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Feb. 3, 2007 - Art Bell

02:35:45

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - SETI Research - Seth Shostak

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01:00:11

seth shostak

01:13:46

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones.
		Prolific indeed in every single one of them covered by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
		I'm Mark Bell.
		It is my honor, my privilege, to be escorting you through the Coast Weekend.
		Great to be here.
		Tonight's webcam photograph is Erin and Abby.
		So we took that, oh, I don't know, a couple of hours ago, not very long ago at all, and I hope you enjoy it.
		Asia continues to grow and kick.
		And we've decided that her middle name will be Rain, R-A-Y-N-E, Rain.
		So she'll be Asia Rain Bell.
		A-R-B, which actually is the same initials as my wife, which would be Erin Ruiz Bell.
		All right.
		Depressing enough, as always, let's look at the world news.
		It never is a pleasure.
		Scores killed in Baghdad market last, probably heard about it, a suicide bomber driving a truck loaded with a ton of explosives, hidden beneath cooking oil, canned food, and a bag of flour, obliterated a Baghdad food market on Saturday, killing 121 people in one of the most fearsome attacks in the capital since the U.S. invasion in 2003.
unidentified		Bad.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Never.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When will we ever, if ever, get good news out of Iraq?
unidentified		I suspect never.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The Army Corps of Engineers, now we talked about this a little bit last week, is proposing to divert up to $1.3 billion for levee repairs from the Mississippi River's East Bank, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, to the West Bank, where tens of thousands of people have now resettled.
		The West Bank was one of the only parts of New Orleans spared the flooding and all the mess that followed the 2005 hurricane.
		But the levees protecting it and the roughly 250,000 people who live there are inadequate, concedes the Corps.
		Pulling blue tarps over the houses that still had walls, neighbors, inmates, and the National Guard worked in the rain Saturday to help residents begin recovering from tornadoes that chewed through the middle of Florida, killing at least 20 people.
		The victims from the second deadliest series of tornadoes in the state's history ranged from a 92-year-old man to a 17-year-old Brittany May killed by a falling tree that crushed her bedroom.
		Terrible, terrible storms in Florida.
		The weather is not going to get better, folks.
		It's just not going to get better.
		It's going to get more and more violent.
		And while we're on that subject, I would really like to urge all of you, and I mean all of you, to go out and get a weather radio.
		C-Crane has them.
		They're generally available.
		You really need to get an emergency weather radio.
		Now, one of these things will go off.
		The CC radio has it built in, or you can buy a standalone weather radio.
		Whatever you get, get it.
		With what's going on right now around the world weather-wise, you really need to be warned.
		Everybody needs to be warned.
		And if there's a tornado, it gets reported.
		It hits the local weather.
		And if you have a weather radio, it'll alarm and go off and perhaps save your life.
		Bill Clinton and his family joined hundreds of mourners Saturday for the funeral of his stepfather, the man the former president said brought his mother the most secure, stable years she ever had.
		Richard Kelly, a retired salesman, died Wednesday at home.
		He was 91 years of age.
		This is an interesting story.
		I don't know why.
		A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction against a website peddling personal pictures, videos, diaries, and other items that heiress Harris Hilton once kept in storage.
		Hilton sued the website called ParisExpose.com last month, accusing it of exploiting her private personal belongings for commercial gain.
		Doesn't Harris exploit her own sexuality for gain?
		I mean, isn't that the whole aura of Paris Hilton?
		Or maybe she's trying to change that?
		Who knows?
		By the way, we're going to go to open lines, meaning anything you want to say very soon.
		So those of you that are aware of the portal numbers to get you in may begin dialing about now.
		However, in a moment, we'll look, as Paul always says, or I'm paraphrasing what he says, at the rest of the news.
		The world's leading climate scientists said global warming has, this is, by the way, from the Associated Press, said global warming has begun and is very likely caused by man and will be unstoppable for centuries.
		This is all according to a report obtained Friday by the AP.
		The scientists using their strongest language yet on the issue said now that the world has begun to warm and hotter temperatures rises in sea level would continue now, they say, for centuries, no matter how much humans control their pollution.
		So in other words, that's, I guess, a kind way of saying it's too late.
		The report also linked the warming to the recent increase in stronger hurricanes.
		The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, together with ice mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing.
		Very likely that it is not due to natural causes alone, said the report.
		The phrase very likely translates to a more than 90% certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels.
		Now, that was the strongest conclusion to Date, making it nearly impossible to say that natural forces are to blame alone.
		What that means in simple language is, we have this nailed.
		That is a direct quote from a top U.S. climate scientist.
		The 20-page summary of their findings, due to be officially released later in the day, that was on Friday, represents the most authoritative science on global warming to date.
		The new language marked an escalation from the panel's last report in 2001, which said warming was likely caused by human activity.
		There had been speculation that the participants might try to say it is virtually certain that man causes global warming, which translates to 99% certainty.
		The panel predicted temperature rises of between, get this, 2 and 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2010.
		That was a wider range than in 2001.
		If we were to get an 11.5 degree raise in the temperatures, where I live would be, I believe, unlivable.
		However, the panel also said its best estimate was for temperature rises of between 3.2 and 7.1 degrees.
		In 2001, all the panel gave was a range of 2.5 to 10.4.
		On sea levels, the report projects rises of between 7 and 23 inches by the end of the century.
		An additional 3.9 to 7.8 inches are possible if recent surprising melting of polar ice sheets should continue.
		And this is a very interesting story from Whitley Streeber's Unknown Country.
		Recently, as you know, I think New York City was disturbed and very mystified by the strong odor of hydrogen sulfide.
		No serious effort was made to identify the source, and the media dropped the story in about a day.
		The smell was identified as possibly coming from a release of the methane, which is stored on the ocean floor, a major sign of global warming.
		Now there are signs this is happening in Canada as well.
		The odor in New York could have come from hydrogen sulfide being outgassed along with methane from the walls of the Hudson Canyon, a massive underwater geologic feature off the coast of New York.
		The walls of the canyon are filled with methane hydrates, which will become gas if water temperatures get high enough.
		Now, in the past, global warming events have climaxed when increasing water temperatures have released hydrates of methane rather from the seafloor.
	Methane does not remain in the atmosphere very long, but it does cause extreme retention of heat.
	And if outgassing should spread, this is likely to occur.
	Now, remotely operated vehicle operations have revealed streams of methane-rich gas bubbles coming from the floor of Canada's Buford Sea.
	As freshwater continues to flood the northern oceans, it is very likely that methane outgassing will in fact increase with an effect on global warming that is not part of the estimates of most climate researchers, but it's going to be dramatic.
	Now, this one just blew me away.
	It just flat blew me away.
	Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate report due out, due to be published, well, they said today, Friday.
	Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, an ExxonMobil-funded think tank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasize the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
	So an oil company is offering $10,000 to any scientist apparently willing to write something saying it just ain't true.
	Or something I'm paraphrasing here, but that's true really too much.
	Major scientists have long charged that the Bush administration pushes pseudoscience based on belief and denial that caters to politics and big business.
	Now, Representative Harry Waxman, Democrat from California, has revealed that every time his committee has tried to get documents about government policy on climate change from the White House, they've been refused.
	Climatologists say they've been told not to even mention the words climate change or global warming.
	Do not utter those words.
	In The Independent, Andrew Buncombe quotes Waxman as saying the Bush administration is trying to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming.
	Other groups say that almost half of the climate scientists they contacted said they had been pressured by the current administration to eliminate the words climate change or global warming from anything in their papers.
	Now, that's really worth thinking about a little bit.
	Half the scientists they talked to said they had been pressured by the administration not to utter those words in a report.
	The Waxman committee heard testimony from NASA's Drew Schindell, who said that in 2004, he was asked to change the title of one of his papers to remove the offending phrases.
	40% of the federal scientists questioned said the changes were made to their work, not changes they made, but changes made without their permission, which changed their conclusions.
	hmm I You know, I honestly don't know what to say about this.
	I really don't.
	Is the administration that frightened of global warming?
	I just, you know, It's one of those things you'd laugh at if you didn't cry.
	For the second time in four days, a big chunk of ice mysteriously has plummeted to earth in central Florida.
	Florida has not had good weather lately, has it?
	A softball-sized piece of hail fell in Daytona Beach on Wednesday morning, grazing Mike Renee on his head and his right arm.
	Renee of Ormond Beach was working at the Eagles Watch Cluster Nursing and Convalescent Home on Fifth Street in Daytona Beach when he was struck.
	Not seriously injured, thank goodness, but in fact, a larger piece of ice fell out of the sky above Tampa on Sunday.
	That one crushed a roof, broke a rear window of a 2000 Ford Mustang.
	It's not known whether either ice chunk came from.
	They have no idea, though, of course, a lot of people believe they have fallen from airplanes somehow or another.
	I'm just astounded.
	Don't use the words global warming.
	Don't talk about climate change.
	And in fact, if you would like to write an article that takes it all apart, there is $10,000 in it for you.
	Now, that's getting a little desperate.
	Don't you think?
	I mean, why not send the scientists forth with an argument against global warming, against climate change?
	If you really believe it's not true in the administration, then send them forth with arguments.
	Have debates.
	Let's have a talk about it.
	Problem is, most scientists now believe it's absolutely true.
	In fact, it's getting up into the high 90 percentile range.
	Even though I'm sure they're somewhat afraid to say it, they did.
	So there you have it.
	All right, let's take some calls.
	David in New York, you are upon the air.
	Welcome.
unidentified		Hi, how you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm quite well, David.
unidentified		All right.
		Well, I'm calling in regards to Edgar Casey.
		I don't know if you're familiar with him.
		I'm sure you are, though.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have heard of him, yes.
unidentified		Okay, well, if people have heard of him before, he's probably the most well-known American clairvoyant ever, really.
unidentified		He's got, what do they say, thousands and thousands of known things that he has written down and like being in meditative state.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I would say Edgar Casey is probably the most well-known.
unidentified		Okay, yeah, okay.
		Well, I found out recently that I have the same birthday as he does.
		It's March 18th.
		And my little brother, who's the closest to me, he's from the same mom and dad, but he also has the day that Edward Casey died, January 3rd, is my little brother's birthday.
		And I was talking to him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And what does all that mean?
unidentified		Well, that's what I'm getting into right now.
		I was talking to somebody that knows a little bit more than I do about the whole subject of astrology and zodiacs and things like that.
		And she was explaining to me that Pisces is the 12th zodiac, which I didn't know exactly how that worked, but she said that when you're a Pisces, you have been each zodiac through one life already.
		And I want to know what you know about that.
		I've been looking on the internet and I just can't seem to find what I'm looking for.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm not clear on what you're looking for.
unidentified		Well, my question is pretty much what do you know, just in a few words, if you can give it, about the whole concept of Pisces and Zodiac and clairvoyancy and things like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, there is, I'm not going to give you a lecture on astrology.
		If you want to know about astrology, I highly recommend that you go to the net and read about it.
		Now, one of the, I guess there is something I will say.
		When I went to the Vatican, I was more than just a little bit shocked to walk in.
		First thing I saw when I went to the Vatican was a gigantic globe.
		And the globe was divided into the 12 signs of the zodiac.
		And I guess that was shocking to me because while it is, I guess, fairly well known, certainly not by me at the time, that the Catholic Church did, in fact, believe in astrology, had astronomers that advised and so forth, I was kind of shocked in a modern day to walk into the Vatican and see that as one of the first items that caught my eye.
		And I just stopped cold, and I looked at it and I said, what?
		So what do I know about astrology?
		Not a lot.
		I'm a Gemini, and I have read the general sun sign descriptions for a Gemini, and I would have to say that it's pretty much right on.
		Geminis are communicators.
		They tend to work in media-type jobs, that sort of thing.
		And so the sun signs seem to be pretty much right on the money.
		I would suggest that you read about yours.
		Do I believe in astrology?
		Yes, to some degree, I do.
		So I don't know how much that tells you, and I certainly don't know a whole lot about you.
		I barely know about myself.
		Let's go to San Diego, California.
		And Pablo, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
unidentified		How are you, sir?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Quite well.
unidentified		The issue in front of me is the bad news out of Iraq again.
unidentified		And unfortunately, the rule has a tendency to be report the bad news as it is sort of the necessity for the papers and media worldwide to just concentrate on what's going wrong with the world, not what's going right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have any suppressed good news from Iraq you can tell us about?
unidentified		Well, I will tell you a piece of good news.
		I met with a radio host from KFI up in Los Angeles out today, and Captain Dye is the military guy up there.
		And he's been very, very instrumental in analyzing the situation that we have in Iraq and how we are changing our tactics right now to make sure that we win this particular battle because it's so central to the overall war on war and terror.
		And if I might add, parenthetically, on the good side, the good news out of Peramp, Nevada is Art Bell is there with his wife and his developing child.
		And I am just ecstatic to hear this news.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm ecstatic to be here, my friend.
		But here's what I'll say.
		I'll say that I still haven't heard any, unless I were to hear what the new tactics are going to be.
		I'm not convinced there's any good news out of Iraq.
		I'll make a little up.
		Maybe it's not made up.
		We're killing terrorists over there, and the terrorists we kill in Iraq, we might not have to kill in New York City or Boston or Los Angeles or somewhere else.
		From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
		I'm going to tell you a pretty cool story.
		I got a call from Bob Bigelow today.
		It was a very, very, very interesting call all the way around.
		Turns out next week, sometime or another, Bob's going to fly a helicopter over here, landing, well, behind my backyard, going to fly me to Bigelow Aerospace, and I'm going to get a look at the satellite.
		In fact, Aaron's going to get to go along with me.
		We're both going to go, and we're going to get a look at the satellite that's going to be launched, the next satellite to be launched at Bigelow Aerospace.
		Now, that is cool stuff.
		I mean, that is really cool stuff, in my opinion.
		So that's one item on the agenda.
		The other, I can't make any promises about just yet, but Bob said the ranch, and I have never, never identified the location of the ranch, where all these really odd things go on, is occupied by a man who is a skeptic.
		Now, he's not a doubter.
		He was an absolute skeptic, and that means somebody who laughs at the unknown, the weird.
		Well, since living at the ranch, he has become, well, I don't know if it's fair, I guess it's fair to say a believer.
		Enough has occurred to him.
		Enough strangeness has occurred at the ranch.
		So he has gone from an active skeptic, and they're pretty rough people, to a believer.
		And I said, Bob, any chance we could perhaps snag an interview with him?
		And he said, you know, I'll look into it.
		So that might or might not be coming up.
		It's certainly going to be very interesting if it does.
		I love a skeptic turned believer.
		We'll be right back.
		Well, all right, it's been a while.
		So to Blair in Sedona, Arizona.
		Blair, hello.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
unidentified		How are you doing tonight?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very well.
unidentified		Good.
		Reference to your 2003 great interview with John Lear, when he told us that Ike and our government in 1954 had two choices.
		One was to choose to go with these ETs that decline technology to us, but they promised to get rid of these nasty grays.
		And the other one was these group, I guess it's the nasty grays, who wanted to trade technology for what, our DNA human packets.
		And now we're in this big deal where what can you say now?
		Are we only sold containers for the grays now, and they're experimenting on us?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that what you believe?
unidentified		Nah, no, because there's many layers to the onion.
		And look, we're only using 10% of our brain right now anyway.
		And so how can we make great pronouncements when 90% is in the subconscious?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're only using 10%, they say.
unidentified		Yeah, so why pigeonhole our reality?
		So why not take it from a point of view, okay, we can make the choices.
		This could be a sphere right here for firstborn souls, and we're intermingled with reincarnated older souls.
		But you know, the thing about the reincarnated thing, I know you've got sort of an issue.
		Why is reincarnation there if we don't have memories of past lives, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's kind of been answered for me, Blair.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the answer is that on a subconscious level, apparently we do recall prior lives and, I guess, make use of that information, if not consciously, then subconsciously.
unidentified		Well, bingo, you got it.
		We got an ocean of knowledge there, and we can tap into it, Art, anytime we want to.
		And it's just a matter of, again, of using this great gift of free will.
		Even if you come from the Judeo-Christian background, the angelic realm sometimes doesn't have free will, but we do.
		And they're protecting us.
		Why do you think we have guardian angels?
		So we are like embryonic gods down here, and it's just up to us.
		Let's make the decision.
		Let's go in one direction or we'll be recycled back into the supreme, you know, and try another, you know, as Lear would say, clear the petri dish, but it's still our choice, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess that's what free will is all about, yes.
		Yes, I've so much of whatever knowledge or wisdom I've accumulated has come from, believe it or not, this program.
		And for a long time, I did wonder, of what use is reincarnation?
		I mean, I tend to believe in it, certainly, that we come back again and again until we get it right.
		That's kind of the basic tenet of reincarnation.
		And I always wondered, what good is it if we can't remember anything?
		But at a subconscious level, I suppose we do.
		Let's go to West to the Rockies.
		John in California, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hi.
		Yeah, I'm a powerful psychic, PK, healer.
		And I called before I healed machines, but I would like to have callers call in with healing requests for themselves.
		Or if they know anybody who's not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, but you can only do that if you're a guest, John, and you're not.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		Well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So if you have real power in that area, feel free to fire us an email or something, prove to us what you can do, and we'll have you on there as a guest.
unidentified		Oh, as a guest.
unidentified		Well, I was wondering if you could have people call in.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, if you're a guest.
unidentified		Oh, if I'm a guest.
		Okay.
		So where do I email to you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, artbell at mindspring.com, artbell At AOL.com.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take your choice.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But when you do email, make sure you send proof.
unidentified		Oh, well, I don't have any.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No proof.
unidentified		What do you mean by proof, anyway?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, actual proof.
		For example, somebody has cancer, and it's a diagnosis that is fatal.
		They're going to die.
		But you, John, have aimed your healing powers at them, and now the new MRI shows absolutely no tumor or cancer where there previously was.
		That would be proof.
unidentified		Okay.
		How about that?
		What about the weather, weather control?
		Because I've weathered it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, John, again, if you can supply some proof, how would you like to do it?
		For example, I live in a very dry area here in the desert.
		Pick a day, call the rain in, I'll believe.
unidentified		Yeah, you know, I could work on it.
unidentified		I could try, but I mean, I couldn't guarantee it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you're that powerful, you should be able to guarantee it.
unidentified		No, I'll work on it.
		I can try.
		Pick a day.
		I don't know.
		Perhaps two weeks from today?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Two weeks from today.
		All right.
		Rain two weeks from today.
		Is that correct?
		In the desert?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Looking forward to it, John, and we'll go from that point.
		Proof is good.
		Wow, Cardline K in Connecticut.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		I'm calling because the other morning after one of the shows, I was still up at 5 in the morning, so I turned on the Discovery channel and didn't realize it was a teaching tape that was on about the moon.
		Now, it's said that the moon, of course, is a regulator, and it regulates the tilt of our Earth.
		There is, I guess, a symbiotic kind of thing between us and the moon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
unidentified		But the moon keeps moving further and further apart from the Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there is a small and ever-increasing distance.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's true.
unidentified		Yeah, and the thing that they put up on the screen was that if the moon kept moving away from the Earth, our Earth would change its tilt from anywhere from zero to 90 degrees.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All kinds of bad things would happen, Kay.
		The tides would stop.
		The tides are basically a function of the moon.
unidentified		And the tiles are not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, we wouldn't have tides anymore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would be bad.
unidentified		Right.
		Another reason we wouldn't have tides is if that elevator of water stops, too.
		Wouldn't that...
		And it showed how all the changes would be exactly like the changes we're getting now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There would be terrible changes.
		It's going to be a very long time before the moon moves far enough away from the Earth to cause the kind of climate change that, as you just pointed out, we're undergoing right now.
		So if you want to worry about climate change, Kay, worry about the one we're going through right now.
unidentified		I am.
unidentified		I am.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's a real serious one.
		As far as the moon slowly, slowly moving away, everything is slowly moving away.
		In fact, when you talk to physicists, they will tell you that eventually we'll be all alone.
		You'll look up into the sky and you will see no stars at night.
		Now, this is not a worry for this generation, nor the next, nor any generation as far as we can see.
		It'll be millions or billions of years.
		However, the climate, I should have a little beep thing, you know, so I can be consistent with what's going on and beep myself when I say climate change or global beep warning.
		Let's worry about the one that's going on right now, the one that I like the commercial.
		I don't know who's running it on TV, the public service announcement, I guess it is, where there's a fellow standing on the train tracks, and there's a train racing toward him.
		And there's some verbiage that says something like, well, what do I care?
		I won't be here in 30 years.
		And he steps aside, and there's his little daughter.
		And, of course, she's about to get smacked by the train.
		That's worth thinking about.
		Paul, in Oklahoma City, I believe.
		Oklahoma, you're on the air.
unidentified		Congratulations to you and your lovely wife, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		You know, something I haven't heard you play in a long time is the catalarn you used to play.
unidentified		My cats would just freak out when you'd do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, as a matter of fact, we have made a change here in what I've got.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I used to have all those put on tape, Paul, and I'm having them converted from tape to MP3s so that I once again have them.
unidentified		I was telling your screener, I have done a little experiment kind of just actually not experiment, I've just noticed it with cats and far as their fur color and their intelligence and their personalities.
		And I don't know if you've ever noticed it.
		I know you've had several kitties, but I've noticed that the kitty cats that have apricot or orange-colored fur, for some reason, their personalities are a lot more outgoing and personal to a certain human, and they seem to be extremely intelligent.
		I mean, I could tell you some things that some of these, my orange cat will do that just blows you away.
		And I'll never believe that cats cannot see color because they have their favorite colors.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Scientists tell us they can't see colors.
unidentified		Well, I don't believe it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, they can see contrasts.
		In other words, they don't actually apparently see the color, but they can see contrasts.
		And they most especially Can see movement.
		And if you've ever fed a cat a treat, and the treat, for example, you put it down on the rug and the treat is too close, it's a dark color, and the rug is a dark color, the cat is going to have a hard time seeing that.
		If there's a good contrast there between the colors, which the cat can see, they're going to be on it just like that.
		Or if you toss it and it's moving, they're going to be on it just like that.
		Now, as far as yellow cats being, I don't know, brighter or with bigger personalities, I have one orange cat, as you know, Yeti.
		He thinks he is the king of the world.
		He thinks that he owns us.
		Of course, to some degree, that's true of all cats.
		But it is particularly true in his case.
		He's absolutely convinced that we are here for his convenience, that we are here for, well, for him entirely.
		Whatever it is that goes on in the house, it's happening for his benefit.
		To Marla in Modesto, California, you're on the air, Marla.
unidentified		Hey.
unidentified		Hey, nose buckets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		That's an old one.
		Yes, it is.
		First of all, I was wondering, was that island that you talked about that disappeared, was that Hawaii's whale skate island that disappeared in 2004?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, this is an island way out in the Pacific.
unidentified		Well, you know what?
unidentified		I just came across an article that said that Hawaii's whale skate island, which was once home to sea turtles, Hawaiian monk seals, and nesting seabirds, vanished beneath the Pacific Ocean in 2004.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Send me a copy of that, would you?
unidentified		Oh, well, okay.
		And then regarding the concept of reincarnation, first of all, I read that in the Dead Sea, when they found the Dead Sea Scrolls, that in K4 they found the signs of the zodiac, but we never hear anything about that.
		And then I picked this up from, I think, a Jehovah's Witness magazine one time, Why Isn't Reincarnation in the Bible?
		And supposedly the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 AD, that was dominated by the Emperor Justinian.
		And the Pope refused to attend.
		So Justinian got his way, and his council condemned the pre-existence of the soul.
		And he said the church went along with it, so people wouldn't assume responsibility for themselves.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, that absolutely makes sense.
		In other words, the church would not teach or want to teach reincarnation.
		Why?
		Because people would have a very different attitude about life, wouldn't they?
		If, on the one hand, you think that when you die, you will either go to heaven or you will go to hell, depending upon your behavior while you are here on earth, then there's a control on you, isn't there?
		You're going to want to behave because you're going to want to go to heaven.
		If, on the other hand, you think that no matter what happens, even if you're a bad guy or gal, you're going to reincarnate and be blessed with another body, then what the heck, right?
		Go ahead and do what you want to do.
		I think that was perhaps the attitude, and I imagine that's why it was removed from the Bible.
		I tend, now underline the word tend, to believe in reincarnation.
		I don't know it to be a fact, but I tend to believe it.
		Henry in California, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		It's good talking to you.
		I've listened to you before you went to Philippines about 10 years ago.
		And I kind of play with semantic arts.
		I practice histology on an amateur level, numerology.
		But what I'm calling about is George Nouri's interview with this, I forget his name, Greg Miller, I think it was.
		Didn't hear it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I didn't hear it.
unidentified		What was that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I did not hear it.
unidentified		You didn't hear that show?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
unidentified		Well, Greg Miller says that the pole shift, which occurs, I research it today, occurs about every 800,000 years of the Earth, you know.
		And it doesn't happen all at once.
		It's kind of a gradual thing, you know.
		You'll get a lot of disturbances, earthquakes and things.
		And it said it took about 2,000 years before the poles really to shift.
		And this supposed science on George Nouri show says that it's going to happen within the next 10 to 20 years with certainty.
		And I thought that was an idea.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, let me ask you, how did they define the certainty?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, how are they sure it's going to occur?
unidentified		Well, he says, George asked him, he says, what's the probability of it happening within that span?
unidentified		And he says, 100%.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Based on what?
unidentified		Based on what?
		Based on the observations of the black holes, which he says are the cause of the magnetic disturbances that shift the poles.
		There's black holes, you know, floating around out in space all over.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are black holes, but actually, though we can detect the presence of black holes, I wasn't aware that we knew enough about them to predict a pole shift based on anything like that.
		Now, eventually, I suppose a pole shift is going to occur, but if the last one occurred nigh onto about 800,000 years ago, well, I'd have to do more research.
		Jim in Arizona, you're on the air.
		West of the Rockies.
unidentified		Good evening, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Got very little time, about 30 seconds.
unidentified		Art, I need a little help with an unruly ham operator that's blowing away the signal of KFYI out here in Chandler.
		This much Art can tell you.
		He must have got a set for Christmas.
		He's got a 46-foot Tower and a 300-watt crystal radio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		300-watt crystal radio.
		That's a new one on me.
		Listen, it's more than likely, now I'm not saying this for sure, but it's more than likely a CBR, not a ham.
		So if you know where he is, knock on his door and have a little talk with him.
		We all can live together, can't we?
		I'm Art Bell.
		Coming up in a moment, Seth Shostak.
		He is the senior astronomer for SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
		He's responsible for much of the outreach activities of the Institute.
		And actually, he's kind of the mouthpiece, really.
		He edits the newsletter, oversees the website, gives talks, writes magazine articles and books about SETI.
		He also teaches a half dozen informal education classes on astronomy and other topics in the Bay Area.
		In a moment, the man who's looking for extraterrestrial life will find out if that long-awaited signal has now been received by SETI.
		There is a taunt.
		We'll be right back.
		Well, all right.
		Seth Shosnak, it's been quite a while for you and I. Welcome to the program.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Thanks, Art.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		It's good to be here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's good to have you back.
		It really is.
		You know, I looked, Seth, over the, I don't know what it is, 12 questions that you submitted, I guess you submitted for tonight's program.
		I almost fell over.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think I'm about to fall over myself because they must be historical, but lay them on me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, I'll sort of go through some of these.
		It's not necessarily at all what we're going to talk about, but I nearly fell over because most of this has to do with ETs one way or the other.
		Oh, for example, do you believe extraterrestrial life and travel is possible?
		Did you write that?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't recall writing it, but it is a question that I get asked frequently, so I might have written it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If they are real, if they're visiting Earth, what do you think they want?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, that's not the question that I would expect Seth to write.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, it could be my alter ego that's sending you questions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe it is.
		Nevertheless, you know, these are kind of fun questions for you because I know your position on so much of this, you know, about whether, for example, we're being visited right now.
		There is a huge part of Stanton Friedman's website that addresses SETI and has a number of questions for you.
		And some of them might be worthwhile posing to you.
		I don't know.
		Have you ever had an encounter with Stanton Friedman?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I have.
		I had a week-long encounter with Stanton because both he and I were invited to be guest lectures on a trip of the Queen Elizabeth II from England to New York.
		And every day we would give lectures.
		They were, in fact, planning to have some sort of face-to-face debate where we were on the stage at the same time.
		That did not happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Never happened.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		No, but of course, obviously, you know, I sat close to Stanton during dinner and had the entire Atlantic in which to spend with him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, before we dive into this kind of stuff, also, by the way, I had a quote that was sent to me by email.
		Apparently, you did an interview on KGO, and somebody asked you, have you done Art Bell?
		And I think your quoted response was yes.
		And it was okay until they opened the phone lines.
		Then it got a little strange.
unidentified		Is that accurate?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I was certainly on KGO, I think, about two weeks ago with Ron Owens.
		And somebody did ask if I had been on your show, and I said yes.
		But beyond that, I don't know.
		It's always strange to be on these shows, of course, because you get such very interesting questions from the public.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, you do.
		You do.
		All right.
		Let's run through this a little bit.
		Stan has a number of interesting points to make.
		For example, frequently, I guess you've made statements like proclamations about how much energy it would take for any sort of interstellar travel.
		Is that fair?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that is absolutely fair.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		I guess Stan is making a point.
		Well, let me read a little bit.
		No professional competence training or awareness of the relevant engineering literature in this area.
		As it happens, a required amount of energy is entirely dependent on the details of the trip and cannot be determined by basic physics.
		If one makes enough totally inappropriate assumptions, as academic astronomers have repeatedly done through history, in their supposedly scientific calculation about flight, one reaches ridiculous conclusions.
		But it is not necessary, for example, to limit the flight to 1G acceleration or to provide all the energy needed for the round trip at launch or to use an utterly foolish trip profile as devised by Nobel Prize-winning Harvard physicists that involves accelerating at 1G for half the outward bound portion and the decelerating at 1G for the second half.
		In other words, do note it takes only one year at 1G to reach close to C. And then he points out there's also cosmic freeloading, which has been done by Voyager Pioneer Galileo, Cassini, and so forth.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, let's consider that.
		I mean, this idea that you might want to accelerate your rocket ship at 1G, I guess that gives you the opportunity to walk around the spacecraft feeling kind of normal because you're always getting, you know, that 1G that you're used to here on Earth.
		But, of course, you can't do that for very long.
		You can't accelerate at 1G for very long unless you have incredible amounts of energy because very quickly you get to 99% of speed of light and then 99.9% of speed of light and so forth.
		Now, all of that would be good because it would mean that your trip wouldn't seem very long to you.
		But, of course, Einstein will tell you your rocket ship keeps getting heavier and the amount of energy required to keep that acceleration up keeps going up.
		That's a pretty impossible task, I think, unless you've got all the energy of the galaxy in your fuel tank or something like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or a lot of time, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, acceleration could be, you know, by a light, for example, a light sail.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And any number of other methods that would give you a slower rate of acceleration, but eventually it would build you to a pretty high speed.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, the light sail is a good idea because you don't have to carry around a lot of heavy fuel.
		The problem with the light sail is that it requires light.
		It's a problem.
		You would quickly be becalmed, as it were, once your light sailcraft got pretty far from the sun.
		I mean, there isn't that much light when you get out even to Jupiter.
		You get out to Saturn, and you've got 1% the amount of sunlight that you have here in Earth's orbit.
		So you can work out the numbers there.
		The light sail is probably not going to get you up to very, very high speeds.
		I mean, it might be as good as a rocket, but it's not going to get you to the nearest stars in a lifetime.
		That isn't going to happen.
		I mean, there is this.
		And in this sense, Stanton Friedman is right.
		If he says, look, you don't need enormous amounts of energy.
		No, you don't need enormous amounts of energy if you're willing to spend a long time sitting there with your tray table and seat back in their fully upright position.
		If you're willing to spend a few million years en route, then you don't need so much energy.
		You have to make that trade-off.
		Do you want to get there quickly or do you want to use very little energy?
		And you can't do both.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Switching topics.
		SETI, of course, is looking at the heavens.
		And actually, I'd kind of like to know what it is SETI is doing right now and where they're doing it.
		Is it down...
		What telescopes are you using?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, right at the moment, tonight, I would say that probably the only telescope we've got going is the optical SETI experiment being run at the Lick Observatory, which is up on Mount Hamilton, not too far from lovely San Jose here in Northern California.
		And that's just looking for flashing laser pulses coming from other stars.
		That's a good way to get in touch, actually.
		In fact, I think it may be the way to ping a whole bunch of planets if you're an alien civilization and maybe get their attention.
		So that's an experiment going now.
		Actually, the major work of the SETI Institute is to build a new radio telescope called the Allen Telescope Array.
		We've occasionally talked about that.
		That's also in Northern California, but it's up in the mountains, up in the Cascade Mountains.
		It's about 300 miles from San Francisco.
		And that's going to be turned on this year, sometime around June or July, and we'll start using the parts of it that are completed to look at the center of our Milky Way.
		There are other SETI experiments.
		There's one being conducted at Harvard.
		That's another one to look for flashing lights.
		And of course, there's the University of California Berkeley project.
		They're down at Arecibo in Puerto Rico taking data, some of which is distributed for this screensaver SETI at home.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so all of that is still going on.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		That is going on.
		There's one experiment that I know about overseas, and that's the Italians.
		They're using some antennas in Italy.
		They're not too far from Bologna.
		If anybody's familiar with the Italian landscape, and they too are scanning the skies looking for radio signals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In totality, Seth, what percentage of that which we can see have we surveyed?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, it just depends on what you mean by survey.
		This sounds like what it is, but in fact, the whole sky has been looked at at some level.
		And it's a level that's not terribly sensitive, but some surveys have been done looking at the entire sky.
		Now, here in the northern hemisphere, you can't look at the entire sky because, of course, the Earth blocks your view of the south.
		But there have been some experiments in the southern hemisphere that have sort of filled in the gaps.
		So the entire sky has been looked at occasionally.
		But of course, if you want a lot of sensitivity, you've got to sort of stare for a while in one direction.
		So you've got to sort of decide what you're going to look at.
		This is a bit like making a time exposure with your camera at night.
		If you open the shutter for a long period of time, the image will build up and you'll see fainter and fainter things.
		So the same is true with a telescope, of course.
		If you make long exposures, you see fainter stuff.
		So if you're looking for faint signals, and of course that's what we are doing, then you're constrained to look at only a few places on the sky.
		So if you say, well, how much of the sky has been looked at at really high sensitivity and with a wide range of frequencies, that's very small.
		Fewer than 1,000 star systems have been carefully looked at.
		It's not much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That isn't much, really, is it?
		How many could we potentially look at?
		If we've looked at 1,000, how many could we potentially look at carefully?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, you're limited only by time, budget, and patience.
		There are a couple of hundred billion star systems in our galaxy.
		So in principle, you could look at a large fraction of those.
		I mean, some of them are blocked by dust clouds.
		They're hard to see.
		We don't have maps of all those.
		But certainly the stars within, say, a few thousand light years, there are millions, literally millions of star systems within that distance.
		And you can look at all those one by one.
		And indeed, that's exactly what we plan to do over the next couple of decades.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How big is the radio telescope you're talking about near San Jose, the one you're going to get?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, the one we're going to build.
		The Allen Telescope Array is unfortunately not too close to San Jose.
		It's up north, up in the mountains where there aren't too many people.
		There's some trout fishermen, not a heck of a lot of people.
		And of course, the telescope is built up there, not because of the trout, actually, but because there are so few people, there's not too much interference.
		Right.
		You know about this as a ham radio operator.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I do.
		I do.
		So how big is it going to be?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, when it's done, the telescope will extend over about two-thirds of a mile of real estate, but it's built up out of small antennas, each of which is about 20 feet in diameter.
		I say small.
		I mean, you know, if you had that in your backyard, you'd undoubtedly offend the neighbors, but there'll be 350 of them eventually.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		350?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		350.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, the whole way that you build, the way that you build telescopes, radio telescopes, has actually changed in the last 10 or 15 years simply because Electronics has gotten much cheaper.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, it sure has.
		I remember when I first got into the satellite business long ago, Seth, you could buy a 95-degree or 100-degree LNA at that time for about $1,200.
		My God, you can go out now and spend about $40 and get a, I don't know, a 15-degree LNA, something like that.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yes, low-noise amplifier.
		Exactly.
		Well, that's part of the change.
		So in the old days, if you were building a radio telescope, well, the electronics was so gosh darn expensive, you couldn't afford to build lots of antennas.
		But the electronics has gotten much cheaper, whereas the cost of the aluminum and steel, that hasn't gotten cheaper.
		So the whole paradigm, I hate to use that term, but the whole paradigm has shifted.
		And now, you know, you build lots of small antennas because you save on the aluminum, and the electronics is not so expensive anymore.
		You can afford to outfit them all with very good receivers.
		So that's what we're going to see in the future.
		You're going to see lots of real estate covered with small antennas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would think the difficult part of it would be in aiming them all at exactly the same place.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, whatever it would take to move that many dishes in concert.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, that turns out not to be such a problem, actually.
		Really?
		Yeah, it's true.
		You do aim them all the same way.
		They don't all do their own thing.
		They work together as a team.
		But because they're small, they have a very wide field of view.
		Each one of them is kind of like a wide-angle lens.
		So with a wide-angle lens, you don't have to aim very accurately, of course.
		But because they extend over this two-thirds of a mile of real estate, they can work together to simulate the amount of detail you would see if you actually had one giant antenna two-thirds of a mile across.
		So it's kind of the best of both worlds.
		You don't have to point them very accurately, but it can see very, very fine detail, which is not so interesting for SETI.
		We're not interested in mapping E.T.'s transmitter farm or anything like that, but it is interesting for the people who will be using the antennas for doing conventional radio astronomy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Seth, when it's all finished and done, how will it compare to Arecibo?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, it won't be quite as sensitive as Arecibo.
		Arecibo is a big antenna.
		It's 1,000 feet across.
		It's really a very special place.
		I think you've heard, by the way, that there's some danger that Arecibo will be shut down.
		That's another story.
unidentified		But in any case...
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, that's a recommendation of some of the review panels about where to spend money on research.
		As you know, there isn't a whole lot of money for research.
		And you've got a finite number of dollars and where you're going to spend them.
		And one serious suggestion is to shut down Arecibo because it costs a few million dollars.
		And those are tax dollars, by the way.
		SETI is not tax dollars, but Arecibo really is.
		To put those tax dollars elsewhere and just shut it down.
		And I don't know what you'll do with it.
		Maybe bronze it or something, put it in the museum.
		But it's a bigger one.
		So it's more sensitive, but it's rather slow because you can only point it at one star system at a time, at least the way it is now.
		So that's why it's taken 10 years to look at fewer than 1,000 star systems.
		The whole point of building a new antenna, such as this Allen Telescope Array, is to speed up the search because, frankly, the people that are doing it are not interested in doing an experiment that might pay off 500 years from now.
		I mean, let's find those guys.
		And so this thing will be hundreds of times faster, even thousands of times faster.
		And for me, that means that there's really a good chance we'll succeed in the next two dozen years.
		In fact, I bet everybody a cup of coffee will do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
		Seth, I'm curious.
		Are you looking at light now only, or are we still looking at radio?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, the Allen Telescope Array is for radio, so it's antennas.
		Now, as I say, it'll get turned on, at least the first subset of these antennas.
		We don't have 350 of them yet.
		We have about 10% that number.
		But they'll be turned on this summer.
		And, you know, that's a small array.
		It'll be 42 antennas, something like that.
		But it will still be powerful enough to do a very good SETI search of certain areas of the Milky Way where you've got clots and clots of stars.
		So it'll be a useful thing.
		But every year there'll be more antennas there.
		It'll get bigger.
		It'll get faster.
		The search will speed up.
		That's radio.
		The other kind of search is, as they say, looking for flashing lights.
		And that's the sort of thing that just about anybody could do because it doesn't take a lot of equipment.
		It just takes somebody's telescope and a bit of electronics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From a personal point of view, Seth, do you think that the signal, when it comes, if we assume it's going to come, will come by light and not radio?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you made that transition?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that, you know, looking at the way we send information around here on Earth, you know, we've always assumed in the SETI community it's going to be a radio signal because, you know, it's what you see in the movies, nothing else.
		But it's also the case that we developed radio technology first, right?
		Marconi's 100 years ago.
		Well, lasers and the idea of using optical fibers and communicating by light, that's only 50 years old.
		So, you know, there's this history here that kind of prejudices us to look first at radio.
		But it turns out that actually that prejudice might not be completely unjustified because radio is a very inexpensive way in terms of the energy to send bits of information around.
		And you could say, well, yes, but as a civilization gets more advanced, and presumably these aliens are pretty advanced, any that might get in touch with us, they're going to move from radio up to optical or whatever.
		But look at the Earth.
		You know, there's still AM radio.
		This show is proof of that.
		This is a technology that goes back almost 100 years, right?
		At least to 1920.
		And we still use it.
		In fact, we use more of it than ever.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You betcha.
		AM radio is not dead.
		Talk radio brought AM back, and AM is going to be with us for a long time.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I think it's going to be, in some form, you're going to use AM forever, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I believe that to be true.
		All right, everybody.
		Hold tight.
		Seth Ozak is my guest.
		He's from SETI.
		He's really the guy who's looking, along with those at Arecibo and elsewhere, for that very special signal.
		One that perhaps we've already received.
		Yeah, That's something I'm going to ask about.
		Is there some chance we've really already received it and missed it on our bell?
		Here I am.
		In a moment, we'll ask whether we actually may have received a signal and missed it.
		It's certainly entirely possible that we missed it.
		Maybe that wow signal they had or some signal very much like it actually was a signal.
		I think even Seth would admit that.
		We'll get to that in a moment.
		Let me refine my question just a little bit.
		Seth, how much of a possibility is there that we actually have received a signal and missed it?
		In other words, we caught it one time and then, you know, Arecibo moved because the Earth moved and so we didn't get a repetition where otherwise we might have.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, that's certainly possible.
		I mean, let's, you know, not be disingenuous about that.
		That's certainly possible, particularly with the earlier SETI experiments where you would go to the radio telescope, and it usually was a radio telescope, and you would record the data, you know, big computer tapes, the sorts of things you'd see in the old sci-fi movies with big tape drives in the corner and people changing the tapes.
		Well, you actually had those things, and you would just card them all back to wherever it was you came from and then play them and then look for signals, and, you know, you'd find signals.
		I mean, you always find signals.
		This is something that you have to keep in mind, that you've got these giant antennas and receivers that are listening to many, many channels.
		Today, you know, tens of millions of channels at once.
		So, of course, you're going to pick up signals.
		But the problem is now you're sitting in your office far removed from the telescope.
		So what are you going to do now that you find a signal?
		What you want to do immediately is go right back and see if it's still there.
		Well, these days you don't do it that way because the electronics are fast enough that you can actually check out the signal.
		You find the signals right away and you check them out right away.
		But even so, it might be 10 minutes or an hour or in some cases, in the case of the SETI at home experiment, for example, it might be months or even years before you get to check out a signal.
		And if you don't find it the second time, what do you say?
		Well, you could say, well, that's clearly not ET because when I went back and looked again, they weren't there.
		Or you could say, well, maybe it was ET and ET has gone on vacation or they shut off their transmitter or they lost their funding.
		Who knows what?
		So, of course, it's possible that some of those signals that were never seen a second time were real.
		That's possible.
		But nobody's going to win the Nobel Prize for that.
		Because if you can't verify it, I mean, you said earlier tonight, proof is good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		And in this case, unfortunately, you have to continue to find the signal.
		You've got to tell somebody at another observatory, hey, you look.
		And if they find it too, then, you know, you become a little more confident.
		So I don't think anybody would really call up the New York Times about a signal unless they could see it over and over again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let me go back to these questions they supplied.
		They really surprised me.
		The first question was, do you believe extraterrestrial life and travel is possible?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, obviously I believe extraterrestrial life is possible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, the second question was, if they're real, if they're visiting Earth, what do you think they want?
		And I looked at that and I thought, this cannot be a question that Seth wrote.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		No, it's not, but it's a good question.
		Interesting question.
		I'm sort of interested in who wrote these questions, but that's my question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am too.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		But, well, of course, as we've discussed, I'm somewhat skeptical that they are visiting Earth.
		I think if they were visiting Earth, we wouldn't be debating it.
		You know, it would be common knowledge.
		But we can take that on a little later.
		But what would they be here for?
		What are they doing?
		One thing you have to say to those people who maintain that we are being visited is so far they haven't done a whole heck of a lot.
		I mean, they occasionally apparently abduct people and they fly around and we get photos of them, but they don't seem to have done anything to either solve our problems or cause more problems.
		They're pretty benign.
		So whatever they're here to do, it clearly is at least not very malevolent.
		If you think they're here, they're the perfect house guests because they really don't cause any trouble.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, they don't, unless you count abductions, unless you count these weird things that are happening to cows, these mutilations and so forth and so on.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, of course there are other explanations for all these things, but even if you want to go from the point of view that the aliens are here and that are somehow mutilating our cattle, a rather bizarre thing to begin with.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		But they don't mutilate us much, at least not that I hear about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, not humans, but clearly they do mutilate cows.
		And, you know, there's really been nobody ever caught doing that, mutilating a cow, nor have they ever seen any footprints or evidence that humans were involved in that.
		And a lot of times these cows have been dropped out of the air, and that just doesn't make sense.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I must say, cows being dropped out of the air does seem extreme.
		But I, you know, I must confess my familiarity with bovine mutilation isn't very high.
		But I have talked to some people.
		I talked to some people actually at the observatory in Puerto Rico, some of the locals there about the chupacabras that were supposedly roaming the countryside, you know, tearing into the goats and eating them.
		And they said, well, actually, you know, it was predators, natural predators, of course, and not humans, but natural predators that were responsible for this.
		That was their take on it.
		Not being a rancher, I really can't speak to that.
		But I've heard people say that, and people who somehow think that it's more likely to be aliens than coyotes, they'd have to make their case.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You host a radio show of your own.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that true?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		That is true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are we alone?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Are we alone, weekly, one hour?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess your answer to that is Yes.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		No, my answer to that is we're probably not alone.
		I think we're probably alone here on this planet.
		But, you know, one thing that strikes me, ever since the SETI enterprise began, it began now, this is almost five decades ago, right?
		1960s.
		Incredible.
		Right.
		And we still haven't found a signal, but as I say, the experiments keep getting faster and faster.
		So, you know, all the actions at the end here.
		But one thing that does strike me is that the assumptions that were made back in 1960 as to how many planets might be out there or how likely is it that a planet would ever cook up life or what fraction of planets that even had life would ever cook up intelligent life.
		They could build radio transmitters and things like that.
		We didn't really know very much of that in 1960.
		We know a little bit more now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For example, what do we know now we didn't know then?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		We know now, for example, that planets are very common.
		We didn't know that because the first planets found around other stars weren't found, really, until 10 years ago.
		So 47 or whatever it is, in 1960.
		We certainly didn't know that.
		But the people that were proposing to do SETI said, well, it seems reasonable to assume that planets might be a dime a dozen, but we didn't know the price, and now we do.
		And it turns out, yeah, they're very common.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What we don't know is whether life is common.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, right, exactly.
		We still don't know that because we haven't found any life anywhere else, not even microbes.
		Not yet.
		Not yet.
		But it turns out that at least there are a lot of worlds that might support life.
		I mean, in our solar system, there are seven other worlds we know about that might have some liquid water.
		That doesn't mean they have life, but at least they have the conditions such that if you were to take all the microbes on Earth and throw them at these worlds, some of those microbes would survive on these worlds.
		So they could host life.
		That doesn't mean they have it.
		So that's a pretty optimistic thing.
		The other thing that we found out, and this is actually also very recent, is that life began on Earth very early.
		There are fossils that are 3.5 billion years old on this planet.
		And the Earth was only inhabitable beginning about 3.8 billion years ago.
		So really what I'm saying with all these numbers is that as soon as Earth could support life, bam, there was life.
		It sounds like it got started right away, which suggests that it's like walking into a casino in Las Vegas, putting in a quarter, pulling the handle, and you win $10,000.
		If that's the case, that bet must have been fairly probable.
		Either that or you're extraordinarily lucky.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that would suggest that where conditions are decent for the kind of life we understand, there probably is going to be life at some level.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		The evidence seems to be favoring that.
		Now, it's still a supposition at this point.
		And until we find some sort of life, on Mars or some of the moons of Jupiter or wherever we're going to find it first, until we do that, we have to say this is what we think is likely to be the case.
		And in science, what counts are the data, and we don't have those data yet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Well, I know you have a pretty big attitude about UFOs and those who claim that we are being visited now.
		And there's quite a bit of evidence.
		For example, there was the recent sightings at O'Hare.
		I guess you're familiar with those?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I certainly, you know, looked at some of the articles.
		I go to O'Hare frequently.
		I wasn't there in November.
		What was it, November 7th, I think, at 4.30 in the afternoon or something?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Too bad.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Too bad.
		So something, I mean, something happened at O'Hare.
		And all of these sightings, why is it not reasonable, Seth, to presume that if we are being visited, that they're adhering to some sort of prime directive?
		I hate to be that simplistic about it, but the prime directive seems so reasonable that if you're far ahead technologically, you would not interfere.
		In a lesser civilization, you might watch it, you might observe it, you might watch for it to get to some point before you would communicate with it.
		Isn't that reasonable?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not unreasonable, but it is alien sociology.
		And, you know, once again, we have to say, well, what do we really know about alien sociology?
		And the answer is not a heck of a lot.
		I have to say that this prime directive, which of course is the Star Trek injunction about not messing in or messing up anybody else's culture, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I'm trying to think of when we've ever followed that here on Earth.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Have we ever?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Never.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, never.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Never.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But then again, we are not as advanced as we assume somebody would have to be to be visiting here from elsewhere.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		That's true, but I don't know why we make the automatic assumption that they're perfected and we're not.
		Particularly given the fact that if you actually look at who does the traveling, who's doing the exploration, you look in earthly history, you look at which Spaniards came to the New World and bugged the Aztecs, actually wiped them out and the Incas and so forth and so on.
		They weren't your average Spaniard.
		These were the very aggressive types that were interested in either improving their financial circumstances or getting job security in the military, whatever they were interested in.
		Those were the aggressive guys.
		So you could argue that if we were really being visited, it's more likely we'd be visited by aggressive guys rather than guys who, well, we're just here to watch you and learn something from you.
		If they just want to watch us, there are much easier ways to do that.
		They could just send out some, just put a satellite in very distant orbit in our solar system and then just monitor the radio and TV and send all that back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was in a store the other day, and I talked to a fellow who worked for U.S. Base Command.
		I wouldn't identify him or specifically where he worked, but they have a kind of an electronic fence that's up, and through this fence passes all of these orbiting objects.
		And they, I guess, they categorize everything right down to Nuts and bolts that are in orbit around Earth.
		You sort of know about that, right?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, sure.
		I mean, to the extent that anybody can know about it, I know what size objects they're monitoring, at least down to what size, yes.
		It's like the size of a golf ball, typically.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There were a number of objects that this fellow was monitoring, and one of them was very large, like larger than 99 square meters.
		It was pretty big.
		And he made some inquiries about it and got immediate attention, Seth, and was told not to ask about that anymore.
		So one could presume there's, I don't know, maybe U.S. government or Russian or who knows what kind of objects that are up there that we don't want categorized.
		We don't want noticed at all.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Well, that's for sure.
		But, of course, that's understandable.
		The military, and all you have to do is talk to anybody in the Air Force about this, and they'll tell you.
		Yeah, they'll tell you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There you are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would think that these things, whatever they are, would be probably transmitting signals.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, it seems to me your organization, SETI, probably receives some of these signals.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Also true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		From these things that they don't want to talk about.
		They don't want known.
		Now, when you get a signal like that, how are you able to eliminate it if they won't talk to you about it?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, it is true.
		We pick up satellites all the time.
		Now, you know, you get a signal from a satellite, and you don't know, is this, you know, some sort of weather satellite or, you know, something fairly innocuous or is it a top-secret, you know, Defense Department satellite or maybe somebody else's defense satellite.
		But keep in mind that, you know, we're set up to average this signal over seconds or even minutes, really, minutes of time.
		Okay, so we're smearing out the signal over seconds or minutes.
		We do that, once again, for the same reason that when you make a time exposure with a camera, you can increase its sensitivity by leaving the shutter open for a long period of time.
		So we do that.
		That's typical radio astronomy practice, actually.
		What's called the integration time.
		You just leave the thing on for a minute and you average the signal over a minute to beat down the noise, to get the noise down.
		But that means all the information has gone away.
		You take an ordinary television signal and it's changing millions of times a second.
		That's the only way it can put pictures up on your screen at 30 frames a second.
		It's got to put millions of bits per second into your T V. Well, when you average for a second or a minute, all those bits get smeared out.
		So I don't think the military is terribly worried about us.
		And we, for our part, we don't, to begin with, we don't have any of the encryption codes or anything like that.
		I'm sure all this stuff is encrypted.
		But beyond that, we don't care about any of that.
		All we want to know is, is this ET or is it DOD?
		Is it just the energy?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So how do you rule out DOD?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, what you do is you look at the way the signal is changing frequency with time, actually.
		Is it moving up and down the dial?
		Because a satellite that's wheeling overhead, you've seen satellites, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, indeed.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, they take maybe 10 minutes or something to go across the sky.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you're talking about a polar orbiter, that kind of thing.
unidentified		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But what about the ones that are virtually stationary?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are geosynchronous satellites.
		We don't actually have much trouble with those because they're all over the equator.
		It's pretty obvious where they are, right?
		You can't have one of those sort of not over the equator.
		That's where you get this geosynchronous orbit.
		So that's one spot in the sky.
		You can say, hey, look, something up there is not going to change in frequency.
		But it's also not going to move with the stars.
		It's easy to rule out because, you know, the stars are wheeling around, but these guys are staying fixed.
		They're like giant telephone poles with transmitters on the tops of them.
		So they're not a problem.
		But the other satellites, the kind that are doing surveillance and so forth, they're producing high-resolution pictures of enemy countries and things like that.
		They're going around about once every 90 minutes.
		So they move overhead in about 10 or 15 minutes.
		And that means that the signals from them are changing frequency pretty fast because of something called the Doppler shift.
		You know about the Doppler shift.
		So for five minutes, they're sort of coming toward you, so the frequency is a little higher.
		And then for the next five minutes, they're sort of moving away from you, so the frequency goes a little bit lower.
		So they go, just like a car passing you on the highway.
		And so that's a very obvious signature of something that's wheeling overhead and not ET, because ET is going to be far away.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not so hard.
		All right.
		I said, is it at the beginning of the half hour?
		Is it possible you missed a signal?
		Would there be any example, the wow signal would be one, but there's probably others, of times when you think we may well have possibly received a signal and we simply were not able to confirm it in a way that makes science happy?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, as I say, that's certainly a possibility.
		And it was more of a possibility.
		You always ended up in the old days, in the good old days of SETI, when you would go down to the telescope and record the data and come back and look at it later.
		You always sort of ended up with a drawer full of a few dozen signals that you got, and you say, well, they look pretty good.
		And then you would go back to the telescope three months later and you wouldn't find them again.
		So it's just one of those things you could say, well, I don't know what it was.
		It wasn't there the second time, so I'm not going to win the Nobel Prize for that.
		And the WOW signal was kind of one of those deals, although they looked again a little over a minute after they first found it, because that particular telescope had actually, if you will, two receivers on it.
		And first one sweeps the sky, and then the other one sweeps the sky 70 seconds later.
		And the second one did not see it.
		So whatever it was, it was very, very short-lived.
		Now, that signal has been looked for again, over and over by people using better telescopes, better receivers.
		And indeed, one of the fellows who's been doing that, a guy by the name of Robert Gray in Chicago has asked if he and I could go up to the Allen Telescope Array this summer and look for the WOW signal again.
		So we'll do that.
		But all the efforts so far have, unfortunately, have not been quite so wowy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		All right.
		Hold it right there.
		Other than the terrestrial broadcasting we do of radio and television, I think there was only one instance of our world transmitting a signal into outer space, and that lasted for all of about 15 seconds or so.
		So I wonder why we imagine that other civilizations would do it for any extended period of time.
		I'm Mark Bell.
		What I mentioned just prior to the break was I think it was about a 15 second, I don't think it was 15 minutes, I think it was about a 15 second signal that we once transmitted.
		Now, Arecibo is a receiving apparatus, basically, but at one point we apparently turned it into a transmitting apparatus and I think transmitted a signal, a very strong signal into space, for about 15 seconds.
		When Seth gets back, we'll ask about that.
		Well, all right, Seth, is that true?
		Was it a 15-second burst transmission we made from Arecibo?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, it was a little bit longer, actually.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		It was three minutes, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Three minutes.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, 15 seconds, three minutes.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		It's hardly any difference.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Right.
		If you consider that somebody on some planet in some far system is looking for a signal, maybe some guy went, wow.
		And, you know, three minutes later when they went back to check, it wasn't there.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, exactly right.
		I mean, you've hit on it.
		What are the chances, to begin with, that they would get it even the first time?
		If you only broadcast for three minutes, what are the chances somebody's got their antennas aimed in your direction during the right period of time to pick that thing up?
		Obviously, not very, very great.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, maybe, let's just assume the very best and that somebody did get it.
		They'd go, wow.
		And then they'd go back to get it and it wouldn't be there.
		And somebody like you would say, huh, we're scientists.
		We don't believe in stuff that just happens once.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, it's not that you don't believe it, but you can't convince anybody else of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So indeed, no, that was a demo experiment, if you will.
		And, you know, we don't do too much transmitting.
		That was, by the way, not the only transmission we've deliberately made to extraterrestrials.
		There have been others.
		And, you know, some of the others ran for hours, actually.
		Yeah, but if you're going to do it, if you're really going to do that, if you want to set up, you know, if you really want to extend the coverage of this show, for example, to the nearby stars, then you've got to really sign a contract that puts you on the air for thousands of years, I think.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes, in a sense, we have been on the air.
		Now, would you explain to the audience, we are transmitting radio.
		FM certainly goes sailing right through the ionosphere and on out into space, as does television on these higher frequencies.
		However, it's not really intended to go great distances into space.
		How far does it go before it becomes part of the background, Seth?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, it goes very, very far before it gets, well, with part of the background.
		I mean, you can always pick it up if you have a big enough antenna, right?
		I mean, it goes on, you know, indefinitely.
		And really, anywhere in the galaxy, you could pick it up if you had a big enough antenna.
		But how big an antenna would you need?
		There was actually a story in the papers here a couple of weeks ago about a new radio telescope being built for astronomy in Europe.
		And a fellow at Harvard pointed out, he said, look, you know, this thing is going to operate at the same frequencies that we use for television here on Earth.
		Maybe we'll hear E.T.'s television.
		But if you work out the numbers, it turns out that that antenna will not hear E.T.'s television if E.T.'s television is anything like ours.
		You'd just never hear it.
		You'd need a much bigger antenna than that.
		You'd need to cover a couple of thousand acres with rooftop Yaggy antenna.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A couple of thousand acres.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you could do that.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's not a problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, as an example, Zeta Reticuli.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would somebody on Zeta Reticuli be able to receive our domestic television or FM?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, in principle, they could.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Zeta Reticuli is, what, 35 light years away?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, without 2,000, whatever, feet of some giant antenna.
		In other words, something reasonable.
		Could they put up a radio telescope the size, let's say, of Arecibo and be getting our television or know that we're transmitting?
unidentified		No.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		No.
		The simple answer to that is that's not quite big enough.
		Yeah, you need something bigger than Arecibo.
		But look, we've gone from Marconi to Arecibo in 100 years.
		You know, what kind of antenna could we build if we were 100 years farther along?
		I mean, I don't begrudge the aliens the possibility of building really big antennas because, after all, it's not so hard to do it.
		If somehow we made that a national priority to build a huge antenna, we could do it.
		And in fact, the astronomical community is also planning to build something called the square kilometer array, once again demonstrating their singular imagination in naming telescopes.
		But the square kilometer array will be a square kilometer in size.
		That's 10 times the size of Arecibo, and we're going to build that in the next 15 years.
		So, you know, the aliens might have a huge antenna, and then they could maybe pick up our television.
		Actually, the stronger signals are not television.
		They're the military radars, but they're, you know, somewhat less entertaining to listen to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indeed.
		Let me give you question number 10, and you'll see why I was chuckling at this.
		Question number 10 for Seth is, can you describe, Seth, any examples of compelling evidence that extraterrestrial visitors have visited Earth?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, obviously, if I could, then, you know, we would be doing this experiment a little differently.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, we would.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Now, I have to say, Art, I get emails almost every – I'm sure you do.
		I do, actually.
		But almost every day I get emails from somebody who's interested in this question of whether we're being visited, and either they have something to tell me or they have pictures to send me.
		Okay.
		But there are also people who don't like the fact that I'm skeptical about this.
		As you can imagine, I get raked over the coals.
		I feel like I should have asbestos BVDs or something right now.
		I get raked over the coals so often for this.
		But I respond to people and I ask them, well, what do you think is the most compelling case, the most compelling evidence that we are being visited?
		Because I'm interested in what they think.
		And I get various answers, but the one answer that seems to crop up more often than any of the others is Roswell.
		So that's what they presented.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And how do you respond to Roswell?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, the thing about Roswell, and indeed there was a National Geographic Special on that last week, in fact, or two weeks ago, that I was part of that.
		I had a small partner talking about what we do at SETI.
		But they presented the fact that, and I think this is fairly well known amongst many of the listeners, that there is an alternative explanation to Roswell that doesn't involve aliens coming who knows how far, maybe hundreds of light years, and then as they pull into the driveway, as it were, they make a navigation error and crash into the desert.
		That's one explanation.
		But there's this other explanation that involves this Air Force project, Project Mogul, which was a project designed fundamentally to design equipment that could find out whether the Soviet Union had developed the bomb or was testing the bomb.
		So that explanation explains all the actual facts.
		There is witness testimony, but the witnesses were only asked 30 years after the event that suggests that, well, they didn't think that was the explanation.
		So here you have, on the one hand, an explanation that just fits the facts, and it's somewhat prosaic.
		I mean, it was top secret and all, but it's just our own military activities.
		On the other hand, you have this possibility that, well, maybe it was aliens.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, a lot of people just find it very difficult, and I'm one of them, to imagine that Major Marcel, who really knew his aircraft, I mean, he really knew, would describe a flying saucer to the press one day, and that would turn into a little piece of aluminum foil with some flimsy sticks the next day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It just seems unreasonable.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, it does, but I would recommend that, and I think you've probably read this book, but there's a book by Cal Corf.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		He spent 16 years looking into this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I know Cal Corf.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I knew Cal Corf quite well.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, and he.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Cal Cal was a debunker.
		Now, Seth, there's a difference between skepticism and debunking.
		And Cal was a debunker, which means actively, you know, trying to put all this to bad.
		Just actively debunking.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, what I was going to say, what he says about the colonel, a major, I think he was a major, Jesse Marcel, was that this was a guy who was prone to exaggeration.
		Now, I did not interview those guys, so that's second-hand knowledge for me.
		What I would say, because obviously I can't speak to the material on a first-hand basis, most of these guys, unfortunately, have passed on, but not all of them.
		Charles Moore, whom I have spoken to at New York University, was one of the guys involved with Project Mogul, and he says, well, you know, what you see in those photos is our experiment.
		And he was there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it may well have been.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But that doesn't necessarily mean that's what crashed.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's, you know, one of the hypotheses that Stan Friedman will tell you is that they switched the stuff, but there were interviews again done by various people who have looked into this and said, no, that was what the original stuff is.
		So you're kind of stuck here with they said, he said, she said kind of an argument.
		And I think that if you really had something crashing there to begin with, this would be an enormous story.
		And the idea that the government would cover it up for, now it's, what, 60 years this year?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, our government would never cover anything up.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, they certainly would, but 60 years for the most interesting science story of all time, I have to say, why are they doing that?
		And, you know, wouldn't you want to put out this material for everybody, you know, all of academia in any case?
		You know, you want to throw it out to research labs everywhere, you know, farm it out the way they farm out the moon rocks and have everybody look at it because that's the way you learn something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You want to find out about cover-up?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Try writing about global warming.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Ah, yes.
		Yes.
		There seems to be a problem there, doesn't there?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Climate change.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Any of these words, these phrases, Seth, are beginning to be banned by our government.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, fortunately, there are other governments.
		I think that's the way to look at it.
		And maybe that's applicable here, too, because...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There are other governments, and a lot of them are more open about all of this than is ours.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you know about other governments?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've lived overseas, you know, experienced some other governments, if you will, firsthand.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I lived in Europe for 13 years, and you've lived overseas as well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just a bit.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, a bit.
		But in any case, and you find that, well, every country has its own way of doing things.
		They're not all the same.
		They don't work in lockstep with other countries in general.
		They will on some issues, and then on other issues they're not.
		I would say that the idea of global warming is still met with some skepticism here in this country.
		I think that's because, you know, we do like the idea of a certain amount of malevolence from the government.
		The Americans like that.
		We're a young country.
		We've been around for a couple of hundred years.
		You don't find that automatic assumption that the government is somehow conspiring against you in Europe, for example.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll tell you, though, it's beginning to move that way in this country.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It really is.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Do you think there's a certain complacency here?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, I think that we are young.
		And as you mentioned, I can recall when I was young, boy, I'll tell you what, Seth, when the FBI would come out, get in front of the microphone, and announce something, you could take it to the bank.
		Today, when the government comes out and announces something, there is a pretty large group that automatically assumes it's a lie.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Yeah, well, that's a good idea.
		Now, that's a change.
		That's a change.
		That's an unfortunate change.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		in the case of global warming, though, I mean, just insofar as that's relevant to this other stuff, you know, you've got plenty of people working on this elsewhere.
		And fortunately, the carbon dioxide doesn't stop at the border.
		So it's affecting everyone.
		And of course, it's not just the CO2.
		There are also the effects of, well, contrails for that matter.
		You know, the sunlight has dimmed by substantial amounts in a lot of places because of smog, because of aircraft and so forth and so on.
		So that's actually, that's sort of counteracting, as you know, that's counteracting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You would think that would cool things down.
unidentified		It does.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		It does.
		So the real effect of global warming is actually worse than we think, the real effect of the carbon dioxide.
		So in a sense, that's sort of bad news.
		But in any case, this is all being studied abroad as well.
		And the facts are the facts.
		We've been pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than, you know, it has the highest concentration of carbon dioxide that it's had in a very long time.
		When I say very long time, you're talking at least millions of years.
		So that's different.
		That's special.
		And while we may continue to put our heads in the sands here in this country for a while, it's being at least looked at.
		I think the science is coming out.
		The science is coming out.
		We saw that, what, yesterday?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, the science is damn near settled.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's just the government that doesn't want to talk about it.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that the big problem, of course, is what are you going to do?
		What do you want to do?
		What can you do?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that actually is a very good point.
		In other words, the government may have concluded that there really isn't anything that can be done about it.
		Short of putting everybody back into the Stone Age, there just isn't a hell of a lot that can be done about it, either in this country or, for that matter, worldwide.
		I'm actually sympathetic to that opinion.
		But I'm not sympathetic to simply deleting these words from any paper that any scientist might write.
		That's kind of silly.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I don't think you want to muzzle scientists, indeed.
		That's not a good idea.
		Not facing the truth only works in the short term, not in the long.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that's why I have always been a doubter about a signal being received.
		You know, I've always felt that, frankly, if a signal was received, we would not know about it.
		Now, I know your answer to that is quick and probably a pretty good one in that it would get out on the Internet right away.
		It would leak out, you say, but I have my doubts.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, we've certainly talked in the past about how when we got a false alarm, as it turned out, but we didn't know it was a false alarm.
		It was a signal that looked pretty good.
		And that was 10 years ago, actually, how the New York Times was calling us up.
		I got a call from them, I think, 10 hours into it.
		So maybe there's some consolation in the fact that this is not a government project.
		I sometimes get emails from people who say, I don't approve of my tax dollars being used to fund your research, or I do approve of it.
		But in neither case is it true because it isn't being funded by U.S. tax dollars.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're not spending any tax money whatsoever on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		There's a little bit of tax money that's gone into some of the electronics for radio astronomy, but not for SETI.
		There's no money for SETI, no government money for SETI in this country.
		It hasn't been for, oh, it's been like 14 years now.
		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about the rest of the world, Seth?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are they spending any government money anywhere on this?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, not much, but there is some.
		The Italians are, you know, it's at a state university, so that's, you know, tax money.
		Okay?
		And the Australians, the Australians had also a university project, and of course that's tax money, too.
		Actually, one of the more interesting things about SETI is that it is mostly an American project and has been, has always been.
		And coming into the field, I was somewhat surprised at that because I come from radio astronomy, which is very much international.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		But SETI is not so international.
		It was mostly America, and at some point the Soviet Union did it, but of course that all went away when the Soviet Union went away.
		And why is that?
		It's not that these other countries don't have the telescopes or don't have the expertise or don't have the money.
		They have all of those things.
		But they don't do SETI, most of them, with some exceptions.
		And the question is why?
		And I think it's cultural.
		It's cultural.
		Americans are willing to take the long shot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If we were to detect a signal, Seth, while I know you say that word would be out right away, I really cannot imagine anything that would have bigger national security concerns than a signal from elsewhere.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know about national security concerns because I'm not quite sure what they would be.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I mean, picking up a signal, of course, is not dangerous, right?
unidentified		If I listen to the article...
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, of course.
		I mean, if it were coming from the moon, you know, or as it was in Independence Day, right, that SETI found the aliens when they were passing the moon.
		I've got to say, those guys, you know, they didn't do a very good job, did they?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Even a signal from, say, Zetirticuli would certainly have some national security concerns.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know why.
		I mean, as we say, this is 35 light years away, I think.
		That's a long way.
		Each light year is 6 trillion miles.
		Multiply that by 35.
		And the facts are that just picking up the signals doesn't alert the zeta reticulans, right?
		If I pick up Art Bell in my car, I don't expect that Art Bell is going to jump into the back seat, right?
		because you don't know who's tuned you in, and they don't know that we've tuned them in.
		So if you want to...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, based on the fact that they cannot travel faster than the speed of light.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's that.
		There's that.
		But beyond that, just tuning in a signal, the guy who sent the signal doesn't know that you've tuned that in, only if you respond to him.
		Now, in some sense, we have been responding with our television broadcasts, if you will, for 50, 60 years.
		So, you know, they may know that we're here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that would mean our TV signals could be 50 or 60 light years out.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, hold it right there, Seth.
		We're at a breakpoint.
		From the high desert, I'm Art Bell with Seth Showstack.
		50.
		So 60 light years out.
		That means our signals could be that far out.
		In other words, 60 years of traveling at the speed of light.
		And I think the first broadcast, probably as noted in the movie Contact, was Hitler.
		I really do think it was the first.
		Anyway, we'll be right back.
		50 to 60 light years out, Aristotle.
		Seth, that three-minute transmission you talked about, the one made from Arecibo, it really wasn't repeated.
		And there's a reason why it wasn't repeated.
		If I remember correctly, there were a group of scientists who got together and said, you know, this might not be such a really spiffy idea, because if we send out a specific signal intended to be received by ETs, they might receive it, and they might come and investigate.
		And actually, that is the reason that we didn't continue doing it, isn't it?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't think that that's quite true.
		Well, you have to sort of look back in history.
		This signal was broadcast in 1974.
		And what had happened was that the Arecibo Observatory had spent a couple of years and some money to upgrade the telescope.
		Actually, transmitting was the real raison d'être.
		It was the reason to have built Arecibo.
		It was transmitting, not receiving, but not transmitting to, you know, ET, but just transmitting up into the ionosphere, was to study the ionosphere.
		There were some scientists at Cornell University who wanted to do that.
		And they said, well, in order to do this right, we need a really powerful radar transmitter, and then we need a big receiver to get to bounce back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Something like HARP.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, sort of, yeah, except this is a higher frequency.
		But the idea was, you know, we'll need about a thousand-foot diameter antenna.
		And, you know, they let that loose once in the coffee room or something, I don't know.
		And the astronomers heard about it, and they said, wait, we're going to build a thousand-foot diameter antenna.
		We want part of this.
		So it's become much more famous for its receiving than for its transmitting.
		But they still use it for transmitting.
		Now, what happened was they had upgraded the telescope in 1974.
		They decided we've got to have a little ceremony.
		It was like 10 o'clock in the morning.
		And the director of the observatory at that time was Frank Drake.
		And Frank is the guy who did the first SETI experiment in 1960.
		Well, now he was down in Puerto Rico.
		He thought, well, you know what we could do as sort of a highlight, a P.S. de l'Esistance or something here for this dedication ceremony, this new telescope.
		We'll send a message into space for three minutes.
		And he looks through the star catalogs, and it turns out there's a big cluster of stars.
		The sexy name of it is M13.
		And we'll aim it at that.
		And we'll do it for three minutes because after that, people will get sort of bored standing around.
		So they did that.
		Now, having done that, it was just kind of a stunt.
		But it wasn't a real, if you will, serious attempt to try and get in touch because that would have involved continuing to transmit on a regular basis or continuously.
unidentified		But that didn't happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But wasn't there a group of scientists?
		I remember something about Canada, perhaps.
		It doesn't come to mind right now, but they suggested it wouldn't be a real smart idea to continuously transmit into deep space.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, there was an objection.
		It wasn't so much a group of scientists, but the astronomer royal of the United Kingdom, of Britain, a guy by the name of Martin Ryle, got kind of riled up by this.
		And he took umbrage at this whole thing.
		He thought, you know, this is a diplomatic act, is the way he characterized it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it is.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		And, well, in a way.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		But then again, so is having the BBC on the air in a way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not quite the same way.
		I mean, there is a big difference, isn't there, Seth, between regular radio and TV and leakage into space versus a high-power pulse signal into deep space.
		There's a big difference.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, there is.
		But on the other hand, it's true that this signal would be much more powerful.
		It was a 1 million watt transmitter with an antenna that's 1,000 feet across.
		That makes one humongous signal, but only on a little tiny spot on the sky.
		You have to be somewhere in that little tight beam, which is about the size of a sort of a big crater on the moon as seen from the Earth.
		I mean, it's a tiny spot on the sky.
		And if you actually look at that spot, there's really not much there until you get to this star cluster, which is 20, I think it's 22,000 light years away.
		Well, doggone it, it's going to be 22,000 years for it to get there, and then another 22,000 years before their answer gets back to us.
		So to think that this is dangerous, I think, is somewhat hyperbole.
		I don't think it was dangerous.
		But there was the objection of the Astronomer Royal of Britain.
		I think that's probably what you're thinking of there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am.
		And does that make sense to you?
		In other words, does the objection make sense that we would transmit into space, perhaps in a more massive manner and more widely, attempting to alert somebody to our presence?
		Is that a bad idea?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, personally, I don't think so, but there are people within the SETI community who will differ with me.
		There is, in fact, this has been the subject of a big discussion for the last couple of years in the only international SETI group.
		There's something called the International Academy of Astronautics.
		That's a very prestigious group of mostly rocket scientists, actually.
		People who build rockets, people who are astronauts, people who are involved with the whole space program.
		But it's an international organization.
		And they have a SETI group, a permanent study group.
		It's called, and actually I'm the chair of that permanent study group.
		And so we get together every year.
		It's an international meeting.
		And there are some protocols about transmitting, not just about receiving.
		And they don't have the force of law.
		These are just, if you will, suggestions.
		And there is debate.
		There has been debate about should you proscribe transmitting?
		Should you tell people no, you can't take your backyard dish, put a transmitter on it, and aim it at Zeta reticuli and send your personal philosophies into space because that might be dangerous.
		There are people who think that that might be the case.
		I'm not one of them, but there are people who are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I would imagine if you took a pretty good-sized dish and put a transmitter on it, transmitting somewhere up in the microwave region, somebody would get on your tail about it pretty quickly.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, look, you're a ham radio operator, right?
		And, you know, the government says, all right, here are the frequency bands you're allowed to transmit.
		And they also put a cap on how much power your transmitter can have.
		A couple of kilowatts, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As a ham, yes.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		A couple of thousand watts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		1,500.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		But they do not say you can't aim your antenna at, Zeta reticuli, for example.
		They don't say that.
		So I'm not sure if it's going to get on your antenna.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, they don't say that.
		But if you were transmitting somewhere in the microwave region and you really were transmitting into space, inevitably you'd collide with somebody's satellite.
		You'd be on the input frequency of somebody's satellite somewhere, and you'd end up getting in trouble, I bet you.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not so sure of that.
		Work it out.
		I mean, I'm not going to work it out here now, but if you work out the numbers, if you have some backyard antenna that's, you know, it's maybe 10 feet across, it's maybe 15 feet across, it's not 1,000 feet across.
		And then you put your 1,500-watt transmitter on it, you aim it up in the sky, and some satellite zips through the beam there in a matter of two seconds, I don't think you're going to cause it a heck of a lot of damage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Unless you're anywhere near the Clark belt, and then you do all kinds of damage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You might even black out HBO or something.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, you may have hit something there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's happened, actually.
		I won't talk a lot about it, but it's happened.
		So if there were aliens, if we were visited by aliens, there's another question here on the list, and I love it because I'd like to see you answer it.
		What do you think they would look like?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, get that question a lot because people do want it.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I think that the first question we would ask the aliens, I mean, aside from the possibility that they might be here, but if you established radio contact, not just picking up a signal, but suppose they were close enough that you could actually have a conversation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that would scare the hell out of people.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, probably would.
		I don't think it's very likely, of course.
		I think the nearest aliens are probably close to 1,000 light years away, but that's a guess, so we don't know.
		If they were really very close and you could have a conversation, I bet the first question you would ask is, what do you look like?
		And the second question would probably be, do you have religion?
		I think those are the questions you'd ask, because we do want to know what they look like.
		That's for sure.
		And the answer is, we don't have an answer.
		We don't know what they look like.
		I mean, you can make very general arguments.
		You can say they're probably not very tiny.
		They're not like those aliens in some Twilight Zone episode where they were kind of the height of a matchstick or something like that.
		Because it's hard to put a lot of brain cells into a critter that small.
		And so the intelligent ones won't be that small.
		They can't be extraordinarily large either because your weight goes up as the cube of any dimension.
		Your strength only goes up as the square.
		So at a certain size, you get so big you can hardly stand up unless they've got super duper muscles.
		So they're probably not very large.
		They're probably not very small.
		You could say that with some degree of confidence.
		They probably have eyes because they're on a planet around a star that's producing lots of light.
		Well, eyes really help to catch dinner.
		And one eye is good, but two eyes are better because you can see in 3D and that really helps you catch dinner.
		These sort of general arguments.
		But the idea that they might look like us, I think, goes quite a bit too far.
		I don't think they're going to look like us.
		In the movies and on TV, they usually do look like us because you can identify with them and you feel like you understand them a little bit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, let's go out on a limb here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you think they might look like the greys?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, I think that the graves are just a projection of what we think we are going to look like in the future, right, when we've lost all our hair and our sense of humor.
		Those guys never seem to smile for some reason.
		But I don't know that they could look like the graves.
		I have to say that there's one evolutionary biologist in the United Kingdom, Simon Conway Morris.
		He's at Cambridge.
		And, you know, he thought about this too.
		And it's his opinion that we're actually a pretty good design for an intelligent creature.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We are.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		And, well, it's easy to say that now that we're here.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, you look at the options.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you just said it yourself, Seth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You said they couldn't be too big.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And they couldn't really be too small.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Right, but they might have six legs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's us.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes, but what if they had six legs?
		Is it still us?
		Right?
		You know, I mean, the fact that we have four is kind of an accident of evolution.
		Most of the creatures on this planet have six legs, right?
		They're called bugs.
		We could easily have had six or maybe eight.
		I don't know that we could have had, you know, 100 because that takes a lot of brain processing if you have that many legs.
		But you could have, you know, certainly some number other than two arms and two legs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You could.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		And so the fact that they always are very similar to us, with their eyes and nose and mouths all in the same places, and you know that, for example, our breathing tubes cross our tubes for eating, you know, very bad design there.
		It leads to choking episodes, things like that.
		We're not so well designed.
		Maybe the aliens are designed a little differently.
		I can't imagine that in detail they would look so much like us.
		But I did want to mention that this guy in Cambridge who studies evolutionary biology, he seems to think they might very well look something like us, in which case, you know, maybe the grays aren't such a bad hypothesis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		They've got large eyes, so they would have greater sensitivity.
		They'd probably be able to see quite a bit better in the dark than we can.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, large eyes will help you that way.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		They also allow you to see you have somewhat sharper vision, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So the greys are not an unreasonable example of what they might be like, are they?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I don't think that the greys are, you know, I wouldn't argue that, for example, that the greys don't exist on this planet because they look too much like us.
		I don't think you can make that argument.
		I think that if the greys were on this planet, you'd have some good pictures of them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Isn't it also reasonable that if we're being watched and not contacted, again, we come back to this prime directive, I suppose, if we're being watched and not contacted, we might get exactly what we get, and that is occasional photographs that really cannot be explained.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Even Blue Book came up with quite a bit, a fairly decent percentage that simply had no rational explanation.
unidentified		They shook their heads and said, we don't know.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not sure that I agree with that.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I really have problems with that because if we're just talking about five years' worth of sightings or even 10 years, I would say, okay, the fact that these pictures are, you know, you look at the pictures of the UFO seen over Hawaii recently or the descriptions of what was seen at O'Hare Airport here in November and so forth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		And it's always, either there are no pictures when the craft are fairly nearby, or there are pictures but the craft are very far away.
		Now, after 60 years, you've got to say, isn't that remarkable?
		And the radars very seldom pick up the sorts of things that are seen visually.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		William, but Seth, we already have aircraft that defy radar if we wanted to.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, they don't defy radar.
		They're harder to see with radar, but how peculiar that the aliens obviously want to be cryptic to our radar, but they're happy to allow our ordinary eyeballs to see them.
		I mean, there's something inconsistent about that, it seems to me.
		And honestly, I liken this to since it's been 60 years since this phenomenon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know, Seth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I can see with my eyeballs a stealth aircraft, but radar has a problem.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, it has a problem, but you can find them.
		One thing you can certainly do is you can certainly see them with satellites, right?
		You can see we don't seem to see many of the UFOs.
		To me, I don't see the bottom line.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Satellites are pretty much, for the most part, other than Google Earth and a few things like that, they're in the hands of our government.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		But not always, but not necessarily, well, not saying, not exclusively our government.
		They're in the hands of lots of governments.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, that's fair.
		Yes, lots of governments.
		And actually, in cases where we've had relatively undiluted streams from something orbiting Earth, as in our space station or the shuttle, we've had a lot of very interesting video that's just simply inexplicable.
		I know they talk about ice crystals and things like that, but, boy, I've seen some stuff that's just amazing.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, the ones that come to mind are the ones made from the space shuttle, where you see something, you see a light, and then suddenly it takes off.
		But in fact, I've talked to guys who work in the space program, and they say, oh, yeah, well, those are water droplets that are actually only five or ten feet away.
		But Art, what I would say is this.
		It's been 60 years since Roswell, anyhow, even if no matter what you think of Roswell, you could say the sightings of UFOs really took off after the war.
		So did the presence of aircraft in the sky, of course.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I would probably say that the sightings really took off after we exploded the first atomic bomb, and that's about right.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's okay, too.
		All right, so that's another two years, right?
		1945.
		So we've had 60 years of this, a little more than 60 years.
		Add 60 years to 1492, right?
		So now we're talking about 1552.
		And start asking the North American natives, do you think you're being visited by Europeans?
		They probably wouldn't be sitting around debating it and arguing the merits of the case.
		They knew.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, although actually you can go right back to the Stone Age, and there were some interesting scrawlings, very interesting scrawlings, in stone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So these sightings may have been going on for as long as we're able to record them.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's true, but there are other, of course, but there are other explanations for that.
		There you have a problem where the evidence is old and it's ambiguous.
		I guess what I would ask you is what I would ask the people who send me the emails about this sort of thing, and that is, give me your best case.
		What is the case that convinces you?
		Because having 10,000 sightings, that doesn't necessarily mean a thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, see, that is what I would say.
		I don't think that I would say there's any single case that's convincing beyond all reason.
		But collectively, certainly there's enough.
		So any scientist who really investigates the number of sightings would have to say, hmm, there's probably something going on here, or there's very likely something going on here.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, I used to have woods in the back of my house.
		Don't have them anymore.
		I have condos in the back of my house now.
		And, you know, occasionally you look out in the woods late at night and you'd see light in there.
		I just assume it was some guy with a flashlight walking through the woods.
		I didn't go out to check, mind you, but that's what I assumed.
		On the other hand, there are other possible explanations.
		It could be the greys are in there with a flashlight.
		Now, the fact that I see this happen more than once and maybe many times over the course of many decades doesn't add to the evidence that it's really greys with flashlights.
		It just means that I've seen a phenomenon many times.
		So I think you need a good case.
		I would be convinced.
		It's not that I'm morally or philosophically opposed.
		I would be convinced if somebody would come in and say, hey, look, here's some physical evidence.
		I actually picked this up off the ground.
		Take a look at this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So something that is clearly extraterrestrial and can be proven to be so, some sort of mechanism, something beyond, I don't know, a meteorite, some kind of mechanism that would be extraterrestrial, that would do it?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think so.
		I think you could prove That you were essentially from another world to somebody in Neanderthal times by giving them a Blackberry or something, whatever.
		This would be something that's so far beyond their capabilities.
		Keep in mind that the universe is three times as old as the Earth.
		There are societies out there that have had billions, not millions, but billions of years to get ahead of us if they can last that long.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if they can, they probably can travel faster than light if it can be done.
		So hold it right there.
		We'll be right back.
		Indeed, here I am.
		And what we are going to do is turn the phones over to you, and you can ask Seth anything you want.
		Here's a man who for years and years now has been heading up the effort, such as it is in the private sector, to find a signal from anywhere else.
		Thus far, we've not found one.
		We found a few, I think, fairly suspicious things, but nothing that could ever be confirmed.
		I'm going to go back and myself ask Seth a question that he kind of posed for himself not very long ago, or was it?
		About a year ago, I guess, we did a program, and he said, you know, Art, eventually, if we don't find anything, we're going to have to more or less admit that we haven't found anything.
		There may not be anything to find.
		More of that in a moment.
		Once again, here is Seth Shostak.
		Seth, welcome back.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you ready for the public?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well then here they come.
		Wildcard line, Bill, in Long Island, New York.
		You're on with Seth.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		You seem to ignore some very credible people who have spoken out, such as the Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, who was quoted in the St. Petersburg Times, which is published in Florida.
		He said that there were a few insiders who know the truth and are studying the bodies that have been discovered.
		He also said that there was a cabal of insiders.
		They stopped briefing presidents about extraterrestrials after President Kennedy.
		And we had Gordon Cooper, who went before the U.N., and mentioned about the hazards that were presented to ships from UFOs coming out of the sea.
		In the book, Above Top Secret, right on the cover of that book, there's a Marine pilot who told us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A pause there, and some of the astronauts have made some interesting statements, Seth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's true.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that is true.
		And I've actually talked to a few of them.
		I've talked to, well, some of the astronauts, of those that I've talked to that have actually claimed that they saw something or heard something that they thought might be an extraterrestrial story Musgrave comes to mind.
		He thought he could hear their music in the space shuttle or something like that.
		Look, there's no doubt that these are credible people.
		That isn't the issue, right?
		I mean, Jimmy Carter saw a UFO.
		He's credible.
		The question is, what did he see?
		And it turns out in that case, it was Venus.
		It wasn't actually an extraterrestrial craft.
		It was extraterrestrial, however.
		I think that in the case of these astronauts claiming to have seen things, you have to treat that the same way that you would treat airline pilots.
		After all, they're not very far up in space.
		It isn't that they're any closer to the aliens, really.
		The space shuttle is up 200 and some miles.
		That isn't very far.
		And so, yes, they're credible people.
		They've seen something.
		They don't know what it is.
		But the big step is when you say, I don't know what it was that I saw.
		It must be an alien craft.
		That's the step that I say, hey, look, if you're going to make that claim, you better do more than simply tell me you think it was an extraterrestrial craft.
unidentified		I have another comment to make.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		This search for extraterrestrial life with electromagnetic waves, I think is quite ridiculous.
		We're dealing possibly with aliens a million years ahead.
		And they're not communicating with smoke signals.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		What would you recommend?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I was about to say the same thing.
		We've moved light now.
		What would you recommend that we haven't done?
unidentified		Possibly through the use of our mind to communicating with that process.
unidentified		There's a lot of things that are being discovered with our capabilities of fact, people say they communicate with mental telepathy.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, Bill, I think if that were true, if you could do two things there.
		First off, your brain consumes, it runs at about 25 watts, right?
		And just from an energetics argument, just from the standpoint of very elementary physics, 25 watts isn't going to allow you to communicate across light years.
		I don't think.
		I think that really demands some sort of very weird physics that we really don't have and don't see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, there is some pretty strange physics on the horizon.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		There may be strange physics, but I don't think that your brain running at 25 watts is a very good communication means.
		The other thing about ESP, that it might work, I think there's a very big experiment being run in the state of Nevada that kind of shows that ESP really doesn't work, and it's called Las Vegas.
		I think if it worked, people would be mind-reading the dealers.
unidentified		Uh-huh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a good point.
		There are people, in fact, who are blacklisted because of what they can do.
		You're aware of that blacklist, right?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I am aware of that, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, first time caller line, Frank in St. Louis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on with Seth Showstack.
unidentified		Thank you for taking my call.
		Sure.
		I have to tell you guys, some of your topics are kind of wild and weird and crazy, but you guys keep me up all night.
		And I like to debunk the theories or to think about those.
		And it's very thought-provoking.
		So I love the show.
		I might be a little weird and wild, too.
		I'm blind, and I watch a lot of, try to listen to a lot of satellite TV.
		Right about now, my satellite receiver shuts off, and I have to reprogram.
		I was wondering two things.
		First of all, I had a previous question, but this is always bumming me out.
		My TV shuts down, and I can't watch anything for an hour from like 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. here Central Standard Time.
		And they tell me that it's uploading or something from some satellite.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's correct.
unidentified		Well, charter cable has never, a cable company has never had to do anything like that.
		First question is, what's the difference between a satellite TV and this cable company's TV where they don't have any delay in their signal or whatever?
		And the second question is the space program supposedly got an alternative space program that nobody else is supposed to know about.
		And I was kind of wondering about that.
		Anyway, I will hang up and listen to you guys, and take care, Mr. Belt.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, take care, sir.
		And let's see.
		The first question, your satellite receiver is updating its listings is what it's doing, and it's accepting software at that time.
		You can set that to occur at any time of the day you want.
		Most people set it between 2 and 3 in the morning because the majority of people are asleep at that time.
		The cable company has many other options and many other professional receivers that don't require what your receiver is doing right now.
		But you can set that to occur any time of the day you want.
		Now, that said, Seth, as far as alternatives?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, it would be nice to think that somebody's getting yet more money to engage in space exploration.
		As you know, NASA is always underfunded, has been at least for decades now.
		And they're cutting back a lot of space science simply because the principal marching orders they have at NASA are to build a replacement for the shuttle and get us to the moon and then on to Mars.
		That's the President's vision.
		And that's wreaking havoc in the scientific community because there isn't enough money to do that.
		And the research, the thought that there might be another budget of comparable magnitude with facilities somewhere where we're launching other stuff into space, gosh, it just doesn't sound very reasonable.
		And I think that you might notice that there were rockets being launched from somewhere other than where we know they're being launched.
		It doesn't ring true to me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's go here.
		West of the Rockies.
		James in California.
		You're on with Seth.
		Hello, James.
		James does not appear to be there.
		James, going once?
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Twice.
		There you are, James.
		No, you just weren't fast enough, James.
		Jim in Pennsylvania, you're on the air with Seth.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
unidentified		Hi, Seth.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		How are you doing tonight?
		I want to just make just a couple quick comments.
		I'm a ham radio operator, and back in the mid-1970s, I got a letter published in QST suggesting that one of the first letters I saw suggesting the use of amateurs for SETI work, listening and possibly transmitting.
		And I got a little static from it from some of the local hams.
		Some of us thought it was ridiculous and a few other various comments.
		Now, beyond that, one of the questions I have, we always talk about as far as people detecting our signals from broadcasting stations and so forth as being something that would alert other civilizations that we're here.
		And I would think if we had the capability of listening on the same frequencies which we use for broadcasting and for high frequency communications and so forth, we would have a much better chance of actually picking up signals rather than listening just up near the hydrogen frequency.
		And unfortunately, we can't do that from the surface of the Earth because we were jamming our own signals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a very, very interesting point.
unidentified		What would be the possibility of getting either a shielded antenna out in space that would block the transmissions from the Earth, or hopefully someday getting an antenna on the backside of the Moon?
unidentified		I think if we did that, frankly, I think we would pick up signals fairly easily.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, Jim, I'm with you.
		In fact, not just I. There are other people in the SETI community who have actually even put some effort into studying how feasible it would be to put a SETI antenna, and for that matter, other kinds of antennas, on the back side of the moon, because indeed, the moon is blocking all this interference from Earth.
		And if you think about it, the far side of the moon is the only place in the entire universe that's perpetually shielded from all the radio noise that we're putting out.
		The problem with that is, of course, a very practical one.
		There's no money.
		SETI runs on a shoestring, and unfortunately, shoestring budgets do not allow you to put antennas on the moon.
		The hope is that in the future we'll be able to do that.
		As to your first question there, though, you were talking a little bit about HAMS and how they could get involved in SETI.
		Tell those guys who are somewhat skeptical about this, that are giving you static, tell them that they might be able to pick up some ET static if they would join this search and check out on the web the SETI League, the SETI League.
		That's headquartered actually not very far from where you are.
		It's northern New Jersey and so forth.
		But that's a group of people who use amateur equipment to do SETI searches.
		It's for real.
unidentified		Yes, I had been a member of that for a number of years.
unidentified		I'm also a member of your Team SETI group for your group out there.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's great.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		That's the SETI Institute's membership organization.
unidentified		Okay, well, it's been good talking to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, thank you very much for the call.
		And I've got a question for you, Seth.
		Amateurs, ham radio operators, use, for the most part, frequencies in the HF range, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's say from above the broadcast band up to 30 megahertz.
		And what we do is we bounce signals off the ionosphere and then back to Earth and then back to the ionosphere and so forth.
		And we're able to go around the world that way, right?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If there was an extraterrestrial signal Coming toward Earth, wouldn't the ionosphere on the other side virtually eliminate that signal or reflect that signal and prevent it, for the most part, from reaching Earth?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, it would certainly be attenuated.
		I mean, that's true, and that's one of the reasons that SETI usually doesn't observe at those frequencies because of the problems with the ionosphere.
		Now, you know, you could argue several things.
		One, you could say, look, the fact that we have this problem with our ionosphere, that's a very temporary problem, because as soon as we do what Jim suggested, and we put the whole experiment on the back side of the moon, there is no ionosphere on the moon, and all these frequencies are good, and there isn't any interference, and so what the heck?
		The aliens will assume that we've at least done that, because we will do that within 50 years or whatever.
		Okay, but there's another point here, and that is that the universe is actually pretty noisy at those frequencies.
		Just as background static, when your television station goes off the air and you're just looking at the TV set, you see all this snow on the screen.
		Most of that's just noise in your receiver, but some of it, about 10% of it, is actual cosmic static because at these low frequencies, I say low, they're low for SETI, the universe is pretty noisy.
		And ET will know that too.
		So I think if they were really trying to get in touch, they'd probably crank up the dial a little higher.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you still think it would be near hydrogen?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's our best guess.
		Nobody's come up with a better guess, in my opinion, because microwaves, you know, the universe is quite quiet there.
		And those are just spots on the dial that everybody will have marked, right?
		Everybody in the universe will have those frequencies marked on their radio dials because hydrogen is everywhere.
		And so if you're looking for a universal frequency, that sounds like a pretty good choice to me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's go to Jeff, I think it is, in Morrow Bay, California.
		You're on with Seth.
		Hello, Jeff.
		Jeff does not seem to...
		Going once, going twice, gone.
		Mary Lee in Arkansas, you're on with Seth.
unidentified		Great, thank you.
		I'm interested in knowing if you understand this subject is much like the climate and global warming.
		It's the beep that government doesn't want us to talk about.
		And that the Internet has been a boon of information.
		And I've come across this book that is written by a Roswell crash survivor by Commander Soni Amayete Sito, who is a Zetty reincarnated as a woman now.
		And she has described her whole experience of the Roswell crash and her memories of it as she grew up as a woman.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you sure she's reincarnated from the crash?
unidentified		Incarnated as a woman now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know a thing about that, hun, and I'm going to bet that Seth doesn't either.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		No, I must say, I haven't seen her on Larry King or whatever.
		I don't know anything about that.
		I must say, Mary Lee, any comment would be gratuitous.
		Let me not say anything about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Jeff in Nashville, Tennessee, you're on the air with Seth.
unidentified		Hey, Seth.
		I have a quick question.
		Art touched on this earlier, but he really didn't press into it.
		Whether or not traveling faster than the speed of light was possible and whether or not there's any testing actually going on that has actually, the access has been allowed.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, there are two aspects to that.
		Of course, Al Einstein said, well, nothing can actually go faster than the speed of light.
		Okay, now, one possibility is that that physics is incomplete.
		We're missing some physics that does allow you to do that.
		One obvious bit of physics that we do know about that may allow faster than light travel is to find shortcuts through space, wormholes.
		We see a lot about wormholes in science fiction, but they're also science fact, at least they seem to be.
		But the second part of this problem is can you actually engineer this kind of travel?
		Can you actually create a wormhole that you can actually drop through and come out the other side still more or less intact?
		And that's very unclear.
		It's unclear whether you can even do this in principle, even assuming you have very, very advanced technology.
		So at the moment, all we can say is, well, we don't know of any way to go faster than the speed of light.
		But of course, you know, hubris is never very well rewarded in science.
		You know, you think this will never be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not in the long term.
		Not in the long term.
		Seth, Einstein also said something about spooky action at a distance.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he was talking about quantum mechanics.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		He didn't like it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He didn't like it.
		Yeah, that's right.
		He didn't like it.
		But it nevertheless appears to be true, doesn't it?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		It is, yes.
		Yeah, it's true.
		And, of course, that's something that's also possibly relevant to SETI because, you know, the radio waves only go at the speed of light, and the same is true of gravity waves and just about everything else you might want to use.
		But what about, you know, quantum entanglement, which is kind of a buzzword these days, where you have a couple of particles separated by who knows how many light years, and you shake this one, and it immediately shakes the other one.
		You do something to this one, and its twin, 1,000 light-years away, immediately, not at the speed of light, but immediately, changes.
		Could you use that to communicate faster than the speed of light?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So far they say no, that any communication attempts have always failed, but nevertheless, it occurs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And to the human mind, it can't occur without some kind of communication, right?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, you could maybe have faster than light communication if you had the time to set up a network.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		You see, if you ran the wires, as it were, and you can't do that faster than the speed of light, but if you take that time to set up a communication network in the galaxy, then maybe you could have instantaneous communication.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
		Instantaneously, we've got to take a break.
		Amar Bell, this is Coast to Coast AM.
		Spooky action at a distance, any distance, faster than the speed of light.
		Well, if that's what quantum is, then eventually it seems to me and I'm just a known human being who knows a little bit about radio, but I don't see how particle A can turn and have particle B turn at any distance faster than the speed of light without something saying turn.
		But I guess that's why it's spooky.
		I'll be right back.
		Just a curious question.
		Seth, if we had something the size of Arecibo on the far side of the moon, shielded from all of this noise and mess, how much more of an opportunity would we have to possibly detect a signal?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, whole parts of the radio dial would open up to you, parts of the radio dial that are essentially impenetrable from Earth simply because of the interference.
		I mean, it's just like, you know, suddenly the whole radio spectrum is available for you to look at.
		And that includes those frequencies at the low end of the dial that we've not really been able to look at because of all the interference here on Earth.
		So, you know, to say, well, would that be what's required in order to find ET?
		I don't know.
		But it certainly would improve the search immeasurably.
		So it would also allow you to speed things up because the interference really slows you down.
		You have to keep checking signals that come in.
		Is this really what you're looking for?
		Is it just more interference?
		And, you know, so that really slows you down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, back to the quantum world for a second.
		You know, some of these people who say, well, then maybe it'll be communication by the mind, your response was 25 watts or something like that.
		Yes.
		But then on the other hand, maybe in the quantum world, you don't need a whole lot of power when two particles with ostensibly no power we can measure are able to talk to each other over distances we can't even calculate instantly.
		Maybe they're not that far off the mark.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's no evidence that our brains use quantum entanglement to communicate.
		So I stand by that.
		I don't think our brains are very good for communicating across the distances of stars.
		You might say, what evolutionary advantage would there be to us to be able to do that, actually?
		But it is this quantum entanglement is very strange.
		And the reason it seems so strange to you, you say, I turn a little particle here, and it instantly tells some particle at the other side of the galaxy to turn.
		How can I do that?
		It's because these are, you know, not really so separate as you think of them.
		They're not little miniature marbles, you know, on the opposite side of the galaxy.
		They're waves.
		And they're connected in the way that waves essentially go on forever.
		So once you've got them separated.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The key word you use, though, is particle A tells particle B to do something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, tells implies communicates.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, that's maybe a bad choice of words.
		They are, in some sense, all the same particle, you know, because they're connected by this wave structure.
		All matter has wave properties, even big things, even things like us.
		It's just that they're not very important when you get to very large structures.
		But that's why you have very strange effects.
		Like if you shine a flashlight at a piece of cardboard that has two holes in it, two separate holes, and one photon comes out of your flashlight, is a really weak flashlight.
		In some sense, that photon goes through both holes.
		It doesn't just go through one of them, even though the photon's very small.
		It goes through both.
		And this is a very peculiar property of the universe.
		And that's, you know, it's so peculiar that even a mind like Einstein couldn't wrap around it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But that does tell us that there's something out there that's unexplained.
		Well, of course, they're talking about multiple universes now.
		Many, many are talking about multiple universes.
		And the time to communicate from one universe to the other may not be measured in light years.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, as far as we know, communicating from one universe, almost by definition, communicating from one other.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry, wrong word, dimension.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, okay, different dimensions.
		But the idea of multiple universes is indeed very much in vogue.
		If you really want to impress somebody, the next time you go to a cocktail party, you start talking about multiple universes that might impress them.
		Then again, maybe not.
		But, you know, the reason that this whole subject developed was that our universe seems to be particularly set up for life.
		And that's been a problem for physicists and to some extent astronomers for a long time now.
		Why is it that our universe, all the physical constants are just right so that we can exist, so that there can be stars and planets and life and radio shows and stuff like that?
		And, you know, you can say, well, God just did it, then you're done.
		But you can't write very many physics papers about that.
		So there must be some other explanation.
		And the most obvious explanation is to say there are lots and lots of universes, and most of them are pretty lousy.
		But of course, by chance, a few of them will be good.
		And we will have to be in one of the good ones because if we were in one of the bad ones, we wouldn't be around asking the question.
		So that is the motivation for this whole concept of different universes.
		But while they may exist, it's going to be pretty darn hard to prove that they exist because presumably there's no communication between them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tim in Phoenix, you're on with Seth.
unidentified		Hi, how you doing?
		Just fine.
		The 25 watt ball in our brain, like Art was talking about, very interesting.
		I still think that we can perceive and put our thoughts out in the universe.
		It doesn't matter what the wattage is.
		And the question I was going to ask, Seth, is about maybe terrestrial craft actually comes through to Earth by folding time, warping time.
		In other words, you think about everything about expansion.
		I wonder if it's all here, just like a wormhole.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, as I say, I mean, you can indeed warp space and time, right?
		Black holes do it, right?
		And indeed, if you you know, the question that everybody asks is what happens if you fall into a worm, sorry, into a black hole?
		And the answer is, you know, it's not really a great experience because you get ripped apart really fast.
		But if it's a big enough black hole, like the ones that are in the centers of galaxies, most galaxies, maybe even all galaxies, but certainly a lot of galaxies have giant black holes in their centers.
		This is a discovery, again, of the last 10 years.
		And they're so big that you can fall into them without getting ripped apart right away.
		So if you go in sort of sideways, you don't go right into the center where, you know, it's just doom.
		If you can go in a little bit sideways, then the equations of relativity suggest you might come out somewhere completely different, as Monty Python would say.
		And maybe a completely different time.
		Maybe you come out in the distant future.
		So that might be a way to travel across the universe in very short order by warping space and time, because that's what the black hole has done for you.
		All of that isn't impossible.
		The question is, is it happening?
		Can you show me that it's actually happening, that we're getting visitors that have dropped into a black hole somewhere and ended up here?
		That's a separate question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		George in Kirkland, Washington, you're on with Seth.
unidentified		Yes, good evening.
		Thank you for taking my call.
		I have three questions.
		What is the most powerful radio signal in terms of wattage that has been transmitted from the Earth to space?
		Have we heard any reflections of that signal coming back?
		And my third question is, will you be doing any more shows about Melshole?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		I'll answer number three first.
		There is always a possibility of it.
		I'm in communication with some people on that subject.
		Now, the most powerful radio transmitter, Seth?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, the most powerful transmission, I think George asked, is probably the one we were talking about a little earlier in the show, that 1974 broadcast from Arecibo.
		Actually, you know, probably their IONAs for your experiments of today are maybe a little bit more powerful.
		But here you had a million-watt transmitter.
		That's, you know, that's what the power usage is on that transmitter.
		It's a pretty impressive thing when you stand next to it.
		It's giant klystron tubes, you know, they'd be impressive in your living room.
		A million watt transmitter, you've got a thousand-foot diameter dish, which means it has a gain, and this is something that the radio propeller heads would like, but it has a gain of 10 million.
		In other words, it makes that signal 10 million times stronger in the direction in which it's aimed.
		So a million watts, and then amplified by the antenna by a factor of 10 million, that's one honking signal.
		And indeed, that signal is so strong that if you had one of our SETI experiments, even 1,000 light years away, you could pick up that one.
		So that's maybe typical of the strongest signals we've ever sent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Anything?
		You mentioned a reflected signal.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, nothing comes back.
		At least not yet.
		I mean, there's nothing to bounce it back other than the ionosphere.
		But this was at pretty high frequency.
		So you just cut right through the ionosphere.
		So what's it going to hit?
		What's there to reflect it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there is a moon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We can, of course, reflect signals off the moon.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		We can bounce off the moon, but this thing, of course, was not aimed at the moon.
		So if you don't aim it at the moon, and there isn't a planet in the way, and the chances of that are pretty darn small.
		Look at how small the planets look on the sky when you go out at night.
		Sure, it's going to hit some stars eventually, but it will go for thousands of years without even hitting a star.
		when it hits a star, you know, that'll cause a slight bounce.
		Some of that energy will come back, but most of it will get scattered, you know, all around space.
		So don't count on anything coming back unless somebody picks it up and, you know, sends back a...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		To Susan in San Diego.
unidentified		Hi.
		Thank you for taking my call.
		You were talking a minute ago.
		It's a really interesting show, by the way.
		You were talking a minute ago about the two-slit experiment and the action at the distance.
		And I guess what my question is, and what I've been wondering, is knowing just the little bit that I know about the two-slit, if you don't measure either of the two slits, then you get a diffraction pattern.
		And if you put some kind of measuring device on one of the slits, then the diffraction pattern disappears.
		And so what I wonder is if you had entangled particles and you put one two-slit thing at one end of the universe and one at the other and sent the particles in both directions, and then you measured only one, would it not cause the diffraction pattern to disappear on the other end and also, and would you not then communicate?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Right, Susan.
		Well, it sounds like you're into sophomore physics there.
		Two-slit experiment.
		The fact that you know the terminology does that you know something about this.
		But indeed, I mean, yes, the reason that when you shine some light at two holes in the piece of paper or two slits, you know, is it going through this slit on the left or the slit on the right?
		You know, you can force it to choose by trying to measure it.
		Okay.
		So, but that's kind of analogous to what we were talking about earlier when you have two particles and one is spinning this way and, you know, or you don't know which way they're spinning, but you know one is spinning up and the other is spinning down or something like that.
		And you look at the first one that happens to be in your backyard and the other one's on the other side of the galaxy.
		And you measure the one in your backyard and now you find that its spin is upward.
		Then the one on the other side of the galaxy is immediately forced to be spin downward.
		Okay, so it's the same thing.
		It's quantum entanglement.
		As soon as you measure something, you force these things to decide what they are.
		And, you know, it's just quantum mechanics, and it's been known for quite a while.
		And at a philosophical level, it's kind of hard to understand.
		But, you know, J.S. Haldane said years ago, the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but it's stranger than we can imagine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you sound a bit like Einstein, kind of like You don't want anything to do with it.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess you could say that if the universe weren't like this, maybe everything would be very deterministic and we wouldn't have any free will and we couldn't decide what we were really going to do.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		So maybe it's a good thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thomas in Oregon, you're on with Seth.
unidentified		Yeah, hi.
		I just have a question about a statement, Mr. Shostak, I'm sorry, Dr. Shostak, is that pronounced?
		Yes.
		You made earlier about Jimmy Carter's sighting.
		He said that it hadn't been Venus.
		And I would like you to clarify that assertion in light of the testimony we have from him on his NICAP report from September the 18th.
		I mean, he says that the object changed brightness, it changed shape, it changed color, it moved to distance, and then it disappeared, and that 12 men all saw it.
		And given the fact that President Carter was a nuclear physicist, certainly in the course of his studies, he took an observational astronomy class once or twice.
		I mean, he'd been familiar with the planet Venus.
		You want us to trust your interpretation of that event over his?
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, what are you suggesting, that he actually saw an alien craft?
unidentified		Perhaps.
unidentified		I certainly don't think it was Venus, considering the testimony we have from him.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, I don't mean to get into the details of what Carter said because I'm not that familiar with the details.
		But indeed, there has been some controversy about whether it was Venus.
		Mind you, if you look at Venus, particularly at the horizon, and you always see Venus at the horizon because you're only going to see it when it gets a little bit dark, and that means the sun is set.
		And Venus is, of course, is closer to the sun than we are, so Venus tends to be close to the sun.
		So it's at the horizon, so you're getting atmospheric effects.
		And to me, that could explain the fact that it got brighter and dimmer and changing shape.
		Apparently, there's a lot of misinformation about exactly what it was that he was reporting.
		But the bottom line is what?
		The bottom line is this.
		He saw something, he doesn't quite know what it is.
		There are many reports like that.
		The difference here was that it was the U.S. President.
		And so I think all this does is underline the fact that many of these reports are coming from credible people.
		They're pilots.
		They're military people.
		They're people who go into space.
		That's not the issue.
		Not for me.
		I don't doubt that they saw something.
		The people that call me up and say, I just saw something, or send me an email, I get those all the time.
		And I can't think of a single instance in which I thought they're making this up.
		That's not the issue.
		The question is, what is it that they saw?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm curious about something, Seth.
		If you walked out tomorrow night and you saw something, let's say you saw a saucer, a typical flying saucer, fairly close range.
		Now, you'd have to do some really hard thinking before you came back the next day on this program or yours or any others and admitted what you saw.
		I wonder if you would come back the next day and report what you saw or not.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, have I backed myself into a corner?
		Is that what you're asking?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, there's what I'd hope would happen, and then there's, of course, what might really happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What might really happen.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what might really happen.
		I'm sure I would be defensive at first.
		I'd try and talk myself out of it.
		But, you know, because that's human nature.
		That's human nature.
		But on the other hand, and this feeds back into a comment that I get often, and that is that scientists who tend to be, as a rule, not universally, but as a rule, tend to be skeptical about the UFO phenomenon being, you know, involving any alien craft, that they're not open-minded to this.
		And yes, scientists are humans, and they're not always open-minded, but as a rule, they are because they only get somewhere in science research if they are open-minded.
		You don't get very far by doing the same thing.
		You have to be open-minded to new ideas.
		And so I hope that I would be open, and I think I would be.
		If I saw something that convincing art, I think I'd be willing to come on and say, you know, I've changed my mind.
		They're here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Something's here.
		I had, as you know, a very, very close sighting.
		And when you have something like that, you only have two possible explanations.
		One is that our own government or some government has something that they're certainly not telling us about and that defies all the normal rules of flight that we think we understand.
		So it's either something our government has or it's theirs.
		Those are the only two possible explanations you've got.
		And I just wonder if you would come back the next day or consider your career, consider all the things you've said and the things you believe and not admit what you saw because it would cause you such a problem.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so, Art.
		I say that, I think, very sincerely.
		My job and that of my colleagues is to prove that what's happened here on Earth is not some sort of miracle, that life is just something that this universe cooks up all the time.
		And not just life, but occasionally intelligent life.
		That's what we're about.
		It isn't about building radio telescopes.
		That's actually not what we're about.
		We're about proving this hypothesis by providing some evidence that anybody can check.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I understand, my friend.
		We're out of time.
		We're just flat out of time.
		We could go on and on.
		We always have been able to.
		Seth, it's a pleasure having you here.
		And though we may not agree on many things, we're all looking for the same thing.
		Seth, thank you.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Art.
seth shostak ▲ ● ▼		It's a pleasure, as always.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have a good night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And here is Crystal Gale, who's got her blue bust back.

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