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March 19, 2001 - Art Bell
02:32:23
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Dr. Seth Shostak - SETI
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♪ Tonight on the best of Coast to Coast and with Art Bell.
From March of this year, it's Art Bell and his guest, Dr. Seth Shostak from SETI.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
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 them there last week.
Except we were booked all last week.
I had, uh, lined up last week, so decided to do it when he, uh, 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.
Just back from Arecibo, here is Seth Shostak.
Seth?
It's a pleasure to be here, as always, Art.
Oh, welcome back.
You're just back from Arecibo, right?
I am.
I've returned from the tropics to California, where I think it's actually a little warmer than it was in Puerto Rico.
Apparently got too warm today because they had rolling blackouts.
About a million people lost power for four hours.
That's right.
It made it difficult for me to get lunch, actually.
The restaurants were all shut down.
Where are you?
Well, Mountain View is actually in the Silicon Valley.
It's like a 45 Miles south of San Francisco.
Wow.
That's kind of a difficult area to be shutting stuff down, Silicon Valley.
I bet a bunch of computers want to belly up, huh?
Well, I suspect they did.
Although, you know, save early, save often has become the real credo around here.
All my companions at work today were hitting that save button approximately every minute and a half, it seemed to me.
Not that it's your... I hear you.
Not that it's your...
Area to comment on Seth, but I I don't know did you hear the first hour per chance? I didn't art
I was all right. Well. I went on a rant. I'm pretty angry You know the Bush administration is using this energy
shortage To count the need for going up and drilling in an war and
getting by 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?
That makes me angry.
Yeah, well, looking at it this way...
I mean, the sun hits the earth with about, I don't know, it's about a kilowatt per square meter, kilowatt per square yard.
Right?
It's hitting us every day.
I know.
We don't do much with it.
We just use it to heat up the place.
Well, I've got solar power here and wind power 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.
Well, that's true.
The crisis is only at the few percent level.
I mean, you know, it isn't that we need twice as much power as we have.
We need, you know, a few percent more, five percent more, ten percent more.
Yeah, these people are clueless.
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, twenty, twenty-five 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 have... they're scientifically pure.
And I've always looked at satellite dishes and sort of felt a love.
You share that?
Well, I can't say I've had many romantic feelings towards satellites.
Not at all.
But, you know, they're kind of the tools of the trade for the biz I'm in.
Yeah, but they're so pure.
Well, they're pure.
And you look at something the size of Arecibo, which takes it even a step further and has many focal points.
And you can look at many parts of the dish and it's even better.
It is.
It's very good.
In fact, you know, that thing is huge.
I, 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'd be like 1800 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 2 millimeters, which is better than a tenth of an inch.
You hear that, folks?
For something that size?
And they make, of course, they make smaller dishes accurate to even greater I don't want that in my yard!
House, incredibly accurate, a small aluminum spun ten foot dish, boy there's something
else.
Anyway, enough, it's not actual romantic feelings Seth, it's just sort of a technical love for
something that's so perfect.
It's fun to look at, I like things that are aesthetically pleasing, a lot of people look
at a dish and they go, I don't want that in my yard, I love them.
Well it sounds right to me, you know, just to follow up a little bit on that energy problem
and 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 know you don't produce any waste
Yeah, but here's the problem.
How do you get it back to Earth?
You microwave it back to Earth, right?
That's right.
Yeah, but did you read Sunstroke?
Well, no.
But you're worried about that beam coming back down?
Well, yeah.
Now, you would think... Now, obviously, the beam is going to contain a lot of power, right?
In the microwave signals.
Yeah, it's going to have a lot of power.
That's right.
You don't want to cook too many birds, let alone any aircraft.
Well, but forget about that for a second.
You could keep the aircraft away and, you know, tell with the birds.
The point is, what if the satellite should drift in orbit?
Just a little bit.
Well, the way they've thought of doing it, I mean, that's the point.
I mean, it just sort of drifts over, you know, wherever you live.
Yeah, you'd start cooking things on the ground.
Well, that's right.
And that could be a real downer your whole day to have yourself cook.
But the way they had figured this thing out is you send it down in a beam, all right, but it's a really broad beam.
So you're spreading that energy out over so much real estate that even if it, you know, swings over downtown Los Angeles, Nobody even feels a thing.
So, I think it's possible.
It's certainly worth looking at.
It's always been hung up on the cost of launching all this stuff.
But, you know, it does have advantages.
Well, as the price of power goes up, a lot of things that weren't practical before are suddenly going to be real practical.
Absolutely.
I just, I just, I'm angry at the administration for talking about, you know, they're using it just for more, maybe we do need to drill, maybe we do need more coal usage in the short term, but doggone it, not even a word about alternative energy.
Makes me angry.
Yeah, yeah, I can understand.
The problem is, you know, alternative energy is, it's difficult because it requires individual initiative.
And, you know, that's a hard thing to get going.
It's much easier to put a lot of money behind it.
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.
Yep.
Well, it's understandable.
It's not desirable, but understandable.
Well, I'm not sure it's forgivable.
Anyway, listen.
How long were you down in Puerto Rico?
Well, I was there for just under two weeks.
The experiment ran for a little longer.
It ran for a little over three weeks.
So I wasn't there for the entire period, but most of it.
Did we find aliens?
We did not.
The bottom line is the aliens have remained coy.
I have to say there were a couple of, you know, momentary, a couple of star systems there that for a while looked kind of interesting.
We even got even moderately excited one night, but it turned out to be a One of our own satellites, and that's usually the case whenever we get excited.
Well, you've just got to be patient, but I think, actually, I'm willing to make a prediction about when we will succeed.
All right, we'll get to that.
But you said we found one of our own satellites.
What did you begin to see?
Some sort of repetitive, obviously, Uh, intelligent transmission, is that what tripped the bells down there?
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.
Right.
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.
Uh, you may recall our system down there has 56 million channels.
It's actually 28 million channels on the dial, but 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 the only speakers in the observing room there are connected to the audio system.
and uh... they're mostly palpable playing uh... celtic rap cities or a how can you
do that i mean to rely on computers completely 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 really
or that's uh... 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 sound's all about.
It's something that's changing thousands of times a second, right?
Mm-hmm.
In order to build up the sensitivity of a SETI receiver, we don't do that.
We average the signal over seconds or minutes.
I think it's pretty much like taking a time exposure with your camera.
You know, you leave the shutter open longer, and you know, if you take a picture of the city at night, then you see the fainter lights and all that.
But, the lights that are flashing on and on, or you know, 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 signal's a thin white line coming down the screen.
Right.
Maybe changing frequency, and in fact they do change frequency.
Uh, particularly if they're satellites, because they're moving overhead, and that means...
There's what's called a Doppler shift.
They're motioned past us.
I assume that you guys have all of the Clark Belt stuff.
You don't make mistakes in that area.
I mean, they're all fixed relative to Earth, so you don't stumble across those, do you?
Well, things that are fixed, no.
We make a big inventory of all the fixed sources the first day or two that we come.
So you get those out of the way right away?
We get those out of the way.
We have, as I say, big...
So the only one really that could fool you would be one of the orbiters, and that's apparently what you got, huh?
Yeah.
And there are a lot of those.
There are a lot of them.
Oh, tons of them.
GPS guys go by.
Oh, yeah.
And there's all sorts of stuff.
And, you know, people say, well, I mean, you know, what about the secret military satellites?
Well, they're going by, too.
Those two, yes.
Yeah, they go by, too.
But, you know, we don't care much about what they're saying.
We don't even know what they're saying.
It's all smeared out.
But we do know.
May I ask a question?
Mm-hmm.
By percentage, Seth, you would know this and maybe nobody else would who could tell me,
by percentage, how many secret military satellites are up there versus polar orbiters that we
know of, the NOAA satellites or the GPSs or whatever?
What percentage of them are secret military satellites?
You must know that.
No, I don't know that, Art.
That's a secret.
I don't know.
Yes, Seth, you have to know that.
No, Art, I wish I did know, but... You do know, Seth.
There's no way you could not know.
No, they all look the same to us.
They're like cats in the dark.
We can't tell the light ones from the dark ones.
Yeah, but you've got to identify in some way, identify them.
Well, what we do is we simply say, hey, look.
Here's a satellite coming over.
What do we know about it?
All we know about it is where it is on the dial.
That's all we know.
In fact... Yeah, but you have the orbital information of NOAA satellites.
You have the orbital information of GPS satellites.
Yeah.
In the future, we'll use that information.
In fact, we don't use that orbital information.
We don't know what orbits they have.
All we know is that we have seen, at this spot on the dial, interference.
Okay.
It's just a signal.
I mean, you can imagine sitting there with your, your, your ham rig tuning the dial.
Yeah.
And you know, two nights in a row at, uh, you know, 14, 25, uh, megahertz on the dial, you, you run into this signal, right?
You know that that's some sort of transmitter that's causing you some QRM, some, uh, you know, some interference.
And so you just write that down in your log book and you say, this frequency is, has got interference.
And you don't know what it is.
It could be a military satellite.
It could be the diathermy machine.
I mean, you know, whatever it is.
Yeah, I don't know if this analogy works, though, because I can listen, and I can pretty much tell you what it is I'm hearing, as I mentioned earlier.
I can tell you it's packet, or it's some form of data, or whatever.
I can identify that, because I'm listening to it.
Right.
Yeah, but again, we don't listen to it.
All we know is that it's at this spot on the dial.
And that's just about all we know.
In fact, that's really all that we know.
Well, then how do you nail it down as a satellite?
Well, what happens, the way we nail those things down, and, you know, 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.
Right, and that'd fool you.
That could fool you.
Yeah, that's just the kind of thing we're looking for.
Right.
To us, the signal of, you know, another society a hundred light years away, OK?
Yes.
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 Jodrell Bank, England, where our man, having just returned from a bad pub dinner, is manning that telescope, OK?
And if he can't find it in England, then you can say, well, whatever it is, it's not E.T.
Because, you know, E.T.
signals 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.
Right.
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, it 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.
And that's a really good test.
That's, you know, that's the Just about the best test we have.
So you never identify satellites.
You just say satellite.
Yep.
Goodbye.
That's it.
All right.
Hold on, Seth.
Thought I was gonna 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?
That's interesting.
Welcome back, Seth.
It's good to be back.
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, albeit short-lived, excitement.
You could do that, right?
Well, but this telescope, with the one down in Puerto Rico, that'd be pretty tough.
I mean, you have to keep in mind, this is a big thing.
It's a thousand feet across.
You can't just sort of tilt it and point it at any place in the sky.
You're limited to... No, but you do have a margin of area you can look at.
You're not limited to one single with that telescope while you can move the low-noise amplifier and look around a little bit, right?
Absolutely.
No, you can do that.
But, you know, to try and follow satellites with it would be a bit like asking, you know, the Keck telescope or the Palomar telescope to follow meteors across the sky.
I mean, they're just, you know, 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 for SETI, 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.
Right.
And we'll take measures to get rid of it.
Right.
And so those people then would know what percentage of satellites are not identifiable.
Hence, what percentage of satellites would be secret military satellites?
Well, it's true.
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.
Since Fred and Charlotte are not launching satellites, why it's just, you know, China, Russia, America, I guess the Japanese with a few, but I mean, you know, it's pretty well known what's up there.
Right, yeah.
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, if you wanted to build something in your backyard that could do that sort of work,
you probably could do that. But see, there's a big difference.
If you wanted to devote your life to that madness, it could be a hobby.
And if you're good enough to do that, probably you ought to just join the military and get
better pay for doing it for them. So I don't know.
Oh, but... but...
But if you knew how many military satellites were up there, could you tell us?
Yeah, I don't know why I couldn't tell you.
You see, it isn't how many that are up there that's really so interesting.
What's interesting is... What they're doing.
What they're doing.
I know.
And you know, that's much more difficult.
We all know they're looking at us in the bathroom.
Well, gee, I sure hope not, but... Yeah, what you really want to know is what sort of information are they collecting, and that's obviously a much trickier thing.
It's one thing to see somebody in the crowd with a camera.
It's something else to figure out what the heck he's doing with that information.
Of course.
All right, well, anyway, leaving that out.
Seth, You've been looking for a long time.
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.
A lot of headlines about that lately.
What do you know?
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
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.
You know, we've been doing these radio experiments now for 41 years.
Right.
And, you know, a lot of people 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'll be coming online in four or five years, which I really think is going to do it for us.
And, you know, we can talk about that.
What is Optical SETI?
Optical SETI is where instead of looking for, you know, 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 Corot, he was kind of a polymath.
He was a guy who was both scientifically literate and he also wrote poetry.
He was this 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, you know, there'd be somebody on Mars 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.
Sure.
And they would recognize this as some sort of signal from the Europeans.
You know, they're sending us pictures 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 you know trenches
of all sorts of geometric 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 got these burning
signals that uh you know our buddies on the moon or mars can see well
Well, I suppose if there were buddies on the moon, they wouldn't have any trouble seeing it, for sure.
Well, that's right, actually.
That's quite right.
Well, we don't have buddies on the moon.
We're debating about buddies on Mars.
Lately, by the way.
Have you heard some of the things that Arthur C. Clarke has been saying?
Well, I actually, believe it or not, I had a very short conversation with Arthur C. Clarke about two weeks ago.
Oh, you did?
Well, yes.
It was in connection with a conference we had here in California, and we got him on the phone.
Well, sir, Arthur has been making some incredible statements about what he calls large life on Mars.
And now it's hard to know whether he means past or present.
Well, it sounds like he means present.
He's almost in a fight with NASA about it all.
What's going on?
Do you know anything about that?
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.
Yeah.
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 rather... Well, I can help you out with the photos.
Well, OK.
I should check them out.
But I have a feeling, you know, they're going to be launching a new 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 ruddy buddy right now.
Yeah, speaking of the Surveyor, let me just stop you one second.
I don't know if you're up on the breaking news or not.
Are you up on the news about the Polar Lander?
Tell me.
A spy agency, NEMA, is saying that they have located the Mars Polar Lander that supposedly was lost.
They say they found it intact, standing on its little legs.
That'd be remarkable.
Um, yeah, yeah.
It certainly would.
That's what they claim.
That's an understatement.
With imagery.
Now, how could they have imagery so good?
If they can see its little legs, then they know damn well they found it.
Yeah.
Because they would see its little body much better.
Exactly.
And that makes me a little bit doubtful because the best camera we've got on Mars right now Is the Mars Global Surveyor, when I say best, you know the one... Well, it's not the only one that's orbiting the planet right now, but that thing... Shouldn't resolve something that small.
It can't resolve something that small.
It can resolve something which is on the order of, you know, 10, 15 feet in size.
So it would have a hard time seeing the spacecraft, let alone its spindly little appendages there.
I think that that's a tough claim to believe.
Well, they're making the claim they are... It's NEMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
And they're sort of a conglomeration of many agencies and apparently they've had their best people on it now for 14 or 15 months to quote have some fun and they're claiming they found it.
Well, that would be really interesting.
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.
No, they talk mostly about splat.
Yes, exactly.
That might make a bigger spot to see.
I don't know.
So, this is really strange stuff, but that's breaking news tonight.
I thought you'd be interested.
I am.
Anyway, optical SETI.
Now, obviously, we're not light and fires, except for the ones down in the rainforest.
Exactly.
I mean, Saddam Hussein has tried a little bit of optical SETI by lighting fires in Kuwait.
That's right.
What are we really looking for in the way of flashing lights?
Are you talking about lasers, for example?
Exactly what we're talking about.
Lasers, you know, are a fairly recent invention, and that's probably why We're doing more radio SETI, perhaps, than optical SETI.
Well, we are doing more radio SETI.
That may just be an historical accident.
We invented radio before we invented lasers.
Yes, yes.
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 laser is really designed for, you know, thermonuclear fusion experiments.
We try and, you know, 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.
It's powerful.
1,000 trillion watts.
But it's only on for a trillionth of a second, you see.
Yes.
So if you only flashed it once a second, it would only take on average, you know, a kilowatt.
I mean, it wouldn't be much more than your refrigerator and TV put together or something.
Okay, that thing would travel at the speed of light away from the planet and practically, Seth, how far would it go?
Well, you could imagine taking that big laser and aiming it at any nearby star.
Forget about aiming it at this, you know, 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, you know, not continuously.
Just in a flash.
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.
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 flashes, 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, a hundred pulses to
every star system that's around them. Well, let me ask you this. An optical shot of the type
you're talking about, how efficiently would that travel compared to radio?
Well, it would be, you know, it goes at the speed of light.
That's 0.1, so it's equally fast.
Yes.
And they all go at the same speed.
Now, that's why I'm asking about efficiency in terms of seeability or contactability or however you want to phrase it.
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?
Yes.
Then light works just fine.
If you talk about bigger distances, then the dust between stars begins to, you know, it's like a haze.
Diffuse the light.
Yeah, begins to scatter the light.
That isn't so good, but you can beat that rap by using infrared light.
You know that, you know, infrared goggles will help you see uh... you know all your logo is mhm
it's the same idea so you could just extend this the idea a little bit
farther from ordinary light visible like the kind of your eyes are
sensitive to to infrared
and so you could use this kind of a scheme for communication right across the galaxy
i mean it would work to any of our uh...
our neighbors in space would it be
what would it be a more efficient way uh... close in than radio.
Would it be more likely to be seen?
I'm trying to stand back from this and see about the, uh, why we would want to be an advocate of looking at light versus radio.
I think that there's 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.
So you could modulate the laser then, right?
Yeah.
And send a great deal of information down it.
In principle, you could put a lot of info down that kind of a pipe.
And so maybe from the alien's 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 a few minutes.
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 that 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 the 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, pointed at a whole bunch of nearby stars and see if anybody's trying to ping us.
How narrow would the light beam be versus a radio signal?
Well, that's a good point, actually, Art, because As anybody who has a laser pointer knows, those beams can be pretty darn narrow.
You betcha.
Even for something you can just hold in your hand, you can imagine 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.
Right, precisely.
Yeah, and that's both good news and bad news.
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 a hundred light years away, because that beam is nice and narrow.
The bad news is, though, you're not broadcasting.
You're just sending an email to a single recipient, almost.
Exactly.
That's right.
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 uh you you know you 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 gets there the stars move it's moved right
yes you got to lead it like you lead a duck all right so somebody would
almost have to want to be signaling us they would almost have to
want that or signal our star system right yeah i think you're right either
that Or they say, well, look, you know, why don't we just ping the nearest 1,000 or 10,000 stars?
Well, you've been looking for what, 45 years, did you say?
Well, SETI's been done for 41 years.
41 years, all right.
One would assume that you've looked at the most likely prospects by now.
We've looked at the closer, more likely prospects.
We've looked at the close ones.
So now, I guess the argument is, let's look at those same close, likely ones, but with light instead of radio.
That's one thing to do, and that's one thing that's being done.
Are you comfortable with spending money on that project, or do you think that it might be a waste of time?
Well, it's, you know, it's a new technology, it's a new approach, and like all new approaches, they're very inexpensive when you get started.
The first things are very easy.
Yes.
Right?
I mean, you know, you compare the cost of... If it came down to where the budget goes, Well, well, Optical SETI, I think you have to spend some money on Optical SETI.
Absolutely.
All right, hold on, Seth.
We're at the top of the hour.
We'll pick up on this when we get back.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Seth Shostak is here from SETI.
Hey, light, look at me.
I can see the real sky.
When you shook me, took me out of my world I woke up, suddenly I just woke up
With a heart like me When you smiled and looked back, you left a beautiful heart
But when you got it in that love, you don't take care of it Once again, here is Seth Shostak.
Seth, I guess what I was trying to ask is, are there two... is there a schism now at all in SETI?
Are those 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?
No, I don't think there's any schism.
And in fact, if you look at the people who are doing the optical SETI experiments these days, they're all people who are also doing radio experiments.
So I guess, you know, they've got multiple personalities.
But the SETI Institute, where I work, as you know, has this world's most sensitive radio search.
But we're also gearing up an optical experiment up here at Lick Observatory, which is not too far from where I'm speaking from.
It's down here in the south.
Yes.
Yes, I know.
So the money is tight.
And in fact, that's the telescope used by some astronomers in San Francisco to find all these planets around other
stars.
It's a pretty famous observatory, the Lick Observatory.
But anyhow, no, I don't think there's a schism.
There's always a money problem, of course, because all study in this country, as you know, is funded by private
donation.
Yes. Yes, I know. So the money is tight.
The money is tight, and you have scarce resources, and now you have more experiments.
So that's a problem.
All right.
And now here's somebody, I guess we're going to get into a little bit of this aspect of it.
Arthur in Houston, Texas says, if aliens know of our existence and they may, I think we all agree they're out there somewhere, Seth.
I think you believe that too, don't you?
Oh, absolutely.
I wouldn't do this otherwise.
And they decide they don't want to be discovered by us.
Could they reasonably take steps with technology not very far beyond ours to see to it that we don't find out about them?
I think they probably could.
You think about it.
I mean, what makes us visible?
You know, how are we broadcasting our presence?
Oh, we're a wideband trash noise.
I mean, we're just making all kinds of noise from this planet.
Well, that doesn't sound very complimentary.
But it is true.
It is.
And in fact, you can work it out.
You know, we've been broadcasting high-powered television signals into space now for, what, 40, 50 years at least.
And that's a simple calculation here.
That means that those early episodes of I Love Lucy are washing over a new star system.
How far away is Alpha Centauri?
Oh, that's about four and a half light years.
Four and a half light years.
So, if we were on Alpha Centauri with a decent-sized dish, And we were pointed our way, back toward us right now?
Mm-hmm.
What would we be getting?
Mostly, you'd be getting military radar.
I mean, that would be the most obvious signal.
And so that would tell you something about us.
But it would be absolutely obvious, wouldn't it?
Military radar would be obvious enough to be regarded as intelligently sourced.
Yep.
Yep, no doubt about it.
I mean, not terribly interesting.
It's not like poetry.
What about TV?
be the strongest obvious signal that there's something down here that knows the laws of
physics.
What about TV?
TV's harder, but there's a lot more of it.
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.
You know, the Earth is rotated just so that New York's on the horizon.
Yes.
Television is aimed at the horizon because, you know, I mean, that's where all your viewers are, of course.
So suddenly you see the Jay Leno Show or something like that coming at you.
Well, you'd get the sync noise anyway.
You'd get, yeah, you'd get the carriers, you'd get, you know, some part of that signal.
Okay, well the earth continues to rotate you don't know about that, but the earth continues to rotate
But then an hour later you're getting it out of Chicago and then an hour later
You're getting it out of you know the Denver area whatever now later
You're getting it out of San Francisco and all the entire rotation there is always there are always a few TV
Transmitters aimed your way, so you know we're broadcasting everywhere all the time with television
Or, uh, how about 100,000 watt Class C FM stations?
Yeah, also.
FM is also good.
Now, AM's not quite so good because, you know, it bounces back from the ionosphere.
Right.
I know, but everything VHF and up pretty much would be a mass jumble of noise four light years away.
That's right.
That's right.
But, you know, the most powerful signals are, indeed, those radars.
And television, although it would take a pretty, you know, it would take maybe a thousand acres of rooftop yaggies to 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 a thousand 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 a 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.
Uh-huh.
And in another 400 years, by the way, it'll be about one an hour.
OK, so then, if there was life that wished to be contacted, or at least was even vaguely looking close in, they would have found us by now, huh?
You have to figure out how many stars have actually been exposed to this.
I mean, it's one a day now, but it didn't always used to be one a day.
The rate's going up as that ball of information is spreading out into space.
Right.
And the total number of stars that have been reached by all this trashy noise, as you call it, is, you know, it's on the order of a thousand stars or maybe two thousand stars.
And, you know, that's actually not such a big number.
No.
If you want to find ET.
I think the answer to Arthur's question, however, is slightly different.
I mean, it's true that a civilization like ours is making noise, but, you know, in another 10 or 20 years, we probably won't have those big TV transmitters.
It'll be coming in on that fiber optic that runs into the side of your house.
Yep.
And so those big transmitters at the outskirts of town... Satellites will replace things, yes.
That's right.
No, it's true.
And so a civilization like that might keep a pretty low profile.
So, in other words, the...
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?
If they follow our path of development, and you know, maybe ours is typical, yes.
The bottom line there is that maybe they're only noisy for 100 years, 200 years, or even less.
And in a sense, you could say that's kind of bad news for SETI.
Yes.
Because maybe Arthur's only touched the tip of the iceberg there.
Maybe the real problem is that most civilizations don't make very much noise.
And maybe a lot of them don't make any at all.
Maybe they develop along totally different lines and they don't develop technologically as we have.
That's always a question.
I mean, if you have an intelligent species on some planet somewhere, are they going to develop radio?
And, you know, it depends on what you call intelligent.
I mean, dolphins are claimed to be pretty smart.
Right.
Although, as I say, I've never found any working crossword puzzles or anything like that.
But, you know, those guys are never going to invent radio.
They're just not going to do it.
To begin with, those flippers aren't very good at wielding a soldering iron.
It's just not going to happen.
So intelligence like that, you can forget it.
You're not going to detect those guys.
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, there are 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, you know, your good health.
A comet comes in and smashes into your planet, you know, that's a bummer.
Yeah, it's a day-ruiner.
Yeah, exactly. So you have some big radars perhaps for that.
And maybe you just have GPS systems for your part of the galaxy that are broadcasting all the time.
I mean there are lots of possibilities and I think we're probably not capable of thinking of all the good ones.
All right we're back to the radio search for a moment.
At it for 40 plus years now.
How much of the sky In that time, have we surveyed?
I realize that in later years, with the new equipment you've got, you've covered a lot more territory.
I'm sure it's a gigantic jump you've made, but I mean, what percentage have we looked at so far, of likely prospects?
Well, it depends on what... I don't mean to equivocate here, but on the one hand, we've looked at the whole sky, and on the other hand, we've looked at very little of the sky, and that sounds a little bit...
You know, incompatible, but it's sort of like doing a reconnaissance of... Well, make believe I'm a guy with millions and maybe even a billion dollars that I have that I could conceivably hand to SETI in a big check with photographers to take pictures.
But just before I give you the check, I want to ask, look, what are you going to do with this?
And you've been looking for 40 plus years.
How is this going to help?
Can you do what you have not done up until now?
I'd ask all kinds of questions.
What are the prospects?
Have you really looked at most of it already?
If so, I'm not going to give you the money.
If you're telling me you've still got most of it to look at, then I might be inclined to hand you that money.
What argument would you make to get the money?
I would say that we have indeed only scratched the surface, but that money would allow us to start really marring that furniture.
You could, you know, if you're looking for something at the beach, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.
You know, you do one star in 12 hours.
I mean, that's pretty slow going.
Yes, it is.
And that means we've done a couple of hundred.
We've done about 500 since we began this experiment five years ago.
But with these new technologies, you could be doing 3, 10, maybe even 50 stars at once.
You might be able to cover the whole chunk of dial that you want to cover, the whole
bandwidth that's interesting to you in five minutes.
And you want a telescope that you can use 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Add all that together and a telescope like that could, in fact, observe stars 100 or
a thousand times faster than what we're doing now.
That money could allow you to do reconnaissance, not of a few hundred stars over a couple of
years, but a few million stars.
And I think that's the kind of effort you've got to put into this.
What are the probabilities?
That there is life, and I know they can start to crunch the numbers because they're finding planets now to be fairly common, or more common than we thought, around stars.
And so you can begin to compute the odds of Earth-like planets, and then I suppose you can imagine civilization.
I don't know how you crunch that number, whether there would be intelligent life that would develop or not.
But you can start to crunch the numbers a little bit.
What are the probabilities that there is life out there at a detectable range for us?
Well, if you don't care about the life being smart... Well, smart enough to get a signal into the air.
Okay, you're talking about intelligent life.
I was going to say, if we're willing to accept stupid life, then, you know, we're probably going to find it on Mars.
Well, let's reject stupid life for the argument here.
Okay.
If you're talking intelligent life, There are a whole bunch of things you need.
Of course, you need that planet that's going to spawn a little bit of biology.
Yes.
And, you know, I'm not at all pessimistic about that.
Planets seem to be a dime a dozen.
Now, you have to keep in mind that although they found well over 50 planets now around other stars, those planets are all pretty much pathological.
Those planets are in very peculiar orbits, or they're giant planets that are Kind of hugging their stars.
Well, yeah, I know, but they're giant because they can only find the giant ones right now.
But if there are giant planets, there's probably small ones, too.
I think there are.
I think there are.
But we don't know.
We don't actually know that.
I mean, there's Jupiters and there's Earth, right?
Right, exactly.
And to me, it's indeed like, you know, checking Africa from 10,000 feet.
You'd see the elephants, but you wouldn't see the field mice.
But the field mice are there and there are a lot more of them than there are elephants.
That's right.
I'm with you on that.
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 process we call biology?
Yes.
All right.
You know, it certainly didn't take life very long to get started on Earth.
There's 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, you know, smart life?
Right.
And that's very uncertain.
You know, people really get into fights about that.
Because... They sure do.
Yeah, you know, nature's not interested in intelligence.
Nature's only interested in survival.
It could be... It could be none, couldn't it?
It could be.
That's possible, and there's some, you know, evolutionary biologists who would make that argument.
They'd say, look, I mean, just take very simple things.
65 million years ago, you know, 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, you know, 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, that we won't know the answer to that till we find it.
And there's no way to really crunch the numbers on this one.
Once you get to the question of intelligence, you're off into Zulu land, right?
No, there's no way to predict.
Well, it doesn't seem to be.
Although, you know, it doesn't seem to stop people from trying.
And their 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, you know, 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.
Unfortunately, though, you know, that doesn't mean they're not smart.
It actually doesn't mean... Dolphins may have intelligence at a level that we simply don't have any reference point for.
Well, that's a point that she makes.
She says exactly that.
And the way the biologists measure intelligence, in fact, is they essentially weigh the brain 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.
Yes.
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, what, white-sided dolphins or something, Pacific plank dolphins,
some sort of dolphins.
And then, you know, and there are...
Dolphins would be number two, huh?
So maybe they are intelligent and maybe they don't really care or want to talk to us or
have any communication with us.
Listen, hold on, we're at the bottom of the hour, alright?
I'll be here.
Alright, good.
Maybe the dolphins are all saying, Why would we want to talk to them?
We occasionally save a swimmer, but otherwise they're useless beings.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
and 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?
Yeah, well, they're not communicative life, yeah.
That's right, and you mentioned the fact that, well, alright, dolphin brains may be big, and they may be intelligent in ways that we don't understand.
I mean, they're intelligent, but it's a different kind of intelligence.
Yes.
And, uh, you know, maybe that's, that's our problem.
Maybe the extraterrestrials are sort of like dolphins, not that they live underwater, but that their intelligence is a little bit different.
On the other hand, I got to say that, you know, the dolphins do share some, uh, some similarities to humans.
Uh, they, they, you know, they're social animals.
Humans are social animals.
That's right.
Most of us, uh, they have a, you know, they spend a long time growing up.
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.
We've already mentioned the fact that they occasionally will save a diver, and they have
a long lifespan.
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.
But still from SETI's point of view, dumb life.
Dumb life?
Yeah, dumb life.
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?
Well, maybe we're not all that bright, and maybe to get to the next level, we need another rock.
Well, I've heard that argued.
I mean, some people say, you know, we're lucky we're not getting these rocks all the time.
Well, what the hey, maybe we need more rocks.
More rocks.
Maybe Jupiter would be, it would be, we'd be better off if Jupiter were a little smaller so it didn't deflect all those incoming rocks.
Yeah, but who's to say, rock or not, evolution would not have eventually put, you know, humans here.
Well, one thing that suggests that it probably would... They'd have been fighting with dinosaurs, but...
Yeah, but you know, if you had arrived on this planet two million years ago, this is a point made by this 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.
I mean, Homo erectus becoming Homo habilis, whatever.
They weren't as smart as the dolphins.
Not by this measure, anyhow.
Right.
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 gonna, you know, take over this planet.
Didn't actually work that way, but, you know, it seems that intelligence develops along lots of different lines here.
Dogs and cats, you know, 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, you know, the mammals Many of the mammals and, you know, 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.
Well, then maybe eventually we'll hear it.
And speaking of hearing it, um, there's, you know, 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?
We could, yeah.
Absolutely, it's the best spot.
I mean... I mean, they even have big craters up there where you could build an Arecibo-like thing.
Well, I've seen drawings where they've got people, you know, 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, sorry, he found a crater.
It'd 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 backside.
I mean, that would work.
But you've got to get the signals back to Earth somehow.
It's no good having the telescope there.
You've got to get the information back to Earth.
Oh, you just put something orbiting the Moon.
Yeah, well, but then you've got to have a radio link to that thing orbiting the Moon.
That's right.
Yeah, you could do that, 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 there you have another.
And there you have it.
Yeah, then you have an antenna that just relays that data back to Earth.
So, he found a crater, it's called Saha, S-A-H-A, Saha Crater, just beyond the edge of the Moon, and he says that's the place to build this telescope.
How much better would that be?
Well, you know, it's hard to sort of quantify that.
If you erased all of the interference, Earth-generated interference, you're no longer Encumbered by atmosphere or ionosphere or anything.
I mean, it's all gone.
All you're hearing is what's out there.
Yep.
Yep.
That's absolutely right.
And, uh, you know, this, this interference problem, it's pretty awful now and it's getting worse.
It's 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.
That 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 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 take the rocket and the bolted together thing and drop it via tethers down into this
crater and just sort of lay the whole thing out from the air.
That's right.
Well, the air, you know, from the space above the moon.
That's right.
And he figures he can do this for, you know, maybe a couple hundred million dollars.
We don't have rockets that can do this at the moment, but it's possible to do it.
It's mostly a money problem.
Alright, 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?
That's right, it was a three-minute message.
A three-minute message.
You gotta really be tuning the dial at the right time to pick that up.
Well, we could be sending a lot more than a three-minute message if we wanted to, right?
Right.
But we don't want to, I guess, right?
That seems to be the consensus.
And we don't want to, why?
Various reasons.
This comes up all the time.
People often ask, maybe we should be broadcasting, and indeed it's, you know, 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, you know, 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.
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.
Well, suppose that there's a... Let's just take the case of something close, off Centauri.
Tory. Okay. Yeah.
Yeah.
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 upstarts.
Look at that, would you?
Where they hadn't before, and send a fleet to dispatch us before we cause more trouble.
That is one of the worries, right?
That's a worry.
I'm not personally terribly worried about that, but, you know, It might be a small probability that anything so awful would actually happen.
Yeah, but that's why they're saying it's dangerous, though, isn't it?
Yeah, those who say it's dangerous, that's the reason.
They say, you know, you don't want to shout in the jungle, because all it may do is attract the predators.
That's right.
So, okay.
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... You've got to keep doing it.
You've 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... No, you're right.
We can't even keep California lit up.
Yeah, there you go.
So, you know, 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.
Right.
We could create something that would be a real Hey, here we are kind of signal.
We could create a real blast.
Yep.
We're working now on, we're getting closer to artificial intelligence.
In fact, the area you live in there is probably leading the way.
That's what they tell me.
Yep.
Getting close to artificial intelligence.
And is it not possible that a civilization hundreds of years, which is not very much ahead of ours, Would not be a biological civilization anymore.
It might be a civilization of machines.
I think that that's very possible.
I mean, if you look at the sorts of things that are going to happen to us in, you know, the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years, there are three things that strike me.
I think one of your guests, Michio Kaku, has, you know, written books on this by talking to a lot of people about what they think is going to happen in the next hundred 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, I think.
Which is a long time, of course.
Can you imagine going to the dentist for 8,000 years?
No.
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%.
Yeah, I suppose.
Yeah, no, I mean, that's just taking the number of people killed.
I mean, that's a very simple statistic.
And if you knew that you were going to definitely shorten your life by getting in your car, You probably wouldn't do it.
You probably wouldn't get in a plane either.
There's a whole bunch of things you wouldn't do.
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.
Yeah, well, maybe that might be the case.
But all I'm saying is that it might result in a very passive society.
But OK, forget the 8000 years.
That's not going to happen for a while.
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.
You know, what are the social consequences of that?
The third thing is this artificial intelligence.
Can really make a machine that can think, of course.
You know, there'll be a tremendously speedy evolution of that machine.
I mean, you'll use that machine to design a next generation machine.
Absolutely.
And the next generation of that.
And it's just like computers.
And pretty soon you've got machines that are, you know, far smarter than the entire human population.
Absolutely.
And so, since I think, obviously, that's going to be very uncomfortable for us.
Well, I guess what I'm saying is biology is Rather fragile compared to, oh I don't know, a hundred generations of artificial intelligence improving upon itself.
Yeah.
We would be considered very fragile indeed.
And not only fragile, but we're also very slow in improving.
Yes, yes indeed.
And a machine would be very fast.
So conceivably there would be machine societies out there, machine planets, machine Even areas of many planets have perhaps spread to many planets.
In other words, it could be that our first contact might be with machines that are running whatever it is.
And I wonder what their attitude about biologicals would be.
Maybe they wouldn't think of us in a really cheery way, Seth.
That's possible.
It's really tough to... I mean, I think you're right, Art, and I occasionally say this, I'm willing to bet anybody a cup of coffee that when we make that first contact via some SETI experimenter, maybe an astronomer will find something outside of a SETI experiment, 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.
It's very hard to figure out what a machine would find interesting about biology.
Yeah, it may be the way we regard, you know, bacteria.
I mean, they're worthy of... Well, I was going to be kinder and say perhaps the way we regard dolphins, you know.
I mean, they're there and they're interesting, but they're not intelligent in quite the same way we are.
And I stress that.
They may be very intelligent, just not the same way.
So a machine might sort of look right past us as Completely irrelevance.
Radio signal or no?
Yep, that's possible.
That's certainly possible.
Indeed, a few facts might be gathered just to put in the archives 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 billion years of biology, Then you can expect the biology to produce the machines and after that things really get interesting and that may be their attitude.
So, contact could be a pretty chancy thing.
Especially if it was fairly near contact, right?
Yes.
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 Uh, no, there are signals coming from Earth and not care one whit.
Yeah, that's, that's possible.
And, you know, people have suggested that maybe there are other ways.
That we could find something like that.
Maybe the machines are busy building, you know, huge construction projects.
Or maybe machines wouldn't care about us until we began to move into space.
Until we began to threaten their domain in some way.
Maybe when they started detecting nuclear detonations, the machines would say, uh-huh.
Hey, look at that.
They've got to be squished.
Something big like that.
We'll be right back, Seth.
Hold on.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
Let's see.
How far out would those nuclear explosions be now?
It'd be a ways out there, but not that far.
They could still be noticed, and they wouldn't be liked.
Okay, here is where it gets really interesting.
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.
That's right.
Well, the guys with the guns, I mean, the government kind of Shut them down, kind of took over the project.
Kind of, yeah.
Kind of did.
Now, movies are really, really close to real life, Seth.
If we go back in our history, and I'll just make this case the best I can, go back, say, to Tesla's death.
What happened?
They ran in, and they grabbed all of Tesla's stuff and his plans and schematics and ideas, and they took them away, and we haven't seen them since.
That's what they did when Tesla died.
Now, when it comes to other important national secrets, they go to all kinds of lengths to see to it that we don't find out about these things.
I mean, our government thrives on secrecy.
Our government is built on secrecy.
I mean, secrets are almost the coin of the realm in our government.
You disagree with that?
Well, you know, I think it's a matter of degree.
I'm not going to disagree with you yet.
You know where I'm taking you, right?
Well, I have some idea.
Yeah, some idea, right.
But it's true.
Secrets are the coin of the realm in the government.
You have different levels of clearance for information that you can have and the whole damn thing is built around secrets.
And the excuse is defense or, you know, and some of it's absolutely proper.
But it's all secret.
So, if we received a signal, I agree that you would do your checks with England and, you know, elsewhere.
And once it was confirmed that we really were getting a signal, the clamps would come down big time and real fast.
That's what I think.
And I think that Seth wouldn't come on the Art Bell Show and say, oh my God, we found it.
Now, you have argument for that.
Well, yeah, Art, this is an area where you and I have... Disagreed?
We have crosswords on this.
Yes.
And I will crosswords with you again on it because... Yeah, let's rock.
Okay, I don't see it happening that way.
And the reason, maybe it's naivete, but I don't think so because we do, as you know, we do occasionally get false alarms that even get us excited.
Right.
This last run, I have to say that for, you know, 15 minutes there was a signal that got everybody in the control room excited and happened to be A moment when there were a lot of visitors in the control room.
Really?
Yeah, well, we get a lot of visitors down there.
That's not something we've talked about much.
But, you know, we're not there too often.
We're there for three weeks in the spring and three weeks in the fall.
So anybody who's interested in SETI, you know, just loves to come on down there.
By the way, I'm dying to come down.
So my wife and I are coming to Puerto Rico.
We're going to come to Puerto Rico and we're going.
I presume we can get in and see the telescope.
Well, anybody can go to the Telethon.
There's a big visitor center.
But, you know, I'd like to have you come down there when we're doing the experiment.
I think that would be a lot of fun.
You can sort of get a behind-the-scenes tour, but, you know, it's a national facility.
Can I crawl up to the LNA and hang off and go Yahoo?
They did it in the movie GoldenEye.
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 soundstage.
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 the 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 are 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.
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.
And you guys suddenly got real busy.
Yeah, and everybody got really busy.
These people were sort of standing around saying, hey, look, you said that we could come in and do these interviews.
They said, well, actually, we got something going here right now.
Did you ever see the old movie China Syndrome with Jane Fonda?
I think it was.
Oh, the big meltdown.
Yeah, the big meltdown.
Remember that?
Yeah.
Well, there were visitors up in the gallery when the dials started going crazy and they began to have their problem.
Yeah.
But those visitors were out of there real fast.
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 It's something that happens very quickly.
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 immediately the door busts open.
There's some guys there that you've never heard of before coming in and telling you to shut it all down.
But it wouldn't be that long, Seth.
I mean, you told me yourself, 15 minutes of excitement.
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?
It would only be a matter of hours, right?
No, actually it'd be longer.
How long?
Well, to begin with, if you're doing this down at Arecibo, because Arecibo's 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.
Yes.
Okay, so you've been following this dumb star up there and suddenly you get a signal from it.
Right.
Okay, you pick it up and you hit the right frequency and you say, my God, hey, there's a signal here.
All right, well, it takes you ten minutes to confirm that with the second telescope in England.
All right, and now you say, well, it's beginning to look good.
Now, this happens.
That sort of scenario, up to that point, happens a couple of times a night.
So hardly anybody's paying any attention at that point.
But then, more tests are made, and it's beginning to look better.
Now you're beginning to pay attention, but within an hour, or something like that, that star is out of your range.
Now what do you do?
Do you call up the newspapers and say, you know, we're good to go on the Nobel Prize?
No, no, no, no.
You call another...
Maybe you call somebody with a radio telescope that moves.
Well, in fact, at that point, you probably wouldn't.
What you'd say is, well, this is the most interesting thing we've ever seen, but we're going to wait until tomorrow, you know, until 24 hours, the Earth rotates, and that star comes back into your field of view and check it out again.
All right, let's say it comes back and there it is again.
Okay, it comes back, it's there, now you're following it for the full two hours.
Right.
And you've tried every conceivable test you can think of.
Yes.
This is now day two and you say, you know, this fills the bill.
This looks like a winner.
What you do then is just what you say.
You pick up the phone.
You call up somebody at another radio telescope 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.
Cockpit error here at Arecibo.
Cockpit error, right.
Pilot error.
Okay, so they go to work and they bolt on the right receiver and they tune it up and, you know, 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 begin to think this is for real.
But I can assure you that 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.
and you know any interesting even if the media was sitting right there
an era CBO and they they sat there through your confirmation of a deployment where you're
calling somebody else
rather 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 well but the thing is
I mean you might have that but you know who that guy gonna be down there and in
in the jungle of Puerto Rico.
I mean, they don't know anything about this, right?
You're an hour and a half from San Juan.
Well, who would be the first person you'd call?
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.
You tell me.
Yeah, but there is a protocol.
Sure there is.
So who do you call?
Yeah, well, what it says, I have to say, I have to preface this by saying that this protocol is, it's kind of a gentleman's agreement.
I mean, there's no force of law here.
It's just that everybody who does this experiment said, well, we ought to have some sort of, you know, sort of Boy Scouts handbook about what to do here.
That's right.
Okay.
And what it says to do is you call First off, you tell all the astronomers in the world, because this star is moving around.
We can only follow it for two hours through a seaboat.
You want anybody with an instrument that can measure something coming from the star to get on the stick and do that.
OK?
So that's the first thing you do.
We would probably tell our donors as a courtesy.
So that's our major donors.
There's maybe a half dozen people there.
OK?
Just a personal favor, they paid for the experiment.
We're going to let them know, just as Galileo let the Medellin... Now, I don't want you to name your donors, but... I'll do that.
Oh, really?
There's nothing stupid about that.
Go ahead, then.
The major donors for the SETI Institute's projects are Paul Allen, who is the 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, gave
them quite a bit of money.
And the fifth major donor has been a fellow who is 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.
They sure are.
And, of course, we would, you know, if it was a matter of courtesy, we would call them up.
But the protocol goes further.
It says, all right, you've let the astronomical community know, also let the government know, and let the public know.
Who would you go to in the government?
Just out of curiosity.
I suspect That the people we would... You know, I think that the government would already know at this point, because they'd... Yeah, they would.
They would be watching CNN, right?
Well... They would know about it.
It's not specified in the protocol, whom you would call.
And, you know, maybe you would call the highest person that you knew personally.
We know, you know, I mean, there's some senators that you know, obviously your local representatives, and then presumably they tell everybody else.
But it doesn't matter, because Everybody who's connected with this experiment now has been sitting at their email terminals.
I know that's the case you make.
Yeah, that's true, and I've seen it happen.
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.
I know, but it would be so easy Well, I don't buy into that because, remember, it isn't just the guys at Arecibo.
Maybe you could shut Arecibo down.
an unfortunate mistake it was just a another satellite uh... it looked really promising it was our second big wow
signal and uh... it's not really an immediate go haha right ok
goodbye it would be buried
i i i i don't buy into that because remember it isn't just the guys that are seen maybe you
could shut air seaboat down maybe
you know they do that in the movies now those people that are working there been told
from day one but 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, you know, 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 anything secret about that.
But there's a lot of cooperation in these matters.
For example, in Great Britain, Uh, they have rules that, uh, would, uh, make us blush, uh, with the Constitution we have.
I mean, they can shut things up over there.
They can shut the media up, uh, very simply and do it all the time.
Yeah, but the thing is that those guys at the observatory, they all know.
And the number of people at an observatory that would know is at least several dozen.
Now.
Okay.
Alright, so now they begin to email their friends.
The point is, That if this were the discovery of the Enigma Machine or something like that, or, you know, some sort of artifact lying there in 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.
Well, it is up there, but you've got to know where to listen and where to point.
Yeah, but if you had just one of those parameters, if you just knew where to point, more or less, right?
And you, you know, you heard these guys found something and it's, you know, this star system.
It wouldn't take you very long.
But that is the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Otherwise, you guys would have found a signal by now.
I mean, if you... 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.
Yeah.
Okay.
But, you know, unless you can suppress all this information that's already been spread around in confirming the signal and checking it out, you know, anybody can say, hey, look, All right, the government shut down Arecibo, and they shut down Jodrell Bank in England, but 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.
And if the signal's there... I saw that in the movie.
It was called The Arrival.
The Arrival, yeah.
Chuckie Sheen.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's why, you know, I think that there's just no way to hide this.
It's not something you can hide.
There's no way of stopping, you know, 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.
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.
Oh, they would know.
No, no, no, Seth.
They would know it is important.
Go back to the Brookings study.
I know that you know about that, right?
Yeah.
Which suggests that it would upset all kinds of people to such a degree that it might be better not to tell them at all.
I mean, that's what would support the kind of secrecy that I'm talking about.
Yeah, well, there's that, that people couldn't handle the news.
And that's a That's maybe a legitimate point.
I mean, maybe knowing that we're not alone and there's another civilization out there would be so disruptive that it would just be bad news.
I mean, it's the kind of news that people don't need to hear.
Yes.
I can imagine, you know, a government making that decision.
I can hardly imagine that every government makes that decision.
And of course, you know, any government that decides, no, let's just tell folks.
I mean, why would you imagine every government would be informed?
I mean, that would come under the cloak of national security for at least a period of time.
Yeah, well, it would be the case.
I mean, that would sound reasonable to me if it were so that, for example, America had a monopoly on big radio telescopes, but we don't.
Yeah, the Chinese are about to build ten Arecibos, or at least they claim they're going to.
Are they really?
Yeah, well, it's their idea anyhow.
No, I hadn't heard that.
Yeah, there was a big Chinese delegation at the Arecibo Observatory when I was there about two years ago.
And they're going to build ten of them?
They proposed to do that.
They haven't started construction, but... Oh, those Chinese!
Yeah, they want to build a telescope that'll blow ours right out of the landscape there.
And why?
For SETI work?
Well, I don't know how much SETI work they would do.
It's mostly for radio astronomy.
It's astronomy.
Yeah.
And the Europeans are talking about building a square kilometer radio telescope, which again would be by far the biggest thing around.
You know, that would be definitely the mother of all radio telescopes.
So we don't have a monopoly on that.
And there are plenty of other countries that could find this.
No, but it's all, again, it's in the knowing where to look, and the Chinese wouldn't be the first we'd call, I'm sure.
I doubt that they would be the first to call, but it is to say, since the news spread so rapidly in the initial stages, when you're still not sure, see, that's an important point.
That was really the point I was trying to make, that this isn't like in the movies.
You remember in The Arrival, Charlie Sheen See the signal on his oscilloscope and...
Well, I thought that was kind of a silly movie compared to contact.
Listen, hold on a moment. We're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back.
There's more. I'm Art Bell. Seth Shostak is here from SETI.
And this, of course, is Coast to Coast AM.
Just driving on through the night. Glad you're here.
I can't stop this feeling deep inside of me.
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 Wild 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 and you've got a signal that looks real and I walk in and I'm Frank Brown from NSA.
Right.
Have a seat Mr. Shostak.
We're going to ask you Uh, 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.
Mr. Shostak, can you help us out?
Right.
Well, now I'm on my 25th cup of coffee here.
Is that the deal?
Well, I mean, you tell me.
I think you're right about that.
But fortunately, the Puerto Rican coffee is A-OK.
So maybe that's all right.
All right.
Your hypothesis is they're going to come in and they're going to tell me... They're not going to try and shut it down.
There's no way you can shut the observatory down without a whole lot of people noticing because... No, right.
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.
Right.
They're going to say, we want you to issue a disclaimer.
That's right.
Yeah.
And just say, well, in fact... It was another satellite.
Sorry folks, just another satellite.
That's right.
Now mind you, they can say it to me, but they've also got to say it to a couple dozen other
people.
Yes, indeed.
They just round us all up.
Believe me, they can do that.
Okay.
So let's say they do that.
Most people probably, if they're really appealed to at that level, I mean you tell me, I don't
want to put the words in your mouth, what would you do?
Well, I would say to them, I'd say, to begin with, this is a private operation and you
don't have any jurisdiction here and this, that, and the other.
I would call it that, but you're probably going to tell me that that isn't going to
matter much to them.
Well, I mean, no, it's like telling the IRS they don't have jurisdiction, but okay.
Right.
But you see, by the time they get there, a lot of time has gone by.
I mean, you don't think they're watching you guys, come on.
Oh, I wish, you know, Art, I'd be flattered to think that they were watching.
Have you ever heard of Echelon?
No.
You haven't heard of Echelon.
Echelon is a known program that monitors emails International telephone calls.
You have heard about Echelon.
Looks for keywords.
Has a giant grey computer looking for keywords and basically it's spying on us, Seth.
That's what Echelon does.
Okay.
And so Echelon, you know, it would know that you're sending emails out.
Let's put it that way.
Okay, good enough.
Let's say they are, okay?
And they decide, they trip on these keywords, SETI detection, you know, whatever.
Right.
Okay, so somebody, you know, where are these guys located?
Are they in downtown San Juan or are they in Washington?
Oh, I think probably the Miami office could get somebody to you pretty quickly.
Okay, so let's say they're in Miami, so they're, you know, they're like three or four hours away if they can, you know, if they don't have to wait to be number 12 for takeoff at Miami International.
Somehow I don't think so, Seth.
All right, they get their own jet, right?
It's parked on the driveway in front of their homes, and they're down there in four hours.
I don't think they can do it much sooner than that, because you have to drive.
You can't land a plane in the air.
Well, you're already at least a day or two days into this by then, so what's four hours?
Yeah, well, exactly.
Exactly.
Okay, 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.
Well, the French are really obstinate, but when it comes down to matters of mutual high security, they probably could be talking to it.
You think that they could?
Well, all right.
Now, mind you, they may have called my friends in Holland, you know, they've got a telescope, too, and then the guys in Germany.
I mean, I think that every telescope in the world by this point would be alerted to this, but I'll play along on this.
In this way.
I'm going to suppose for a moment that they managed to get us to retract it all.
Well, you didn't really answer the first question.
If I walked in NSA, sit you down, have a conversation.
What would I say?
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.
So we're asking you to do this for your country.
Yeah, but what are they asking me to do?
They just asked me not to say anything.
No, they're asking you to... I'm assuming by then, as you point out, a small furor has begun.
They're asking you to shut it up for a while.
Mm-hmm.
In other words, just don't tell anybody else.
No, issue a statement saying that there was a mistake made, for now.
Well, I'd have a lot of personal trouble with that, of course, because now they're asking me to lie.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, yeah.
I'd have trouble with that and, you know, Perhaps you can suggest to me what they would say to my saying, I don't think I want to do that.
Well, I guess we'd all have to use our imaginations from there.
We have ways of making you not talk.
I just think that there would be that attempt made, Seth.
It would be that big a deal.
Let's say you're right, Art.
Yes.
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, it in the end 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, whatever.
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?
Sure.
Somebody else is going to trip on it.
Yeah, but they'd want to buy time to keep the secret, and certainly to figure out if there was a national security issue.
In other words, is it a modulated, I assume it's some sort of modulated signal, and there's some sort of intelligence perhaps being transmitted in it.
They would want a little time to try to figure that out, to figure what they had on their hands before they told the world.
At the very least, they'd want time.
Well, they might.
Now, if you say that they want time because they want to evaluate the potential danger here.
Yes.
Now, how are they going to do that?
Let's just take that on for a moment.
Well, of course, by attempting to decipher the meaning of the signal.
Right, 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 telescope 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 Morse code at 14 words per minute, and you just average that signal for 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 a hundred times bigger than an Arecibo just to get the message.
Well, now you're throwing up roadblocks that don't necessarily need to be here.
Let's say it was a really strong Jody Foster kind of signal, and that telescopes, if they knew where to point, Uh, the larger telescopes, the ones that move, could easily track it.
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 Io with antennas or something like that... Yes.
If that's the strength of the signal... Yes.
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... Well, maybe in time, yes.
Maybe in time they'd find it.
Within two years, they'd find it.
Yeah, okay.
Within two years, that's still a lot of time to try and evaluate what you've got on your hands.
I tell you since they would do it, as sure as I'm sitting here, I know they would.
Well, maybe we're going to get to three.
I'm sure you've thought about, haven't you thought about how you would react to such a request in the past?
You have to know in the back of your mind that it's probable.
Yeah, I don't think, no, 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.
Yeah, you probably started thinking about how we're going to handle this, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I was, I'll tell you quite frankly, I was a nervous, I was a nervous guy.
I bet.
And, uh, and I realized that if this is really the signal, my life is going to be changed forever.
Forever.
Everybody's life is going to be changed forever.
The history of Humankind's going to be changed.
That's right.
Not just for a few weeks during which this is going to be in the headlines, but forever.
That's right.
And that's such an overwhelming thought.
It's one thing to talk about it occasionally at a cocktail party, but it's something else to actually think that it's here.
Yes.
So there's no doubt that it was thinking all that.
But the point I really want to make is that in that entire time when we thought this might be it, I was looking around for those guys from the NSA.
Were you?
Yeah, I was.
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.
You had no doubt begun to think about it.
I'll tell you what we had begun to think about.
I don't know that anybody was thinking of calling up the government, although it would have been nice if the local mayor had bothered to call me up, who is somebody I actually knew.
This is small town, so I knew the guy.
Uh, he didn't show any interest either, I might say, but... Well, mayors are like dolphins.
Yeah, I get that.
When we did the, well, some of them aren't.
But what we did think about was calling up another observatory.
We were beginning to look up those phone numbers.
Right, sure.
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 and uh... post our program you're working on or whatever
and uh... check out the signal we we were moving that way
i've mentioned to you before by this time
the major news release one major newspaper the new york times had
already called us up and said you know uh... we hear you're following an
interesting signal what about it
and what you don't well i i didn't like it in my
I said, we are, but these signals have always turned out to be interference in the past.
But see, that would make such a later statement.
Oh, gee, it was just interference.
So easy to be swallowed by the New York Times.
Yeah, it could be.
And I told them, I said, you know, I'll call you back in three hours and let you know.
And in your scenario, I could have come back and said, well, you know, it wasn't the real thing, even though it was the real thing.
That's right.
But they were already alerted to the fact that we had found an interesting signal and And all it would take is that one other person somewhere else to say, you know, this was the real thing and they're not talking, that I think that there would be some sort of investigation of that by the media.
Suppose the opposite happens.
Suppose, unlikely as it might be, one of the other observatories were to call you and say, Or just tell Arecibo to drop what it's doing and take a look at something.
How exciting would that be?
Well, that'd be very exciting.
I mean, you know, it's an excitement.
You're on the Nina Pinto in Santa Maria and you get there and you find some other Spanish ship tied up at the shore.
It's perhaps a little less exciting than finding it yourself, but it's still the discovery.
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, you know, sort of knows other people in the field and they would do it.
Sure.
And you'd have to be pretty sure before you made that call to another because it'd be academic embarrassment.
It'd be bad and you know you're inconveniencing them too.
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.
All right.
How does the regular radio astronomy academic community view SETI these days?
In the movie Contact, it was a very, very cynical relationship indeed.
They didn't think a whole lot of SETI.
Is that really still true in some quarters, or not?
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
ten 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 ten 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?
Well, we actually don't pay money for the use of Arecibo.
You don't?
No, we don't.
The SETI Institute was granted... I might mention our website, by the way, because people who are interested... Oh, by all means.
Yeah, you should really go check it out.
In fact, they can join our membership organization, Team SETI, but it's at www.seti.org.
Yeah, I think we've got a link up there right now.
Yeah.
So, you know, they ought to check that out.
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, you know, these two quasars or whatever, And that will be reviewed by a bunch of astronomers.
And they'll say, OK, well, Art Bell's proposal looks OK to us.
Let's give him 12 hours.
And you will not pay for that time.
The taxpayers have paid for that instrument.
It's a national facility.
You do not pay.
You couldn't afford to pay for it.
Do you have any idea how unlikely it is that they would give Art Bell 12 hours for anything at all?
I mean, come on, Seth.
You're going to have to have some credentials, right?
Well, I can't deny that.
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 Six-Pack, who just had this crazy idea.
But in the end, in the end, then I don't think you're Joe Six-Pack.
Oh, no, they view me that way.
Believe me, they'd think I was looking for the Anunnaki coming back or something.
Well, listen, they'd look at the science.
Listen, we're at the top of the hour here.
You want to take calls?
Can you stick around?
All right, then.
That's exactly what we'll do when we come back.
Yeah, right.
My 12 hours.
I shouldn't hold my breath, should I?
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
All right, we're going to take some questions now for Seth Shostak 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 is suddenly a 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, you know, the whole planet thought we ought to send back.
Yeah, people talk about that.
You get a signal and, you know, it is possible to send a reply.
There's 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.
So that makes a pretty powerful signal, so you could use that,
you could send something back.
Yeah, you could do it. Well if somebody were consulting with you on what the
protocols should be, what would your answer be? Well, you know I have
no objection to what 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.
See, that's so close by.
I know. I'm picking it on purpose.
Yeah. I mean, in that case, I'm not quite sure what I'd do.
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.
It probably doesn't matter.
Okay.
Let's take a few calls.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Seth Shostak.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
It's a pleasure to be calling you.
I'm a police officer.
I listen to you every night, driving around, and you're the best thing on the air.
Thank you.
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?
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, OK, 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.
That's pretty slow speed communication.
Yeah, but I've got an answer for that.
Oh, no problem.
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.
Ah, good idea.
They're going to tell you how to build this faster-than-light communication device.
Yeah, absolutely, if not the chair, you know, in the machine.
Ah, the chair, so you can go there.
Well, if that's the case, then all bets are off.
I think 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.
Yes.
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 penny, no matter how good the plans are.
Caller?
Thank you very much.
Alright, you're welcome.
Thank you.
Huh.
Well, I suppose that's true, but I would assume that we would have the materials on the planet
to probably do that, or they...
Maybe we wouldn't.
Well, I think we'd have the materials.
We have all the materials that any other part of the universe has.
So then if they were to send us cogent instructions, uh... Yeah, but, you know, again, thinking of that Pentium computer within Neanderthals, you know, they've got all the materials there in their cave.
But they don't have that technological infrastructure to make, you know, purified silicon for the transistors and all that stuff.
Well, would 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 think that's, you know, that depends on physics.
We don't know.
So that's a, that's a, you know, just putting your finger up to the wind and saying, well, you know, is that possible?
We don't know that.
I do think it is easier to send information though.
But think of the logic of it.
I mean, if, if something is coming from, uh, or is going to take 2000 years to get to us, then it better have some instructions that are meaningful.
Otherwise, as you point out, 2000 years, ho hum.
You know, at best, no harm.
It would be something to idly chat about, but wouldn't mean much of anything to anybody.
Yeah, 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 a 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?
True.
It probably wouldn't be that big wow signal, though.
It would be a very weak signal, indeed, if you were getting their own GPS, right?
Well, I mean, you know, I use that as an example.
Yes, an actual GPS transmitter might not be so powerful, but if it's for, you know, that 1% of the galaxy, if it's really a big thing, maybe it wouldn't be so weak.
If it's intended for contact, then it's probably going to have some instruction that would deal with a 2,000-year problem.
It might.
If there's a way to deal with that, it might, indeed.
And it might say, by the way, Here's a map of all the civilizations in your neck of the woods, and you might want to try talking to somebody a little closer than we are.
Might have something like that.
I bet you guys sit around and imagine this kind of stuff all the time, don't you?
What the nature of the signal might be.
Yes, there's actually people who worry about how you might encode information.
There's one fellow at the SETI Institute who's 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, you know, some way of communicating that doesn't depend too much on how your brain's organized or your culture.
Well, if it's rap, I say we nuke them.
Yes.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Seth Shostak.
Hi.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning, Seth.
This is Christopher calling from Honolulu, Hawaii, listening to you at the 8.30 a.m.
dial, KHVH.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I really admire the work you're doing.
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 your reply is, a little over 100 years ago, I forget exactly the date, Marconi discovered radio waves.
Up until that point, people didn't really imagine such things.
We've learned a lot about the universe, different rays, radiation, EM, x-rays and so on.
We're kind of at the rudimentary level, I think, because all that background noise from stars and galaxies, if 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 hyper-dimensional communication, then we'll suddenly hear, we'll be tapping into the main vein and we'll be like hearing everybody.
It's a very good point.
There are many theoretical physicists now who are doing a whole lot of work on parallel dimensions, that sort of thing.
Ever think about that, Seth?
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, you know, from stars, or the gas between the stars actually makes a lot more static, that's not a problem.
In fact, if you, you know, use a radio receiver, and you're, well, let's go to Alpha Centauri, and it's our 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 than, you know, Uh, the sun's putting out, what, uh, something like, uh, a hundred million billion billion watts, but the, the Earth in radio, in radio, is, is, uh, is brighter, if you will.
It's, it shows up more.
Uh, that's because, you know, we build these, these nifty little transmitters.
So, I don't think that's a problem for radio, but your, 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, you know, Kind of silly of me to suggest that, no, there can't be any better physics.
Well, maybe there is.
Well, can I ask you this?
Is there any specialized frequency that you're using that's, say, a higher or lower frequency?
Which do you think would be better?
The lower, lowest frequency?
Oh, hydrogen is the answer.
Uh-huh.
Tell them about that, Seth.
Yeah, well, Lark's right.
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 radio static.
It's at 1,420 megahertz on the dial, and it's a frequency that'll 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.
And that makes it a good place to look, and that is indeed where we do look.
You spend a lot of time there.
We spend a lot of time there, and around it.
We go, you know, a thousand megahertz on either side, roughly.
Well, that's quite a ways.
Well, it's, you know, 500 megahertz down and, you know, like a You said something earlier that was obviously very important.
We cover as many frequencies as we can.
We cover about 2 billion, with a B, frequencies for each of the stars we look at.
You said something earlier that was obviously very important.
You said that we may actually get to the point, and we have progressed toward it, where it's
too noisy on Earth to continue the project.
Yeah, that's a possibility.
This is kind of like the battle between offensive and defensive weaponry.
In the sense that 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, 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 stealth.
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 gotta 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.
Well, that's when we've got to go to the moon.
Ease to the Rockies.
You're on the air with Seth Shostak.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
It's me.
It's you.
OK.
Where are you?
Lubbock, Texas.
All right.
Yes, I forget the name of the equation.
It takes the form, I believe, of N equals F sub P. Yeah, the Drake equation.
OK, Drake.
Thank you.
Yes.
In Scientific American some months back, there was a discussion, a small article discussing
that in regard to SETI in general.
They were mentioning that most solutions of that equation would come up with the galaxy
possibly being actually saturated with extent ET life forms by this time.
What are your thoughts on that?
Would we be saturated or would there be just a few scattered?
Well that's the big question.
Unfortunately, it really doesn't matter what I think.
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, you know, 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 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, You know, 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.
I mean, maybe that happens most of the time.
We don't know.
That's sociology, so... That's what Michio Kaku thinks, by the way.
Well, I think he's wrong if he says that because... Really?
Yeah, I think we're going through a bottleneck.
Uh, we might be able to blow ourselves up now, but within a hundred years, we'll be spread out.
Some of us will be on the moon, some of us will be on Mars, we'll be in tin cans, you know.
Oh, well, he says that we're on the cusp of, uh, becoming a Type 1 civilization, but, uh, he also says that most, uh, Type 0s blow themselves to smithereens before they get to be a Type 1.
Don't agree.
Really?
No.
Oh, alright, um, caller, thank you, and we'll pick this up on the other side of the break.
Really?
That's interesting.
I almost find it impossible not to agree.
Element 92 is here, and someone's gonna use it.
Pretty soon.
I think.
I'm Art Bell.
I see more, mmm, my lord, mmm.
Once again, Dr. Shostak, and we're talking about, this is really interesting.
I'm really surprised.
I take it you are at least familiar with Dr. Michio Kaku, right?
Yes, uh-huh.
Probably have heard him on the air.
I actually met him.
Oh, you met him?
Well, there was a TV series a couple years ago made about Stephen Hawking.
And he and I were both in it.
I see.
All right.
Well, then you must be familiar with his his theory of type zeros, ones, twos and threes and so forth.
Civilizations.
Yes.
Actually, that theory, I shouldn't say this, but that actually was the idea of a Russian physicist by the name of Nikolai Kardashev.
OK, so 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.
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 A-bomb.
Reasonable, yes.
Yeah, and then, you know, 50 years after that, they're no longer on the air for 100 years.
Yes, pretty, again, reasonable.
Because their transmitters have all been, you know, cremated in mushroom cloud.
That's right.
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.
You bet.
But, I don't share that pessimism, and here's why.
Alright, I figure, look, okay, 50 years after you've invented the H-bomb, you begin to spread out in your own solar system.
Maybe you don't go very far, you just go to your local moon or the next planet over, whatever.
We're not doing real well in that category.
No, that's right, budget constraints.
Alright, make it 100 years.
Okay.
Alright, fair enough.
But, you know, 100 years, 50 years, I mean, we're not talking real money here yet.
So, when that happens, you know, 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.
Yes.
Out of, uh, you know, big aluminum cans, if you will, ten miles long and two 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, you know, uh, flies, and you live the good life there in space.
As long as you're supplied from Earth, sure.
Well, but you don't need too much from Earth, because you recycle, you know, 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 gonna 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.
So, All this is gonna happen.
But asteroids are not choice real estate.
Well, not even close.
I mean, they're bare rocks in the vacuum of space.
Well, they might not be your first investment choice, but in fact, they've got all the light elements you need for building computers.
On the other hand, I bought here in Pahrump, so... Okay.
I mean, it's still cheaper to put new condos in Pahrump than it is to put them on the Asteroids.
I grant you that.
But forget the Asteroids if you don't like that idea.
I think that's an idea with merit, by the way, but let's Let's just say the moon, Mars, and these rotating tin cans in space.
Now, picture this.
It's now 200 years since they invented radio.
It's the year 2100.
And you're sitting there on Mars, reading the paper on your touchscreen or whatever, and the headline comes up, Nuclear War on Earth.
Everyone obliterated.
Right.
Well, what do you say to your wife?
You say, gee, honey, they obliterated themselves on the Earth.
That's too bad.
There goes the export market.
Huh!
Humans, I mean, you know, it's bad news, but on the other hand, humans are not obliterated.
It's like ants.
I can get rid of the ants in my kitchen with some difficulty, but I can't get rid of all ants because they're dispersed.
And so what I'm saying is that these civilizations will invent, indeed, as you say, weapons and so forth at the same time they invent radio, but very shortly thereafter.
They just have to survive this little bottleneck of 100 or 200 years, and then they're dispersed.
And then I think it's very hard for them to self-destruct completely.
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.
Uh, and you think the odds are with us?
Yeah, well, let's say it's 50-50.
Let's just split the middle there.
So, 50-50 that we'll self-destruct.
But if it's 50-50, then that means there are a lot of civilizations out there, presumably, who didn't self-destruct.
And, uh, so that's okay.
Might not be good for us, but... Well, you know, here's a side of the argument for you.
You've been looking for 40-plus years.
Haven't found anything yet.
That might argue on the side of implosion.
Mightn't it?
It could, but I don't think it does.
If life is plentiful, if life is common, then that might argue on that side, actually.
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.
True.
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.
Do you imagine that you might find a discrete signal which gives you only information on how to receive the real signal, which is spread spectrum?
That's a possibility.
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, you know, tune in at some infrared frequency up the band.
Exactly.
Just, you know, as it were, QSY, whatever.
Go somewhere else on the band.
Well, you know that spread spectrum is incredibly more efficient in terms of distance for power.
It is.
In an environment where you have lots of interference, we use it here on Earth for our cell phones and things like that.
That's true.
It might not be So interesting for communications in space.
There's some disadvantages to using wide spectrum in space.
And on the other hand, there are some advantages.
I think it would be just like on Earth.
You'd probably use every kind of radio signal for some purpose.
Well, it would be useless sending out spread spectrum without sending out the key.
That's for sure.
Yeah, well, that's a problem.
That's why you might want to have that hailing signal that, as you suggest, tells you how to get the real good stuff.
All right.
First time caller on the line.
Hi there.
You're on the air with Dr. Shostak.
Good morning, boys.
Good morning.
I can't imagine any intelligent beings even wanting to connect with us, you know?
Why would they?
It's like, oh, get away from those people.
Hang around them, they start blowing you up, and God knows what.
Well, you watch a lot of movies.
Well, I mean, if we're sending out mushroom clouds before our, um, little bleep.
Yeah, as I pointed out, uh, the mushroom clouds and the nuclear detonations, uh, could indeed be a signal.
Really?
And not received real well, either.
Well, at any rate, um, what I wanted to ask you is, uh, I think this was about six or seven months ago.
Um, I picked up, uh, one of those, uh, newspapers, uh, at the checkout.
Oh yes, one of those.
Specifically one that's in black and white, and usually there's like a two-headed baby on the front.
Yes, yes.
One of those.
Yes.
Well, in this one they had an article about SETI, and it was a full-page picture.
Really?
Yeah, of a, I guess what looked like... Was it Seth holding an alien baby?
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 and all over on the ground.
And this happened somewhere, if I can remember correctly, in Africa.
In Africa?
Yeah.
It was your Africa... I don't know if you even have an African...
Too bad it wasn't Puerto Rico.
I mean, he could have commented.
Well, it looked very, very real, and I thought, I mean, and I know there is a city.
I mean, all that was real.
Oh, there is a city.
All right, Seth, has one of your brethren in Africa been destroyed by a blue beam?
No, I noticed 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.
Say what?
Because there have been three radio telescopes that have collapsed in the past ten years.
One was in West Virginia.
It was metal fatigue and just gave in.
It was a 300-foot telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia.
It was 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.
It was these aliens who were unhappy about these SETI experiments.
And all I can say is, if they're that interested in our SETI experiments, I'm kind of flattered.
Well, it would be somewhat disappointing, wouldn't it, Seth, if If the answer to our careful listening was a blue beam of destruction and Arecibo just crumbled to the ground.
I was thinking maybe it would be a good excuse to build a new telescope, actually.
But one should keep in mind, and of course, I know you're well aware of this, but listening doesn't tell the aliens anything.
I mean, they don't know that we're listening.
So just as you know, you don't know who's got you tuned in.
That's true.
That's absolutely true.
So there's no danger in listening.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Seth Shostak.
Hi.
Hi.
Hello.
Where are you?
I'm Mike.
I'm calling from Pacifica, California, KSFO.
All right, Mike.
On the air you are.
Okay, I'd like to know what Seth might think that E.T.' 's waiting for.
I mean, do they need a publicity agent, a PR person?
What's holding them back from exposing themselves to all of humans?
Well, uh, your conclusion is that they are here now all around us.
Oh, absolutely.
Why aren't they contacting us, right?
Yeah, I mean, you know... Alright, well, yeah, we'll take that argument up.
No problem.
Seth, a lot of people say this.
They say, Come on.
Look at all the sightings.
Look at all the sightings.
I mean, just incredible amounts of sightings.
Abduction cases, crop circles, evidence of aliens all around us to which Seth says...
Yeah, I don't think it's evidence of aliens, but I think that there are lots of sightings and there certainly are crop circles, but I don't think they're made by aliens.
I think that's the answer to your question.
I think it's a good question.
If they really were here, why are they being so secretive?
I mean, you know, when the Spaniards arrived in the New World, they didn't just sail their ships five miles off the shore and kind of tease the Indians.
There is an answer, though, Seth.
What about the prime directive?
You know, that sounds like a great idea.
The prime directive.
Don't interfere with other civilizations.
I'm trying to think back... Monitor, but don't interfere.
I'm trying to think back on any time in human history...
When we explored... Something like that?
Yeah, when we explored, we 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.
Let's leave them alone.
Let's not tamper with the natives.
Yeah, exactly.
They always want to tamper with us.
And we've always destroyed just about every small civilization we've come upon.
Yeah, so we're not really right.
I think we need a prime directive, but we certainly haven't followed it, so... 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, and they might actually follow it.
Yeah, well, they might regard us as, you know, sort of like a nature preserve.
That's certainly possible, that they come across this planet, you know, Earth, and say, oh, biological intelligence, you know, that's kind of messy and, you know, squishy and, you know, mostly disgusting.
It's kind of an interesting place for people to perhaps, for aliens as it were, to study.
So, you know, we'll just put it off limits.
Don't touch it, but you can take pictures or something like that.
You know, maybe the way we treat some selected areas of our own planet.
That's possible.
Okay.
That would allow then for visitation, occasional sighting, but no contact.
Yeah, well, in a scenario like that, yes, that's right.
We're just a zoo, and occasionally we spot the visitors on the other side of the bars.
These are the Rockies.
You're on the air with Dr. Shostak.
Hello.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Where are you?
I'm on the Mississippi River between Cairo and Cape Girardeau.
I'm in a towboat.
All right.
You're on a boat?
Yes, a towboat pilot.
Wow.
Yeah.
Okay.
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's so many different sightings from all over the world and, you know, you just take 1% of those to be real, you know, of an alien or UFO, whatever, that maybe just shorten your signal up to try to contact them.
Well, OK, you know, listen, you don't even need one percent of them to be real.
If one of them was real, that would be astounding to me, of course.
But I don't think that actually SETI is very well set up for finding anything that might be as nearby as... Yeah, you know who's set up for that?
I am.
I am.
I'm set up for that.
Seth, in other words, I've got Nearly 500 radio stations that are carrying my signal right now, right?
So in terms of short distance, broad type, you know, like firing a shotgun, I'm your guy.
Yeah.
Well, but how are you suggesting that you would find him this way?
Well, I mean, in terms of broadcasting in, you know, in the in the in the close environment.
Well, yeah, I've got that covered, believe me.
Okay, I thought Richard was perhaps suggesting that maybe we could try and listen in on any nearby visitors.
Oh, I see.
Well, actually, isn't it true that, in a sense, you might miss, if there were visitors really close, even within the atmosphere, you might miss them?
Oh, yeah.
No, no.
You probably would miss them.
Oh, we definitely would miss them.
I mean, we wouldn't miss them with this.
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 telescope, 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.
They would never see it necessarily.
Well, even if you look at your own home telescope, I've got a telescope here, you don't go out and look for meteors with a telescope.
That's right.
That's right.
That's the wrong instrument for that.
There are other instruments, however, that would see these things, in my opinion.
I mean, you've got plenty of satellites that are looking back down toward the Earth, and they look at a third of the Earth at once, so they might very well see anything that was coming in from outside.
They might.
All right.
Well, listen, we've done it again.
Just like that.
And the program is all over, I'm afraid.
It's always a blast, Seth.
It really is.
You're a lot of fun to interview.
You've got a great sense of humor, and I really do want to come down to Puerto Rico and sit with you for a while.
All right, well, we'll try and arrange that, Art.
Next time we're down there, you're going to hear about it in advance.
All right, my friend.
Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure, as always, Art.
I look forward to the next time.
Good night.
Good night.
All right, that is Seth Shostak, and he is the SETI guy.
He's really something.
So, uh, that'll be it for tonight, I'm afraid.
The clock says we've gotta go, and when it says go, it's really serious.
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