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Sept. 24, 2013 - Art Bell

03:29:17

Dark Matter with Art Bell - The Kepler Telescope and the Future Search for ET - Seth Shostak

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	🎵 🎵
	Be it silent sound, smell or touch, there's something inside that we need so much.
	The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound, or the strength of an oak when it moves deep in the ground.
	The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
	Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
	To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing.
	To have all these things in a hammer and saw.
	And the memory is all of the users to help us survive Ride, ride like she saw
	Take this place on this trip just for me Ride, take a free ride
	Take my place, have fun and sing, it's for free I'm free!
	I'll Wanna take a ride?
	From the high desert and the Great American Southwest, exclusively on Sirius XM Radio, this is Dark Matter with your host, Art Bell.
	Now, here's Art.
	Here I am.
	Welcome to Extraterrestrial Radio.
	Glad to be here.
	Wonderful to be here, actually.
	A whole lot to talk to you about tonight.
	Seth Shostak from SETI, the chief astronomer at SETI.
	Gonna be here.
	It's gonna be a wild night, I guarantee.
	But a few notes for you first.
	And I'm trying to be rid of this, but it seems like I can't get rid of it.
	All right, after you told us about why listening to you on XM timeouts... Uh, it does time out, I know, after 90 minutes.
	I changed the volume on my iPod.
	Five minutes later, your show timed out.
	What am I to do?
	I don't know.
	When I gave the advice to everybody about how to avoid these timeouts, and that is, you know, jiggle your mouse or turn the volume up or down or something, I forgot about iPods and probably iPads and stuff like that.
	Um, the only suggestion I have is, uh, move something around on your screen.
	I don't know.
	You know, I, I do.
	Honestly, folks, I understand why Sirius XM does what they do.
	Because a lot of people will fall asleep listening to the program, and then you'll be streaming for the next two days.
	And you can't have that.
	Now... Hey, I wonder.
	They do have control of things to some degree.
	I wonder if they could make it four hours.
	That's worth thinking about.
	Make it four hours.
	If it goes four hours, nobody dies, right?
	I hope.
	Oh, and this person then goes on.
	So I don't know about tripod.
	We'll have to experiment.
	And please have Ed Dames on.
	Uh, Dr. Doom.
	Yes, I'm sure that, uh, actually I've got some messages in to Ed.
	But you know, now he's got a Russian pretty.
	And, um, I guess if it's a choice between me and his new pretty, we may be waiting a while.
	I don't know.
	We'll see.
	Um, listen, warning.
	Dire warning.
	Um, I may be getting a cold.
	When you have a six-year-old daughter in the first grade who has been now absent for two days, I think two days, and one day she went anyway, 101, 102 temperature, then down to, you know, 100, and then back up, and she has a cold, and I'm sure this biological entity is coming to get me.
	So, um, knock on wood, I do have some.
	There we go.
	This desk is not wood, I can't knock on it.
	Alright, so there's some pictures on my website tonight, which are pretty hilarious when you understand the context.
	I've got a really good friend in Las Vegas whose name is Scotty, and that's all I'll say, Scotty.
	He's a ham operator, as am I, and Scotty has decided he's going to put up this huge tower.
	That's what we hams do.
	Now, the women aren't wild about it, but we hams, we put up towers, you know, tall structures.
	And he has a brand new tower.
	And wanted to put it up, so he got the tower delivered.
	It was delivered to the front of his house.
	This is a tower that extends, of course.
	But even in its collapsed state, this tower could not be taken around.
	He's got a pretty high-end house in Las Vegas, and it was impossible to get the tower, they figured out, around the house.
	It simply wouldn't make the turn that they had.
	So, there was no other way.
	Scotty earlier today called me and said, Art, bad news, the tower won't go around the house.
	So he said, it's gonna go through the house.
	I think that what he did is hand his lady, you know, a ticket for a nice day at the spa.
	And by God, he brought that tower through the house.
	Now, if she had been there, he'd be in little pieces right now.
	But this was captured by a camera, this tower going through the middle of the house.
	Oh my God.
	I wonder if she'll see these.
	Probably never.
	But you can see them.
	They're at artbell.com.
	He's got a well-stocked bar.
	I noted that.
	We're going through the middle of the house, yi yi yi.
	There is a comet coming.
	I know that you know about this, Radh Aisen.
	Aisen, I guess.
	Aisen.
	Anyway, comets, for forever, have been predictors of doom.
	Oh, I can feel this.
	Speaking of predictors of doom, I can feel this cold coming.
	Comets have been predictors of doom.
	And I don't know why.
	Catastrophe, doom, darkness, dark matter.
	You know what I think?
	This is a big comet too, by the way.
	It's potentially so big it could be, if you can wrap your mind around this, 15 times brighter than our moon.
	Or it could fizzle.
	But it could be really big.
	Coming in November, I believe.
	And I was thinking about this earlier, this Doom thing.
	And you know what?
	I think that there's something in our DNA.
	I'm serious about this now.
	I think there's something in our DNA from way back when.
	Perhaps when humans saw this burning comet in their sky and then kaboom, she hit.
	And it was catastrophic.
	Now, I don't know any of this to be true, but if you go through so many cultures, including Native American, there is big-time doom in the sight of a comet.
	And you can kind of feel it, you know, as a chill going up your spine.
	And this is a big one.
	It's not going to hit Earth, nor are we aware of any spaceships trailing along or preceding it.
	However, honestly, I believe it's in our DNA that when we see a comet, it sends a chill down our spine.
	And it's some kind of genetic memory, I'm convinced.
	Let's see.
	Have I covered what I wanted to cover?
	Oh, yeah.
	CNN, all day long, was covering this Republican senator.
	Who's going to stand in the Senate and talk us to death.
	He says he's going to keep talking until he can no longer stand.
	Now he's protesting Obamacare.
	And so it's beginning to get interesting.
	CNN was, you know, keeping the camera on him, kind of like, he'll keel over any minute now and you'll get to see it right here.
	Going back every now and then getting shots of him, you know.
	Talking away.
	He's probably still talking now.
	I don't know.
	Anyway, I figure eventually they will get a picture of him collapsing and then probably needing Obamacare.
	Elsewhere in the world, Kenya's president proclaimed victory Tuesday over the terrorists who stormed the mall in Nairobi.
	Saying security forces had ashamed and defeated our attackers.
	That's an odd word to use, huh?
	Ashamed them.
	This is all following a bloody four-day siege in which dozens of civilians were killed.
	Ridiculous.
	Emeritus Pope Benedict has emerged from his self-imposed silence inside the Vatican walls To publish a lengthy letter to one of Italy's most well-known atheists.
	In it, he denies having covered up for sexually abusive priests and he discusses everything from evolution to the figure of Jesus Christ.
	Wouldn't it be interesting to know what he had to say about so much of that, evolution particularly.
	I wonder what he said.
	I don't like it.
	Hillary is warning against a government shutdown basically saying it'll be a bad news for the Republicans and it'll make a lot of people angry and I'm sort of adding word phrases here and that it's not to be all that bad for Democrats because people are going to be really really angry and they're going to be angry at the Republicans.
	So, there you have it.
	That's kind of a sketch of the world as I see it this night.
	In a few moments, we're going to talk with Seth Shostak.
	All right.
	Now, the Sea Crane Company transmitter.
	This thing is so cool.
	It's an FM transmitter, right?
	So, any nearby radio will hear what's transmitted.
	Now, here's the cool deal.
	You can connect this little transmitter with one wire to an iPhone, put it right into the iPhone, an iPad, an iPod, a smartphone, a computer, an internet radio.
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	Then you can go anywhere in the house and you can hear this program.
	Because you can hear it on any radio.
	Imagine that.
	It's made to transmit up to 45 feet line of sight, but remember, do not, I repeat, do not attach a 30 inch wire for improved distance.
	Do not go on the internet and read about how to tinker with it.
	It's powered by an AC adapter, which means you can plug it into the wall, and it runs on AA batteries too.
	It has full frequency coverage, bottom of the FM band 88.3, all the way up to 100.7 megahertz.
	It's portable.
	It's small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and it's only $59.95.
	That is so cheap for a stereo transmitter.
	Call, see, I mean, think about it.
	Hook it up to your computer, the audio, right, just plug it in back there, and it'll transmit to other radios, or to two radios in the house.
	How convenient is that?
	For $59.95.
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	coming up in a moment Seth Chostak
	Seth is the senior astronomer
	at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California He has an undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University and a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.
	For much of his career, Seth conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies, has published about 60 papers in professional journals, That's a lot.
	written more than 400 popular magazine, newspaper, and web articles on various topics in astronomy,
	technology, film, and television. That's a lot. He lectures on astronomy and other subjects
	at Stanford and other venues in the Bay Area, and for six years was a distinguished speaker
	for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
	He was chair of the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Permanent Committee.
	That's interesting.
	I wonder what the Permanent Committee is.
	Every week he hosts the SETI Institute Science Radio Show, Big Picture Science.
	So he has to talk about this stuff every week.
	He's written and edited and contributed to a half dozen books.
	His most recent is Confessions of an Alien Hunter.
	That's what I want, confessions.
	A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
	That was for National Geographic.
	So, coming up...
	In just a few moments is Seth Shostak.
	He's a great guy and I've got some great questions for him.
	This is dark matter in the nighttime This is the city in the middle of the dry spell
	Jimmy Rogers on the victor up high Mama's dancing, baby, on her shoulder
	The sun is setting like molasses in the sky What's happening? What happened?
	Who's there?
	Who's gonna tell you when it's too late?
	Who's gonna tell you things aren't so great?
	You can't go on thinking nothing's wrong you
	Who's gonna drive you home tonight?
	Who's gonna pick you up when you fall?
	Hangin' up when you call It's XM, baby, and we're very serious.
	To call Art Bell, please manipulate your communication device and call 1-855-REAL-UFO.
	That's 1-855-732-5836.
	I really just can't resist that one at the beginning.
	All right, coming up now, the SETI Institute's chief astronomer, Seth Shostak.
	And Seth, are you there?
	I am, Art.
	All right.
	Seth, I hate to start it out in such a contentious way, but I have absolute evidence, and this is from two sources, that you're holding on to the big news.
	That you actually have had contact with aliens and you're withholding it from the American people and the world.
	How about it?
	Well, Art, it's even news to me.
	That's how successful I've been at keeping this news from making it out there.
	Well, obviously, if that were true, of course, you know, I wouldn't be here.
	I'd be in Stockholm collecting a check and a prize, and beyond that, I'd have jobs to do.
	I couldn't resist.
	I'm sorry.
	I had to try.
	It's good to hear your voice again, Seth.
	And yours, Art.
	Really, it is.
	Good to have you back on the air.
	Yeah, it's great to be here.
	I guess it's like I kind of belong here or something.
	I don't know.
	All right, so what's new since we have last talked?
	Well, I guess to badly paraphrase Chuckie Dickens, it's the worst of times, it's the best of times.
	There's, of course, some new experiments being run in SETI, big news about planets around other stars.
	I think a lot of that has developed since we last talked.
	Finding planets and finding plants that might support life, and you know, that's the good news.
	There's some new ideas, and SETI will probably talk about those, but the bad news is, as usual, there's not too much money, and that kind of hampers the experiments.
	Money is always a problem with SETI, huh?
	It is.
	It's a perennial problem, and you know, I guess the difficulty is, I mean, we're here in the Silicon Valley, and people have money to invest in You know, new ideas, important ideas, and so forth.
	But unlike so many other enterprises, of course, SETI can't guarantee that you're going to be successful in any given length of time, or even forever.
	So I think that that's part of the problem.
	Do people get angry?
	You know, I sent you $8 three years ago.
	Where are my aliens?
	Yeah, well, I've never heard anybody say that.
	Not at the $8 level.
	Usually at the $2 level.
	Exaggerating, yeah.
	I mean, there is some of that.
	There is some of that.
	Doggone it, you guys have been looking and you haven't found anything.
	And so that must mean either they're not there or you're just doing the wrong experiment.
	I want to go back, Seth, to a show you and I did together, maybe one of the last ones we did together.
	And what you said in sort of a kind of a dejected voice was, you know, we're coming up pretty soon on 50 years.
	And if we don't find something in 50 years, I'm about ready to call it.
	You know, in other words, it might all be over.
	Yeah, I think the comment was slightly different.
	It's true that SETI is now, well, it's a little more than 50 years old in the sense that the first, you know, SETI experiment was done in 1961, or 1960.
	So that's more than 50 years ago.
	But I think that my comment was that if we didn't find a signal by 2050, So are in the next 50 years.
	I guess it's only 37 years, but whatever that I would say that that that would discourage me with the current approach.
	I would say this is not the right approach, but of course, it's not 2050 yet.
	All right, that's true.
	Okay, I thought you had said 50 years is coming up.
	Okay, so I may have had that wrong.
	Actually, you've got forever.
	I mean, we're either going to find them or we're not going to find them, but I doubt that we're going to stop looking.
	I agree with you.
	I listened to a gentleman today who came and gave a talk at the SETI Institute.
	You know, he's not a SETI astronomer.
	He, you know, designs big optical telescopes, telescopes with lenses and mirrors, the kind everybody knows about.
	And he's got plans to develop a big telescope that would allow us to maybe see the lights of alien cities, or at least the heat that they produce.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it's an interesting idea.
	It's a completely different approach to doing SETI.
	And I thought, you know, he's going to have problems raising the money to get this too.
	But on the other hand, There are all these new ideas about how you might, you know, track down E.T.
	Question.
	You said we might actually see lights of their cities.
	Now, at what distance?
	Well, he's talking about stars that are all within 60 light years.
	That's six zero, 60 light years.
	And for for listeners who don't know, of course, a light year is about six trillion miles.
	So that's 360 trillion miles, which That would be impressive on your odometer, I suppose.
	But that's fairly close.
	That's our backyard, our neighborhood backyard.
	But even so, within that distance, they're on the order of 500 or 1000 likely planets similar to the Earth, we would guess.
	We don't know that for sure.
	But yeah, but you know, there's a lot of planets even nearby.
	And what he was saying was that, look, with a big enough telescope, what you can see, maybe not the lights from their cities, Because they're going to be pretty efficient about lighting.
	We're becoming more efficient about lighting.
	But inevitably, they'll be using more energy than we do.
	I mean, that's one thing that's very, very closely correlated with the standard of living.
	You know, the higher the standard of living, the more energy you use per person.
	We all run it at about 10 kilowatts.
	That's what Americans run at.
	So, you know, he's saying that these aliens, if they're even 100 or 200 years more advanced than we are, their society, We'll be using so much energy that you'll be able to see the waste heat coming from their planet.
	That's the idea.
	I see.
	And they can distinguish that from, for example, volcanic activity or whatever else might be going on that generates heat on the planet?
	Yeah.
	Well, that's an excellent point because any planet, of course, you know, reflects a lot of heat back into space.
	I mean, the Earth is receiving, well, what is it, 10 to the 17 watts.
	That's 100,000 trillion watts from the sun.
	That's just sunlight falling on the earth.
	And of course, that all gets reflected back eventually into space as heat.
	So you've got to sort out, you know, okay, is that just heat coming from that planet because it's sitting in its sun?
	Or is that heat coming from the planet because there's a very advanced industrial society there?
	And he made a convincing case that he could tell the difference.
	Did he say how?
	I hate to press this, but, you know, heat's heat, it seems like.
	Well, yeah, well, he did indicate how.
	I mean, you can assume maybe that their planet is rotating.
	Our planet rotates every 24 hours.
	There's mine rotating 10 hours or 100 hours or who knows.
	But if it's a rotating planet, then you'll see the energy coming from that planet.
	You have to watch it for a few days, but you would see the energy, the heat coming off it.
	It'll go up and it'll go down depending on whether You know, a desert is facing you or not, but something like a big city or a big metropolis like, I don't know, the New York metropolitan area, you know, that comes around the planet, it produces a spike in the heat, and then it goes around over the edge and goes away.
	And by doing various tricks, he can sort out which of those heat signals, if you will, is due just to the topography of the planet, just to the forest, lakes, and deserts of the planet, or volcanoes for that matter.
	And which of it is due to some sort of fixed structure on the ground?
	Okay, let me try this one.
	Since we're discovering so many planets that are Earth-like, exoplanets, is that correct?
	That's correct.
	Does it at all discourage you to begin to know that these planets are out there and they're just like, well not just like, but Earth-like, and yet we don't have a signal yet?
	I mean, the one is very exciting, and the other is, but, we don't have a signal yet.
	Yeah, well, that's true.
	On the other hand, how many of those planets that we've found, and, you know, the number is, well, there's something like 900 that have been found that are for sure that they're there, but there's several thousand.
	Yeah, that's a bunch.
	Yeah, it's 900.
	Well, 900's a big number.
	I mean, consider, in 1994, there were zero.
	is a big number. I mean, consider in 1994, there were zero.
	But there are thousands more that have been found by the Kepler space telescope.
	Kepler.
	That are suspected of being planets.
	Not all of them will turn out to be planets, but probably 90% of them will.
	And so there are a few more thousand planets.
	But how many of them have we looked at carefully for a signal?
	And the answer to that is not too many.
	Not too many.
	A few hundred.
	You know, I'm not discouraged by that.
	I still think the numbers are too small to allow me to get discouraged.
	All right, all right.
	How about this question?
	You said there are 900 planets.
	Is SETI beginning to focus its antennas toward those planets?
	In other words, are we going to, can you specifically point that carefully, that you can point at those planets as, you know, likely targets?
	Yes, you can.
	You know where they are, and so you can aim your antennas in their direction.
	Now, you know, some of them are in the Southern Hemisphere, in other words, you could see them if you lived in Brazil, but you can't see them if your antennas are in Northern California, as ours are.
	Right, right.
	I understand.
	So, you know, some of them you just can't get to, but yeah, the majority you can, and we do look at them, and in fact, we even have a special project that's looking at the planetary candidates, these ones that are still not confirmed.
	that Kepler has found, and they're all in one spot in the sky. They're up there in the
	summer triangle, you know, in the constellation of Cygnus, and, you know, there are hundreds, there are thousands of
	them, and we've been looking at them, and over a very wide range of radio frequencies. I
	mean, we're going from a low band to a high band. This would be an, you know, amateur
	radio operator's dream to have a receiver that can cover as much of the band as our telescope can. So
	we are looking at those.
	We are looking at those.
	Okay.
	You mentioned Kepler.
	Kepler is a very interesting phenomenon.
	Kepler, I guess, is in trouble.
	I've heard that it's now, I mean, this wonderful satellite that has found so many Earth-like planets is dead?
	Yeah, well, I'm afraid it is.
	Oh no, what happened?
	Well, maybe moribund would be a better adjective.
	Well, what happened is In order for this thing to find planets, the way Kepler finds planets is it just stares at 150,000 stars all the time.
	It's the ultimate staring contest.
	And what it is, it's just a big light meter, really, like cameras have, you know, a light meter to measure the light.
	It's just measuring the brightness of all of these 150,000 stars.
	Every 30 seconds, it dumps some more data with the brightness as it was for the last 30 seconds.
	And it's just looking for little dips in the brightness.
	When a star gets a little dimmer because some planet has crossed in front of it.
	And that will occur occasionally.
	And it has occurred thousands and thousands of times.
	So that's what it's doing.
	But in order to pull this little trick of measuring the brightness of all these stars, you have to be very accurate in how you point the telescope.
	The telescope has to be pointed very accurately so that you don't confuse one star with another.
	And to do that, You know, they have the little thruster jets on this thing, the spacecraft, but really what they have, to keep it very precisely pointed, are what are called reaction wheels.
	And those are nothing more than, you know, spinning flywheels.
	They're just flywheels, really.
	And there were four of them.
	You need three flywheels if you want to keep something oriented in three dimensions.
	You need three flywheels, one for each of the dimensions.
	It had four.
	A little bit of redundancy.
	But, you know, some time ago, a year, year and a half, two years, I don't remember exactly, One of the wheels seized up and the bearing went bad.
	Yeah.
	So it was out of action, but there were still three.
	But what happened last spring was that a second one failed and they spent a couple of months, NASA spent a couple of months, you know, trying to free it up.
	Uh, if it was just sticky because the grease got a little cold or whatever, then they could have made it work again.
	But it looks like there's actual, you know, just physical damage.
	It's just broken.
	Like when you occasionally break a bearing on your car.
	Right.
	And it's hard to repair something that's where Kepler is.
	That is so sad.
	What about a mission?
	Oh, that's right.
	We can't do missions, can we?
	Well, yeah.
	That's so sad.
	That's another subject.
	And besides, Kepler isn't even close.
	It's not in a near-Earth orbit where you could get to it easily.
	Well, what did Kepler cost?
	I don't know the answer to that.
	It wasn't terribly expensive.
	It was in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which would be, you know... Well, there you go.
	We should have spent billions.
	Well, maybe we should.
	There's this good news with Kepler.
	I mean, I will say something here, because even though you can't point it very accurately, you can't use it for finding planets anymore, but it's still usable for other astronomical projects.
	So NASA is soliciting the astronomical community and saying, hey, you know, Can you think of something that you could use?
	A space-based telescope that's really in great shape, except we can't point it extremely accurately.
	So there's that, plus the fact that there's something like two years' worth of data that Kepler made before the wheel quit, that's still in the data processing pipeline.
	So it will undoubtedly, you know, be the discoverer of yet another couple of thousand planets.
	Well, I hope so.
	If not, then maybe they can sell it on Amazon.
	Well, yeah, but it's going to be FOB.
	I mean, you're going to have to arrange for the delivery yourself.
	Oh, boy.
	All right.
	I think you probably, maybe, did you hear the beginning of the show, or did they not call you until we were well into it here?
	They did not call me until we were well into it.
	Okay.
	Well, I was talking about Comet Eisen.
	There have been... American Indian culture and so many other cultures have this doom thing, this deep conviction that comets, when seen, mean fatal happenings are a-coming.
	That not good things happen when you have comets.
	And I was sort of speculating in the beginning of the program, Seth, that maybe there's something deep in our DNA About comets.
	Maybe early man said, ooh, look at that bright thing, and then, you know, days, weeks, months later, kaboom.
	Now, I'm not saying that happened, but it is odd that we feel so strangely about comets.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, that's a good question.
	I don't know.
	If you can see a comet for a couple of nights, you know, and talk about it and whatever, probably that's not one that's going to hit you.
	On the other hand, maybe, maybe, maybe.
	I don't know.
	I think it's the combination of ingredients, product.
	On the one hand, anything that's unusual in nature is usually a bad sign, right?
	I mean, the waters are rising or something.
	I mean, if there's something unusual in the backdrop of your life, you know, you're living on the savannas 100,000 years ago and something in nature changes, that's often bad and not good.
	So, when you look up in the sky, which, you know, essentially looks the same every night, now you see something that wasn't there last week.
	Maybe that's troubling.
	The other possibility is that it's just all the derivative from this Beirut tapestry, right?
	In 1066, when King Harold went up, you know, we lost this Battle of Hastings, whatever, and he had an arrow shot into his eye, as I recall.
	You think that?
	comet was in the sky at the time and so you know people said that this was a
	portent of his loss there. On the other hand the other guy might have claimed it
	as a portent of his win so I guess it depends on your point of view but that's
	a that's a very famous example of comets signaling something bad and that that's
	a thousand years ago so it's kind of worked its way into our our folklore if
	you will. You think that I'm thinking genetics and some terrible catastrophe
	I really am.
	I think that somehow it's in all of us.
	Anyway, onward.
	This comment.
	Some people say it could be 15 times as bright as the moon, which would be really, really bright.
	Other people say it could fizzle.
	And I guess that's the truth.
	It could go either way.
	But what do you think it would be like if it were 15 times as bright as the moon?
	Yeah, there have been comets that have been that bright in, you know, in the last couple of hundred years, actually, when people actually wrote this stuff down.
	And in the last hundred, hundred and fifty years, they could even make photos of it.
	Something I've seen.
	Well, no, not actually.
	Not in our lifetimes.
	I mean, there have been some pretty good comets.
	I mean, Hayutaki and Hale-Bopp.
	And, you know, there have been some good ones.
	Haley, which I guess was 1981.
	Is that right?
	Something like that.
	Haley's Comet was kind of disappointing.
	Remember, everybody was getting all excited about it.
	Yeah, it kind of fizzled.
	The problem with comets being really bright, and they can get very bright, is that what determines whether they're bright or not is like your kid brother.
	What determines whether he's bright or not?
	I mean, it's a combination of their intrinsic properties, you know, how big they are, what they're made of, and all that stuff, but also a lot of things that are, you know, kind of variable, like At what angle is it coming toward you?
	I mean, what part of your orbit are you and what part of its orbit is it in?
	Because at certain angles, it's going to be brighter than others.
	Obviously, how close it gets to the sun, whether, you know, it boils off easily and produces a lot of gas that, you know, you can see or dust, things like that.
	So there are a lot of variables.
	But people are saying, indeed, that ISON, which is an acronym for the Russian Observatory where this thing was found, that I saw will be by the end of November, maybe beginning
	of December, will be gosh darn bright. I mean, there have been comets in
	the past that have thrown shadows in the way the Moon does, and this one throws
	shadows.
	You might even be able to see it, you know, in the early morning or late afternoon when the Sun is still
	lighting up the sky a bit.
	Well, okay, I've never seen a comet that bright or even close
	to that, right?
	Yeah.
	So if it does get that bright, it's going to be a heck of a topic on the radio, that's for sure.
	How long, out of curiosity, might it stay that bright?
	Well, best I can judge, it'll be bright enough to be something you'll be talking about for a couple of months.
	Maybe two months.
	Like that.
	Maybe three.
	It depends on what you mean by that bright.
	But, you know, these things don't last for a year because they're moving fast and they whip around in the sun and then they go back out and then they just sort of get dimmer and everybody forgets about them.
	The guy who left early from the party, he's gone.
	Okay, well I'm looking forward to it.
	I hope it's a wowser.
	I hope it really is a good one.
	And you know, all astronomers really should hope that, because it gets people interested in astronomy.
	And let me point out, before we ever touch the subject of UFOs, Seth, that if people are going out every night to look at ISOM, And they're actually looking up in the sky.
	I'd be willing to wager you serious money that UFO reports go right through the roof during that period of time.
	Well, that doesn't sound unreasonable.
	No, because people are going to be looking up!
	Yeah, they are.
	And by the way, I also very much agree with your argument there that it gets people interested in these things.
	I mean, that's a good thing.
	I don't know if it'll get them as interested as a good science fiction movie, but maybe it will.
	Maybe it will.
	Well, as a matter of fact, I had to leave today halfway through World War Z, and right now I'm really interested in those dead people that have come to life.
	Anyway, Hollywood, since we're sort of close to all of this right now, anyway, let's ask about Hollywood.
	Why do you think that aliens The whole idea of life beyond Earth is so fascinating to Hollywood.
	Yeah, well, you know, and it is.
	I mean, well, it's fascinating to Hollywood, but it's fascinating to a lot of the public, of course.
	To me.
	Yeah, well, you know, or maybe you don't know, that the National Academy of Sciences has recognized that a lot of scientists, and astronomers in particular, if you ask them, why did you go into this field?
	Why did you study science?
	A very high percentage of them will say, well, I saw these cheesy sci-fi films when I was a kid.
	So they figure that, well, if Hollywood has this much influence on future scientists, why don't we get more of the science right in Hollywood?
	And as it turns out, I and a bunch of other scientists are kind of on call whenever this agency hears about directors or writers or producers in Hollywood that are going to make a sci-fi film.
	They will occasionally fly us down to L.A.
	and have us talk to them to try and get the science right.
	What I find is that most of the time they ask you the same questions over and over.
	What will the aliens look like?
	Why are they here?
	What sort of weapons do they have?
	But, you know, on the other hand, that's not bad.
	Why they're making the films, why aliens have become so popular of late, I ascribe to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
	Because there went all the easy bad guys.
	Hollywood didn't have any easy bad guys.
	You couldn't ridicule any other group of people.
	You could always ridicule the Soviets.
	So now, you know, aliens stepped right up, and they said, well, we're still here, and we won't ask for residuals.
	Are the North Koreans beginning to ask for residuals?
	I mean, they're about the only people we have left to, you know, rap on a little bit.
	Yeah, they're all gone.
	So you think that the bad guys now, other than, and I was thinking of that while I was watching World War Z, zombies are absolutely okay to decapitate or slice up in any manner whatsoever because they're already dead.
	And so I guess aliens are kind of in that category.
	And they're easy targets to be the bad guys.
	It's a good point, but this interest of the American people in the world goes well beyond that, I think.
	It goes a lot deeper, and I think it goes to, we want there to be others, Seth.
	Yes.
	Yes, we do.
	I certainly concur with the thought that we have an innate interest in others, if you will.
	I mean, you can imagine, you know, you're living in some Godforsaken Valley, a hundred thousand years ago, you and your tribe, and you hear that there may be another tribe on the other side of the hill, and you have, you know, there's real value in being interested in those guys, just like there's real value in being interested in the habits of predators, right?
	I mean, if you watch television, or Animal Planet, for example, you know, they're always making shows about predators, scary-looking things.
	Never make shows about gerbils.
	I mean, never.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	Hold tight, Seth.
	Seth Shostak.
	SETI's chief astronomer is my guest.
	Doesn't get any better than this in terms of somebody to ask about them.
	I'm Art Bell and this is Dark Matter.
	All the night, it's power.
	City lights, painted skirts.
	In the day, nothing matters.
	It's the night, turn the platter.
	In the night, no control.
	Through the wall, something's breaking.
	Wearing white.
	She's got something that wounds my soul.
	She's got something that moves my soul And she knows I'd love to love her
	But she lets me down every time Can't make her mine She's no one's lover tonight With me she'll be so inviting
	And she knows I'd love to love her.
	But she lets me down every time.
	Can't make her mine.
	She's no one's lover tonight.
	With me, she'll be so invited.
	I want her all for myself I'm so tempted She'll ask if you'll come home
	I want her all for myself.
	Oh, how temptation I see.
	I'm tempted, she'll ask if I'll be lonely I'm lonely tonight
	I'm lonely baby From the area of 51, this is Dark Matter with Art Bell.
	To join the show, please call 1-855-REAL-UFO.
	That's 1-855-732-5836.
	When I was in music radio up in Alaska, I actually got to introduce the grassroots on stage.
	And that was a big deal for me then.
	Ladies and gentlemen, the grassroots!
	The place would explode.
	Anyway, welcome back, everybody.
	Seth Shostak is my guest, and we're talking about them.
	We really are talking about them.
	Seth, welcome back.
	Thanks, sir.
	That is what it's going to come down to, you know, in the end.
	Them.
	Oh, by the way.
	Oh, I forgot.
	I was doing a little research for the show, and I heard that Jill Tarter is retiring, right?
	Yes, she has done that, at least from her, if you will, day job, but she still holds the chair for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, and honestly, I think she's in the office as often now as she was before the retirement.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	You know, Jodie Foster was modeled on her, right?
	Yes, well, yes.
	I mean, that's a complicated thing.
	I think that the Jodie Foster character, Ellie Arroway in the movie Contact, was modeled on several people that Carl Sagan knew.
	And one of them certainly was Jill Tarter.
	There are others that have been mentioned as well that, you know, were down the hall from Sagan at Cornell or whatever.
	So I think it's probably an amalgam of several people.
	But, you know, Jodie Foster's character's father died when she was young.
	Well, that happened to Jill Tarter.
	She went into SETI.
	Well, that happened to Jill Tarter.
	She had trouble getting money.
	Well, that happened to Jill Tarter.
	So, yes.
	Contact is actually, I believe for sure, Seth, it's my favorite movie of all time.
	Really?
	I love that movie.
	I love it.
	In fact, where do you think Wanna Take a Ride came from?
	You have seen Conduct, right?
	Yes, in fact I was an advisor, believe it or not.
	Don't you remember when the billionaire was up in the space station and he was talking to Jody and he said, want to take a ride?
	Yeah, John Hurt, right?
	Wasn't it John Hurt?
	I don't know, but I remember, I'll never forget that line.
	You used to use it on your show, didn't you?
	Yes.
	It all comes from contact.
	Contact impressed me in a way that no movie ever has before or since.
	Well, I'll tell you this.
	I, needless to say, have seen the film many times.
	In the beginning, I considered it a job requirement, actually.
	But again, as I say, many of my colleagues and I were advisors to the film, and Warner Brothers was calling up essentially every day.
	You know, to check, mostly fact-checking and stuff like that.
	They had me take pictures around the SETI Institute to send to them so that the art department could get the sets right.
	They would ask me questions like, so Seth, what does it look like when you fly through a wormhole?
	You know, as if I do that every other week.
	Stuff like that.
	And they even sent up one of the casting directors who wanted to see what, you know, real SETI scientists were like, I guess.
	Actually, that was kind of amusing, because she's sitting in my office, and she says, all right, I want to meet these scientists and engineers.
	So I gestured toward the door, and I said, they're out there!
	And she disappeared for three hours.
	And she came back three hours later, and I asked her, I said, well, did you learn anything?
	She said, two things.
	First, you all have very fancy coffee mugs.
	Next time you watch the film, pay attention to the coffee mugs.
	You'll see they're pretty fancy.
	So she did learn that.
	And the other thing she said that she noticed was the way people carried their weight around.
	And I thought, gosh, she's noticed the hierarchy of jobs here.
	You know that kind of thing?
	Yes.
	But that isn't what she meant.
	She said, you guys are all on, you know, you have sedentary jobs.
	You're all a little on the heavy side.
	So if you'll notice in the film, Aside from the principles, I mean, I'm not talking about Matthew McConaughey or Jodie Foster, but all the other techie types, the engineers and so forth, they're all a little bit chubby.
	Rotund.
	Yes, well, I mean, where do you think things like this come from?
	Want to take a ride?
	I use it all the time.
	That's where I got it.
	It just stuck with me.
	And I thought, want to take a ride?
	What a great slogan.
	And so there you go.
	I'm just in love with the movie.
	I'm in love with the book.
	I've read the book several times as well.
	It's, uh, it's just, it's so well done.
	And, and it's actually, obviously scientists were there and they were advising people on, you know, the way to, I guess, the way to present this, the whole thing.
	Um, because it's, it's accurate.
	Uh, and then you get down to the wormholes, even there it's, yeah, a series of wormholes, It's accurate.
	I wish more movies would do that, and I'm going to give you my favorite example.
	I'm a radio operator, and I am so sick of these shows that somebody's using a handheld radio, and you hear, hello?
	Well, folks, that noise comes after you talk, not before.
	I mean, where are the advisors on these programs?
	You need a squelch advisor, a squelch wrangler.
	I don't know.
	You know, I was asked a couple of years ago to be on a panel that was at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on science fiction and the movies, or science and the movies, and we discussed whether getting the science wrong, as science fiction films so often do, was actually a bad thing.
	Every time you see the Starship Enterprise go by the camera, you hear whoosh!
	You know, you hear this whoosh!
	Okay, I excuse that, though.
	I know.
	I mean, there has to be the whoosh sound.
	That's what they will tell you.
	You can make the scene without the whoosh, and everybody thinks something's gone wrong with the projector.
	So, they have to have the whoosh.
	And indeed, we kind of concluded that while it's nice to get the science right, it probably doesn't matter for a film like Contact or other space opera.
	Where it matters is in a medical show, because there you might mislead people who actually, you know, can't afford to be misled about things.
	It's not modern science fiction, but medical shows, yes.
	Good point.
	Anyway, I would like a little better consultation, especially for something really major.
	Anyway, it doesn't matter.
	So, here's the place that you and I have always come to odds, Seth.
	I really do think we're going to make contact.
	So that's not it.
	But I think that after we make contact, that you're not going to tell us.
	Oh, right.
	And I know you, Seth.
	You would tell me, probably.
	If they didn't kill you first, you'd tell me.
	But I'm sorry, I do believe it's the province of governments.
	If we get a signal, if we've discovered Other intelligence out there.
	It's so big and it's so important that I'm not sure that our government would allow it to be announced until they held it secret for a long time.
	Let me give you an example.
	We made a little mistake back in the 60s and we dropped two hydrogen bombs on North Carolina.
	Had you heard about that?
	I did hear a bit of that story, yes.
	In fact, one of them almost went off, apparently.
	Oh, actually both.
	I guess they had four safety features, and three of them failed, and the fourth was a low voltage thing.
	So there were like three or four volts between us and hydrogen bombs going off in North Carolina.
	But my point is, they couldn't tell us about that until now, Seth.
	Now, why do you think that would be?
	Yeah, well, I can understand why that would be.
	You might have problems with deploying nuclear weapons anywhere.
	You might not be able to carry them around.
	You might not.
	You'd have to shut down part of the Air Force.
	I can imagine that.
	Well, then how come it's okay to say 50 years later?
	I assume we still tote those things around from time to time, right?
	Yeah, right.
	But after 50 years, you can say, well, that's not something that would happen today.
	Right?
	Well, you might say it.
	Well, yes.
	No, I hear what you're saying, but I think that people figure, well, all right, there's been progress in 50 years, right?
	I suspect that's all there is to that.
	But, you know, did you want me to address your hypothesis here that, you know, the government would just keep it a secret?
	Do you think you're up to it?
	I don't know.
	But, well, as you've already stated, I mean, my position is that it wouldn't be kept quiet.
	I would say that on both theoretical and actually observational grounds.
	Here's the theory.
	The theory is, you know, why would they or even could they?
	Because the SETI projects in the United States are not run by the government.
	Some of them are run at universities, but those are state governments and they're not really in control of their faculties in some sense.
	And the SETI Institute is just a private nonprofit.
	And so, you know, Nobody ever checks with what we're saying or what we're doing.
	So, there's that.
	That's the theoretical.
	You might not buy that.
	You might say, ah, you're just saying that or you just think that.
	I really do sort of think that.
	Now, here's a straight-on question for you, Seth.
	In all the years you've been doing SETI now, how many years?
	Gee, I joined the SETI Institute in 91, I think.
	91, okay.
	So, that's a lot of years.
	So, Seth, in all those years, since 91, Are you here to tell me that nobody in government has ever approached you, you know, like a guy in black or I'm over-dramatizing this.
	I don't care.
	Has anybody in government ever come to you and said, look Seth, we need to have a talk about the protocols in case you guys find something.
	Nobody has ever come to you with that kind of statement?
	Nobody.
	Nobody, nobody, nobody.
	That's so hard to believe.
	Well, I mean, I can only tell you.
	I mean, I can't, you know, I mean, I can swear on this dictionary over here.
	SETI Handbook.
	SETI Handbook, whatever.
	No, well, that was what I was going to say, actually, in terms of observation.
	To begin with, the premise that if we were to find a signal and the public were to find out about it, they would go nuts.
	That's the usual explanation for why the government would keep it quiet.
	I would.
	Well, I don't think they would go nuts, because we tried that a hundred years ago, right?
	A hundred years ago, people were talking about the canals on Mars, and there was a very reputable astronomer by the name of Percival Lowell, Harvard-trained guy, and he had his own observatory, and he wasn't the only one saying this, that there was this civilization on Mars busy with shovel-ready projects digging up their planet.
	Oh, wait a minute, Seth, wait a minute.
	What about the big broadcast back then?
	Remember that?
	Well, yeah, that was 1938.
	That was a little later.
	People went berserk.
	Well, some people went berserk.
	Fewer went berserk than you might think.
	I mean, they kept announcing, this is our Halloween broadcast.
	You know, it didn't matter to a lot of people.
	Martians were chewing up New Jersey, and that was it.
	Yeah, well, chewing up New Jersey might be of some concern if you're in Pennsylvania.
	That's a lot different, you know.
	Martians are chewing up New Jersey.
	Okay, compare that with, we picked up a signal coming from 500 light years away.
	Right.
	You know, there's not a whole lot of danger to New Jersey by picking up a signal from 500 light years away.
	There's no danger to anybody for picking up this broadcast coming from a satellite, you know, orbiting the Earth.
	There's no danger.
	They can tell people they don't have to tell people whatever.
	So if you pick up a signal coming from space, I mean, there's no danger there.
	What if you pick up a signal from 10 light years away?
	Well, that's still pretty far, I would say, 10 light years.
	That would be very surprising, by the way.
	That would mean that there are a lot more aliens out there than anybody seems to believe, but it's still 10 light years is, what is it, that's 60 trillion miles.
	That's a long ride.
	It's a long ride, but it's not that long if you can go at or better than the speed of light.
	Well, going better than the speed of light is still unproven.
	Being able to go at the speed of light is not quite allowed either.
	If you can go close to the speed of light, then it takes you a little over 10 years to get here.
	That's a long time, but beyond that, they might not know we're here.
	I mean, how are they going to know we're here?
	So, but here's the other thing.
	We have had false alarms, and so have other SETI experiments.
	I mean, there was the WOW signal, right?
	The WOW signal.
	Everybody talks about the WOW signal.
	1977, Ohio State University, these guys find a signal, the astronomer comes in on the morning, he looks at the computer printout, he sees this big spike.
	I get emails about the WOW signal every week.
	And he writes, WOW next to it.
	This is the triumph of branding over product.
	Because there were hundreds of other signals, but they didn't have this nifty name.
	But did anybody from the government descend on the Ohio State astronomers and say, we're going to shut you guys down?
	Not that I know about.
	These guys are still walking around.
	They never said anything about guys in black or any other color.
	Well, all right.
	But still, I maintain that if the American people were told that we have now received a signal, first of all, everybody go back right away and watch Contact, I'm sure.
	But after that, there would be a lot of Gnashing of teeth and worse.
	I mean, even when comets appear, people do strange things, right?
	We know that.
	So, if we actually knew there was intelligence life contacting us, my, my, my, it would be a big deal.
	And I just think that if our government, so there's no protocol.
	You would contact me before you contacted anybody in government.
	Is that right?
	Well, I don't know about that.
	I don't know that you're specifically named in any of these documents, but I can tell you what the documents say because a committee that I chaired for 10 years is kind of responsible for those documents.
	Fine, what do they say?
	Huh?
	I said fine, what do they say?
	Okay, you're sounding skeptical.
	I mean, they're on the web.
	There's no secrecy here.
	Anybody wants to look them up.
	But what they say is, first, if you find a signal, check it out.
	Use other telescopes, use other instruments, make sure it's real, because this is big news.
	And you don't want to tell the world, hey, we found a signal coming from extraterrestrials, when it turns out only to be interference.
	Or a bug in your software.
	Okay, before we go on, can you do that?
	In other words, if you get a signal, can you quickly call, I don't know, Australia, Brazil, wherever they have really good radio telescopes for confirmation of the signal?
	Yeah, you can do it.
	You can call them up.
	I mean, they might say, you know, sorry, we've got a grad student here who's working on his thesis project and we're just not going to take the time.
	They might say that.
	Oh, brother.
	Oh, brother.
	No, seriously, if you told them, if you made these calls, because in contact they immediately cooperated and verified the signal.
	Right.
	I think that's what would happen.
	We've never gotten to that stage.
	No SETI experiment, with the exception, by the way, of a signal called EQPEG, which you may know about because it was on your show, That's the only signal that ever prompted somebody at an observatory to do an observation that wasn't doing SETI before.
	In general, however, you are right.
	They will, I think, say, okay, we know that the people doing these SETI experiments are, you know, they're reasonable people, they're level-headed, they know what they're doing, they have technical expertise.
	If they say, we need you to break your observing schedule, whatever it is you're doing for a moment, Spend a day or two and see if you find the signal at the same place on the sky and at the same spot on the dial.
	I'm sure they would do it.
	They would do it.
	No problem there.
	All right.
	And that would be done before you called me, right?
	Yes, because we don't want to shout wolf.
	We would cry wolf.
	We would check it.
	So that's the first thing in the protocol.
	And by the way, this is where contact is slightly wrong.
	In contact, they essentially know right away that the signal is for real.
	Now, I think that Carl Sagan knew that you won't know for real, you know, that quickly.
	It's going to take a few days of confirming observations and all that.
	But, you know, it's a movie.
	You've got to speed things up.
	Right, right, right.
	So that's fair enough.
	So that's what the first thing in the protocol is.
	Check it out.
	The second thing in the protocol is let everybody know.
	And when it says everybody, mind you, it doesn't say, you know... I bet that's in brackets, you know, with a little star, and you've got to read down at the bottom of the page.
	The formatting isn't that sophisticated, no.
	But it does give examples of what is meant by everybody.
	And it doesn't name any names.
	It doesn't say, call Paris Hilton or something.
	What it says is, You know, let the public know, the media know, the government know.
	I mean, essentially.
	But the first group that you should let know, and this is just astronomy in general, is the entire astronomical community.
	Because what you want is that every telescope in the world that can point in this direction, that it's doing that because you want to get all the data you can.
	Absolutely.
	I get it.
	How did you like the way the movie Contact unraveled the SETI signal?
	In other words, pretty soon you're finding other signals within, then you're finding sub-carriers, and you're finding other information, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, pretty soon you've got the machine.
	Yeah, well, I thought that was ingenious.
	In the end it turned out to be, what, a 3D hologram or something like that?
	Right, right, exactly.
	And what it said in the end was, Okay, Earthlings, build this machine.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Here it is.
	Build it.
	Right.
	It was really cool.
	But in real life, what would you expect?
	Would you expect prime numbers?
	Or what do you imagine you might get?
	Yeah, prime numbers, the value of pi, all those sorts of things to market as a clearly artificial signal.
	You know, you don't need to do that.
	That's kind of silly.
	Prime numbers, they're going to know the prime numbers.
	Because the characteristic of this signal That sets it apart from natural radio noise that the universe is pumping out all the time, you know, quasars and pulsars and all that, is that it's narrow band.
	That is to say, and you know what this means, but for listeners who are not into radio, that just means that the signal is at more or less one spot on the dial.
	It's not all over the dial the way natural interference is.
	Okay, so if you find a signal where it's, you know, at one spot on the dial, like an AM signal, it occupies Whatever, 810 kilohertz and it, you know, occupies 3 kilohertz of that or whatever, a signal that's being made by a transmitter is at one spot on the dial.
	So if you find that, that's, you know, pretty convincing that it's for real and you don't have to rely on them sending you a bunch of prime numbers.
	And in fact, I think that that would be a waste of their time.
	That would be a waste of their transmitter power to send prime numbers.
	Really?
	Because, well, look, they're likely to be hundreds of light years away.
	I mean, we don't know.
	But they're probably not very close.
	Well, there's a signal, and then there's a... I guess if they just send a dead carrier, that'd be pretty boring.
	You've got to indicate in some manner that it's coming from an intelligent source, right?
	Yeah, and you say sending a dead carrier, just, you know, a constant tone or something like that, which is what a carrier really is.
	I don't think they would go to the trouble and spend the money.
	To build a big transmitter that could communicate between the stars, and we're going to send them middle C, or something like that.
	We're just going to send them this endless tone.
	I think that they would recognize that, look, we're very far away from these guys.
	We might be a hundred light years, we might be a thousand light years, whatever it is.
	Which means that communication is really going to be very tedious, because, you know, you say hello, and it takes hundreds of years to get there, and hundreds of years for that reply to get back to them.
	So I think that they would probably just want to send you a lot of information at once.
	You know, it's not going to be about conversation.
	It's about going into a library and reading a book.
	You're not having a conversation with the author.
	You're just reading what he had to say.
	So I think there will be a lot of information and maybe they'll repeat it.
	But if they really want you to understand it, if this is a deliberate broadcast and not just, you know, some internal signal that you happen to pick up, if it's deliberate, they're going to make it very easy for you to figure it out.
	Maybe a lot of pictures or something like that.
	Pictures would be good, as long as they're not too ugly.
	All right, hold tight, Seth.
	Seth Shostak, my guess.
	He's the chief astronomer at SETI.
	I'm Art Bell, and this is Dark Matter.
	All our times have come.
	Here but down and gone.
	Feel the Reaper No to the wind, the sun, or the rain
	We can be right there Come on baby, don't feel the Reaper
	Baby take my hand, don't feel the Reaper We'll be able to fly
	Ooh and it's alright, it's coming on We gotta get right back to where we started from
	Love is good, love can be strong We gotta get right back to where we started from
	Ahh....
	Do you remember that day?
	When you first came my way?
	I said no one can take your place And if you get hurt, if you get hurt
	By the little things I say I can put that smile back on your face
	When it's all right and it's coming home We gotta get right back to where we started from
	Love is good, love can be strong We gotta get right back to where we started
	Dark Matter, much like Sirius XM, is all around you.
	To beam up with us, please dial 1-855-REAL-UFO.
	That's 1-855-732-5836.
	Not to worry, we'll have plenty of time for call-ins, and I know you want those.
	Not to worry, we'll have plenty of time for call-ins, and I know you want those.
	Seth will answer questions. He will answer them or else.
	Anyway, welcome back, and Seth, welcome back.
	Thank you.
	Alright, fine.
	I'm with you on the hundred light years away.
	Let's, let's, for just a moment, imagine that the signal comes from one light year away.
	Now, are we dealing with a different animal?
	Yes, yes.
	I'm not sure whether it's animal, vegetable, or mineral.
	If it's one light year away, of course, it's closer than the nearest other star.
	So it's something, I guess, artificial.
	It's some sort of craft.
	A craft, and it's coming in our direction.
	So, now, would you announce that, or would you run that by some people before you did?
	And yes, I know, you'd check it out, make sure that it's real McCoy and all that.
	Now, assuming that's been done, it's a light year away, it's coming our way, who do you tell?
	Well, I think that that would be, to begin with, you don't know that it's coming our way.
	If you're the only one looking at it, right?
	I'm telling you, I'm telling you it's coming our way.
	Okay, well, higher authority.
	You're right, you wouldn't know really if it's coming our way.
	I suppose eventually though, if the signal continued, you'd find a way to determine where it was going.
	You could do this if, well, at one light year, it depends, you know, one light year, it depends a little bit on how fast it's moving.
	If it were moving fast enough, You could determine its real motion if you can observe it with high enough resolution, as we say in the astronomy biz.
	In other words, you can see enough detail to see whether it's moving side to side, if it's moving off to one side or not.
	Right.
	Is it going left, right, up, down?
	If it's not, then it's coming at us.
	Well, that's right, or moving away from us.
	Or moving away, that's right.
	And that wouldn't be too hard either, because moving away, you would have a certain shift of light, right?
	There would be a Doppler shift, yeah.
	But on the other hand, if it's moving away at a steady velocity, as rockets do in space, then there's no change in the Doppler shift, so you wouldn't know.
	But, let's assume you can figure that out, because you could figure it out if the signal were strong enough, if the signal were always on, And you enlisted the help of a lot of radio astronomers and optical astronomers.
	You have to get a lot of people working on it to establish that it was something coming toward you.
	That would take a little bit of effort, but I agree with you.
	You could probably tell.
	You know, something at one light, your distance, even if it's going, you know, I don't know, 100,000 miles per second, which is pretty fast.
	It's half the speed of light, more.
	You've got to wait a while before it moves enough, either to the left or right, before you see that, but okay.
	Maybe you could tell that.
	Now, what would you do?
	Well, already you've had to tell all these people in order to even learn what the deal is on it, right?
	You can't tell that by yourself.
	You can't.
	You just have to get all these other people.
	And these other people, very often, they're not in the United States or Canada.
	I mean, they might be, as you say, in Australia or somewhere else.
	And they might say, well, yeah, okay.
	By the way, we're telling all our buddies and we're telling the newspapers.
	I think it'd be kind of hard to keep it quiet.
	And the only exception to that might be that if the government itself was the one to discover this, then they have obviously tighter control over the flow of information.
	But, you know, that assumes that the government is better at finding these things than we are.
	Okay, then let me try this.
	Let's say the government found it.
	Do you have any confidence whatsoever that the government would tell you about it?
	Well, they probably wouldn't tell us.
	I mean, if they have the equipment to find it, they probably don't need us, right?
	If they have better instruments than we do, why are they going to tell us?
	I mean, I don't know whether they tell us, but maybe what you're really asking is, do I have confidence that they would tell the public?
	Would they tell anybody or would they just keep it quiet?
	And the answer to that is, I don't know the answer to that.
	I mean, I don't know if they felt that the military brass figured, you know, we've got to figure out whether this is a danger or not.
	Well, there's no point in getting everybody alarmed yet.
	Mind you, at a light year, you know, that's still pretty far away.
	That means how far you can go at the speed of light in a year, right?
	So if they're going half the speed of light, that would be two years?
	If they're going half the speed of light, that would be two years.
	So that's not that long.
	If you've got something sending a signal headed our way two years out, I don't think that... I really don't think they would tell us about that.
	I think they would prepare militarily.
	I think they'd do a lot of things, but I don't think they'd tell us.
	Now, I could be wrong, but people I mean, this is a big deal, Seth.
	A lot of people would be challenged with their religion.
	A lot of people would think it's end times.
	They could be right.
	And so forth and so on.
	In other words, gigantic changes.
	So, you know, that's the reason that I've always hassled you about this because it's such a, it would be such a monster announcement that, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
	Maybe everybody would know.
	Maybe you'd call and say, hey Art, guess what?
	Well, I think so.
	But hey, I mean, maybe you'll prove me wrong.
	But this is a different case.
	If you're talking about something that's clearly artificial, and that's physically coming our way, as opposed to a signal, a signal isn't going to hurt anybody.
	The signal per se doesn't hurt anybody.
	And again, they don't know that we picked up their signal, right?
	Nobody has to fear From tuning in the Art Bell Show, I mean, Dark Matter... All right, all right, all right, fine.
	Let's do this, Seth.
	Let's say that a signal came from 50 light years away.
	And we decode the signal, and the decoding essentially says...
	Hello there.
	We are your makers.
	We seeded your planet X number of millions of years ago, and we're going to be coming to visit you.
	But, you know, that's oversimplified, but essentially that's what the message would say.
	We are your makers.
	There was kind of a lilt to your voice there.
	We are your makers, and we're coming to visit you.
	I'm sorry, it was simple, I know.
	The big part of it is, we are your makers.
	That's the big part of the signal.
	That would be very disturbing.
	Okay, the idea that our makers might be deep in space, I mean, that's not crazy.
	I mean, there are theories, there's this theory of panspermia that's been in the news recently, in fact, because there's the claim by some Academics in the UK and in England who say that they sent a balloon up into the stratosphere here recently and they collected stuff up there and they found all this, you know, bacterial stuff.
	There's biology up there and they say it's coming from space and consequently we're being rained on all the time by life from space and maybe that's what seeded the life on Earth.
	This goes beyond the idea that we might be Martians because Mars may have seeded us.
	But, you know, that we might be being seeded from a planet 50 light years away, as you say.
	That's possible, but all you have to do is walk on down to the local Natural History Museum and look at all the skeletons in there.
	Not just the dinosaurs, but, you know, look at everything and you'll find that, gee, You know, our skeleton looks a lot like the skeleton of the primates that we came from, which looks a lot like the skeleton from the ground sloths or whatever that they came from.
	Right?
	There's this continuity that goes back as far as you want to go.
	It goes all the way back at least three and a half billion years, maybe four.
	So if they are our makers, these guys are pretty long in the tooth because they would have had to have seeded the earth with Essentially bacteria, you know, four billion years ago.
	And that's okay by me.
	I mean, I don't have any problem with that.
	If they, if they did it and that's okay, maybe there's a lot of life out there because these guys are act, you know, actively planting it.
	They're way past the iPhone 5s.
	Yes, it might be.
	Okay.
	You know, I'm joking around, but really, uh, if they indicated, if they got that one message across that they are our maker.
	Yeah.
	I'm not sure that would be released.
	I'm really not.
	It would be so disturbing to almost everybody.
	I mean, if you look around the world at all the religions and what they say about how we got here, they nearly all have a, you know, lay it out, how we got here.
	And almost none of it talks about people 50 light years away.
	It would be very disturbing.
	Yeah.
	You know, here's the thing about this idea of panspermia, because it's a legitimate idea, and there are people like Bob Zubrin, who's occasionally on your shows, actually, who think that, you know, this really has legs, that it really could explain a lot of things.
	And the idea, again, very simple, that life springs up on some planet somewhere, and then, you know, you just occasionally get rocks hitting your planet.
	That happens to us all the time.
	And they kick stuff up, just dirt, essentially, into space.
	Some of it gets kicked very high speed, and it just leaves the planet altogether, and some of that will wander through space, and eventually fall on another planet somewhere else, and it might infect that planet.
	So, the idea is that life could come from a distant world by this accidental infection method.
	You know, one planet kind of sneezes, and another... Either accidental or on purpose, either way.
	Well, there are people who've said it could be on purpose, that maybe they're Johnny Appleseeds that are busily stuffing life, DNA of some sort, into a rocket and sending it somewhere else.
	Well, I mean, look at us, Seth.
	If we could do it, we would do it.
	If we could send life elsewhere, we would do it.
	Yeah, and we have done it, in a way.
	We sent it to Mars, quite accidentally.
	Right.
	But, you know, Mars hasn't suddenly bloomed with life.
	It's got to be a good place to send it.
	That aside, I mean, how does this change anything?
	On the one hand, it would be very interesting to know.
	The only change, substantive change, I can see is that, A, it would mean that we're all sort of related, right?
	We might be related to life that's very far away, simply because, you know, and that would be interesting.
	It's sort of like, I don't know, Mr. Spock, right?
	He was sort of half related to humans, and that's why he looks so human.
	The other thing is that, of course, that doesn't make any sense because you're talking in panspermy about sending microbes, not humans, from one planet to another.
	So that doesn't really make sense.
	But what does make sense is that it might mean that there's a lot of life.
	Because we usually assume that if you want to look for life, you've got to find a planet where it could have sprung up from natural processes.
	right and then eventually develop but if you have a mechanism for spreading it around
	then you don't need to grow it from nothing on every planet you can just
	infect one planet after another so that's a good thing In fact, that was an interesting choice of words, insect?
	No I said infect Yes, it's an infection.
	Well, maybe that's making a value judgment on life.
	Maybe it is!
	Okay, well, at any rate, where I was going with this is that I don't think you could announce that to people.
	I don't think you could tell them that everything they believe, and it's a core belief, about how man arrived on Earth Is all just wrong, that it's those guys 50 light years out that did it.
	That would really be a troublemaker and I wonder how it would be absorbed, assuming they'd even make the announcement, which I don't believe, but I wonder if they did, how it would be absorbed.
	You know, would people go wild?
	Would they accept it?
	What do you think?
	Well, I think that that's very close to the question that has been very frequently asked, and that is, you know, if SETI, for example, were to pick up a signal, how would that affect, for example, our religious beliefs?
	Right.
	Well, I know you, Seth, would accept it, and a lot of people of science would accept it, and they'd be totally okay with it, but there is another group of people out there Believe me, they're out there that wouldn't accept it and wouldn't want to hear about it at all.
	Yeah, I agree with you.
	I've talked to a number of people about this because it is an interesting question.
	In fact, it's one of the most interesting questions when it comes to SETI.
	Not, you know, how do you build the equipment and where do you point antennas and all that.
	But if you find a signal, how will that affect us?
	I mean, aside from these invasion scenarios, which, you know, I don't put a lot of credence into.
	But there is the effect that you know that you're not alone, that they're really out there, and you've got an even more aggressive scenario in which we find out that they, by the way, are responsible for life on Earth.
	How does that affect a religious belief when suddenly you know this?
	And that's an area which has not received a whole heck of a lot of attention.
	Some people have done some studies, there are researchers who've gone and talked to a whole bunch of theologians about it, There are sociologists who weigh in on this, and here's the bottom line, as I understand it now... The old Brookings study.
	There ought to be something new.
	Somebody should do something new in terms of looking at this.
	Yeah.
	I think if there are any sociologists, grad students out there, or anthropologists, or whatever, they ought to consider writing their thesis about this, because it's a wide-open field.
	What I have heard is that if you ask theologians, if you will, The major Adamist religions, those are the ones that, you know, like Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and you say, look, what if we knew tomorrow that there's other intelligent life out there?
	How would that affect your religion?
	And the answer they'll give you is, it's all okay.
	But if you talk to some of them, they'll say, look, that's what we're saying.
	But if you're a fundamentalist, you have a different view of this.
	And all the action in religion in this country these days tends to be at the fundamentalist level.
	There may be a stronger reaction there because it really does violate their beliefs.
	So I think it's an open question.
	I think it's a good question.
	Okay.
	I think there should be another study.
	A good study.
	And maybe the only way you could do that is to actually simulate it to a large group and see how they handled it.
	I don't know.
	All right.
	Here's another one.
	And this one will go round and round with this.
	I know the way you feel about UFOs, or at least I think I know how you feel about UFOs.
	You're very skeptical that we have been visited or are being visited on a regular basis, and there's an awful lot of evidence That would argue with your premise, and it just isn't so.
	I mean, these things are seen all the time.
	Granted, I'm sure a lot of them are various sorts of aircraft and or weather balloons or swamp gas or whatever, but surely some of this could very well be true.
	What say you?
	Well, I don't need to state my opinion because you've encapsulated it very well.
	I have to say... Swamp gas?
	Yeah, I don't even know what swamp gas is.
	It must be methane.
	I don't know what it is.
	It doesn't sound like I'd want it in my house.
	If I were an alligator, I'd have something against swamp gas.
	It is true that I get emails and phone calls every day, every day, that I'm in the office anyhow.
	Every day from people who are wanting to tell me about either something they've seen, something they've photographed, something they've experienced, whatever.
	Why are you, if I were writing an email, why are you wasting our money looking out there for signals when these things are zooming above our heads?
	They're everywhere!
	What's the matter with you?
	Are you behind these emails?
	No, I just know, I know what you're getting, I know.
	Yeah, well, that's true.
	I mean, I get many that are very similar to what you just said.
	First thing I point out to them is that it isn't their money, because it's all run on private donations, unless they're a donor.
	I know, I know, I know.
	It's just that I've been in this business long enough to know how they're worded.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, what I say is this, look, I mean, I can't prove to you that they're not here.
	But that's not actually what's required here.
	If you think they're here, then you have to prove to me that they are here.
	Not necessarily just to me, I mean, certainly not necessarily to me, but to enough people that they're going to stack this up as evidence in the Smithsonian.
	That's, for me, the big criterion.
	If the evidence is good enough to put in the Smithsonian, then I'm going to say, you know, this looks pretty good.
	And so what I often will say, I mean, when people write me, I try and help in the sense that I try and think of what might be the explanation for what they've seen, other than UFOs.
	I mean, it could be UFOs, but, you know, if they send a photo, I've done a lot of photography, so very often I can look at the photo and tell what's going on and suggest that to them.
	I can't say that I've ever been hoaxed in the sense that somebody called me up just as a prank and was making stuff up.
	All these people who call me, who write me, are all sincere.
	As far as I can tell, they're all very sincere.
	They're honest folks and they just want to know, that's all.
	They just want to know.
	And very frequently, I can't tell them.
	I mean, they tell me, you know, I was out with my kid in the backyard and it was 1958 and whatever.
	Yes.
	And, you know, there's very little I can say because, you know, there's just not enough evidence to make any judgment there.
	But what I do say is this, look, and this is mostly to the people who are, if you will, Kind of in the biz of the UFOs.
	In other words, it's not just that they had an experience.
	These are people who are aggressively saying, look, the evidence now is very good.
	I ask them, give me what you think is the best case.
	Don't tell me there have been 10,000 reports this year, because there probably were 10,000 reports of ghosts, too.
	That's not going to convince anybody.
	But what would convince them is just one really good case.
	Really good case.
	And that's what I'm trying to get at often when I talk to people in the UFO community.
	What are the really good cases?
	Don't give me a hundred, give me one, give me two, give me three, but I don't need more than three, just one good one.
	And I've just never gotten a very satisfactory answer to that.
	All you really need, buddy, is to see it yourself.
	Yeah.
	I'd love for that to happen to you.
	It happened to me, Seth, and once you've seen it, That will never go away.
	It changes you.
	It happened to me, Seth.
	I know I think I've described it to you before.
	A triangle came about 150 feet above me, floating, not flying, defying gravity, or maybe lighter than air, but I don't believe that.
	No propulsion, but it was moving right along, watched it go right across the valley.
	A military commented that it was a C-130.
	In other words, I had an experience of the magnitude that you just flat can't deny or ignore.
	It was either something super secret, and I acknowledge it could be that, but I don't think it was, Seth, and it was just right above me.
	I could almost touch the damn thing.
	So if you had an experience like that, I wonder how you could do your job anymore.
	I would switch my job description, I think.
	You know, somebody told me once, he said, if I thought there was a 1% chance that we were really being visited, then I would spend all my time on that problem.
	I think a lot of people would.
	I think a lot of people would.
	I probably would.
	If you saw something of that magnitude, would it cause you to change your focus?
	I think so.
	I hope I'm not so rigid that, you know, no matter what evidence you provide, including that kind of an experience, if you will, No, I'm just not going to believe it.
	I'm sorry.
	I just don't want to believe it.
	I don't think I'm like that, but others do.
	Maybe they know me better than I know me.
	Okay, what's the best argument against it?
	In other words, what a lot of people say is that, look, they are monitoring us, and there's a fair case to be made for that.
	If somebody out there can really exceed the speed of light and go wherever they want to go, like in Star Trek, Type 2 or type 3, whatever.
	It would make sense, perhaps, that they would check on us from time to time, see how we're doing, see what we're ready for.
	Is that really so far out?
	Well, I mean, that requires speculating a little bit on, you know, alien behavior.
	And we don't have a whole lot of data, at least to my mind.
	We don't have a whole lot of data about alien behavior.
	To begin with, it presupposes that they find us that interesting.
	And you have to wonder, you know, do you think the dinosaurs are sitting around thinking, you know, they probably know we're here and they want to just monitor us.
	And we think that about ourselves.
	But look, if they want to monitor us, they can do that, as long as they're not so far away that, you know, they can't pick anything up.
	But if they're within 50 light years or 80 light years or something like that, then they don't need to send spacecraft here to monitor us.
	They can just watch our television.
	Well, you know, it all seemed to begin in earnest sometime after we exploded the first atomic bomb.
	Now, I'm not saying that that caused sudden visitations, but if you look at the record of ufology, it did seem to spike after we exploded an atomic bomb.
	Hold tight, Seth.
	I've got to do something very quickly here.
	I want to talk to you about the super Wi-Fi antenna.
	If you're a trucker, I really want to talk to you about it.
	If you're just at home, listen very carefully.
	This thing is amazing.
	When I say it'll boost your Wi-Fi signal at home or in a truck or a car, boosting it is not... it doesn't do it justice.
	When you plug this thing in, it's just a USB that you plug into your computer.
	And even if your computer now has Wi-Fi, oh, believe me, you want this super Wi-Fi antenna.
	I mean, we're talking about two or three times as far, or four times as far.
	Let's say you're in a truck.
	You're at a truck stop somewhere.
	You want a good Wi-Fi signal.
	You plug this baby into your computer, USB port, and boom!
	You're seeing and getting good, solid signals from very far away.
	And if it's open Wi-Fi, of course you can use it, right?
	Hundreds of feet!
	More!
	It's made for indoor or outdoor use.
	It's just kind of like a rod with suction cups on it.
	So if you're a trucker, you can go stick it to the window, plug it into your computer, and voila!
	You're seeing Wi-Fi from all over the place!
	Or if you're in a high-rise.
	This is really fun.
	I plugged mine in in Manila and you know I was in a high-rise there and it was it was fun.
	It was legitimately fun because I went from seeing three other Wi-Fi units or signals in my condo To something like 68 of them.
	That tells you how much difference it makes.
	I mean, this is serious.
	This is Wi-Fi DX.
	So, I'd say if you were to measure the antenna about the size of a ruler, and it comes with a 15-foot USB cable so you can get it wherever you want it to go, and it's so reasonable.
	It's $99.95.
	This is a technological advance a Serious, it's the next big thing in Wi-Fi.
	They love to use that now and On TV.
	I noticed the next big thing.
	Well, this is the next big thing.
	Trust me in Wi-Fi $99.95 worth every penny call C crane right now Operators are there waiting for you.
	You want to ask about the super USB Wi-Fi antenna.
	Three.
	Third generation.
	Call 1-800-522-8863.
	The number again, you can dial right now.
	to you.
	1-800-522-8863.
	you It's just that good.
	My guest is Seth Shostak, Chief Astronomer at SETI.
	And we're talking about The Signal.
	Dark matter in the night.
	Some velvet morning when I'm straight I'm gonna open up your gate
	And maybe tell you about Phaedra And how she gave me life
	And how she made it in Some bell...
	It was a beautiful day...
	It was a beautiful day...
	I'm wearing a long nose belt, I hope that you guys thought it was a lot of studies, but no, Phaedra's a turd.
	It's 2 a.m. here in the hall that I'm signing with. It's still warm, still nothing. It's bad and it's taking a
	chance. Yeah, that's a call from the blues. Sirens in my head.
	It's wrapped up inside of me.
	All circuits are dead.
	Can't I be cold?
	My whole life spins into a frenzy Now I'm trippin' into the twilight zone
	Faces in the house, feelings like being blown My feet just can't move, I'm the moon and the star
	And I'm the ghost of love that I've grown to love Now I'm trippin' into the twilight zone
	Faces in the house, feelings like being blown My feet just can't move, I'm the moon and the star
	And I'm the ghost of love that I've grown to love So you and I, we'll go
	Runnin' for the heads of all Wanna take a ride?
	To initiate a dialogue sequence with Art Bell, please call 1-855-REAL-UFO.
	That's 1-855-732-5836.
	This is from somebody who names himself, Are You Serious?
	Great handle.
	Says, Just another scientist stuck in outdated concepts.
	Refusing to see the forest through the trees.
	All for the sake of money.
	And his scientific rationale.
	Ouch!
	That sound like the stuff you get in the email, Seth?
	Yeah, that's actually mild.
	Okay, that's coming through the wormhole.
	Now, if you want to send a message with a question for Seth, or even say nice things to him, you can go to artbell.com.
	There, you'll have to look for the wormhole.
	Now we're trying to get Keith to put it very prominently somewhere where you can see it, the wormhole.
	And you can type a message, it goes to Arizona, it goes through the wormhole, and it comes out right here on my computer in front of me.
	Making it very easy for me to ask him the question.
	So, there you have it, thewormholeatartbell.com, and I am indeed reading these like crazy.
	So, yeah, mild.
	I don't know about mild, but certainly not in agreement.
	When you read your emails, when you read feedback that comes to SETI, how much positive versus how much negative do you get?
	Well, the overwhelming I would say the positive greatly outweighs the negative.
	That's for sure.
	If I express skepticism in any sort of public forum, like this one, then I will get a certain degree, a certain fraction, I should say, of the email the next day is going to be negative.
	And some of it is just people disagreeing, which is, that's fine.
	I mean, that's what it's all about, really.
	Sometimes it's just, you know, sort of ad hominem attacks that You know, the problem is me as a human being, kind of thing.
	And that's a little harder to take, because after all, it's just an opinion.
	It would be like, well, never mind what it would be like.
	But then occasionally, there's the things that you actually get worried about, because people get very emotional.
	I think that this is one of the more interesting aspects of the whole question of whether UFOs might be alien craft or not, is why the subject is highly, highly emotional.
	Yeah.
	If they landed, would you fear for their safety?
	What, the aliens?
	Yes.
	Well, it never occurred to me, actually.
	I think that's a legitimate question.
	Allow it to occur to you, because I think if they landed, there would be a lot of people who would want to make Swiss cheese out of them as quickly as possible.
	Possibly, possibly.
	You know, my general take on it, and this is, of course, It could be made invalid if there was only one craft that landed and three guys walked out or whatever.
	I mean, then they're vulnerable.
	But in general, any society that can come here, right, is so far beyond our technological level.
	It would be like, you know, an army helicopter landing in a coven of Neanderthals from 30,000 years ago.
	I mean, the Neanderthals might want to cut them to pieces, but they might not be able to do that.
	Well, that's certainly a good point.
	The bullets would bounce off the invisible force field, whatever.
	But there would be bullets.
	There's simply no question about it.
	There'd be bullets.
	All right, let's talk about a real threat, and that is asteroids.
	There was one that came down over Russia not that long ago, and then there was another near miss, and it was like suddenly there were all kinds of asteroid There was lots of asteroid talk going around, and frankly, the one in Russia was fairly impressive.
	It was, particularly if you were in Chelyabinsk when it happened.
	Fortunately, I don't know, maybe in the big picture it's not so fortunate, but there's so much insurance fraud in Russia that a lot of people have these dash cams, and they've got all this great video footage of the asteroids sweeping across the sky.
	I don't know.
	I broke thousands and thousands of windows.
	Nobody was killed apparently, but it's really scary.
	You know, one of the scary things about this is that you look up in the sky and you see this thing streaking across the sky, and probably doesn't take very long, streak all the way across the sky, 10, 20 seconds, whatever it is.
	Right.
	And then it's gone, right?
	Because, you know, it blew up in the sky.
	And then you say, well, I don't know, Marge, whatever that was, that was interesting.
	And then you go inside or you keep looking out the window at something else.
	And of course, the shockwave from it burning up in the sky, that's just a sound wave, really.
	So it moves at the speed of sound.
	This happens many miles up, so it takes a minute or so before that hits you, and then it breaks all the windows and injures people.
	So that, to me, was one of the scariest aspects, that people don't realize that just because it's disappeared, the danger is over.
	It hasn't ended yet.
	But nonetheless, that thing, had it actually hit the ground, you know, they would have done a lot more damage.
	The thing about asteroids is they're big ones and they're small ones.
	The big ones could wipe out all life on Earth, or a lot of it, as the dinos could attest.
	The small ones could wipe out, you know, downtown Las Vegas or something.
	But we know about the big ones.
	We still don't know about all the small ones.
	OK, well, OK, then I've got a question.
	And it's this a lot of times we are told about something that will be a close encounter something of pretty good size It'll come whizzing by earth But then there's other times Seth where the story reads like this Yesterday, we had a very close call.
	It doesn't say we're going to have a close call.
	It says, yesterday, we had a very close call.
	Those are the ones that worry me, Seth, because, well, that was yesterday, which means they didn't know enough ahead of time to write about tomorrow we're going to have a close call.
	They only saw it after it passed us.
	That's very worrisome.
	Yes.
	Well, you have some reason to be worried.
	Mind you, in all of recorded history... Thank you, thank you.
	Honestly, if you have a dental appointment this week, I would worry more about that, because... I do.
	I hate the dentist.
	I worry a great deal about it.
	The facts are, in all of recorded history, I don't think a single person is known to have been killed by one of these asteroids.
	On the other hand...
	Yeah, and maybe in antiquity, before they wrote things down, you know, maybe 50,000 years ago, there were people killed, so we don't know.
	It's also the case that if you do the statistics, it turns out that unless we do something to forestall this, your chances of being killed by an asteroid are greater than your chances of being killed in a commercial airline accident.
	There you have it!
	Yeah, but the thing is, I mean, it's one of those deals where if it happens, it's not happening just to you and a couple of hundred Other people.
	It's happening to, you know, millions, maybe billions of people.
	Now, what's being done?
	The first thing you have to do is find out where these guys are.
	The second thing you have to do is, if any of them look like they're headed your way, you either have to get out of the way or you have to do something to divert it.
	And there's some progress on both fronts.
	I mean, NASA has been using automated telescopes to try and map all the big asteroids.
	You start with the big ones, because those are the ones that could really do a lot of damage.
	And we now know... Yeah, we know about all the ones that are bigger than About a kilometer or so, you know, a little over a half a mile.
	Well, all except the rogues.
	Now, we wouldn't know about the rogues.
	In other words, if I understand this correctly, asteroids come around again and again and again so that we can sort of plot, you know, their trajectory and we can understand that by how much they'll miss us or whatever.
	But there could be a rogue, right?
	Well, yes, in this sense.
	I mean, most of the asteroids, what you're interested in are asteroids that get closer to the Sun than the Earth.
	Most asteroids, they hang out around, you know, in the Asteroid Belt.
	They've even got their own real estate.
	It's called the Asteroid Belt, and it's beyond Mars and before Jupiter, okay?
	So there are a lot of asteroids, but they're just sitting there.
	They're not doing anything dangerous to us.
	There are other asteroids that have been perturbed, and their orbits have been changed by, you know, Near fender benders or whatever, and they come closer to the Sun than the Earth does, so they cross our orbit and they could hit us now.
	Right.
	You know, as I say, all the big ones of those have been charted, so we know that for the next 30 years, for example, not one of those big guys is going to hit us, but you talk about rogues, it could be that some asteroid out in the asteroid belt, you know, bumps into another asteroid tomorrow and then gets hurtled to the inner So, that could be a role.
	There you have it.
	There you have it.
	And moreover, Seth, there is this.
	If it's headed directly at us, we are very, very unlikely to see it ahead of time.
	Is that right?
	Well, not really, because, yeah, it's headed for us, but, you know, we're moving around the sun.
	It's going to take a while to get here.
	It's going to take, depending on, you know, where it starts, but it might take months and months to get here.
	And in that time, we've gone around a little bit in our orbit around the sun, so our angle with respect to this thing has changed.
	So it isn't, you know, just sort of hanging in the sky.
	We see it move side to side.
	So, you know, we would know about it.
	But look, you know, worrying about a rogue like that is like worrying about, gosh, you know, most tigers are in cages and we know where they all are.
	But what if one escapes from the zoo?
	It might get me.
	Well, it might.
	It might.
	But it's not a very big risk.
	The thing that Might get you that sort of rogue-like are what are called long-period comets.
	Because, you know, a lot of the comets come from very far away.
	Halley's comet doesn't go very far away.
	It goes out to Neptune or whatever it is.
	But there are comets out there in the Oort cloud that could come to the inner solar system.
	You're only going to see them once.
	Remember Jupiter?
	Remember when Jupiter got clobbered?
	Yep.
	That was really something.
	It was Shoemaker-Levy 9, right?
	And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
	If that had hit Earth instead of Jupiter, what would have happened?
	Well, to put it this way, it left a hole in the Jupiter atmosphere that was as big as the Earth.
	So you can imagine what would have happened if it had hit the Earth.
	Mind you, Jupiter is a better target.
	To begin with, it's bigger, and it also has this very strong gravity as a result of that, and so it kind of pulls these guys in.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So what you're asking now is, all right, you've mapped all these things, but suppose you map the ones that are a little smaller than a kilometer.
	Maybe it's the size of the Rose Bowl or something like that.
	Okay.
	What would that do?
	I mean, if that hit an urban area, for example, it could just take out a downtown area easily.
	Easily.
	In fact, probably the suburbs too.
	It wouldn't wipe out all life on the planet, but it would be very, very destructive.
	The second thing is, what could you do about it?
	Suppose you do see it.
	You see it and you've got, who knows, six months time, six years time, something like that.
	What do you do about it?
	And of course there are people who think of schemes to divert these things.
	Could we really do that if it was a pretty good size object?
	I don't know.
	Can you give me some idea, before we go on, in other words, From a small rock to a Volkswagen to something the size of a mountain, you know, or miles across.
	In other words, destructive power.
	When should we really... How big does it have to be to kill a planet like ours?
	Well, yeah, to be a planet sterilizer, it doesn't kill the planet, but it could kill all the life on the planet.
	To do that, you need to do things like boil away all the oceans, right?
	Yes.
	And that takes a fair amount of energy.
	I mean, you can work it out, but, you know, boiling all the oceans is a real challenge.
	Well, I'm hoping you'll work it out.
	In other words, I want to know, to be a planet killer, how big does it have to be?
	Something like that would be, I would say, I mean, it's off the top of my head, but I think the order of magnitude is correct, somewhere maybe 10 or 20 Miles in diameter.
	That's a big rock.
	It's a big rock.
	That's a really big rock.
	Well, the one that did the dinos in was roughly five miles in diameter.
	That's a big rock.
	It is a big rock, and it had, you know, it got rid of two-thirds of all the land-dwelling species, too, but it didn't, you know, it didn't get rid of everything, and we're here, and it didn't get rid of much of what was in the oceans either.
	Some, but not all of it.
	Yeah, but you see, I think of dinosaurs, and they're really big and robust, and we're, you know, pretty tiny compared to most of the dinosaurs, and they're completely gone.
	Yeah, well, they had a bigger food requirement every day than we do.
	That made them vulnerable.
	You know, they were at the top of the food chain, so are we, but they weren't very good farmers to begin with, and, you know, when a lot of the lower life forms went away, their food went away.
	A lot of it was the impact.
	That certainly killed a lot of stuff, but Mostly it was the fact that the dust that got kicked up, the dirt, if you will, that got kicked up by the the impact, you know, that just spread around thanks to the winds around the earth and just darkened things for months, maybe years.
	And so you lost a lot of plant life and that's at the bottom of the food chain.
	So, you know, everything above that suffered.
	All right.
	So let's say something five or six miles in size is coming toward us.
	What could we do about it?
	Well, there are various approaches.
	One is you could just buy a lot of frozen pizza and head for the hills and wait it out and just hope it didn't hit you.
	But if it's five or six miles in diameter, that's going to be so destructive that you really do have to do something about it, because it doesn't matter which hills you go to.
	You're going to suck.
	No, see, I'm not saying where do you run to?
	I'm saying what do we do about it?
	As in, we don't have much of a space program right now.
	We don't even have a shuttle, as a matter of fact.
	That's true.
	Yes, it is.
	We're more or less depending on the Russians' goodwill.
	Yeah, I think we would have a space program very quickly if something five or six miles in diameter showed up.
	How do you get a space program quickly?
	We know how to build rockets.
	We haven't built any big ones recently, but, hey, look, how are you going to do it anyhow?
	I mean, first you have to decide, just having the rockets might not be enough.
	The question is, what are you going to do when you get a rocket up there?
	So what?
	You've got a rocket up there.
	I mean, you could send Bruce Willis up and have him land on the thing, but, you know, what's he going to do?
	Well, I guess what he did, you know, in other words, So your answer is you've got to have a fast space program, and you think we could do that if we had to?
	Okay, fine.
	Let's say we could do it.
	Let's say we could do it.
	We've got a rocket.
	Now what?
	Okay, well that's the big question mark.
	Now what?
	What's the best scheme?
	Let's assume you can get a rocket out there, but what do you do with a rocket?
	Do you just use it to loft some nuclear weapons and just nuke the thing?
	Would it work?
	Well, it depends, but probably not.
	To begin with, you know, nuking a rock five miles in diameter, it probably doesn't do that much to the rock.
	Really, it doesn't.
	And if it did, if you did the Bruce Willis approach and you dug a hole in the thing and then you drop the bomb in and try to blow it apart, all you've done is, you know, you've changed an artillery shell into buckshot.
	And the buckshot might be just as dangerous as the shell.
	I mean, it's all still moving toward you.
	It's all still aimed at you.
	It's just lots of little rocks.
	And that might be even worse.
	So that wouldn't change the trajectory?
	No, not really.
	So what you want to do is change the trajectory.
	You want a scheme that deflects the motion of this thing.
	It doesn't have to be by a lot.
	It could just be, depends on how far out it is, but it could just be changing the trajectory by an inch a second or something in one direction.
	I mean, you know, just push it a little bit to the side because Over the course of six months, six years, whatever it is, until it gets to you, all that adds up, and the rock just sails by the earth.
	And that's what you really want to do.
	So, how do you do that?
	And you would warranty to us, wouldn't you, that we would know how much in advance, did you say?
	Well, typically you would have, I mean, you know, it depends, but typically a big rock like that, you would know it many years in advance, actually.
	It's not going to be like in the movies.
	Okay.
	All right.
	We know many years in advance.
	So now we've got our fast space program.
	We've got our rocket.
	I'm giving you that.
	What do we do?
	Yeah.
	Well, here are the possibilities.
	One scheme says, you know, just find, I don't know, a light spot on the thing and aim a big laser at it.
	And eventually the pressure from the light, the light pressure, light exerts a little bit of force.
	We'll just push this thing to the side.
	That might work.
	It's a little doubtful.
	And in particular, if the thing's rotating, there's a problem there.
	You could throw some white paint on it.
	Who knows?
	That's one scheme.
	I don't know that that's one of the leading contenders.
	There are better ones.
	You know, Rusty Schweickart, by the way, has a foundation, the B612 Foundation.
	He's an Apollo astronaut.
	He's very into this thing.
	And his scheme is to use what he calls a gravity tractor.
	In other words, you just put a rocket ship up there, And you park in space right next to this rock.
	Okay, now, of course, the rock is pulling the spaceship toward the rock.
	But on the other hand, the rock is also sorry, the spaceship is also pulling on the rock, right?
	This is, you know, Newton's law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
	So just like the earth is pulling on you, and that's keeping you in your chair.
	But on the other hand, you're pulling on the earth, obviously, a little less than the earth is pulling on you.
	But So this rocket is pulling on that rock, that asteroid, and so you just fire your rocket engines occasionally to keep your rocket in place, and it will slowly cause the rock to drift over in your direction.
	Gravity tractor.
	Okay, that works on paper.
	Maybe it would work in reality.
	Rusty Schweiker thinks we ought to do testing on these kinds of schemes, and that sounds reasonable to me.
	The other possibility is you essentially bolt A rocket engine onto the side of the asteroid, and you just sort of push it away.
	You turn on the rocket engine and let it go for a long time.
	That one sounds pretty good.
	Yeah.
	And I guess it wouldn't take all that much of a rocket engine when we've got some pretty exotic stuff we could use, right?
	Well, I think, you know, this is again sort of freshman physics, how big a rocket engine you'd need, but I don't think you would take any chances.
	You would bolt a lot of rocket engines onto this thing.
	You would send multiple missions up there so that you're not subject to catastrophe if something fails.
	Okay.
	All right.
	I have a break coming up and I want to release the phone lines right now and allow people to begin calling.
	And I want to remind the audience that we will screen these calls only to the degree that we're sure that you have a relevant question for Seth Shostak.
	And we'll begin to take some calls.
	I've taken up a lot of his time, but he's a really, really, really interesting guy.
	He's got a lot to say.
	And so, if you have a question for him...
	Now would be the time.
	Our phone number is 855-REAL-UFO or 855-732-5836.
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	732-5836. Dark Matter, raging through the nighttime. I'm Art Bell.
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	you To join the show, please call 1-855-REAL-UFO.
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	about you, there's no other.
	From the area of 51, this is Dark Matter with Art Bell.
	To join the show, please call 1-855-REAL-UFO.
	That's 1-855-732-5836.
	My guest is Seth Shostak, chief astronomer at SETI.
	And what better a guy to ask questions of than Seth?
	He's well-humored, otherwise he would have already blasted me, and answers questions.
	And so I've only got one more for him before we go to the lines, and the lines are stacking up right now.
	And that question is this.
	Certainly somebody like yourself, Seth, who's been looking for signals from ET and looking and scanning this guy like crazy and just waiting, has had lots of time to consider things.
	For example, If we do get an answer, if we do... Oh, God, that is a question I've got to ask.
	The transmitting point, I forgot about that.
	Anyway, the question is, what do you think they might look like?
	Surely, in the moments while you've been waiting for a signal, you've thought a lot about what they might be like.
	What do you think?
	Well, yeah, I thought about it a little bit.
	I find that few of my colleagues have given it a whole lot of thought because, after all, maybe they don't care what's behind the microphone, only that Somebody's speaking into it.
	But it is a question I get a lot from, you know, the Hollywood folks who are putting together sci-fi movies because they'd like to know what they look like.
	Well, of course, we don't know what they look like.
	There's some evolutionary biologists who think that they would look somewhat like us because we're a pretty good design from an engineering standpoint for an intelligent species, right?
	We've got that opposable thumb and we've got stereo vision and all these things.
	And, you know, that all sounds pretty reasonable.
	On the other hand, every time I go to the zoo and I look around, there are all these other designs that work perfectly well as, you know, as well as we do for most things, anyhow.
	And so it strikes me as unlikely they'd really look very much like us.
	But the real answer that I give most often is somewhat different.
	I say, look, anybody that you hear from Has, you know, they have a bit of a lead on us.
	We're not broadcasting strong signals into space trying to signal anybody.
	If they're doing that, then they're, you know, maybe hundreds or thousands or maybe many more years in advance of us.
	And to me, that means they've gone beyond biological intelligence and they're already thinking machines.
	So, they'll look like a machine, whatever their machines look like.
	So, you think they'll be machines?
	I think so.
	I think that there's a very good chance of that, because I'm sure that many people in the audience have heard about the idea of the singularity, and certainly about artificial intelligence, and thinking machines, and computers that wake up and suddenly start running things, whatever.
	It seems very likely, certainly if you talk to people in the artificial intelligence research community, It seems very likely that sometime in this century, and probably early in this century, we'll develop machines that can really think.
	And if we're going to do that, just, you know, 100 or 200 years after inventing radio, you can probably assume that they've done that too.
	So if you hear them, and they're even slightly more advanced than we are, then they've probably moved on to a kind of intelligence that we don't think about very much.
	All right.
	Why do you suppose they're always depicted, or nearly always depicted, as the classic grey alien?
	You know, the greys.
	I mean, come on.
	To one degree or another, whether they're tall or short, they have a certain look to them.
	The greys.
	There's got to be a reason for that, and that reason might be rooted in some reality.
	Have you thought about that?
	I have, because I wanted the same thing.
	Gosh, these guys always look the same.
	They're fairly short, not always, but they're usually short.
	They have big eyes, you know, small noses, small mouths, no hair.
	They look great.
	They don't seem to tell many jokes because, you know, they always look kind of serious.
	They don't always wear clothes.
	But I actually have asked a biologist about this more than once, actually.
	But the answer I got, the first person I asked was the best one.
	And what she said to me, she said, was, look, These greys are just projections of what we think we are going to become.
	I mean, we're losing our hair.
	That's interesting.
	Yeah, we're losing our dentition, our, you know, our ability to smell.
	I mean, all of that is getting a little worse.
	And so these guys, you know, they've lost all their hair and they have small noses and small mouths.
	Big brains.
	They have big brains and they have big eyes because in the future, most people are, you know, designing websites or whatever it is we do in the future.
	And they have small bodies because in the future, you know, physical labor isn't where it's at anymore.
	And so this is just a projection of humans a million years from now, and that's what it is.
	And once you've established them as aliens, then there's a big advantage for, say, Hollywood To depict aliens as being sort of variations on this theme, because it's a shortcut in the storytelling.
	You don't have to explain that these are aliens.
	Everybody knows they're aliens.
	All right, that's a cool answer, but I gotta tell you that what about the possibility that we have been visited, we have seen them, we have drawn them, and that's why they look that way?
	Well, okay, I'm going to the National Art Gallery and check it out and see if there's All right, all right, I've really got to go to the phones, but one last question.
	Stephen Hawking has warned, it's okay to listen, but we should not transmit, that it might be very dangerous to transmit.
	Your feelings on that?
	Yeah, I've actually been in debates about this, because it's a very heated Because there are people, even in the SETI community, there are people who think it would be a good thing to transmit.
	Maybe it might provoke a response.
	Who knows?
	You'd have to wait a while.
	But maybe if you aimed at nearby star systems, you might get a response within your lifetime.
	But the real advantage might be that it gives you some insight on how to listen.
	If you have to actually mount a transmitting project, then you'll understand better The problem is from their point of view, if you will.
	Now, the argument against it is just what you said.
	And Stephen Hawking, of course, has said this.
	He's not even the most vociferous.
	He only made one statement.
	But it is argued that, hey, look, you don't know what's out there.
	And you broadcast signals into space saying, hi, look, we're the earthlings and, you know, come join our book club or whatever.
	That's right.
	And some of them are going to be malevolent.
	And maybe not all, but even 1% or 0.01% or whatever, and you might be responsible for the destruction of the Earth.
	And you can't take that risk.
	That's what they're saying.
	It's like shouting in the jungle, not a good idea.
	Because you don't know what's out there.
	Well, here's my argument in essentially two sentences.
	It's too late.
	And ever since the Second World War, we've been broadcasting into space, not strong signals, not even signals aimed at the stars, but all that radar, FM, Television, all the high frequency, high power stuff, that's been going into space since the war.
	Well then, God help us, because they're going to disintegrate us just for the quality of the product that we've been sending.
	They may object to reality television.
	You might be right.
	I would.
	Okay, let's forget that for a moment.
	I know that those signals are going out, and there's nothing we can do about it, but now we're talking about, for example, putting a high-power transmitter out at the end of, I don't know, what's down in Puerto Rico, and sending a very serious signal out.
	Is that a good or a bad idea?
	Well, I personally think it's a good thing to do, for the reasons I stated.
	Really?
	But the facts are that Arecibo is being used all the time for radar experiments, and it has a two megawatt transmitter.
	Okay?
	So, you know, you can easily show, this is not a hard thing to convince yourself of, that any society that could come here or launch robotic interstellar battle wagons in our direction, I mean, whatever, any society that has the capability of doing that could Well, we are warlike.
	You don't dispute that, do you?
	We're warlike.
	we've been willy-nilly sending into space ever since the Second World War. So
	that horse has left the barn. I don't think it's worth worrying about. Well, we
	are warlike. You don't dispute that, do you? We're warlike.
	Well, certainly for the last five or eight thousand years, yes. So then why would
	we imagine that they wouldn't be? Well, I don't particularly imagine that.
	I mean, I don't know.
	That's alien sociology.
	I don't know the behavior.
	I mean, yeah, but people, you know, in the media, they're always so advanced and they're nice, you know, spiritual beings.
	I think they're as likely to be warlike as not.
	Maybe even more likely to be warlike because that's what we are.
	Yeah, well, aggression pays.
	At least a certain amount of aggression pays.
	Every species has a certain degree of aggression.
	I agree with that.
	But there's a cost-benefit analysis here, too.
	We may be warlike, but we're not about to mount some sort of invasion of another star system.
	Where's the benefit in that?
	It's extremely difficult.
	Well, okay.
	Let's go to the phones.
	Guess what?
	You're on the air on Dark Matter with Seth Shostak.
	Hello?
	Hello?
	Yes.
	Yeah, he said something earlier about water boiling off.
	You're talking to him.
	You're talking to him right now.
	Yeah, but what if, before the dinosaurs, enough things hit to knock enough water off to make life possible on the ground?
	I mean, what if that's what happened?
	You're saying that it might actually create life?
	Well, no, but they knocked enough water off the earth for there to be enough land mass for creatures to come onto land.
	I see.
	Okay, I think I get it.
	Okay.
	Do you, Seth?
	Maybe it was Waterworld, and maybe enough water was knocked off in some previous asteroid hit or something to allow for life.
	Land.
	Yeah, I mean, well, that's an interesting thought, but there was certainly plenty of land before the dinosaurs, because there were plenty of land-dwelling animals before the dinosaurs.
	I mean, the dinosaurs weren't that long ago.
	I mean, they were wiped out 65 million years ago, which I can almost remember that.
	I mean, that's not that long ago, and there's been life On, you know, on land, land-dwelling life, there's been land-dwelling life for hundreds of millions of years, many hundreds of millions of years.
	So, there was land before the asteroid that wiped out the dino.
	So, that asteroid for sure wasn't the one that produced land.
	I mean, land was produced, we understand that, I think, fairly well.
	It grew thanks to the action of volcanoes and things like that, producing these massive continents, you know, these floating plates of continents.
	Is it your view, I'm sorry, is it your view that the moon was carved out of the earth early on?
	Yeah, that seems to be the going hypothesis, and there's good evidence for that in the moon rocks and so forth.
	It's not the only hypothesis, it could be wrong, but I think if you took a vote amongst people who work on this problem, I think the majority would still say it was a rock about over 4 billion years ago, like 4.4 billion years ago, 4.5, Very early in the Earth's history, there were still a lot of rocks flying around the solar system.
	We were like, you know, we were in a Karam game or something like that.
	And a rock the size of Mars slams onto the Earth and it just, you know, all this debris goes up and some of it coalesces to form the moon.
	Most of it just falls back to the Earth.
	That's not a rock, that's a planet.
	And by the way, while we're on the subject, and just before the next line, I'm sorry, I've got to do this.
	Planet X.
	Planet X. You know about Planet X, right?
	Well, is it the same as Nibiru?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Could there be such a thing?
	Well, there could be planets.
	I mean, I'd bet money there are planets we don't know about, whether you'd call it a planet or not.
	I mean, that's another discussion.
	But Nibiru is usually portrayed as a planet that visits the inner solar system every, what, 3800 years or something like that.
	Right.
	And it's as big as the Earth, and it's about to, you know, cause havoc and destruction by visiting us again.
	Correct.
	That, that you can say is... Nonsense?
	Goofy.
	Yeah, it's nonsense.
	Goofy?
	Yep, yep, it's nonsense.
	Because any, to begin with, any planet that size, you would see it.
	You could see it, right?
	You could see it with our telescopes.
	And when it got a little closer, you could see it with your eyes.
	Secondly, if it was on this orbit that every several thousand years, I think it's 3,800, but I'm not sure, Let's say every two to five thousand years orbits the inner solar system.
	It's been doing that for four billion years.
	It's the age of the solar system, four and a half billion years, which means that it's done that a million times.
	And so, if it's done that a million times, you can be sure that it has shaken up all the orbits of the planets in the inner solar system.
	We would see all sorts of consequences from that, and we don't.
	You would tell everybody, don't worry, there's no Planet X. Nope.
	Not as it's defined in the usual.
	Dark Matter, you're on the air with Seth.
	Hello.
	Hey, Seth, how are y'all?
	Fine.
	Go ahead, sir.
	I actually have two questions, one for each of you, Seth.
	Y'all were talking about comets a little earlier in the show, and I was wanting to know If there is one close that we're possibly going to be able to see soon, and if there's one heading towards us?
	I'm sorry, I didn't quite get it.
	I didn't get it either.
	You're asking if there's one headed toward us, would we see it, or what?
	Yeah, if there's a comet heading our way, and when should we expect it?
	Well, there are comets headed our way, you can be sure of it.
	Every year we discover six new comets or something on that order.
	So there are plenty of comets.
	There are literally billions of comets, but mostly they keep their own company.
	They exist far beyond the orbit of Pluto, but occasionally they come back.
	But we usually find comets far enough away that we have maybe a year's worth of warning from even these long-period comets, the ones that only come around once, the rogue All right, you have a question for me?
	Okay, that's not a question for me, though, sir.
	at least a year of warning on those guys.
	Alright, do you have a question for me?
	Yes sir, I tried to call last night, I had an experience about three years ago.
	Okay, that's not a question for me though sir, that's a statement and we'll do that in open lines, okay?
	Okay.
	Alright, thank you.
	That's sort of a reflection of something that was said last night that he wanted to state.
	That's not a question.
	You're on the air with Seth Shostak on Dark Matter.
	Hello.
	Roswell's Art.
	Hi, Seth.
	Hi.
	Art, can I say hi to Judy and Liz, two of your biggest fans?
	No.
	All right, I won't then.
	You just did.
	Yeah, yeah, I caught that.
	But anyway, Seth, what if we're just too primitive to actually even know what signal to look for, or maybe we're just too primitive to even see a signal from an alien race, or whatever.
	That's actually a very good question.
	Yeah, it is a good question, and there's no good answer to it.
	I mean, you know, 150 years ago, about the time of the American Civil War, there were proposals by European physicists to get in touch with maybe alien beings.
	They were thinking Mars in those days, but You know, by building big fires, essentially, or using searchlights, gas lamp searchlights, to signal them.
	Okay?
	And, you know, today that looks a little primitive, but it's certainly possible that the experiments we do today will look primitive 150 years from now.
	Maybe, as you kind of suggest there, we'll find physics that sort of changes our whole opinion of how you communicate from one place to another. I mean,
	that could happen.
	But, having said that, you know, there's not much you can do with it.
	You can't do an experiment with physics you don't know, so the options you have is
	A, just sit around for a couple of centuries and wait and see what sort of new physics you learn, or B, try
	and experiment with the physics you have.
	That's what we do. Certainly, though, his question has a lot of merit, doesn't it?
	Because they could be so far advanced that the signal would be all around us, and we just simply haven't learned to recognize it.
	It could be even signals of gravity.
	I mean, who knows?
	Or some inter-dimensional thing.
	Now I'm really getting out there.
	Yeah.
	Well, I don't know about inter-dimensional.
	I don't know what that means.
	But gravity waves?
	Gravity waves do exist, as far as we know.
	They're predicted to exist.
	We haven't measured them yet, but there are a whole bunch of people who are spending their days trying to detect gravity waves.
	You know, I do get quite a number of emails from people who think we should be looking for gravity waves, but gravity waves don't seem to me to be a very good way to communicate, because it's hard to make a gravity wave.
	You have to sort of shake something really big, like a planet or a star.
	That's harder than building a transmitter.
	And the second thing is, It's very hard to detect them.
	You need big, sensitive instruments.
	And third, they only go at the speed of light.
	They're no faster than radio waves.
	So, I'm not quite sure what the attraction of gravity is.
	But you're right.
	Maybe there's something all around us and we just don't know.
	Well, there are theoretical physicists who believe there are multi-dimensions.
	And gravity might be one thing that would bridge the dimensions.
	All right.
	Dark Matter, you're on the air with Seth.
	Hi.
	Hey, Seth, how are you?
	All right.
	My question is, your first part of your comments tonight, basically we were saying that any civilization was light years away because we can theoretically only approach the speed of light.
	Well, suppose they went at physics from just a slightly different angle and have blown light speed out of the water.
	I mean, they could be here next week.
	Yeah, well, that's pretty much what the previous guy was saying, that there could be physics we don't know that's really important in this whole question of, you know, getting in touch with cosmic neighbors.
	And if there's some way to either communicate faster than the speed of light, or to travel faster than the speed of light, obviously that changes the game.
	But, you know, people concoct physics experiments all the time to test Einstein's Relativity, which says the speed limit is the speed of light, and that's it.
	And he comes up a winner every time, so at this point... Yeah, every time so far.
	Well, every time so far, right?
	Yes.
	It's certainly possible that, for example, I've heard of bending space, essentially bending space and jumping across from one point to another point.
	That would get the job done.
	You would be going from one point of whatever to another point just like that.
	Yes, well that's a wormhole basically.
	I mean, and those exist on blackboards in physics departments.
	I mean, that's general relativity.
	The idea that space, if you will, has a shape that space can be warped and so forth.
	That's right.
	And if you could do that, you know, if you could just Create a wormhole and somehow figure out how to get through it in one piece, then it would indeed allow you to travel in space or time.
	Actually, you could go into the future, maybe into the past.
	But, you know, again, it's unclear whether things that might work on the blackboard actually work in practice.
	It may be that, yes, there are little black holes all around and they may be the entrances to wormholes, but there's no way you can get anything through them.
	That's an open question, so to speak.
	Well, if somebody does figure out how to go faster than light, then imagining a ship hovering over L.A.
	suddenly one day is not so wild.
	Could be done.
	You're on Dark Matter with Seth, hello.
	Hi, Roswell, it's good to see you.
	Thank you.
	Seth, the last two callers stole my thunder, but Dr. Kaku mentioned last week that these civilizations probably Or type 2 or type 3 and you mentioned something about communication through lasers.
	Do you have anything in the works or any technologies that are coming up in the near future that you might be implementing into finding signals other than radio technology because it's quite antiquated at this point?
	Good question.
	Well, okay, first off, you mentioned Type 2, Type 3 civilizations, and for those who don't know, this was sort of a categorization of potential alien societies into, you know, Type 1, 2, and 3 civilizations, and the idea here was that if you're a Type 1 civilization, and we are, by the way, then you use the resources of your planet.
	Wait a second here.
	You have elevated us to Type 1?
	When Dr. Kaku, he says we're Type 0, and we may eventually, or pretty soon even, be a Type 1, but we're not there yet.
	Well, okay, I think we deserve, I think we're 0.1, how's that?
	We use, look, all the energy that we generate, it's all, you know, there is some solar power, but most of the energy we generate is the resources of our planet, so, you know, we burn stuff.
	Okay, you know, whatever.
	But Type 2, that's a civilization that uses, you know, the energy output of its star.
	Type 3 uses the energy output of its galaxy.
	Now, if there are Type 2 and Type 3 civilizations out there, and they're using so much energy, they would be very obvious, you would think, and yet we don't see them.
	So that's maybe something interesting.
	As to your second question, What about lasers?
	Yeah, there are people who do what's called optical SETI, and they're looking for flashing laser lights.
	There's a good project being run out of the physics department at Harvard, in which they scan the sky looking for lasers.
	And that may be the part of SETI that has a great deal of improvement in the next, you know, half decade or so, because... I've been hearing noise about pulsing lasers.
	Yeah, well, you can make a pulsing laser.
	Yeah, I mean, a laser will work for communication.
	Obviously it'll work.
	We use fiber optics all the time, and so it's the same deal.
	And so maybe they're just aiming lasers in our direction, and what we really need are, you know, a few thousand amateurs with backyard telescopes and some fast electronics to look for flashing lasers, because it's very hard when you're only looking at one spot on the sky at a time.
	You might easily miss everything.
	Understood.
	You're on the air with Seth Shostak on Dark Matter.
	Hi.
	Hi, greetings from Northern Illinois, gentlemen.
	Thank you.
	Mr. Shostak commented earlier this evening that he is still awaiting compelling or convincing evidence of UFO visitation.
	In my mind, at least, I think the evidence is overwhelming.
	But more importantly, I'd like to ask Mr. Shostak if he ever had an opportunity to speak with The renowned Harvard researcher, winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize, Dr. John Mack, who, of course, spent many years researching the UFO enigma, and eventually came to the firm conclusion that we are indeed being visited.
	So, thank you.
	Okay, you're very welcome, and indeed he did.
	Yes, I did know that he had won the Pulitzer Nobel Prize.
	That's news to me, I have to say.
	I didn't know about that either.
	Yeah, but I have, yes, I've met John Mack.
	In fact, I had breakfast with him in some small town in Canada.
	Unfortunately, he died, you know, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago in a traffic accident in London.
	In London, yes.
	Yeah, he was doing an experiment when I met him, in which he identified people who claimed that they were being abducted.
	Who lived with somebody else.
	In other words, they shared a bedroom.
	They were either a spouse or a sibling or somebody.
	Roommate, whatever.
	And he inquired of the people that shared the room with these people who were routinely being abducted.
	He would ask him, do you ever wake up and find that your roommate's gone?
	Are they ever missing from the room?
	And that experiment, unfortunately, he didn't give the answer to that.
	But I did talk to some of his lab assistants and they said, well, The answer to that wasn't very encouraging for the hypothesis that they were being abducted.
	Okay.
	Well, there sure are a lot of abduction stories around.
	Hold tight, Seth.
	We'll be right back.
	If you have a question for Seth, 855-REAL-UFO is the number.
	From the high desert, and beyond.
	and the great American Southwest, this is Dark Matter.
	I'm going to be doing a lot of research on this.
	Music playing.
	You're listening to Dark Matter with Art Bell.
	For you to really matter, please dial 1-855-REAL-UFO.
	That's 1-855-732-5836.
	Those are the numbers that Shostak is the man.
	He is the head astronomer for SETI.
	And here I've got a couple of Wormhole questions that I think are pretty good.
	This one comes from Donna, and Donna asks, how much of the sky has SETI already searched, and how long will it take to search the rest?
	Yeah, well, I think Donna's hit on the reason we haven't found a signal, or at least a reason for not having found a signal, maybe not the reason, but we've only looked carefully, and when I say carefully, that means with A high sensitivity and over a wide range of radio frequencies at a few thousand nearby star systems.
	Well, most of them are nearby.
	So, you know, a few thousand, say 5,000 maybe.
	5,000 star systems out of maybe several hundred billion star systems in our galaxy is obviously a very small percentage, yeah.
	Okay.
	She also asked, how much of the Allen Array has been completed and when will it be finished?
	Yeah.
	You know, I didn't answer her second question, how long will it take to do the entire sky?
	That depends mostly on money, actually.
	If you had enough money, you could do, certainly, you could look in almost all directions in the next several decades.
	You could look at a million stars in the next two dozen years, that's for sure.
	The Allen Telescope Array currently has 42 antennas.
	The design goal was 350.
	Money.
	It's just a money thing.
	Money, money, money.
	Yeah, I hate to sound like a broken record, but if the money were there, you could finish the array.
	You could build 350 antennas, or the remaining 300 and, what is it, eight antennas.
	You could build that within two years.
	You could have them up and running, I think.
	All right.
	And John says the following, quantum entanglement, very interesting.
	Is certainly information that travels faster than the speed of light, is it not?
	And if it can do that, I will add, then isn't that one answer to traveling faster than light?
	Yeah, John raises a point that, again, is very frequently raised.
	Doesn't quantum entanglement happen instantaneously?
	And it does, if you have two entangled particles or photons or whatever, and you look at one And you find that it, you know, is spinning this way, the other one will be spinning the other way, and if somebody measures it, that's what they'll find.
	But it turns out, and you can ask your local physicist this, but it turns out that it's not a way of sending information faster than the speed of light.
	It sounds like it might be, but it isn't.
	A Stanford physicist... Well, I mean, to say that with any surety, the way you're stating it, it seems to me that you would have to know how these two particles ...are entangled and maintaining the dance at any distance you want to name.
	You would have to be able to tell me how it's being done before you could tell me there's no communication?
	Yeah, well, no, it's just that to communicate, what you have to do is you have to send information over.
	And all that's happened is you've looked at this particle here and you've discovered that its spin is one way instead of the other way, for example.
	Yes.
	That's one of the things.
	But you didn't send any information to the other one.
	All you did was determine what the other one would be if somebody looked at it.
	And you didn't actually send any bits of information.
	You couldn't send a Shakespearean sonnet that way.
	As I say, a Stanford physicist, I asked him this point blank.
	I said, I'm getting all these emails from people who keep saying quantum entanglement, quantum entanglement.
	That's the way to Send information fast and light.
	And he wrote me back in all caps.
	He said, get that.
	Okay.
	Even I don't understand, Seth, how the particles could be doing the same flips and flops without some form of communication.
	And I don't think you can tell me how that's happening, can you?
	No, I don't think I can.
	I mean, this is spooky action at a distance.
	That was Einstein, yes.
	Yeah, that was Einstein.
	And, you know, you had a point.
	It is kind of spooky, but it seems to be the way the universe is built.
	Okay, well, spooky is cool, but it's not an answer, right?
	It's just spooky.
	No, this is an observation that the world, that quantum mechanics actually works.
	Fortunately, it works, and we know enough about how it works, or at least can describe it, so we can build things like, for example, your smartphone, which depends a lot on quantum mechanics.
	Dark Matter, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, Bart, how are you?
	Very well, thank you.
	Oh, I have two questions, one for each of you.
	Do you remember the first time you came back from your first retirement and I told you that a little bit of manure helps make the flowers grow?
	Yes.
	That's a long time ago.
	I have a question for Seth.
	Why don't they concentrate a little bit on Sirius, the dog star, and look for a signal from there since the Egyptians seem to point their pyramids at it and Well, I tell you, an argument like that latter one, I don't think it's going to cut it with a scientist.
	celebrate the dog star, you know, the dog star rising above the horizon in Egypt.
	Well, I tell you, you know, an argument like that latter one I don't think is
	going to cut it with a scientist. You're asking him to spend who knows how
	much money, sweat, equity, and time to look at something because, you know, the dog
	star is in a certain part of the sky on July 20th, which by the way happens to be
	my birthday, so I like it.
	But, so that's not a very good argument.
	The fact that it's been important in mythology or that the Egyptians found it interesting is also, to me, not an argument based on science.
	That's, you know, that's an argument based on folklore, which is not a good, I mean, you know, Newton could never devise his principles of physics by looking at folklore.
	It just wasn't there.
	And the other thing is, I mean, the Egyptians, you know, the pyramids are lined up north-south pretty accurately within, I think, it's three minutes of arc, the big pyramid in Cheops.
	That's pretty good, especially when you consider that when these things were built, you know, like 5,000 years ago, the North Star Polaris that we know about today wasn't where it is now because the Earth, you know, wobbles.
	And as a result, they didn't have a North Star to line things up north-south, and they still did it.
	Well, it's not impossible, it's just an astronomy problem, but they did that.
	So, should we be looking at the North Star?
	I mean, you know, I think if you're going to do a scientific experiment, you need a stronger rationale than that.
	Okay.
	There's another SETI plan, apparently, to look for artifacts.
	Attention, Richard Hoagland.
	In other words, not search for radio signals, but to hunt for alien engineering.
	I have been a very big skeptic, Seth, of, you know, looking at Mars faces and rocks and that sort of thing.
	However, I must say that Richard Hoagland was on the air with me about a week ago, and he presented me with a photograph, which is number nine.
	It may or may not still be on my My website.
	But I looked at that thing, and I'm telling you right now, Seth, there's no way on God's green earth, or Mars, red Mars, that this thing is a natural formation.
	It's literally got a pipe sticking out of it, among other things.
	It's incredible.
	I looked at it, and for once Richard stumped me.
	This number nine was not something natural.
	It was taken by our latest Mars mission, which is a very good one.
	And I don't know if you have had the opportunity to look at these, at this photograph, or not.
	There are lots of questionable things that Richard presents, but this one, I'm telling you, brother, it knocks you right in the eye.
	And you look at it and you go, this is not natural.
	There's just no way.
	This is not natural.
	Have you seen it?
	Yeah, I have not seen that, no.
	I guess I haven't.
	I haven't seen it.
	I can only make a general comment here, then, because I haven't seen that particular one.
	I think that if you found anything that looked like the product of the industry, in other words, when you say a pipe, I don't know if you mean like a drain pipe or you mean like a Meerschaum, you know, pipe that you smoke, but either way... No, I mean like a pipe that is exactly round, sticking out of this thing, just like an exhaust pipe on a car.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Well, look, if it really looked like, I mean, if it looked like a typewriter, I'd be more impressed.
	The pipe is the kind of thing that nature might actually just make by accident.
	So I get photos all the time where people have, uh, you know, they're pointing out something on Mars and say, look, this looks like a, whatever it looks like, you know, a little, the, the Copenhagen mermaid and whatever, that kind of stuff.
	And that, that's very unconvincing because you just go into the Arizona desert and look around, you'll see stuff.
	However, The idea of looking for artifacts, that's perfectly legit.
	That's very legit.
	I don't think that they found anything on Mars that shows that, despite the fact that you haven't even found microbes there today, somehow there was this vast civilization there at one point.
	I'm not convinced of that at all.
	But there are experiments, for example, Wait a minute, hold on.
	Why is that hard to believe?
	I mean, after all, Mars, we know it one time long ago, what was it, billions of years ago?
	Had an atmosphere, and it got blown away, right?
	So, why is it so hard to imagine that there might have been a civilization there?
	Well, it's true that Mars was once a kinder, gentler world.
	That's true.
	That's true.
	I mean, it still has an atmosphere, by the way, but its atmosphere is not one you'd want around your neighborhood.
	I know, I know, I know.
	It got blown away, but I mean, at one time, there could have been.
	There could have been.
	The atmosphere was undoubtedly thicker in the past, actually.
	The total is very thin now, and there's no oxygen.
	It's all carbon dioxide.
	Right.
	Okay, but the point is, If you say, look, all right, there was a time four billion years ago when Mars had liquid water on the surface, it had a thicker atmosphere, so, hey, why not some sort of advanced society?
	You know?
	Hey, why not?
	Well, here's why I would say unlikely.
	I can't say why not, because it's not completely impossible.
	It doesn't violate the laws of physics, but it probably violates the laws of biology, because look what happened on Earth.
	You get life going three and a half, four billion years ago, and it takes The first three, almost four billion years before you get anything that you can see without a microscope.
	And then another half billion years before you get, you know, Homo sapiens walking around making pipes.
	So that took four, four and a half billion years, or four billion years, to go from the first life to pipe making humans.
	Now, Mars didn't have that kind of time because it began to go bad very quickly.
	So you're asking for the same scenario to have played out on Mars very, very, very quickly Maybe, but it doesn't sound very reasonable.
	The other thing is, if there was this vast biota on Mars, and then somehow it got wiped out, how come we don't see any evidence?
	I mean, if you killed all the life on Earth, today or tomorrow, and then just let the Earth sit here for four billion years, you'd find lots of evidence that there was once life here.
	And Earth has lots of climate, it has rain and stuff like that that washes all this stuff away.
	Mars doesn't even have that, it's a perfect museum.
	And, you know, you don't see that.
	You don't see it.
	You really are a serious skeptic, aren't you?
	Go out on that theory, yes!
	But there is a way to find artifacts.
	I mean, I think that that idea is worth just one more mention.
	There are people like Jeff Marcy over at the University of California, Berkeley, and others who are examining these Kepler data that, you know, look at stars that dim, and they're looking at the way they dim and then the way they get brighter a few hours later.
	Trying to see if whatever it is that's passing in front of the star isn't round.
	Because we always assume that planets will be round, or planets are round.
	But if you see something that has this sort of characteristic that it dims the star, but it's triangular in shape, or it's hexagonal, or it's a square, or who knows what, but something other than round, then you'd say, you know, that's a giant space station, or whatever, some sort of orbiting thing, around that planet.
	And they may be using that to get in touch, and that's a legitimate experiment.
	Okay, let's continue with calls.
	Hi there, you're on Dark Matter with Art Bell and Seth Shostak.
	Hi Art, Seth, thanks for a great program.
	This is Roger, a truck driver in southern Minnesota right now, and I got two quick questions and I'll hang up.
	Sure.
	Seth, what is the most efficient And the fastest way to send signals off the planet, directed at whatever is out there, and the very first signal left the Earth, and whatever year it was, can you estimate how far out there that signal might be right now?
	Thanks a lot.
	Okay, both really pretty good questions actually, alright.
	The best way to send signals?
	Yeah, well, Roger that.
	Well, Roger, yeah, the best way to send signals, I mean, we've already mentioned here tonight the Arecibo antenna down in Puerto Rico.
	You can go visit it, by the way.
	They have a great visitor center.
	It's a wonderful place.
	In fact, they're about to celebrate their 50th anniversary, believe it or not.
	But they have this big two, I think it's two megawatts these days, two million watt transmitter on that thing.
	It's a thousand foot diameter antenna.
	Obviously, You know, you can't point at anything in the sky with that thing because, you know, it's it's it's fixed on the ground.
	So there's, you know, there's only about a third of the sky can be aimed at with this thing.
	But hey, a third of the sky is a lot.
	And you could pick out something and you could, you know, load up the transmitter and send something.
	And, you know, there's somebody at the SETI Institute who's interested in doing that.
	So that's what I would recommend because you've got a big antenna, a powerful transmitter.
	So if you're talking about You know, a signal that rates high on the S meter or whatever.
	I mean, a really honking signal, then that's your deal.
	The second thing that you asked, you know, how far out are those earliest transmissions?
	Well, that's easy.
	Let's consider a signal that was sent out.
	Consider I Love Lucy.
	I think the first episode of I Love Lucy was 1953.
	I may be wrong about that, but I think that's it.
	Let's say it is.
	1953, that's 60 years ago.
	So, those signals are now 60 light years into space, because radio travels at the speed of light.
	So, 60 light years out.
	And you may wonder, well, you know, how many stars is that?
	I mean, you know, how... Yeah, but are they really, Seth?
	I'm going to throw you a curveball here.
	We're fond of saying that, you know, the I love Lucys or whatever are out there now, but maybe they're not.
	Because if you take the signal path loss of getting through our atmosphere and then breaking out and, you know, going light years of travel, there's going to be a computational loss of signal Per light year, or part of a light year, or whatever.
	So, have you thought about that?
	I mean, whether they really would be that far out?
	They wouldn't, would they?
	Yeah, they'd be that far out.
	I think what you're asking is, would they be detectable?
	Well, yeah.
	Well, yeah.
	Well, you know, the loss going through the atmosphere, you know, it's only 20 miles or whatever, and if it's high enough frequency, and television is high frequency, it doesn't bounce off the ionosphere, so it just goes right on through.
	Okay, fine.
	That's not much of an issue, but the real issue is what you alluded to there.
	There's this inverse square law.
	Every doubling of the distance, the signal, the intensity of the signal drops by a factor of four.
	So by the time you've gone 60 light years, it's gosh darn weak.
	However, and it wouldn't be detectable by any of the equipment that we have, but there's this about radio and light.
	You can find any signal if you have a big enough antenna.
	And so, if the aliens are willing to... Yeah, because eventually you collect enough of those photons that you can find the signal.
	And so, if the aliens, for example, if they're 60 light years away and they want to watch I Love Lucy, because they like the humor, I mean, they'll have to build an antenna that's, you know, they'll have to come up with a state that's... Seth, there would be a point where the signal effectively has disappeared.
	No.
	Where the path loss has done it in.
	Well, only for any given set of equipment.
	You can always build bigger antennas.
	Look, I've worked this out, and if they were, you know, like a, well, say 60 light years away, this is very rough now, but is approximately right, you would have to cover an area the size of the state of Ohio with rooftop, yaggy antennas, whatever, you know, just television antennas, and then you could pick something up at 60, you could pick up I Love Lucy at 60 light years away.
	Now, that's a big project.
	You're not going to do that.
	But maybe if you're aliens, you don't mind doing that.
	Okay, we've got a caller.
	Dark Matter, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Roswell Arch, and Arecibos to you, Doctor.
	Arecibos, that's good.
	I once saw, let's shift gears a little bit back to flying things in the universe.
	I saw an article in Scientific America some years back, and somebody hypothesized, what A red dwarf entered our solar system and impacted our sun.
	Any thoughts?
	You guys are tracking these objects.
	Is there anything out there moving that might have sparked this thought?
	Well, there are a lot of red dwarfs out there.
	Nine out of ten stars are red dwarfs.
	These are just, you know, runty little stars, maybe half the mass of the sun.
	But there are a lot of them.
	You know, it's the same for stars as it is for animals.
	There are a lot more small ones than big ones.
	And the stars are all moving around, so there's nothing to say that, well, you know, the sun is going to get hit by a red dwarf.
	I mean, it could happen, but let me just tell you that this is yet one more thing that you probably shouldn't spend too many nights worrying about, because you can work it out.
	How many times has one star slammed into another one here in the Milky Way since the Milky Way was born about 13 billion years ago?
	And the answer is very few, maybe zero, but certainly not a whole lot.
	The chances that we'll get hit by another star, that's just one of those things that it's like, you know, the chances that a piano is going to fall on you in Kansas.
	It isn't likely to happen.
	It was so far out there and even had an illustration of what you would see when it happened eight minutes later.
	Yeah, it wouldn't be good.
	No, it was pretty wild.
	It just popped into my mind and I thought I'd throw it out there, but thanks again for the show, Art, and I'm on the side.
	Thank you.
	All right, take care.
	What about WR104?
	I don't know.
	What is it?
	I don't know.
	I should never say that.
	Okay, yeah.
	These are two stars that are doing a dance right now, and apparently at some point they're going to collide.
	Yeah.
	And when they collide, there's going to be this big gamma-ray burst.
	And this gamma-ray burst very well may be directed toward us, or put another way, we could be in the gun barrel of this gamma-ray burst.
	Yeah.
	You all familiar with that?
	Well, yeah, I mean, you know, more than half of all stars are double stars.
	And a lot of those doubles, you know, there's just a star that has a buddy and they orbit one another.
	And they inevitably are going to collide because of various, you know, subtle forces that slow them down.
	So all these guys eventually collide.
	And if you have two kind of dead stars, neutron stars, for example, that collide, you produce a lot of energy because these are, you know, like two billiard balls sort of annihilating one another.
	But they're big billiard balls, and you release a lot of energy, including all these gamma rays, and it's known as a gamma ray burst.
	And the thing about gamma ray bursts, other than the fact that they're great for writing papers if you're in the astronomy biz, is that they produce so much energy that if one goes off, even thousands of light years away, it can still wreak real havoc and destruction on your atmosphere and your planet.
	So, it's a serious threat.
	It's a serious threat, gamma-ray bursts, because there's no way to see them coming, in a way.
	I mean, you don't know.
	In the case that you just mentioned, Art, I mean, obviously, you can look at these two stars and say, well, sooner or later, this is going to happen.
	But in general, you don't see the gamma-ray bursts until they've bursted and they've reached you.
	However, that's the bad news.
	So gamma-ray bursts may be a real killer in the cosmos.
	The good news is, life has been on Earth for four billion years, There have been lots of gamma-ray bursts in all that time, and not one of them has managed to sterilize the Earth.
	So, either we're very lucky, or the chances that you'll get sterilized by a gamma-ray burst aren't very high.
	Um, okay.
	You might want to look into that number.
	You're on Dark Matter with Art Bell, and Seth Shostak.
	Hi.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Yes.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Yeah, I was just going to ask a question.
	It might be a little silly, but you have all these comedy movies out that show about other life forms already living on our planet.
	I mean, how possible would that be since earlier y'all were talking about the intelligence of their life form is much greater than ours?
	You know, what is there to say that there aren't some already living here and we're just looking in the wrong places?
	Well, Seth says there are not.
	Yeah, well, yeah, that's in general true.
	I think that if there was a lot of life living here, you know, a la Men in Black, where you had all these aliens being kept in check.
	Men in Black are like government guys.
	No, they're not.
	Yes, but their job description Was to keep these aliens in line who are trying to smuggle cigarettes across the state line and stuff like that, right?
	Oh, see, now you're trying to do that comedy you talked about.
	Well, no, but that was in the film!
	It was in the film.
	Well... Alright, whatever.
	But the point is that, I guess this is the point, that if it was life like that, then I think it would be pretty obvious.
	You have 7 billion people walking around the Earth, and if there were also aliens competing for real estate of that size and that complexity, I'm sure you would notice.
	But the idea that there might be a hidden biosphere here on Earth, what's called a shadow biosphere, is kind of a trendy idea these days, that there may be life on Earth that's actually had a different genesis.
	All the life we know about is based on DNA, from the lowliest bacteria to us.
	It's all DNA-based, and it's all related.
	But could there be some life on Earth that's, I don't know, QNA, or some other form, and we just don't notice it because when we go looking for life, we're always looking for life that has DNA?
	And the answer to that is, well, it could be.
	It could be, and maybe we should be looking, and some people are looking, but nobody's found anything yet.
	All right, so there could be shadow life.
	A lot of people are going to grab that one for sure.
	Shadow life equals shadow beings.
	Right?
	Dark matter in the night time.
	I'm Art Bell.
	He came from somewhere back in a while ago.
	He settled by the boulevard.
	He tried hard to recreate what had yet to be created.
	Once in her life, she musters a smile for his nostalgic tale.
	Never could be dear what he wanted to say.
	Never could've been dear what you wanted to say Never could've been dear what you wanted to say
	Mmm...
	Mmm...
	I can't survive, I can't stay alive Without your love, I can't survive, I can't stay alive
	Ah...
	Ah...
	Don't leave me this way I can't survive
	I can't survive, I can't stay alive Without your love, oh baby, don't leave me this way
	I can't exist, I'll surely miss your tender kiss Don't leave me this way
	It's XM, baby.
	And we're very serious.
	To call Art Bell, please manipulate your communication device and call 1-855-REAL-UFO.
	That's 1-855-732-5836.
	Love that thing.
	Okay.
	Let's see.
	Scott in Missouri says, if we were to hear something that we considered intelligent, how would we decipher what it's saying?
	I'm thinking now of the animal kingdom.
	For example, we and they communicate, but we don't really talk.
	That's such a good point.
	That came through the wormhole.
	What do you think, Seth?
	Well, it's certainly a good question, and it's one that's intrigued an awful lot of people.
	Some people have developed even entire languages that might be used for interstellar communication.
	An academic in the Netherlands, in Holland, Leiden actually, who has developed a language he calls Lingkos.
	So, you know, the Lingua Cosmica, the language of the cosmos.
	It's based on mathematics and he thinks it would make a good way to communicate.
	I don't know.
	I think that, you know, an easier approach is just to send a picture dictionary.
	Send just a whole bunch of pictures.
	You can send pictures as bitmaps and most intelligent species could figure those out.
	And underneath them you could just put the word in whatever language you have and you just send enough of these things so that after that you can send a newspaper and they can read a lot of it.
	That's my thought.
	Alright, I really want you to take the time and trouble to go to my website when you're able and click on the name Richard Hoagland and then I think, I hope that number nine is still up there somehow or another.
	This picture of what we call number nine or the number nine picture of something that is obviously artificial in my eyes, uh, was backed up by the original, uh, NASA picture, uh, the high-resolution picture, and you can go get that high-resolution picture yourself, you can find the object, you can zoom in on it, you can take a look for yourself.
	I really would like you to do that, Seth, and, uh, so the next time we get together, I'll bring up number nine, and you'll have a comment for me, huh?
	All right, that sounds good to me.
	I'll check it out.
	I'll check it out.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	And you're on the air with Seth Shostak on Dark Matter.
	Hi.
	Roswell's Art.
	Seth, I have a quick comment and a question for you.
	You know, I believe as I look up into the night sky, I think it's hard for us to comprehend just how big the universe is.
	And so that lets me to believe that, you know, if we're here, then there's probably a good chance that they are there.
	And we just may not have found each other yet.
	My question is, Comet ISON is coming around here in the next few months, I understand.
	November.
	Yes, yes.
	I'm in Arkansas, and in the night sky, when should I be able to spot it?
	And what direction should I look in?
	Thank you very much, sir.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	That's a good question.
	You might actually, I'm going to give you an answer here, but you might want to consider, for example, going to one of the websites, well, for example, Astronomy Magazine or Sky and Telescope Magazine, because they're going to have a lot about where to look for comet ISON.
	In fact, It's going to.
	It still requires a telescope right now.
	It's not bright enough to see without a small telescope.
	If you're an amateur astronomer, you can find it.
	But, you know, in a month from now, you should be able to see it without the telescope, certainly with your pair of binoculars, but even with your naked eye, I think.
	That depends, but probably.
	And you should get up early, you know, before dawn, look for Mars in the sky.
	That'll be fairly bright.
	And it's pretty close to Mars.
	So that's your guidepost to finding ISON.
	Okay.
	I have a question about ISON.
	How big is ISON compared to other comets?
	Do we know?
	I don't know that we know.
	It's hard to judge, you know, the actual size because you can't actually see it.
	You can't sort of see a little rock in space unless you have a spacecraft that's gone up there and taken a look at it.
	So I don't think that you can tell except indirectly By looking at, you know, how much of a tail it has and, you know, how luminous it is and stuff like that.
	And that's going to depend on how much stuff melts, right?
	In other words... Yeah.
	Okay.
	Right, right.
	And so once it starts heating, it's going to come close to the sun, right?
	It is.
	It's going to come, I mean, a lot closer than it is now.
	It's not going to, you know, it's not going to skim it, but it's going to come closer.
	And, you know, it may be that we'll, well, for sure, we'll know more as it gets closer.
	But to actually know how big these things are is not entirely trivial because they're so small.
	You never get a picture where you say, look at that rock, Bob.
	You know, it's obviously 400 yards wide.
	I mean, you know, to see something that size from a distance is quite hard.
	You really need a spacecraft to go out and get close to it.
	So it could either be very small or very big at this point?
	Yeah, probably it's not very small because the fact that it's so luminous already Hi, this is Carl from Wisconsin.
	Hey, something occurred to me that, like you say, we've been sending signals into space for 60 years at least, so we can't just play dead now.
	What if somewhere somebody gets one of these signals, decides to come visit us,
	and let's say they have a way of traveling faster than light
	so they show up sometime soon, and they're benevolent, they're not looking for trouble,
	but they bring with them viruses from their planet, maybe to them is just no more serious than the common cold,
	but since we have no immunity to it, You can really do some serious things here.
	I'm worried about the common cold, so you've got a good point.
	That's right.
	He's right, Seth.
	What if they bring an alien virus that is easily transmissible by humans.
	It does jump like that, after all.
	And that could be the very end of us.
	In fact, something could even come in on an asteroid, or a comet, or whatever, enter the atmosphere, crack open, and away we go, right?
	Well, yeah, I think it's unlikely.
	To begin with, you know, asteroids have all sorts of organic material in them, and they even have things like amino acids.
	As far as we know, they don't have life in them.
	They don't have life.
	But, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.
	However... All it takes is a little bug!
	Yeah, well, yeah, but it has to be a little bug that knows enough about your biology to do something to it.
	Remember, all the things that attack you, we've co-evolved with all the illnesses that we get here, right?
	All the infections and so forth.
	We've been sharing this planet for three and a half, four billion years with all these life forms.
	So, when you get a cold, it's bad for you, but it's good for the virus that produces the cold, because it makes more of itself, and that's its day job, right?
	You know, so we have this mutual evolution in which we've co-evolved with all these things, whereas something coming from another world, it doesn't know anything about our biology, so it's not entirely clear that it's likely that it would become a pathogen.
	You know, it might be a poison, but a pathogen, something that can actually attack your body somehow, it needs to know something about your body, otherwise it's not likely to be, you know, able to do that.
	Well, aren't there a lot of viruses that adapt almost immediately?
	What are they?
	Chimeras?
	Chimeras, yeah.
	Sure, these things, some of them can change very quickly.
	That's not necessarily a very good strategy for life, by the way, because if you get a good design, you don't want to change too quickly.
	Most changes are for the worst, not for the better.
	You know, it's not impossible.
	It strikes me as very unlikely, but it's not impossible.
	And NASA does worry about this, not in terms of alien spacecraft coming along and, you know, releasing bugs into our atmosphere by accident or whatever.
	But they do worry about, for example, if you bring samples back from Mars, right, you know, could you be bringing some sort of pathogen back here?
	So, you know, they put them in isolation boxes and they make sure that there's nothing dangerous in there.
	So, I mean, it's a serious enough problem that they might worry about it.
	I'll tell you what I think is a much more worrisome problem is the fact that these days there are plenty of people doing what's called bio-hacking, where they buy some, you know, equipment off of eBay or wherever.
	You can buy it for very little money and you can, you know, make bacteria that glow in the dark or whatever.
	But you could also make pathogens and I think that that's a much more immediate threat.
	Yes, I'm going to have some experts on that and we're going to talk about it because I think that's what will get us more than anything else, the little things.
	You're on the air with Seth on Dark Matter.
	Hello.
	Hi Art, Roswell.
	Hi.
	Hi Seth, how you doing?
	It's a great program and thank you for taking my call.
	I had a question for you Seth.
	You know, given the size of the universe and the galaxies and all the I bet Seth was just about to comment on that very thing.
	What are your thoughts on the theory that some or all UFO sightings are actually humans
	from the future using time travel to check on or intervene with the present?
	I bet Seth was just about to comment on that very thing.
	Seth?
	You're looking into the future.
	Well, time travel is, you know, going back in time is a lot harder than going forward
	We're all going forward in time, lamentably.
	But going back in time is really hard, and you can't go back any farther than when you invented your time machine, either, by the way.
	But maybe that's not a problem for them.
	Maybe they invented the time machine a long time ago, and they're just coming back to check on us.
	Well, I mean, it's an idea, but what's the evidence for that?
	I mean, you can't say that all the UFO sightings are evidence for that.
	The UFO sightings are evidence for something that people are seeing, but it doesn't tell you why they're doing that or what they're doing or anything like that.
	You really are quite the skeptic, aren't you?
	You know what I think?
	I think that if you would start to embrace the possibility that they are here now and that we are being visited now, you would be drummed out of SETI so quickly they'd rip your badge off and cast you into the night.
	Where is my badge?
	Well, yeah.
	I do get emails and comments on the internet along those lines, Art, where people will say, well, Seth knows that they're here, but his job depends on him denying that they're here.
	I think it does!
	I wish that our company had policies like that.
	But, you know, the SETI Institute doesn't tell you, don't believe in these UFOs.
	They don't tell you anything like that.
	I'm sure they don't tell you anything like that, but if you were to suddenly embrace something like that, I think the drumming ceremony would be underway.
	Well, I don't think we can afford any ceremonies, but maybe a pink slip.
	Maybe a pink slip.
	Hello there, you're on the air on Dark Matter.
	Hello, Google Roswellzart, how are you?
	I'm fine, thank you.
	Good.
	I have a question for Seth.
	First off, are the Phoenix Lights enough evidence for you, for one good evidence?
	Oh, no.
	No, of course it's not enough evidence for him.
	He would have said so.
	And if that's not enough, what would be?
	What would he be looking for?
	Now that's a good question.
	Alright, what would be, Seth, that's a good question, what would be enough evidence?
	What would convince you?
	Yeah, the Phoenix Lights are not.
	Art was right on that one.
	I gotta say, because... That was easy.
	Yeah, well, it was easy, because there are explanations for everything that happened in Phoenix that evening, all of which seem very reasonable and are backed by, you know, things that actually are known to have happened and that don't involve aliens.
	So, you know.
	But that is a good question.
	What would convince me?
	I have thought about that, although I seem to have forgotten what it was that I thought about.
	But it's got to be in the nature of physical evidence.
	It can't be anecdotal.
	It can't be people describing what they saw, what they experienced.
	That's very, very poor evidence in science.
	It also can't be things they've seen, even though they will inevitably say, I know what I saw.
	I hear that three times a day.
	Well, I understand why.
	I know what I saw, too, Seth.
	I'm sorry, but I want the answer to that question.
	Well, okay, okay.
	This is, hey, physical evidence.
	It's got to be something that a scientist would respect.
	If you know what you saw, then, you know, police lineups would always get the right suspect, and they almost never do.
	I mean, people don't know what they saw.
	The human visual system is compromised by these three-pound brains we carry around in our heads.
	So, you know, witness testimony is kind of... I mean, you wouldn't send anybody to the electric chair on just witness testimony, I don't think.
	I hope not.
	What a craft defying gravity convinces you.
	Well, if you had indeed good physical evidence, I mean, not the kind of photos I see every day, but if you had, you know... No, Seth, I'm talking about your own eyes, buddy.
	Oh, my own eyes?
	What about those?
	Yeah, your own eyes.
	If you saw a large craft defying gravity doing what airplanes can't do, however you want to put it, would that do it?
	Not with my eyes, unless it was so close.
	So you wouldn't believe your own eyes?
	No, because people tell me all the time, they say they've seen this craft and it can't be anything we've built, because it was moving at thousands of miles an hour, right?
	That's a very frequent comment, or that it suddenly made maneuvers that none of our aircraft can do.
	That's a very, very common claim.
	Yes, it is.
	And what's wrong with it?
	I mean, I'm not asking about somebody else.
	I'm not talking about somebody else's testimony.
	I'm talking about your eyes, Seth.
	Well, they're not all that good, but look, in order to know how fast anything is moving, I need to know how far away it is.
	I need to know how far away it is.
	Okay, so if I saw something and it was between me and that building three blocks away, and it had a very high angular velocity, and then it suddenly switched and went in a different direction, You know, all right, I would begin to say, you know, that's very unusual.
	That's very strange.
	So, you know, I'm sure that there are some experiences where I would scratch my head and say, you know, maybe this is it.
	Never had any like that, but, you know, sort of hypothetical, but... You know what?
	I bet if you did, I bet if you did, you'd keep your mouth shut.
	No.
	That's what I think.
	Really?
	Really?
	I could get on your show in the next two weeks.
	You could.
	You could.
	But I don't think you would.
	Dark Matter, you're on the air with Seth Shostak.
	Hello.
	Infinite Roswells to you, Art.
	Thank you.
	And also 51s from Belgab.
	Seth, I have a question for you.
	And I really actually want you to put your thinking cap on this, if you can, for me.
	Is light speed the fastest form of communication we have right now for civilization, for data transfer, that sort of thing?
	Yes.
	Okay, that's the pinnacle of our civilization.
	Now, I submit to you that on a cosmological scale, the light speed is known to be the slowest.
	And I do mean universally, fundamentally, the slowest method of communication.
	So why wouldn't a civilization simply throw the towel in and say, look, we know this is not going to work.
	We're just going to wait until we figure out how to get between these great distances and then we'll communicate.
	Well, If they knew that they were going to develop that, maybe they would make that decision.
	But, you know, what if you could go back to 1492 and talk to Chris Columbus there in Spain and say, you know, Chris, it's possible to cross the Atlantic in six hours in an uncomfortable seat, eating peanuts off your lap.
	So forget these wooden ships.
	I mean, is he going to sit around and wait for that?
	He might, but I doubt it.
	I think he'd just say, look, maybe the wooden ship's good enough.
	I think that's a great argument, but Seth, I think you're trying to go to the moon on a tricycle.
	I think you've got all the effort and gumption and you really want to make it there, but the technology and the science is just not there.
	It's too vast.
	I don't care if you're using 21 centimeter radio or lasers, it's just a needle in the haystack.
	No one's going to use it.
	They're going to wait until they have a technology that can actually be done.
	Alright, so what you're suggesting is don't do the experiment, sit around and wait?
	Is that it?
	The experiment, well, you're only on one side of the experiment.
	The experiment's only listening, not sending so much.
	So, I mean, why don't we look at other possibilities?
	Somebody brought up these other things.
	Like, okay, let me ask you this then, Seth.
	Is there another form that is not electromagnetic, that is not within, you know, from an audio spectrum all the way to an x-ray spectrum, that we could somehow receive that would allow us to communicate?
	Well, Art brought up gravity waves a little earlier in the discussion.
	And, you know, those are not electromagnetic waves.
	So, yeah, you could conceivably communicate that way.
	You could use neutrinos.
	You could just send a beam of neutrinos and turn them on and off very quickly and that way send information.
	Some guys at Rutgers said the best thing to do is to load up a rocket with a lot of Blu-ray discs.
	It's the fastest bitrate of any of these schemes.
	silly but i mean come on honestly that's not so silly it's the fastest bit rate of any of these
	schemes it's just that the first bit takes a long time to get there but you get lots of bits
	but i mean the civilization looks up to the night sky and they see stars and they see that that is
	that that light is occurring at a constant speed for the universe
	Wouldn't they actually recognize, okay, this is fundamentally too slow of a method for us to communicate.
	Let's try something else.
	And all I'm saying is, why don't we look in that something else region?
	Well, but what is the something else region?
	That's what I'm saying.
	We don't know yet.
	Well, then how can we look at it?
	Through a hell of a lot of theoretical physics.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, you've just nailed the problem there.
	See, people talk about hyperdimensional physics, and they talk about this, that, and the other, and interdimensional physics, and all this stuff.
	Those are nifty words, and they show that you've mastered Latin in high school.
	But the point is that if it's all physics we don't know, then you can't build any equipment.
	You can't do the experiment.
	That's the problem.
	It's frustrating, Seth.
	You've got to be frustrated on your end.
	I'm not particularly frustrated, but I hear what you're saying.
	You're saying that, look, this is all primitive.
	It may be, but you know what?
	They invented the wheel a few tens of thousands of years ago.
	Maybe it wasn't even a few tens.
	Maybe it was less than ten.
	They invented the wheel five to eight thousand years ago.
	Whatever it was, it's antiquated technology.
	But I use the wheel every day.
	It's still the best we can do.
	And, you know, it may be that electromagnetic radiation, although it's getting a bad rap tonight, a lot of people don't seem to like it, it may be the best there is.
	I mean, there's no guarantee that there's anything better.
	Yeah, I just think we're using smoke signals.
	Anyway, great show tonight, guys.
	Thanks so much.
	Thank you very much.
	I could have just turned the rest of the show right over to that caller.
	You've got to take a break here.
	The last break, actually.
	Boy, time does fly, doesn't it?
	From the high desert where the winds are blowing in the night, this is, uh, Dark Matter.
	I'm Art Bell.
	And, oh, they are blowing out there.
	Screaming across the desert.
	I'm dead calm in the air tonight.
	And we're very serious.
	To call Art Bell, please manipulate your communication device and call 1-855-REAL-UFO.
	That's 1-855-732-5836.
	Several people saying, while they agree with that caller, might as well use smoke signals.
	Oh my.
	Well, what you're doing, Seth, of course, is very controversial.
	It really gets people going, doesn't it?
	It does.
	It does.
	And smoke signals, by the way, are hard to find.
	Also for lunch.
	I'm sure they are.
	Dark Matter, you're on the air.
	Hi, this is Margo.
	I'm calling from Los Angeles, and my question has to do, well, I guess with something that another caller was talking about, time travel.
	And, you know, a lot of people actually think that aliens are on Earth, but I just, I have a problem with that, because As far as I understand it, we can't actually travel faster than the speed of light.
	So, my question is, is there anything in the works, you know, that could actually show that you can travel past the speed of light?
	You know, I've heard about wormholes, but I don't even think that with wormholes you can actually travel past the speed of light.
	So, I mean, is there anything actually out there that can even show that Aliens can get to Earth by spaceship.
	Absolutely nothing.
	As far as I know, Seth, what about it?
	Yeah, I think you're right.
	I don't know of anything, even theoretically, that, maybe I shouldn't say that because you know, theoretical literature is very light, but no, there are no sort of intriguing experiments where it looks like something went faster than the speed of light.
	The transmission of information Or physical matter.
	I mean, there have been things in the past, there were various kinds of objects observed by radio astronomers, like 20 years ago, where it looked like some gas clouds in a distant quasar were expanding faster than the speed of light.
	It was a big puzzle.
	And then it turned out, well, they weren't really.
	It was just a geometric effect and a relativistic effect.
	We've not observed any phenomena where we think the light speed barrier has been broken, Margo.
	I'm sorry about that.
	Okay, here's a question for you.
	If something were out there traveling faster than light, would we see it?
	Yeah.
	We would?
	Yes.
	It depends.
	I suppose it depends.
	But yes, the assumption is we would because people have looked for tachyons.
	Right, and tachyons were sort of a hypothesized kind of particle that their slowest speed was the speed of light.
	Somewhat like what the last caller was saying.
	That, you know, they could only go faster than the speed of light.
	They couldn't go any slower than the speed of light.
	But nobody's ever found any evidence for tachyons, so presumably there was a way to look for them.
	Well, it might well be that when things go faster than light, we don't see them.
	Well, if you can't measure them at all, If there's no hope of measuring them, then you could say, isn't that kind of irrelevant?
	I mean, it's like... Until they get here and stop, yeah.
	Well, yeah, and then you can see them.
	Yeah, I mean, if something is totally and forever unmeasurable, I mean, it's like my hypothesizing that there's a party going on in this room here in the 12th, 13th, and 14th dimensions, but I just can't measure that.
	And so, at that point, the party becomes somewhat irrelevant.
	Listen, I've seen the Starship in Star Trek, and when it begins to exceed the speed of light, all you see is a dusty trail.
	Yes, well, that may be it.
	Maybe that's the observation.
	Darkmatter, you're on the air.
	Good evening or morning or whatever.
	Hi, Art.
	This is Jim from Arizona.
	Hey, Jim.
	Hi, and I wanted to say, you certainly have a spring in your voice over the last week.
	Do I?
	You do.
	You're happy to be back on the air on your terms, and I can tell.
	It may be the spring before the storm.
	I've got a cold coming on, but we'll see.
	Well, I've been fighting it because my daughter goes to that Petri dish they call a high school.
	There you go.
	But I was going to say also, what you guys call skepticism, Dr. Seth, I call good science.
	And we all know that Art's favorite movie is Contact, because he's been mentioning it over the last week with the esteemed guests he's had on.
	And I was wondering, in your opinion, what is the most credible or at least verifiable movie, in your opinion, that has come out of Hollywood scientifically in your area of specialty?
	And I'd also like to thank you for sitting out there and just listening for anything that might come in, and I'll take the answer off the air.
	Okay, it's a pretty good question.
	What is the best movie wise?
	Well, I think Jim's already named it.
	And by the way, thank you very much, Jim, for those kind, kind comments.
	Yeah, Contact.
	Look, it was written by Carl Sagan.
	Carl Sagan, of course, not only knew about SETI, but he had done some SETI experiments.
	So he got the science right.
	Now, you know, the beginning of that movie talks about how they're looking and, and the end of the movie, well, all right, he, you know, Jodie Foster goes looking for her dad in space.
	By some sort of wormhole device.
	That's the fiction part.
	But the SETI part was very accurate.
	Well, now wait a minute.
	Wait a minute.
	She found her dad at the end of the wormhole experience.
	She didn't go looking for her dad so much as she found her dad.
	I don't think that's what she... She didn't have expectations of finding her dad, but she did.
	I guess that's right.
	It looked like she was in Sarasota, Florida, but she was actually somewhere else.
	Yeah.
	Well, but the real point I'm trying to make only is that the description of how SETI was done was quite accurate.
	And in addition, although Sagan really, he got sick during the filming of that show and he died.
	So he wasn't there when it was completed, but he had his input because his book, of course, and then his later advice.
	guided the film to being accurate. We were, as I say, at the SETI Institute. We were also consultants to the film,
	and there are a lot of, actually, might make an interesting short article, there are a lot of, if you will,
	sort of secret marks, hidden comments in the film that refer to various technologies
	that are used for SETI that are sort of inside jokes.
	I mean, you know, it's just that they refer to certain pieces of equipment as Elmer and so forth.
	I'll tell you what that means.
	Elmer, when you think of Elmer, what do you think of?
	You usually think of Fudd.
	No, I don't.
	I think Elmer is, in ham radio, somebody who helps you get the knowledge necessary to become a ham.
	Okay, well, that's what I think of.
	All right, well, you got me on that one.
	I think of Elmer Fudd, I have to say, even though See, Matt, that may be your problem.
	You're a ham, and yet when you think of Elmer, you think of Elmer Fudd.
	That is your problem!
	That's at the basis of all the problems we've had tonight!
	You know, Art, if that were my worst problem, I'd feel good!
	Well, I was going to say, the Fudd.
	That was an actual piece of equipment that we were using for SETI in those days.
	It was called a follow-up detection device, and it was just Whenever you got a signal that was interesting, and you got those all the time of course, you needed to follow up and see, look, is this the real deal or is this just interference?
	Yes.
	And so that follow-up detection device, F-U-D-D, it was called a FUD.
	So that's an inside joke that's in the movie.
	Okay, that's very interesting.
	Did they actually consult you?
	They did.
	Is there any part of it that you can tell me that you absolutely... was that yours?
	I don't think, no, that was not mine.
	No, there were things that got wrong, despite the fact that they talked to us, too, by the way.
	Well, I'm sure.
	I mean, there is creative license, right?
	Listen, my friend, we're at the end of the show, and I just can thank you, thank you, thank you.
	It was a wonderful program, and I very much enjoyed having you here.
	You're my Elmer.
	Well, thanks very much, Art.
	Great to have you back on the air, and good to talk to you again, as well.
	All right.
	Take care, my friend.
	Bye-bye.
	You're my Elmer for learning how to be a doubter, a skeptic.
	I don't know if I'm going to take the lesson because, well, frankly, I really do bleed.
	It's been a pleasure.
	Thank you all very much, and we'll do it again tomorrow night if the winds here in the desert don't blow us away.
	Meanwhile, good night.
	Midnight in the desert.
	And there's wisdom in the air.
	I've been looking for the answers.
	All my life I've held you there.
	As the world, we're living for them Are we heeding all the signs?
	Have we lost our intuition?
	Are we running out of time?

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