial gravity.
Everything's hunky-dory.
You don't have any mosquitoes or flies, and you live the good life there in space.
Well, but you don't need too much from Earth because you recycle the water, the air, and then you have a separate rotating aluminum can, which is growing everything you need to eat on the basis of all that solar power.
So you don't need too much.
Now, that's going to happen, and we haven't done it yet, but we could do it.
We could do it today.
Ultimately, like Freeman Dyson at Princeton says, we'll probably spread out to the asteroids because there's a lot of good stuff there, and the asteroids have a lot of real estate.
Well, you don't disagree all that much, then, with the theory, really.
It's just that he's got the half-empty glass, you've got the half-full glass.
He thinks that during this 200 years, this critical 200 years, you all agree on that, that we're not going to make it, or that the odds, let's put it this way, are against us.
Well, you could interpret it that way, but I don't think it's fair to do so simply because we really haven't examined enough real estate closely enough yet.
But this is an exponentially improving search.
That's just the nature of SETI these days.
It's mostly a digital processing problem.
So just like, you know, the computer you've got on your desk today is more powerful than all the previous computers you had put together, which it Is.
The SETI experiments today are more powerful than all the previous SETI experiments put together.
And that'll be true 20 years from now, too.
So that's what you call an exponential growth.
And that means that the chances for success just keep getting better and better.
And the fact that you haven't done it in the first 40 years doesn't mean you're not going to do it in the next 10 or 20.
It may be that the hailing channel, as they used to say on Star Trek, that that hailing signal, which might be very easy to find, could just be a pointer.
In other words, indeed, just one that says, hey, look, for the real stuff, tune in at some infrared frequency up the band or actually just, you know, as it were, QSY, whatever, go somewhere else on the band.
Well, in this one, they had an article about SETI, and it was a full-page picture.
Yeah, of a, I guess what looked like, well, they had like...
No, it might as well have been.
They had a picture of a big radar disc, and they said that the aliens were tired of us sending stuff out there, and they hit it with a big blue ray of light and destroyed the SETI dish.
And then they had a picture of the SETI dish, you know, all land-based it all over on the ground.
And this happened somewhere, if I can remember correctly, in Africa.
No, I notice in those particular newspapers that the stories always happen in places you've never heard of.
But, in fact, in this case, there's a certain amount of truth to this because there have been three radio telescopes that have collapsed in the past 10 years.
One was in West Virginia.
It was metal fatigue and it just gave in.
It was a 300-foot telescope in Greenbank, West Virginia.
It's one I used to use a lot, actually.
It collapsed rather slowly.
Nobody was hurt or anything.
Then there was one that was used for SETI, not very much, actually, but up at Hat Creek in Northern California that collapsed in a windstorm just a couple years ago.
And then one that was used all the time for SETI, actually, near Harvard in Massachusetts.
And this is just, again, about two years ago, it collapsed again.
Bad weather.
But if you read the Checkout Line Press, it wasn't bad weather that did that baby in.
Well, it would be somewhat disappointing, wouldn't it, Seth, if the answer to our careful listening was a blue beam of destruction and Arecibo just crumbled to the ground.
I'm trying to think back on any time in human history when we adhere to something like that?
Yeah, when any explorer said, well, you know, we've discovered these new islands here in the South Pacific, but let's not bother to land because we've got this prime directive.
Well, yeah, but one might imagine a civilization that did make it to type 1 or 2, thousands of years ahead of us, would have socially progressed as well.
And a prime directive in that case might actually make some sense.
Yeah, well, they might regard us as sort of like a nature preserve.
That's certainly possible, that they come across this planet, Earth, and they say, oh, biological intelligence, that's kind of messy and squishy and mostly disgusting.
But it's kind of an interesting place for people for aliens, as it were, to study.
So we'll just put it off limits.
Don't touch it, but you can take pictures or something like that.
Maybe the way we treat some selected areas of our own planet, that's possible.
And I was wondering if you could just, my name is Richard, and if you could just shorten up the signal a little bit and try to make contact with listening to our show.
There are so many different sightings from all over the world.
And, you know, you just take 1% of those to be real, you know, an alien or UFO, whatever, that maybe just shorten your signal up to try to contact them.
I mean, we would definitely miss them with this kind of experiment.
The kind of experiment we do wouldn't find anybody that nearby.
I mean, if, you know, it's sort of like anybody with an optical television, one of these big optical telescopes like they have on the mountains there in Hawaii.
You know, there might be a comet could come in and land on the side of the mountain.