Seth Shostak, SETI’s chief astronomer, debunks claims of hidden ET discoveries while detailing Kepler’s exoplanet findings—thousands identified but only a fraction scanned for signals. He proposes an optical telescope to detect alien civilization waste heat within 60 light-years and insists current protocols demand verification before disclosure, despite Art Bell’s skepticism about government secrecy. Shostak dismisses fringe theories like Planet X (Nibiru) and faster-than-light communication via quantum entanglement or tachyons, emphasizing reliance on known physics. Comet ISON’s visibility near Mars in November is confirmed, though he warns against overestimating its brightness. Hollywood’s Contact, co-advised by Shostak, remains the most scientifically grounded SETI-inspired film, blending skepticism with speculative wonder—yet even Bell admits its influence on his own open-minded curiosity. [Automatically generated summary]
Be it sight, sand, smell, touch, the something inside that we need so much The sight of a touch, or the scent of the sand, or the strength of blood moves deep in the ground The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up To turn back to the sun again Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing ride
from the high desert and the great American Southwest, exclusively on Sirius XM Radio.
Seth Shostak from SETI, the chief astronomer at SETI.
Good to be here.
It's going to 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, 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.
The only suggestion I have is move something around on your screen.
I don't know.
You know, I do, honestly, folks, I understand why SiriusXM 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.
You'll have to experiment.
And please have Ed Dames on.
Dr. Doom, yes, I'm sure that...
But you know, now he's got a Russian pretty.
And 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.
Listen, warning.
Dire warning.
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.
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.
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 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 going 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.
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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, has 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 Chostak.
He's a great guy, and I've got some great questions for him.
This is Dark Matter in the Nighttime.
unidentified
Dark Matter in the Nighttime.
Mama's dancing, baby, on her shoulder.
It's gonna start like my last legs in the sky.
What's happening?
What's happening?
Who's gonna tell you when?
It's too late.
Who's gonna tell you things?
Aren't so great.
We can't go on.
Who's gonna drive you home?
Who's gonna drive you home?
Who's gonna pick you up?
When you call.
Who's gonna hang it 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.
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.
It's true that SETI is now, well, it's a little more than 50 years old in the sense that the first SETI experiment was done in 1961, or 1960, 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, or in the next 50 years, I guess it's only 37 years, but whatever, that I would say that that would discourage me with the current approach.
Well, he's talking about stars that are all within 60 light years.
That's 6-0.
60 light years.
And for listeners who don't know, of course, a light-year is about 6 trillion miles.
So that's 360 trillion miles, which 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 1,000 likely planets similar to the Earth, we would guess.
We don't know that for sure.
But, you know, there are 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 in 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 will be using so much energy that you'll be able to see the waste heat coming from their planet.
I mean, you can assume maybe that their planet is rotating.
Our planet rotates every 24 hours.
Theirs might rotate in 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 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, 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 forests, 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.
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 no signal yet.
On the other hand, how many of those planets that we've found, and the number is, well, there are something like 900 that have been found that are for sure that they're there.
But there are several thousands.
Yeah, it's 900.
Well, 900 is a big number.
I mean, consider in 1994 there were zero.
So today there are 900.
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.
So, you know, I'm not discouraged by that.
I still think the numbers are too small to allow me to get discouraged.
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 amateur radio operator's dream to have a receiver that can cover as much of the band as our telescope can.
Well, maybe moribunds 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.
This is 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, this spacecraft, but really what they have, to keep it very precisely pointed, are what are called reaction wheels.
And those are nothing more than 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.
You know, 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.
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.
And it's hard to repair something that's where Kepler is.
I mean, I will say something here, because 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 are 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.
Now, 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 or are 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, oh, 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.
I don't know if you can see a comet for a couple of nights and talk about it and whatever, probably that's not one that's going to hit you.
But 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 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.
And Halley's 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 very famous example of comets signaling something bad.
And that's a thousand years ago, so it's kind of worked its way into our folklore, if you will.
I mean, Hayutaki and Hale Bop, 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.
I mean, the problem with comets being really bright, and they can get very bright, is that what determines whether they're bright or not, this 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 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 it boils off easily and produces a lot of gas that 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 ISON 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 will throw shadows.
You might even be able to see it in the early morning or late afternoon when the sun is still lighting up the sky a bit.
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, something like that, maybe three.
It depends on what you mean by that bright, but these things don't last for a year because they're moving fast and they whip around the sun, then they go back out, and then they just sort of get dimmer, and everybody forgets about them.
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 ISIN 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, 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?
Well, you know, or maybe you don't know, 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.
So are the North Koreans beginning to ask for residuals?
I mean, they're about the only people we have left to, you know, wrap 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.
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 Sally 100,000 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.
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.
And stuff like that.
And they even sent up one of the casting directors who wanted to see what real SETI scientists were like, I guess.
And 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.
So 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.
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 Jodi Foster, but all the other techie types, the engineers and so forth, they're all a little bit chubby.
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 so well done.
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, because it's accurate.
And then you get down to the wormholes.
Even there, yeah, a series of wormholes, but 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.
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 in the movies.
And we discussed whether getting the science wrong, as science fiction films so often do, was actually a bad thing.
And every time you see the Starship Enterprise go by the camera, you hear a whoosh.
You can make this scene without the whoosh, and everybody thinks something's gone wrong with a 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 can't afford to be misled about things.
unidentified
It doesn't matter in science fiction, but medical shows, yes.
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.
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.
Well, I don't think they would go nuts because we tried that 100 years ago, right?
100 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.
Well, that's still pretty far, I would say, 10 light-years away.
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.
But still, I maintain that if the American people were told that we have now received a signal, first of all, everybody would 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.
That's right.
We know that.
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...
You would contact me before you contacted anybody in government.
But what they say is, first, if you find a signal, check it out.
You know, 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.
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?
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 this signal at the same place on the sky and at the same spot on the dial, I'm sure they would do it.
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 going.
Yeah, prime numbers, the value 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 the 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, one spot on the dial, like an AM signal, it occupies whatever, 810 kilohertz and it, you know, occupies 3 kilohertz or 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 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 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.
And you say sending a dead carrier, just, you know, a constant tone or something like that, which is what a dead carrier really is.
I don't think they would go to the money of building a, or sorry, 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 100 light years.
We might be 1,000 light years, whatever it is.
Which means that communication is really going to be very tedious because 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.
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 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.
Pictures would be good as long as they're not too ugly.
All right.
Hold tight, Seth.
Seth shows that, my guests.
He's the chief astronomer at SETI.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Dark Matter.
unidentified
All our times have come Fear for the town that has gone Seasons don't feel the rebirth No due to
wind, the sun, and the rain We can be like this Come on, baby, don't feel the rebirth Baby, take my hand, don't feel the rebirth We'll be able to fly Ooh, and it's all
right, it's coming on We gotta get right back to where we just started going Love is good, love can be strong We gotta get right back to where we just started going Do you remember that day When you first came my way I said
no one could take your face And if you get hurt If you get hurt By the little things like the rain I can put that smile back on your face
Ooh, and it's all right And it's coming on We gotta get right back to where we just started going Love is good, love can be strong We gotta get right back to where we just started going Dark Matter, much like Sirius XM, is all around you.
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 could 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 towards you.
That would take a little bit of effort.
But I agree with you.
You could probably tell.
You know, something at one light year distance, even if it's going, you know, I don't know, 100,000 miles a 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 are very often, they're not in the United States or Canada.
unidentified
I mean, they might be, as you say, in Australia or somewhere else.
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.
They only reasonably have, 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, then they might say, well, there's no point in getting everybody alarmed yet.
Mind you, at a light year, you know, that's still pretty far away.
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 shell.
The idea that our makers might be deep in space, I mean, that's not crazy.
I mean, there are theories, 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 bacterial stuff, this biology up there, and they say it's coming from space.
And consequently, we're being reined 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 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 look at everything, and you'll find that, gee, 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.
And, right, there's this continuity that goes back as far as you want to go.
It goes all the way back at least 3.5 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 4 billion years ago.
And that's okay by me.
I mean, I don't have any problem with that.
If they did it, that's okay.
Maybe there's a lot of life out there because these guys are actively planting it.
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.
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 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 planet.
We sent it to Mars quite accidentally, but we got it.
But, you know, Mars hasn't suddenly bloomed with life.
I mean, it's got to be a good place to send it.
But 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.
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, you know, 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've got some mechanism for spreading it around, then you don't need to grow it from nothing on every planet.
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.
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?
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 the 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, you know, more aggressive scenario in which we find out that they, by the way, are responsible for life on earth.
How does that affect our 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.
Well, 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 of the, if you will, the major atomist religions, those are the ones that, you know, 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.
So there may be a stronger reaction there because it really does violate their beliefs.
So I think it's an open question, and I think it's a good question.
Yeah, well, I don't need to state my opinion because you've encapsulated it very well.
I have to say...
Yeah, I don't even know what swamp gas is.
It must be methane.
I don't know what it is, but it doesn't sound like I'd want it in my house.
If I'm a propagator, 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 and in all Why are you wasting our money looking out there for signals when these things are zooming above our heads?
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 the, you know, 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.
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 100.
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.
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 hope I'm not so rigid that, you know, no matter what evidence you provide, including that kind of an experience, if you will, that I would know, I'm just not going to believe 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, you know, 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.
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, well, do you think the dinosaurs were 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 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.
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-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 I was in a high-rise there, and 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 on TV.
I notice 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.
And then everybody around you is going to buy one.
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.
unidentified
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 So they'll be And how she made it in So they'll be Somewhere in the room So I
won't let you guys start Until I say eternal fate has turned its back on here It's 2am It's 2am Here is all that I'm feeling But it's still warm And I think It's better to take any chance
Yeah, the storm won't lose Sirens in my head It's wrapped up in sign And it's all circuits to dance Cannot be cold My whole life spins into a frenzy And I think I'm stepping into the twilight zone Faces in the house Feels like getting cold My people can't move Under
the moon and star And they're on the goal Now that I've gone to fall So I'm stepping into the twilight zone Faces in the house Feels like getting cold My people can't move Under the moon and star Where else I go Now that I've gone to fall So you were gone No I'm all the heads of all to take a ride?
To initiate a dialogue sequence with Art Bell, please call 1-855-REAL UFO.
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 sounds like the stuff you get in the email, Seth?
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, the wormhole at arpel.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 sort of ad hominem attacks that 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.
And 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.
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.
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 is so far beyond our technological level.
It would be like 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.
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 talk.
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.
And 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 got all this great video footage of the asteroid sweeping across the sky.
And I don't know, it broke thousands and thousands of windows.
Nobody was killed, apparently, but it'd be 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.
It probably doesn't take very long, streak all the way across the sky, 10, 20 seconds, whatever it is.
And then it's gone, right?
Because 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.
So 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, 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 downtown Las Vegas or something.
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...
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.
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.
In other words, if I understand this correctly, asteroids come around again and again and again so that we can sort of plot their trajectory and we can understand by how much they'll miss us or whatever.
Well, 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 earthed 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.
But 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.
Something like that would be, I would say, and 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.
Yeah, but you see, I think of dinosaurs, and they're really big and robust, and we're 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.
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 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.
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 spend it.
Well, most, you know, 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 dropped a bomb in and tried to blow it apart, all you've done is you've changed an artillery shell into buckshot.
And the buckshot might be just as dangerous as the shell.
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, 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.
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.
unidentified
I don't know that that's one of the leading contenders.
You know, Rusty Schweikert, 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, I'm sorry, the spaceship is also pulling on the rock.
This is 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, and the Earth is pulling on you.
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.
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.
My guest is Seth Shostak, Chief Astronomer at SETI.
And what better 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 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.
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 the Hollywood folks who are putting together a 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.
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 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.
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 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.
They're usually fairly short, not always, but they're usually short.
They have big eyes, you know, small noses, small mouths, no hair.
They don't seem to tell many jokes because 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 from the first person I asked was the best one.
And what she said to me, she said, was, look, these grays are just projections of what we think we are going to become.
I mean, we're losing our hair, we're losing our hair.
Yeah, we're losing our dentition, our ability to smell.
I mean, all of that is getting a little worse.
And so these guys, they've lost all their hair.
And they have small noses and small mouths.
They have big brains and they have big eyes because in the future most people are designing websites or whatever it is we do in the future.
And they have small bodies because in the future, physical labor isn't where it's at anymore.
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.
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.
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-powered transmitter out at the end of, I don't know, what's down in Puerto Rico and sending a very serious signal out.
Well, I personally think it's a good thing to do for the reasons I stated.
I think it really should be something.
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 easily pick up our leakage, the signals we've been willy-nilly sending into space ever since the Second World War.
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.
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 carom 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.
Because to begin with, any planet that size, you would see it.
You can just see it.
You could see it with our telescopes.
And when it got a little closer, you could see 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 2,000 to 5,000 years, orbits the inner solar system, it's been doing that for 4 billion years.
It's the age of the solar system, 4,5 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.
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?
Every year we discover six new comets or something on that order.
So there are plenty of comets.
I mean, 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 objects that you were talking about earlier, Art.
So you get at least a year of warning on those guys.
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?
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 by building big fires, essentially, or using searchlights, gas lamp searchlights, to signal them.
And 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.
Well, I don't know about interdimensional because I don't know what that means, but gravity waves, gravity waves do exist as far as we know.
I mean, 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.
I'm sorry.
Dark matter, you're on the air with Seth.
unidentified
Hi.
Hey, Seth.
My question is, the 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 ballooned light speed out of the water.
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 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 people concoct physics experiments all the time to test Einstein's relativity, which says speed of, you know, the speed limit is the speed of light, and that's it.
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.
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 On Dark Matter with Seth.
unidentified
Hello.
Hi, Art.
Roswell's to you.
Thank you.
Seth, the last two callers stole my thunder, but Dr. Kaku mentioned last week that these civilizations probably are type 2 or type 3, and he 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?
Look, all the energy that we generated, 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 two, 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, I mean, 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.
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 half decade or so.
Yeah, but 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 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.
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 Meck, who, of course, spent many years researching the UFO Enigma and eventually came to the firm conclusion that we are indeed being visited.
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.
Yeah, he was doing an experiment when I met him in which he found, well, 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, a roommate, whatever.
And he inquired of the people that shared the room with these people who were routinely being abducted.
He would ask them, 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.
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, 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.
And it does if you have two entangled particles or photons or whatever, and you look at one and you find that it 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 NASA lands their moonshot on the July 20th, which is the day they celebrate the Dog Star, you know, the Dog Star rising above the horizon in Egypt.
Well, I tell you, an argument like that latter one, I don't think it's 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.
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 an argument based on folklore, which is not a good, I mean, you know, Newton could never have devised 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 pyramids.
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 align 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, I think if you're going to do a scientific experiment, you need a stronger rationale than that.
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.
Now, I have been a very big skeptic, Seth, of 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 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 this photograph or not.
There are lots of questionable things that Richard presents, but this one...
And you look at it and you go, this is not natural.
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 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 Mirshaw pipe that you smoke, but either way, that would be a good idea.
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, you know, they're pointing out something on Mars.
They say, look, this looks like whatever it looks like.
You know, the little Copenhagen mermaid and whatever, that kind of stuff.
And 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, to...
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 or four and a half billion years, or four billion years, to go from the first live 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 tomorrow, and then just let the Earth sit here for 4 billion years, you'd find lots of evidence that there was once life here.
And Earth has lots of climate, has rain and stuff like that that washes all this stuff away.
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 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 dimmed 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.
We're fond of saying that, you know, the I Love Lucies 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 is 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?
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 not.
Look, I've worked this out, and if they were, you know, like, well, say 60 light years away, this is very rough now, but it's 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.
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, 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.
unidentified
It was so far out there and even had an illustration of what you would see when it happened eight minutes later.
You know, more than half of all stars are double stars.
And a lot of those double stars, 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 4 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.
You're on Dark Matter with Art Bell and Seth Showstack.
unidentified
Hi.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes.
Hello.
Yeah, I was just going to ask a question that 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?
No, 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?
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 it.
But the idea that there might be a hidden biosphere here on Earth, right, that what's called a shadow biosphere, seems to be 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.
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.
There's an academic in the Netherlands, in Holland, Leiden, actually, who has developed a language he calls linkos.
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.
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, was backed up by the original NASA picture, 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 so the next time we get together, I'll bring up number nine and you'll have a comment for me, huh?
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 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 a pair of binoculars, but even with your naked eye, I think.
That depends, but probably.
And you should get up early, before dawn, look for Mars in the sky.
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, it could really do some serious things here.
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 worse, not for the better.
But 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, 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 biohacking, 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.
unidentified
Hello.
Hi, Art.
Roswell.
Hi, Seth.
How are 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 planets outside of our solar system, 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 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.
You know, I do get emails and comments on the internet along those lines where people will say, Well, Seth knows that they're here, but his job depends on him denying that they're here.
Art was right on that one, I got to say, because there are explanations for everything that happened in Phoenix that evening, all of which seem very reasonable and are backed by 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 or what they experienced.
That's very, very poor evidence in science.
And it also can't be things they've seen, even though they will inevitably say, I know what I saw.
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, Seth, I'm talking about your own eyes, buddy.
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.
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 sort of hypothetical.
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 a 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 talent 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.
unidentified
I think it'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 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.
So what you're suggesting is don't do the experiment.
Sit around and wait.
Is that it?
unidentified
The experiment, well, you're only on one side of the experiment.
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 communication?
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.
unidentified
But the minute the civilization looks up to the night sky and they see stars and they see 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?
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 tenths.
Maybe it was less than 10.
They invented the wheel 5,000 to 8,000 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.
I'm calling from Los Angeles, and my question has to do, well, I guess with something that another caller is 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 spaceships?
I don't know of anything even theoretically that maybe I shouldn't say that because who knows, theoretical literature is very large.
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.
So we've not observed any phenomena where we think, you know, the fast, the speed light, the light speed, hello, the light speed barrier has been broken, Margot.
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.
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, this 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.
It looked like she was in Sarasota, Florida, but she was actually somewhere else.
Yeah.
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 of the film.
And there are a lot of, actually, it 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?
That was an actual piece of equipment that we were using for studying 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, that you needed to follow up and see, look, is this the real deal or is this just interference?
And so that follow-up detection device, F-U-D-D, it was called a FUD.