Aug. 27, 2001 - Art Bell
40:01
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, let's rumble up toward the Bay Area and meet up with Seth Shostak. | ||
| We'll get it out. | ||
| An astronomer at SETI. | ||
| Seth, great to have you back on the program. | ||
| It's a pleasure to be here, Art. | ||
| All right, Seth. | ||
| I know that you are by now very well aware of the incredible crop circle at Shobolton, the ones in Great Britain that have been popping up in recent days. | ||
| And there is this absolutely astounding one, which is more like a glyph, I would say, than a crop circle as we've come to understand crop circles, which would appear to be an answer to the SETI signal the bigger sent out back in 1974. | ||
| But before we get to your take on those, and I know you've got those on your screen, so we can talk about them as the hour wears on and Richard joins us at the bottom of the hour, before we get your actual take on all of this, tell everybody the technical details as you know them about the signal that was sent out. | ||
| Well, Art, that was done, as you just said, in November 1974. | ||
| So that's, what, something like 27 years ago now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it was during a time when the director of the Arecibo Radio Observatory, that's a big dish down in Puerto Rico that probably many listeners have seen in the movie Contact, was headed up by Frank Drake. | ||
| He was the director. | ||
| But Frank Drake was already known by that point as the father of SETI. | ||
| So Arecibo is normally just a received dish, that great big monster dish. | ||
| And somehow, for this purpose, I guess one time only, I think it's one time only, they converted the dish to a transmitting dish. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Well, it actually is mostly used for receiving, but it isn't the case that this was a one-shot, you know, transmission. | ||
| The dish was actually built with the intention of doing planetary radar experiments. | ||
| For example, if you want to know, you know, what the surface of Venus looks like, well, Venus is covered with clouds, but if you can bounce some very powerful radar off that planet and look at what comes back, then you can map the surface of Venus. | ||
| So that was part of the intention. | ||
| It's also used for upper atmosphere research. | ||
| So it's always had a transmitter on board, but it's true. | ||
| That's not used a lot of the time, but it's used fairly regularly. | ||
| Was it that transmitter they used to send this signal? | ||
| It was. | ||
| They didn't bring in a special transmitter just for this three-minute little demonstration. | ||
| They had just, in fact, the government had given them money to upgrade the transmitter they had, and they had also upgraded the antenna itself. | ||
| It was originally essentially just a bunch of chicken wire covering a big bowl there in the mountains of North Puerto Rico. | ||
| But, you know, that chicken wire is not terribly accurate. | ||
| It's a surface. | ||
| So they beefed that up. | ||
| They put in aluminum panels. | ||
| You can see them today, and they're very accurate. | ||
| In fact, that whole dish, which is like a thousand feet across, is probably accurate to a few millimeters. | ||
| So you're really not allowed to walk on it because you'll disturb that. | ||
| Now, one of these days, Seth, when you're at Arecibo, as you frequently are, I really, really, really want to come down and see the dish in person. | ||
| Well, next March, Art, we'll be there. | ||
| Next March. | ||
| Okay, I'm marking that one down. | ||
| All right, so how much power did this transmission run? | ||
| Well, the transmitter itself is on the order of a million watts. | ||
| I think 74 probably wasn't quite a million watts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And that's fairly hefty. | ||
| If you plugged a million watt transmitter into your local outlet, the FCC would want to talk to you, and probably the power company would as well. | ||
| You know, that was a million watts, but the real point is that when you have this huge antenna... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| How much in that? | ||
| Well, it turns out to be that number is 2 trillion. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| In other words, in the beam, if you were looking at the power coming out that beam, it was equivalent to broadcasting all the energy produced by every electrical generating plant on the planet in all directions. | ||
| So that's a really big signal. | ||
| That's maybe at the time, and maybe even today, was the strongest single signal ever deliberately broadcast. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, radars, some radars, in fact, the Arecibo radar is a little more powerful now, but that was one honking signal, you might say. | ||
| It sure was. | ||
| And sent out, it was only a three-minute long signal, right? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Yeah, it was, you know, it was intended as kind of a demo. | ||
| I don't think that anybody at the observatory figured there was a big chance that the aliens were going to hear this because if you're only turning the transmitter on for three minutes, it's going to be pretty lucky if they happen to be listening when that signal washes over them. | ||
| Okay, if you go down on the webpage I know you're on, the one that says Hoagland Crop Glyphs Part 3, and you go down to image number three, on the right, there is what appears to be, I don't know what you would call this, a glyph. | ||
| It looks like a glyph, sort of, which is supposed to be what was sent out from Arecibo on that day in 1974. | ||
| Is that a representation of the zeros and ones, the digital signal that roughly was sent out? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| In fact, it is the signal that was sent out. | ||
| The only caveat there is that this picture here on the website, it's been colored in just so you can make it a little easier to separate one thing from another. | ||
| Of course, it is a fair representation. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Just imagine it in black and white, and then you've got the real thing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Is it worth going over what all these things mean? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, you know, we could spend a lot of time on that. | ||
| That's probably not worthwhile. | ||
| But let me just say very briefly that, you know, some thought was given to what should we tell the aliens. | ||
| I mean, that's what this was about. | ||
| It was just an exercise to, you know, broadcast something about us to them. | ||
| And people sat around the observatory and decided, well, what the aliens would probably want to know, at least what we would want to know if we were the aliens, is what do earthlings look like? | ||
| Where are they located? | ||
| And how are they built? | ||
| And to some extent, that's all answered in this little graphic, this bitmap you might call it, if you're a computer type. | ||
| Bitmap, right? | ||
| And so you can see down there there's a little stick figure of a man, and there's some DNA, and some of the molecules that make up DNA above the DNA, and down below a little map of the solar system, and below that, a picture of the telescope. | ||
| And that's pretty much it. | ||
| So all of that then is roughly accurate. | ||
| We've had this all described to us before, but those are the major elements of it. | ||
| And you say some guys sitting around the observatory, the SETI Institute, or who exactly, I guess I don't need names, but it was sort of a gathering of people who decided, you know, kind of committee-wise, what would be in here? | ||
| That's my understanding. | ||
| It was not the SETI Institute because the SETI Institute didn't exist in 1974. | ||
| Frank Drake and Company. | ||
| Frank Drake and Company. | ||
| And Frank freely admits that, you know, a lot of the ideas came from people that were at the observatory. | ||
| So, you know, they had some time. | ||
| They knew this was coming up. | ||
| They had plenty of time to think about it. | ||
| And this is what they decided they broadcast. | ||
| Well, with all of these years now to reflect on, looking at that broadcast, as I am and you are right now, would you change much about it after all these years? | ||
| Well, I think I would, perhaps I would do something with the telescope. | ||
| And the other thing that I believe is missing is although it shows our solar system, it doesn't show where the sun is located in the galaxy. | ||
| So this is like having a city map, but nowhere do you send a map of which city you're in. | ||
| So that's missing. | ||
| And that was corrected in the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques that were sent out about five, well, no, about three or so years later. | ||
| In your work at SETI, as you go from radio to now include light, I guess, pretty soon, that's what I'm reading about anyway. | ||
| Would it surprise you, shock you, if you got a radio answer somewhere near hydrogen, your favorite place, that would be essentially an answer to this signal? | ||
| Well, it would surprise me, actually, Art, because that gets down into the nature of the reply that apparently some people believe has been carved into the wheat there. | ||
| All right, then. | ||
| I guess let me stop you because I know where we're going. | ||
| And just one more thing that I want to get out before we go there, and that is, by now, 2001, where would that signal be? | ||
| And where would it have passed? | ||
| Yeah, it's 27 light years out. | ||
| Okay, so, you know, 27 light years is fairly far. | ||
| That's beyond the nearest star. | ||
| The nearest star to us is four and a half light years. | ||
| In fact, you know, after they turn off the transmitter, within one minute, this signal had passed the orbit of Mars. | ||
| And after half an hour, it passed Jupiter. | ||
| And, you know, very quickly it overtook the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. | ||
| It overtook those probably within a couple of hours. | ||
| Boy, that's something to think about, isn't it? | ||
| Space travel versus travel at the speed of light. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very fast, and I was wrong, by the way, the Pioneer craft were actually launched before this thing. | ||
| But in any case, it moves at the speed of light. | ||
| And now, at 27 light years, it's past a few hundred stars. | ||
| In other words, it's farther than a few hundred stars away. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, you know, it's on its way. | ||
| I take it they pointed it at a part of the sky that was, I don't know, most favorable, that would have the most stars or whatever in line, best chance for reception. | ||
| Did they go by that standard? | ||
| What they did is they pointed it at a big cluster of stars. | ||
| In fact, the name of that cluster, it's got a very sexy name. | ||
| It's called M13 because it's number 13 in a list constructed by a guy by the name of Chucky Messier in France many years ago. | ||
| Anyhow, that's just a big globular cluster. | ||
| It's a ball of stars. | ||
| There's several hundred thousand stars in that cluster. | ||
| And the beam of the telescope conveniently, more or less, fit right over that cluster of stars. | ||
| Oh, so they thought this one out pretty well. | ||
| They thought it out. | ||
| Now, there is an important point here, of course, and that is that M13 is not next door. | ||
| It's about 25,000 light years away. | ||
| So it's going to be a while, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't, yeah, that's right. | |
| So it's not at M13, but it is past several hundred stars. | ||
| Now, that means several hundred suns with the possibility of planets around those suns. | ||
| Getting more and more likely as we discover more planets around more stars, right? | ||
| That's true, that stars do have planets. | ||
| We know that now, and as you point out, more and more of them are found to have planets. | ||
| But those stars are not in the direction in which this beam was pointed. | ||
| Keep that in mind. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Keep that in mind. | ||
| Now, as I say, this thing was aimed at M13, and you might think, well, that's a good idea, and not terribly dangerous, because after all, if M13 is 25,000 light years away, you know, why are we worried about this? | ||
| I might say that at the time, this was kind of interesting, the astronomer Royal of Britain got somewhat riled up about this broadcast, and he petitioned the International Astronomical Union. | ||
| And why was Royal riled? | ||
| Well, yes, Martin Ryle, Sir Martin Ryle, got riled up because he thought this was a diplomatic act. | ||
| Broadcasting into space was potentially dangerous after all the aliens would know we were here. | ||
| Well, he has a sort of a point. | ||
| He does. | ||
| And I might say that SETI almost never does broadcast into space. | ||
| This is one of the very few times we've ever deliberately broadcast anything into space. | ||
| From your point of view, if you could go back in time and stop that broadcast and never have it happen, would that be your preference? | ||
| No, I don't think I would do that. | ||
| If you're really worried about letting the aliens know that we're here, stopping this broadcast doesn't strike me as the right thing to do. | ||
| The thing you want to stop is our television and our military radar. | ||
| And there's probably going to be some opposition to stopping either one of those. | ||
| All FM radio stations, too, I bet. | ||
| Also FM radio stations. | ||
| So turn them all off. | ||
| We'll be okay. | ||
| So conceptually, then, I just wanted to flesh out your position on it. | ||
| You would do it again today. | ||
| Yeah, I think That a three-minute demonstration, I tell you what was interesting about this, not so much the transmission per se, because that was just a very simple technical exercise. | ||
| I think that the really interesting thing was, as you point out, coming up with this message. | ||
| What would you say to the aliens? | ||
| You know, I'm sure that that was the subject of lots of discussion, and we've talked a little bit about it tonight. | ||
| I mean, it's just not entirely clear what you would tell. | ||
| No, I think they did a pretty good job, actually, Seth. | ||
| You know, as I look at it and I think about it, you want to tell the basics, and in a way, they did a pretty good job of that, actually. | ||
| They did. | ||
| They could have made it much more detailed, of course, if they had gone for a longer transmission. | ||
| But given the fact that they wanted something short and relatively uncontroversial, I agree with you. | ||
| I think they did do a good job. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, we're at figure number, what is this, three. | ||
| On the left-hand side is the Chilboltan glyph. | ||
| Now, a few days ago, in a field in England, this Chilboltan glyph appeared. | ||
| It's not really a classic crop circle. | ||
| It is extremely complicated to do if you're going to try to tromp it out. | ||
| I don't know how they would do that. | ||
| It became what appears to be an answer to the Arecibo signal of 1974 in a crop glyph in England. | ||
| And it is so close, I think you would at least agree, even though you think it might be a hoax, you would agree certainly that this would represent, obviously, an answer to that transmission. | ||
| I mean, that would certainly be the intent here. | ||
| It's not unclear, is it? | ||
| Not at all unclear. | ||
| No doubt about that. | ||
| This is indeed intended to mimic the Arecibo broadcast To change it, indeed, to add new information. | ||
| What do you see that's different? | ||
| Well, you know, it's a very important thing. | ||
| What jumps out at you, doesn't it? | ||
| Yeah, well, the first thing that jumps out at me are three things. | ||
| One, the little stick figure of the human has been replaced with a little stick figure of a guy who's going to require a larger hat. | ||
| He's got a much bigger head. | ||
| Bigger head, yes. | ||
| The other thing is that the little map of our solar system, which has nine planets and the third one, namely Earth, is offset in the direction of the stick figure to indicate, hey, this is where we live. | ||
| Now they have, it looks like, nine planets still, but three planets are offset, which might suggest that... | ||
| Yeah, instead of just one. | ||
| So that suggests that, well, maybe they've got more planets occupied. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Done a little bit of local colonization. | ||
| And the third thing that strikes me is, whereas on the bottom of the Arecibo message, you have a picture of the Arecibo antenna and a little diagram of how it works, you have something here that I don't know what it is. | ||
| It looked to me like some sort of spacecraft with solar panels or something like that, but I really don't know what it is. | ||
| In any case, that's... | ||
| That's a bit of a mystery, but it's clearly changed. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Seth, hold tight. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| I think we all now have a 101 on that signal that was sent out. | ||
| I had no idea it was an effective radiated power of 2 trillion watts. | ||
| Holy mackerel. | ||
| That is one mother of a signal. | ||
| Coming up in a few moments, more Seth and Richard Holzen. | ||
| Well, this incredible crop glyph, and by the way, those who think it was computer simulation, you're all wrong. | ||
| It really is a crop circle. | ||
| That'll be verified again and again tonight. | ||
| That's really not even in question, although some people inevitably question it and say, oh, it's a computer thing. | ||
| Well, no, it's not. | ||
| It's a rendering of what exactly appeared in that wheat field. | ||
| I might add near a Chilbolton Observatory. | ||
| Seth, welcome back. | ||
| Just two fast things. | ||
| Actually, three. | ||
| One is it did appear, and we've got a photograph of it further down the page. | ||
| This thing appeared right in front, not further down the page, up the page one, right in front of the, is it the Chilbolton Observatory? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| It's, by the way, not the first time they've had such glyphs appear. | ||
| Have you talked with them? | ||
| I tried to get hold of them, but believe it or not, it's a bank holiday in Britain today. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Anyway, there it is, right in front of this observatory. | ||
| And it could not be more clearly in front of it and pointing right at it. | ||
| Why do you think, and I know you do think this, that this is not a valid reply to the signal sent out? | ||
| Well, there are lots of reasons. | ||
| Some of them just have to do with the whole crop circle phenomenon. | ||
| To begin with, it's rather an inefficient way of getting any information to us. | ||
| I mean, if the aliens had intercepted that Arecibo message, they would clearly have radio technology. | ||
| They would need that to pick up the message, right? | ||
| And if they were able to come to Hampshire and, you know, burn graffiti in the grain there, well, that means they're capable of interstellar travel. | ||
| So these are fairly sophisticated critters. | ||
| Now, the idea that Well, why would you do it with really simple graphics? | ||
| Why not just leave the Encyclopedia Galactica at the front door of the observatory, or maybe the front door of the farmer himself? | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| You mean actually deliver it as opposed to putting it in wheat. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if they've come here to... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If they come here to... | ||
| Part of the problem is that these crop circles or crop glyphs or whatever you want to call them have very little information. | ||
| The amount of information in a glyph like that is kind of the information you would have in less than a paragraph of text. | ||
| Kind of like we sent to them. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But at least we didn't go to their planet and burn it in their agriculture. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you're not hot on the idea that it really is an answer, obviously. | ||
| Well, there's that. | ||
| There are other reasons, and some of them I'm sure we'll get into here. | ||
| All right, my audience said almost together in email that I received, when you get to that part where everybody says, well, how come in a wheat field, why would they do it in a wheat field? | ||
| I'll tell you what the answer was that my audience gave. | ||
| And you'll chuckle. | ||
| Because it can't be covered up. | ||
| Ah, well. | ||
| That's the answer they gave. | ||
| Oh, you mean the government can't cover it up? | ||
| Apparently, the farmer covered it up. | ||
| In other words, nobody could. | ||
| Well, yeah, the farmer, I think, went after it. | ||
| In other words, you know what they're saying. | ||
| Yes, you know, I understand that. | ||
| But if you're worried about that, if you're worried that the message won't reach everybody, then you could write it in the sky or you could just burn it into the pavement of the local interstate. | ||
| I mean, there are lots of other things you could do. | ||
| But the real point is if you're going to burn any message, I mean, just try and picture this. | ||
| You're in an alien parliament, right, 100 or 1,000 light years away and trying to decide whether to spend 100,000 galactic cruiseros to build this big spaceship with the burner on the bottom to send, you know, 100 or 1,000 light years to this little blue planet just to come down and carve graffiti in our wheat. | ||
| You know, that's a really expensive proposition for very little gain. | ||
| So I think that if that's all you wanted to do was give us a little bit of info, why not broadcast it to us? | ||
| Because, you know, to begin with, you can pick that up anywhere on the planet, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper. | ||
| If you had picked up the equivalent of this, Seth, this answer, but on radio somewhere up near hydrogen, you'd be jumping up and down now? | ||
| I bet I would. | ||
| Let's add quickly, Richard C. Hoagland. | ||
| Richard, welcome. | ||
| Good evening. | ||
| Good evening. | ||
| And you supplied a lot of the images or the arrangement of them for this evening's discussion. | ||
| Richard? | ||
| Well, I've been in touch with a lot of the folks in England. | ||
| And, you know, we now have the web, so you can ship images back and forth, and everybody's getting their appropriate credits. | ||
| And there's a lot of people over there scratching their heads trying to figure out what this really is all about. | ||
| And you're going to have one of them on in a few minutes. | ||
| So you'll have a lot of questions for Michael. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Seth, hi. | ||
| How are you, Richard? | ||
| I'm pretty good. | ||
| And I'm not at all surprised you're skeptical because I'm skeptical. | ||
| I mean, when you're confronted with, I mean, Art just asked the key question. | ||
| If you had received this thing, you know, at Arecibo or Owens Valley or any place, you would be jumping up and down. | ||
| The first thing you would have done is notify everybody on the loop and have them all look at the same star and see if they got the same signal, right? | ||
| That's the protocol. | ||
| That is the protocol. | ||
| And if they got the same signal from the same, you know, right ascension declination, you would then believe it was real, right? | ||
| Well, yes, I would. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then you would proceed with the exciting stuff, which is to decode it. | ||
| The problem is the medium. | ||
| You don't think a priori this can be real because you don't see philosophically why you would spend so many galactic credits to do something so simple with so limited bandwidth and so little return, right? | ||
| Well, that's one reason, although that's not the most compelling reason. | ||
| What's the most compelling reason in your life? | ||
| The most compelling reason is that this signal hasn't reached anybody yet. | ||
| Well, it was on Fox tonight. | ||
| Well, that may be a limited audience. | ||
| Well, but, you know, I'm intrigued that Art's audience, almost to a person, says the biggest reason to do this is so it can't be covered up, because that's basically the reason that I would come up with, that this cannot be covered up. | ||
| No matter what the motives of government or institutions or your motives or whoever's involved in SETI, this stuff is out in the open, and because of the internet and because of cable television and satellites, it has gone around the world. | ||
| This has caused a tremendous stir. | ||
| You know, though, this is the exact same reason that Seth says that a similar signal received at SETI could not be covered up because of all the networks and because of the internet and all the rest, right, Seth? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| In fact, we have some proof of that because during a false alarm we had in 1997, we saw exactly what happens when we do get a signal. | ||
| And the first thing that happens is that the New York Times starts calling you up. | ||
| So there is no possibility of a cover-up from a radio signal as well. | ||
| And a radio signal has the advantage that you get a lot more information and anybody anywhere in the world can receive it. | ||
| Now, I didn't say I believe that, Seth. | ||
| I just said that's what you say. | ||
| You can check with the New York Times. | ||
| No, we know that happened. | ||
| But I mean, those who believe this would believe any conspiracy nearly, and they would certainly believe that there would be sort of a setup like that. | ||
| So everybody would believe it would have to get out. | ||
| One thing that strikes me about these crop circles, I would like to get to the point that the signal has not gone anywhere, but one point that strikes me about these crop circles is their enormous preference for England, for the United Kingdom. | ||
| There have been about 160 crop circles in the last 10 or 20 years that have appeared, and almost 100 of those have been in the U.K. Now, it's a good point, Richard. | ||
| How many have been in the United States? | ||
| There are thousands. | ||
| There are thousands that have appeared, not just 160. | ||
| I mean, I have a little experience with signals, because if you go up to the top of our page there, you'll notice that we have a little representation of the Pioneer plaque. | ||
| Eric Burgess and I were the guys who suggested to Carl that we start sending messages into the galaxy. | ||
| And we started with a set of glyphs. | ||
| We started with an actual picture of who we were and how big we were compared to the spacecraft and what planet we came from and where it was in the galaxy and all that good stuff. | ||
| This is the first message in 71 that the human race actually sent into the galaxy. | ||
| That is kind of a neat message, and it really is kind of a glyph, isn't it? | ||
| It is a glyph. | ||
| It's not a kind of glyph. | ||
| It is a glyph. | ||
| And there is a binary code, you know, based on the hyperfine transition of hydrogen and all that. | ||
| But it basically is a kind of a picture that you're supposed to use the binary to decode. | ||
| And we only followed up in 74 with the Arecibo message. | ||
| Now, let me stop you for a second, Steph, on the whole philosophical thing, because I find it slightly tedious when everybody keeps coming up with theories why aliens do this or why they do that or why they don't do this. | ||
| As a point of fact, we don't know what an alien would think. | ||
| We don't know what an alien would think would be economical or political or democratic. | ||
| We have no basis for presuming anything. | ||
| We've got to start with what we got. | ||
| And at the moment, what we have is a rather remarkable glyph, which, by the way, is still in the wheat field, guys. | ||
| I got an email from England this morning, and it's still there. | ||
| It has not been cut down. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Anyway, he's right. | ||
| That is certainly a glyph at the top. | ||
| The first one we sent is glyph-like. | ||
| So if you go down, you know, the thing I find most intriguing with this little mystery is whoever did this, and I'm right in the middle. | ||
| I can argue that it's a hoax or I can argue that it's real Seth, all right? | ||
| That may surprise you, but I can make both cases. | ||
| The thing I'm intrigued with, to start with, is the differences between what's there in that field and the original Arecibo message. | ||
| Because there is really interesting information, and even with a little bit of digging, I mean, the web we have is such an extraordinary tool that I was able to find some pretty interesting information regarding some details of the differences. | ||
| If you go to the second line of the message, all right, in the crop width, like if you go down to, let me see, where are we here? | ||
| You go down to image number, it would be image number five, which is done by Paul Vigay, who runs the Crop Circle Research Institute over there in England. | ||
| He has done a very careful analysis, which we also link to, so people can maybe later on this evening go and actually read what he's done here. | ||
| He has pointed out in red on the right-hand side, you can see all the differences between the Areceba message and the glyph response. | ||
| What I found, for instance, in the second line is the line devoted to the definition of the elements that are required for living things. | ||
| Remember that was part of the key discussion, Seth, back in 74? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And they listed phosphorus, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. | ||
| Well, whoever did this added silicon. | ||
| Right, fairly. | ||
| And I looked and I found the most remarkable thing from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego this afternoon. | ||
| Scientist named Benjamin Volcani, B-O-L-C-A-N-I, died in 1999. | ||
| He was 84. | ||
| In 1969, Volcani established the biological role of silicon in the most fundamental life processes through his work with diatomas, which are little single-celled aquatic plants that are the base of the marine food chain and the oceans of the whole world. | ||
| All right, Richard, but I think Seth would probably say that's an obvious draw from science fiction, Seth. | ||
| Yes, I would say that. | ||
| I think that it would pay instead of, you know, looking at these differences, and we ought to do that, but I think that all the differences can be ascribed to either a good imagination or a fair familiarity with science fiction. | ||
| You must admit, though, Seth, that in terms of an answer, this is not, or doesn't seem to be, an amateur attempt. | ||
| In other words, the differences are subtle and interesting and meaningful. | ||
| So whoever did this was quite clever if it was a hoax. | ||
| Exactly, but I do believe, and I hope I'm not wrong in this, that there are clever people in Britain. | ||
| And indeed, this is not the first crop circle that has appeared next to this observatory. | ||
| As a matter of fact, in fact, I kind of wonder why they put it next to this observatory at all. | ||
| Why didn't they put it in Arecibo, where the message came from? | ||
| They know the size of the Arecibo dish, and it surely must occur to them that the one they put it next to is 12 times smaller in diameter. | ||
| Well, if they did it in Arecibo, they'd have to do it in trees and jungles. | ||
| Exactly, but if they've come all this way, perhaps they could do that. | ||
| But let me get trying to read the minds of aliens. | ||
| Well, then let's do some science here. | ||
| Let's do some science. | ||
| Because if they've replied to the Arecibo message, then they have to have received the Arecibo message. | ||
| Now, the Arecibo message was broadcast, we've already said it a million times, by the Arecibo Telescope, which is 1,000 feet in diameter, and at the frequency at which the broadcast, which was made, which is about 2,400 megahertz, the size of the beam, the transmitter beam coming out, is two minutes of arc. | ||
| That's 1 15th the diameter of the full moon. | ||
| That's a small patch on the sky. | ||
| This is like taking, imagine hanging a field with marbles hung on threads and aiming your laser pointer through there, but the marbles are each 100 miles apart. | ||
| Okay, how far does that laser beam go before it hits a marble? | ||
| Pretty far. | ||
| You can work it out. | ||
| It's freshman astronomy. | ||
| You can work out how many star systems this signal has hit in the 27 years it's been since it was broadcast from Puerto Rico. | ||
| And the answer is zero stars. | ||
| The chances that it's hit one star in, you know, within 27 light years, and really you should make that 13 and a half light years because after all, you've got a lot of time for the fly to get back here, and that can't be better than the speed of light. | ||
| But even if you don't do that, even if you assume they have faster-than-light travel, the chances are 50,000 to 1 that it's hit a single star. | ||
| Well, but who assumes or has to assume that this is a repeat of a signal that we sent? | ||
| Let me interject here, gentlemen. | ||
| We only have a few moments. | ||
| And if the two of you are agreeable, I'd like to extend this 30 minutes. | ||
| Oh, by all means. | ||
| How about you, Zeth? | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let me interject one quick thing. | ||
| Suppose this signal was received by something that was a whole lot closer than 25,000 light years away. | ||
| Suppose this signal was received by something traversing near space. | ||
| Just a point. | ||
| Yeah, well, you have the same problem because the chances that they're in the beam now are actually smaller because they're closer and the beam is smaller. | ||
| Well, let me, you know, again, we're backing up to assumptions. | ||
| Let me follow what Art just said. | ||
| My theory about this, if it is real, that it has nothing to do with the signal being intercepted and returned, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| It is that someone has decided it is time to respond in an idiom that we understand, and they took the most well-known message we ever sent, the first radio SETI signal we ever sent, and they basically laid it out with modifications to describe something they want us to think about as part of an acculturation. | ||
| If aliens had been wandering around, if the UFO phenomenon is representative of someone looking us over since the 1940s, if not before, then we don't have to consider that they received this out there at all. | ||
| They would have been able to pick it up on the equivalent of CNN, although CNN didn't exist in 1974. | ||
| And by the way, was it really on Fox Seth? | ||
| Ivy, that was Richard. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was on Fox. | |
| Richard, it was on Fox tonight? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| O'Reilly, the O'Reilly factor? | ||
| Really? | ||
| He interviewed Linda. | ||
| Oh, very good, by the way. | ||
| Good for him. | ||
| And good for Linda. | ||
| Yeah, and you see he's intrigued. | ||
| So this is beginning to make its way into the popular television global nervous system that we have created. | ||
| Hooray. | ||
| If nothing else, Seth, perhaps we'll get, if this continues this way, the social experiment we want before something else happens. | ||
| Well, it certainly seems to be a social experiment, indeed. | ||
| Let me point out something else. | ||
| I mean, you kind of cavalierly dismiss the idea that the information contained in this is relevant. | ||
| I would like to point out that Dr. Vocani's work was not even apparently known to Frank and to Carl when they composed the original signal that silicon is important as a biochemistry of current life systems here on Earth. | ||
| Well, but so are a lot of other. | ||
| You've got aluminum in your body. | ||
| You've got lots of elements in your body that are not the CNOH and T that are represented here. | ||
| They're all in trace amounts, unless you're a dietary. | ||
| But silicon is not down at that trace level. | ||
| It turns out it's a very important element, and it was not apparently appreciated. | ||
| So it's a correction to our biochemistry. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But I suspect that the intention there was to show that they know that silicon is the only other candidate in the world of chemistry that can hook up to make complex molecules that are necessary for life. | ||
| Carbon does that a heck of a lot better if you look around. | ||
| There's more silicon in the crust of the earth than there is carbon. | ||
| But if after 4 billion years, all it's made is some quartz and sand. | ||
| Carbon has done a lot of money. | ||
| But surely, gentlemen, you can both agree this was not done by a couple of beer-drinking, good old boys with boards and chains in Great Britain because they just wouldn't think this up, would they? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I think it was done by university students, and they could think it up. | ||
| Well, that will be interesting to find out, and it would be really useful if you could continue to try to call the Chilbotin folks and either get them to talk to the rest of us or maybe ask some questions yourself as to who saw what, when, do they have security cameras? | ||
| I mean, this is a very important government facility, very important. | ||
| Apparently, government work is done there as well. | ||
| Is that correct, Shah? | ||
| Well, you have to get to meteorological. | ||
| You know, what they do is they study the weather, actually. | ||
| They don't really listen to space very much, but they study the weather. | ||
| VLBI experiments with the ABL. | ||
| They are part of the VLBI network. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They study quasars. | ||
| But it's mostly for providing maps of the local weather that are shown on the television there in Britain. | ||
| My point was it's a very important facility. | ||
| It's a government facility. | ||
| And you can't go anywhere in England these days without running into a security camera. | ||
| That's one of the main complaints for the civil libertarians over there, that even in a country grocery store, you're put on video. | ||
| So it would be nice to find out, and we haven't been able to find out because they don't answer the phone, if they had security cameras, if they were running tape, and if anybody saw anything. | ||
| In other words, why don't we proceed on this scientifically instead of making assumption after assumption after assumption? | ||
| Okay, well, maybe they saw this glyph and they all ran, and it's unmanned now. | ||
| Gentlemen, hold on. | ||
| We're at the top of the hour, and we'll be right back. | ||
| We'll do another 30 minutes. | ||
| Too important to leave this quickly. | ||
| Sesh Chosak from SETI and Richard C. Hoagland, one-time NAS advisor, are my guests. | ||
| We're discussing the answer to the transmission. | ||
| Question one. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Art Bell. | |
| I don't know if it was Richard or if it was Seth that said as we left the final segment, let us proceed scientifically. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| Let us proceed scientifically, although with the caveat that it's from our point of view. | ||
| Morton from Minneapolis, Minnesota, writes to me on the computer, if Seth understands how aliens think, perhaps he can explain to us how women think. | ||
| Don't ask too much. | ||
| All right, anyway, gentlemen, scientifically, eh? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, let me just throw out a few things here. | ||
| I mean, we're into describing the message, but I do think that it is important to look at the context a little bit about this whole idea of using crop circles because they can't be covered up. | ||
| You know, the same is true of graffiti sprayed on the subway cars of New York. | ||
| It takes them a while to cover that up, too. | ||
| That is why they put it there, though. | ||
| It may be. | ||
| It saves the city perhaps some paint jobs. | ||
| But, you know, if you found the Arecibo message sprayed on the side of a subway car in New York, you probably wouldn't leap to the conclusion that this was a message from extraterrestrials. | ||
| But I find that this grain graphics are very similar because, to begin with, you can only do it six months, it's not even that, six months of a year, which who would want a communication mode where you had to wait until it was crop season? | ||
| They always do it at night. | ||
| And by the way, kind of an interesting thought, I'd be interested to hear what Richard has to say to this. | ||
| The crop circles were a little bit late in showing up in Britain this year. | ||
| The crop circle season, as they call it there, got started very late. | ||
| And that's maybe not coincidental because the government, being afraid of foot and mouth disease, had levied large fines on anybody who was caught walking into a field because they would spread the contagion. | ||
| So, you know, that sounds like something that the aliens were keyed into, too. | ||
| They didn't walk on the field anyway. | ||
| Let me pick up on that. | ||
| Seth has made a very interesting point, Arch. | ||
| In fact, Linda discussed this with O'Reilly on Fox tonight because he asked the same question. | ||
| Well, here's an interesting idea. | ||
| I have actually seen the graphs which compare the whole year with Last year and the year before. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's true there are fewer total numbers of circles. | ||
| But they didn't start later. | ||
| There just are fewer numbers of them. | ||
| Now, think about this: you've got a bunch of hoaxers who, you know, scramble around in the middle of the night and invade farmers' fields and make these things, right? | ||
| That's the model. | ||
| This year, they had guys with shotguns and dogs and helicopters and infrared and surveillance, and they didn't catch anybody. | ||
| And yet, Circles, quote, still appears, Seth. | ||
| Well, that's not what I'm told by my friends in Britain. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's what I'm told by the actual systematic data. | ||
| Well, I'll have my friends call your friends. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Michael Gwickman, who has been there all year, is an expert on these and runs into everyone that appears, I think, is going to be on next hour or next half hour. | ||
| Maybe you can explain that. | ||
| Well, he has a 20-year database, and I think it'll be very interesting to see what he says about that particular thing. | ||
| Because what struck me about the graphs is the total number was reduced. | ||
| Seth is correct. | ||
| But they didn't start later. |
Export Selection