All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 11, 2015 - Art Bell
02:13:08
Art Bell MITD - Seth Shostak SETI
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
From the high desert, the great American southwest, this is Midnight in the Desert.
and I'm Art Bell.
Good evening, everybody.
It is my pleasure to be here.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
We have but two rules for the program.
No bad language, and only one call per show.
Beyond that, we have no rules.
We have some thank yous.
Always tell us with a great sound.
And oh, by the way, it is great.
I want to read this from Tom.
I know it'll sound like it's an ad.
I guess it is, sort of, right?
From Tom on the wormhole.
Art, the earbuds are so good from Zeke Green Company that I can hear you snort when you laugh.
Really?
You mean like... I got the premium wood ones, he says.
I highly recommend.
They fit well and love me.
Thanks for the excellent advice regards Tom in Reno with an H. I guess it's Rhino.
Anyway, Talos for the great sound.
Thank you.
Keith Rowland, my webmaster I've found out of 20 years now.
My producer, Heather Wade, all of you out there, the Bell Gabb website, great bunch of vaguely lovable, grumpy, interesting people, a site called People Who Love Art Bell, midnightindesert.com, the Bell Gabb, well I said that, the Streamguys, Just a couple things to note.
One, China rattled entire global financial markets by announcing they are devaluing their currency.
course, our commercial guy. If you want to run a commercial, you'd be well served since
we have so few. Contact Peter Eberhardt. You can find him at Artbel.com. All right. Just
a couple of things to note. One, China rattled entire global financial markets by announcing
they are devaluing their currency. Now, do you know what that means? That means that
things from China are going to get cheaper.
They're trying to stimulate their economy.
It declined by 1.9 percent.
That's big.
That really is big, folks.
The biggest drop in a decade.
And so things from China will get cheap, but it's not necessarily good for us.
The Donald made a big deal of that, and he's right about that.
A young Mississippi couple who are charged with attempting to join the Islamic State were held without bail Tuesday, so two more want to go over there and fight.
Why, I don't know.
Why Americans are doing that, I don't know.
A random encounter leads to astonishing discoveries.
This is pretty amazing.
Between two men, who get this, They didn't know each other, but they had still managed to lead the same life with wives and children all of the same name.
They had the same cars, the same vacation spot, which is, by the way, where they met each other.
Psychologist Chris McKay says, in his years spent as a therapist, He's begun to understand something about synchronicity.
I mean, what are the odds of that, right?
Two lives identically led.
Less than one-tenth of one percent difference between them.
Actually, no difference at all.
It would just be too weird.
It's like I would go on vacation, meet another guy who looks like me, meet his wife named Erin, and his daughter named Asia.
And we're driving identical cars, color, everything.
That is just simply too weird.
That was from Anonymous.com, Anomalous.com, and what a good website that is.
Alright, I'm going to read this and then I'll break.
Now, I don't want a response to this tonight.
Maybe we'll do it Friday.
It's going to open the doors of whatever.
I don't know when it's going to open.
Have you noticed there is, this is all over the internet, so I just simply can't and won't ignore it.
Have you noticed there's a tremendous amount of internet buzz about the month of September 2015?
Never before have I seen so much speculation about what would happen in one particular month.
Some people believe that we're going to see an economic collapse next month.
Others believe there's going to be some sort of historic natural disaster.
Others convinced judgment day is coming.
So right now large numbers of Americans are apparently stocking up on emergency food and supplies like crazy.
I'm beginning to get a little concerned about the period myself.
Several weeks ago Um, I think I did express a belief that chaos will begin once the summer ends.
These are the last days of normal life in America, people are saying.
Just about everything that we currently take for granted is about to be shaken.
It seems a lot of people lately are having a gut feeling that something really, really big is about to unfold, but nobody knows exactly what it is.
Maybe people are feeling this way because of the events that, you know, are taking place around them now.
Signs in the heavens, military stockpiling, politically disturbing events.
There does appear to be a confluence of activity in both the political and spiritual realms, culminating in 2015, causing people's alarms to go off.
So, this is all over the Internet.
I'm not going to talk about it.
In fact, I refuse to talk about it now, but we may talk about it Friday.
It will open the gates of whatever.
All right, coming up in a moment, Seth Shostak.
Seth developed an interest in extraterrestrial life at the tender age of 10.
When he first picked up a book about the solar system, the innocent beginning eventually led to a degree in radio astronomy.
Now, as senior astronomer, Seth is an enthusiastic participant in the Institute's SETI Observing Program.
There's more than one.
He heads up the International Academy of Aeronautics, a SETI permanent committee.
Hope I got that right.
This comes in slightly, you know, somebody types on an Apple computer, when I get it, it comes out a little differently.
Especially the punctuation parts.
Seth, no wait, there is more.
I forgot.
Seth will also update us on all the signals thus far received from all the life forms out there.
He will update us on the aliens that SETI has had examined.
How they now have 37 different alien languages that they've interpreted.
And, of course, all of the technical advances that have been derived thus far from the technical information taken from these aliens.
Hello, Seth.
Hello, Art.
How are you?
I'm fine.
37, huh?
I'm sorry.
I couldn't help myself.
That's okay.
If we had those 37, you know, I think my job security would be a little, well, better.
Actually, it'd be pretty shaky, wouldn't it?
I mean, if we actually had 37 different aliens, the budget for looking for them might, you know, dry up.
Well, that's true.
You'd have to sort of switch your job description to studying as opposed to searching.
Mm-hmm.
I think you'd have to do that.
How long has it been since we talked?
Well, I don't really know.
I think it's, I don't know, maybe three years, two, three years, something like that.
Mm-hmm.
At least that long, I would say.
SETI, it goes on to say, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is an exploratory science that seeks evidence of life in the universe by looking for some signature of its technology.
And in a moment, when we get back, I will ask Seth exactly what kind of, it's very interesting, what kind of signatures they might be looking for.
That would certainly be interesting.
From the high desert, the great American southwest, midnight in the desert, rockin' in the nighttime.
Take a walk on the wild side of midnight.
From the Kingdom of Nigh, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
Please call the show at 1-952-225-5278.
That's 1-952-CALL-ART.
You know, we may do something a little bit different tonight.
By the way, I love this song, and it really gets my blood going.
As we have Seth on, I'm going to dispense with some telephone number stuff right now.
You've got the landline number right.
It's area code 952-225-5278.
Once again, 952-225-5278.
Now, you can also call us on Skype from North America.
The way to do it, on your iPhone or your computer or whatever, just bring up Skype and put in MITD51.
MITD51.
If you're outside the U.S., M-I-T-D-5-5.
That's as in midnight in the desert, M-I-T-D-5-5, and give us a call anytime.
We may start taking calls during the show with Seth, sort of occasionally, you know, peppering it with calls, sort of just playing around with a different format.
All right.
Welcome back, Seth.
Thanks, Art.
I'm here.
I'm awaiting those calls.
Oh, well, OK.
You really want calls that fast?
Well, no, not right away.
But I always find the calls the interesting part of the show because, to be honest, that's the part I haven't heard before.
Well, yeah, you're right about that.
Actually, there may be a few things tonight that you haven't heard before.
OK.
So let's straighten something out.
When you talk about signatures, Well, there are several ways that you might, in fact, convince yourself that you'd found some evidence for something that's intelligent out there in the cosmos.
One thing would be, you know, if they physically landed or you went there.
I mean, that's straightforward.
It happens every night on television, but we're not about to go anywhere.
And undoubtedly, we'll get into the second possibility here tonight, whether they're visiting us.
I don't think they are.
That's straightforward.
The second thing you could do is maybe you could see something, you know, with a big telescope that would convince you that, you know, Bob, I don't know what that is, but it isn't natural.
You know, some huge astroengineering project.
Maybe there's some advanced society that's built something so big.
That we can see it with our telescopes.
And the third way to do it, and the approach that we use here most often, the SETI Institute and other places that do this kind of research, is to try and pick up signals.
And radio signals are what we usually look for, but you can also look for flashing lights in the sky.
So, that's the method of choice, I would say, to try and prove we have some cosmic company.
Back to the telescopes for a moment.
You know, we have a hard time resolving small things With big telescopes on Mars, right?
Well, yeah.
I don't know what you mean by small.
If you don't have an orbiter that's actually at, for example, Mars, what you can see from the ground is pretty limited.
You know, big mountains, things like that are probably the smallest thing you can see.
Fortunately, Mars is close enough that you can put something in orbit around it.
Okay, I made a poor choice.
Pluto.
Well, Pluto.
Actually, we can see things on Pluto that are, I don't know, the size of a football field, something like that.
And that's pretty good, given the fact that the cameras that made those photos, which were aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, They had one shot.
That spacecraft didn't land on Pluto, obviously, but it didn't even go into orbit around Pluto, which would give you weeks, months, maybe years to make these photos.
It just sailed right by at a speed that it was by the whole planet in a few minutes.
It didn't take very long.
You get that one shot, it's sort of like you're in your car and you see something interesting there on the sidewalk as you're going down the street.
You grab your camera and you take a couple of pictures and that's all you get.
So it's really amazing that they've got these incredibly detailed photos of Pluto.
Alright, it is.
But telescopes don't see a whole lot, right?
Well, I suppose compared to, you know, a visitor or a rover or something like that.
And if you're going to say they do, then I'm going out to Alpha Centauri.
Yes.
Closest star system, I think, right?
Star?
Okay.
Anyway, telescopes are pretty limited in terms of detecting life, unless it was pretty close, relatively speaking.
So, you listen for the more likely thing.
Which would be radio signals.
It's been years since we explored together, Seth, I don't know the current state of SETI, what telescopes you have available to you, what kind of computer power you're using, what frequencies you're listening on, that kind of thing.
Well, we are using an array of telescopes.
It's called the Allen Telescope Array, and that's because the money to build it was largely given by Paul Allen.
Paul Allen was the co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation.
Everybody knows about Bill Gates.
Paul Allen was his partner in the early years.
opportunities that you know new developments in technology make
make possible things that are interesting to do but you never could do
them before because he you just couldn't build the technology so he has funded
this array of antennas it's so far up to 42 antennas
That's what we have, 42 antennas.
The idea is to build many more, but that takes more money, and it's always difficult to get the money.
I would say 42 is pretty impressive.
Well, 42, yeah, but it's really designed to have hundreds.
That's what you really want.
And it turns out that by building hundreds of small antennas, you get kind of the performance, in fact more than the performance, of one giant antenna for a lot less money.
So that's the way to go these days.
Anyhow, this array of antennas is up in the Cascade Mountains of California.
It's about 300 miles north of San Francisco.
We put it up there not because of the beautiful scenery, although the scenery is beautiful, and not because of the cuisine, because there is none, but because you've got all these mountains and they kind of shield the antennas from all the radio static that you would get from the Bay Area here around San Francisco.
How big are they generally?
Well, each one of them, they're all identical.
They're all about 6 meters.
It's like 20 feet in diameter.
If you put one of these antennas in your backyard, you'd probably provoke opposition from the neighbors.
They'd probably want you to remove them as an eyesore.
I have a 3.8 meter dish in my backyard now, and I'm getting static about that.
Oh, yeah.
Not from neighbors.
My wife walks out and goes, oh my God.
Anyway, so 42 telescopes.
Now, again, a technical question.
These are kind of in parallel in the sense that they turn simultaneously and focus on the same point in space.
And is their gain then, therefore, collective?
Well, it is.
They don't have to do that.
It's not that they're, you know, kind of chained together and they all have to all point in the same direction.
I don't know.
It's sort of like a chorus line in a way.
You know, they're all doing the same thing.
They're all kicking at the same time, turning around, whatever, at the same time, but they don't have to.
And the same with these antennas.
They could be pointed individually, but The general scheme is indeed to have them work as a team.
They all point in the same direction in the sky.
And they're spread out over about, I don't know, maybe 3,000 feet of landscape up there.
The idea is, you know, you could build one giant antenna, and that would collect a lot of cosmic static just because
it's big.
Arecibo.
Yeah, Arecibo.
But, you know, Arecibo is fixed in the ground.
It's a big antenna down in Puerto Rico.
It's a thousand feet across.
It's huge.
But, you know, you can't turn it.
You can't twist it.
You can't build that kind of structure.
It's too expensive.
So you build a lot.
It's like taking Arecibo and hitting it with a hammer or something.
Break it up into, you know, dozens, maybe hundreds of small antennas.
And then you can get very much the same performance with something you can afford to build.
So, if you were to suddenly start getting some kind of signal, just an example, something weak, you could focus all of your antennas, or as many as possible, on that one source, have the collective gain hear it better?
Yes.
In fact, that's the way we do the searching, too, actually.
They're all looking at the same spot.
So, you decide, okay, we got these antennas, we got them for this week, what are we going to look at?
And you know, you could just point them randomly at the sky.
But normally speaking, you don't do that.
You try to be a little a little more clever.
And so we point them in the direction of star systems where we know their planets.
These days, that might actually not be such a terrific strategy anymore, because now we know planets are so commonplace.
You really can't miss pointing at planets.
But, you know, if you decide where you're going to point them, they all work together.
They're looking at a few spots on the sky at once.
And then you got this huge receiver that's listening to 30 million channels at once, trying to see if there's some channel in there, some frequency, some spot on the radio dial where you pick up a signal and, you know, change the world.
30 million channels at once.
Yeah.
That's incredible.
That's really incredible.
So the computer's come a long way, huh?
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Jones on Arutz Sheva Radio.
This digital technology that makes all this possible and there's actually an upside to
that, the upside being something called Moore's Law which sort of drives the industry around
where I'm sitting which is the Silicon Valley as most listeners will know.
Every couple of years, you got to replace your computer because the computers on the
store shelves then are so much faster than the one that you have that you don't get any
respect at parties when you tell them you got a three-year-old laptop.
It's good for the Silicon Valley.
So, they'll sell you a new laptop, a new computer, whatever it is.
The same is true for SETI.
Every couple of years, the equipment gets so much better that the search becomes faster.
So I think that that's what keeps me interested.
Actually, not everybody knows about the WOW signal.
Let's go over that.
That incredible event that occurred to SETI.
You had what you call the WOW signal, which is?
The WOW signal, yeah.
We didn't pick it up, actually.
In fact, it was before the SETI Institute, which is where I work, before the SETI Institute was actually founded.
That came later.
But this was a SETI experiment being run at Ohio State University, which is in Columbus, Ohio, I think.
And they had a big antenna there that they'd been using for astronomy, radio astronomy.
Uh, but, you know, it sort of outlived its usefulness, but it was still there, and it was a perfectly good antenna.
So, they said, okay, what we're gonna do is just put the brakes on it, we're gonna have it just park here, just aimed in one direction.
You might think, well, that's not terribly interesting.
But, of course, the Earth does rotate.
And so, you know, it's looking at one spot on the sky, but, you know, the sky kind of sweeps across it as the Earth revolves.
And so, they just put a, you know, I think it was like a 64-channel receiver.
I don't know how many channels their receiver had.
It wasn't 30 million.
It was a small number.
This was in 1977.
And, you know, it would just look for signals.
And every morning, one of the astronomers, a guy by the name of Jerry Amon, actually, that was the guy's name, he would come in to the observing room in those days they print out the
results on paper for people who remember those big line printers
the computer cease to have
and he would just flip through the paper and look for a signal and one day came
in and there was a big signal he wrote wow next to it so that became known as the wow signal I mean this is maybe
the triumph of marketing over product because you know all those other
signals that were found in there were many others that were found in those days
they didn't have such a nifty name and they're not remembered
but the question is was it ET?
do you have a recording of the wow signal?
No, there wasn't any recording.
It was just a bunch of numbers printed out on this line printer.
And you can go online.
I mean, people who are interested should go online and just, you know, search for... What do you mean a bunch of numbers?
Look, we all saw Jodie Foster sitting right there with those headphones on and this... started up, right?
Yeah, well, we did.
And you're telling me it's only a bunch of numbers, huh?
I don't want to disillusion you.
You know, you're too young for me to disillusion you, but you know, it was a movie.
Not young!
No, no, no, there were just like, you know, 10, 12, 15 numbers that went from, you know, something like 0, then 1, 3, 5, 8, 12, and then they had some hexadecimal numbers because they, you know, when they got beyond 9, they needed some other way to represent the number.
But it's just a string of, you know, maybe a dozen numbers.
But these numbers are a combination of actual numbers like 0, 1, 2, 3, ordinal numbers,
then plus A, B, C, D, E, F. Now, if you program computers, you know that's hexadecimal. It's
just a way of representing numbers up to 16. So in other words, these
were meaningful.
They were just the intensity of the signal. That's all it was. It just went,
and it came back down, and that's it. And if you listen to it, you wouldn't hear anything.
You would just hear some static that went, pshhhhhh. That's it.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah, that's kind of neat, but you can't dance to it.
The thing is that that telescope was programmed to automatically re-observe everything a minute later.
You sort of, you know, check it out.
Yeah, but the Earth is turning.
It is.
It is, but they offset the receiver in such a way that it would look at the same spot.
So every spot on the sky got two tries, if you will, two opportunities to make the signal known.
So this signal was found, but a minute later it was not found.
So, what was it?
Well, maybe it was E.T.
and, you know, he was on the air for a minute and then he took a break.
I mean, it could be.
Could be.
Or maybe it was just interference and then it went away.
Could be.
But you don't know.
Nobody knows.
So... Well, it had to be wow above everything else they were getting to be called the wow signal.
Yes.
It was very strong.
Was it observed by more than one?
Well, it wouldn't have been.
No.
Because only that was pointed at it.
Yes.
There have been attempts since that time.
I mean, this is quite a while ago.
This is almost 40 years ago now.
Right.
And there have been attempts.
There's a gentleman in Chicago, Robert Gray is his name, and he has actually gone to radio telescopes around the world and gotten a little bit of time and, you know, re-observed that spot on the sky where the wow signal came from with much better equipment, actually, and much more sensitivity and looking over much more of the radio dial, and he's never seen it again.
So, you know, If you only see it once, you might be convinced that nobody else is going to be convinced.
Got it.
All right.
This is that break where you can walk around, do what you want.
Break.
We've got news, a couple of spots, and we'll be right back.
I know you can see me now here's a surprise.
I know that you have cause there's magic in the air.
To sniff our packets, then with a smile on your face, please call the show.
That's 1-952-CALL-ART.
Love that.
Actually, it sounds like an alien language, doesn't it?
That's 1-952-CALL-ART.
Love that.
Actually, it sounds like an alien language, doesn't it?
All right.
My guest is a significant person, Dr. Seth Shostak.
He is Senior Astronomer and Director of the Center for SETI Research.
That's quite a title.
Seth, welcome back.
Okay, I think welcome back.
There you are.
All right, Seth, a lot to talk about.
So we had the WOW!
signal, and then you had been working for, what, many, many years, right?
Well, yes.
I mean, the Wow!
Signal was in 1977, so that's a while ago.
Okay, since 1977, have you had anything as impressive as the Wow!
Signal apparently was?
You know, at the time of the wow signal, the way you would do these experiments, you point the antennas up in the sky and you had to record the data.
You didn't have the compute power back then to actually, you know, analyze it kind of real time.
So, typically, you would record things on computer tape, like in the old sci-fi films, on these big tape units there.
Yes, of course.
Well, they actually had that stuff.
So, you know, you'd record those things, and then you would take this tape back to wherever it was that, you know, you actually worked.
That might be far away from these antennas.
It might be thousands of miles away.
So you'd cart all these tapes back to your office, you'd play them on a computer there, and then you'd analyze things, and you'd find a signal.
Well, you know, what's that?
It looks kind of interesting.
But of course, you can't just immediately check it out because it's long gone.
So in those days, when you had that situation, there were lots and lots of signals that looked interesting.
But today, we have enough compute power that when you get a signal, you immediately check it out.
And it turns out, if you have that capability, Then all those kind of intriguing, wow-like signals seem to have gone away.
So that says to me that those guys were not real.
They were just interference and you didn't have the ability to identify it as interference at the time.
So then a person might almost say that since we've been listening There probably has not been a signal indicating extraterrestrial intelligence received by radio.
I think that's a fair thing to say.
I think it's a fair thing to say.
In 1997, we did have a signal that looked really good.
And in fact, it looked good for, I don't know, about a day.
And I was at home.
I just had dinner.
And the boss calls me up at home and he says, I think you ought to get down here.
So I drove down to the Institute and found all my colleagues arrayed behind a phalanx of computer terminals all watching the screens because they picked up a signal that looked good.
Now that was very interesting and very exciting for about, I don't know, 16 or 18 hours until we figured out it was a satellite.
But for quite a while, that was maybe the longest time we went.
Where we thought this could be it now.
It would be sure fun to hear what that 16 to 18 hours was as all of you listen to this incredible signal that you thought was coming from elsewhere.
That's still actually a long time, 16 or 18 hours.
That's a long time.
You, of course, called the president, right?
Call the president of the local rotary club.
No, I didn't call the president.
I don't know the president's number, actually.
But I was expecting somebody to call us.
I have to say that, you know, because usually you hear, come on, guys, you know, if you found a signal, you know, the federal government will move right in.
The men in black will show up and shut you down or something.
But, you know, that's right.
Yeah, it didn't happen.
Nobody was interested. I mean, you know, there were people who were interested and by the time it was all over the
newspapers were calling because they knew about it by then.
But no, the government never showed any interest.
If the signal had been a description of how to build a better bomb, they'd have been there.
Well, maybe.
Maybe.
I mean, who knows what the signal was.
It was the signal.
But, you know, we're just picking up what's called the carrier signal.
That is to say, it's just a component of the signal that's in the air to carry the information.
So, it's not actually interesting to listen to, if somebody's on the air, and that's the first thing you want to do.
So, you were hearing a carrier without modulation?
That's right.
So, modulation is... We weren't even hearing it.
It was just numbers on the screen.
Okay.
Modulation is the intelligence that would be included in the carrier.
Exactly.
So it was a radio signal without any message, if you will.
But only because if there was a message, it would take a different kind of equipment to find that.
It turns out it's much harder to find the message than it is just to find the on the air sign, if you will.
Okay, so then to sum up, other than that great excitement and of course the wild signal, which you kind of dismissed, there's been nothing in all These years and all these planetary systems, we pointed at nothing.
That's right.
That is correct.
And some people think that's, you know, significant.
They think, well, you know, you guys have had plenty of time to do this.
After all... Even you were one of them.
I remember you telling me, and I'm sure you remember it, you said, if we don't get a signal, and I forget what it was, the next five years, ten years, something like that, we're going to have to start thinking there may not be one to get.
Well, I don't quite remember it that way.
Maybe it was 50 years.
I don't know.
What I do remember saying, and this I would say again, in fact, I'm going to say it again right now, if we don't, if SETI doesn't succeed by, I don't know, say 2050, that's a long way off.
2050, so that's 30 something, 35 years away.
If we don't find something by then, Because by then we will have looked at millions of star systems.
Millions.
At this point we've looked at thousands.
But because of the improvements in technology, by then you looked at a fair sample of star systems.
And if you don't find anything after looking at millions of star systems, you know, some people would say, okay, that proves it.
We're the smartest things in this part of the universe.
And a lot of my neighbors believe that's true.
Would you be one of those saying that at that point?
I would never be one of those saying that.
That strikes me as entirely too improbable.
What I would say, though, at that point is that this is the wrong experiment.
We're not going about this the right way.
What we're looking for isn't something we're going to find.
So you've already thought of this, actually, right?
And that tells me you've already thought of a better way.
Well, I'm not sure I've thought of a better way.
I can think of ways that, you know, sort of improvements or changes in what we're doing that might really change the odds.
Like what?
Well, the most obvious thing is simply to have antennas and equipment that's a hundred or a thousand times more sensitive.
We're listening for signals that have to be fairly powerful.
In other words, the Klingons or whoever they are up there, they have to invest a fair amount of money in their transmitting setup Unless they know we're here, and they're deliberately targeting the Earth, and they can make a very focused, if you will, a very beamed signal, and then it doesn't cost them so much.
But if they don't know we're here, and they're just giving the, if you will, the galactic weather forecast, or maybe it's the galactic internet signal, or whatever it is, if it isn't really intended directly for us, we're only going to hear it if it's an incredibly powerful transmitter.
And that might be unrealistic.
Maybe you don't want to pay for all those kilowatt hours.
In that case, if you had receivers that were a thousand times more sensitive, then maybe the landscape changes.
Okay, so we've pretty well summed up the signals not received to date.
That's right.
All right, something I want you to hear.
Hold on just a second and you'll get a chance to respond to it.
This is Dr. Stephen Greer, and I know that you know that name.
What I want you to do is listen very carefully.
Now, I'm going to say something here because this is enough years after it happened.
A few years ago, there was a show called Coast to Coast with Art Bell, and it was on the cover of Time Magazine, and I was one of his favorite guests.
And when I'd be on that show, it really lit things up at certain agencies.
And one time I was on his show and a few years back towards the end of his career there and this issue came up and I said well you know I have a source high up in SETI that confirms to me that they in fact have received interplanetary signals but in a kind of phased not normal array it was kind of a pulsed array and that it was kept secret and covered up.
And the city people were furious.
Subsequently, Seth Shostak got on the show and just said, well, Dr. Greer knows what he's talking about and he probably talked to some volunteer computer operator because we have all this network of volunteers.
What Art Bell didn't know and what Seth Shostak didn't know, which I'm going to say now because it's enough water gone under the bridge, is that The guy who told me that was the founder of the SETI project and the Drake equation, Dr. Drake.
He told me that, that they had had that contact.
Moreover, a man who had been one of Carl Sagan's best friends, the best man at his wedding, confirmed it.
And he had been present when the wow signal came in at Harvard.
There you have it.
I'd like to get your reaction to that.
Well, I'll try and moderate myself here.
I actually do remember this show when Stephen Greer came on, on your program, as he says, and he went on for a couple of hours about how he knew that we had found a signal.
Now, first off, you've got to ask yourself, if we'd found a signal, why wouldn't we tell the world?
That would really help our funding.
Right, but at that time, to be fair, he didn't say how he knew this.
Oh, he did.
He did.
He didn't say what he just said.
Somebody had said he told them.
He said somebody at the SETI Institute told him at a party, actually.
There you have it.
He laid it out here, though, who it was.
He did.
He did.
And I got hold of, you know, Coast to Coast, and I said, this is incredible.
And, you know, and they said, we'll put you on.
So I was on with you, I think, the next night or within 48 hours, anyhow.
Right.
And what I had done in the meantime was, you know, there were only four The thing is that there were only four scientists connected with the SETI project at that time, and of course they were all just down the hall from me.
They're not casual acquaintances.
They're people I work with every day.
whereas in fact it was at Ohio State.
But never mind any of that.
The thing is that there were only four scientists connected with the SETI project at that time,
and of course they were all just down the hall from me.
They're not casual acquaintances.
They're people I work with every day.
And I went to all of them, including Frank Drake, by the way,
and said, what do you know about Stephen Greer?
Not one of them had heard of Stephen Greer, let alone have talked to him at a party somewhere.
somewhere and so I thought okay well that's interesting so I called up the
Stephen Greer's organization should I go on? I mean do you want to hear more of this?
A little more. Okay so I called up Greer's operation in Charlottesville, Virginia
and I asked to speak to Mr. Greer about this because I wanted to know with whom he had spoken.
He didn't say on the air when he was with you that it was Frank Drake.
Right.
Of course, if Frank Drake had known that we'd pick up a signal, frankly, Drake would be, you know, he'd have a Nobel Prize on his mantle today.
And they didn't let me talk to Greer, actually.
And in the end, they just stonewalled me.
They said, well, he's busy.
And I said, look, well, could you just at least send me an email?
Just have him tell me a date or location where he heard this information, just so I can verify it.
Yeah.
And he refused to do that.
Well, I doubt they refused.
They probably didn't know at that point.
I mean, the reason I pulled this audio, obviously, is because he laid it out.
You know, the people involved and everything else.
Now, are you absolutely sure, Seth, that if one was received, that even you, as senior astronomer, I mean, of course you would know, but I mean, what if there's some protocol that you don't know about
well i i i was terribly of the uh... international committee that set the protocols
so i guess i know about the product off but beyond that you you you just gotta back off from this
for a moment and look at
what we're trying to do we're trying to find a signal that would prove somebody's out there
Oh, yes.
Okay, and we do this on the basis of volunteer donations.
I mean, the only money we get for this is the money people send us because they think it's an interesting thing to do.
Now, if we had found a signal and that looked pretty good, doggone it, you know, the problem of the funding of course would go away.
But it would be like asking a cancer researcher Ralph, you're looking for a cure for cancer.
Now, are you sure you're not keeping that a secret?
Maybe you found it and you're keeping it a secret.
Would you say, well, does that make sense?
From some points of view, Seth, you know it does.
Well, not in the case of SETI because, you know, there are people who will say, You know, Seth, if you guys find a signal, probably the government would want to shut you down, keep that news quiet.
Yes.
And every time somebody says that to me, I have to come back and say, why?
Why would they want to keep it quiet?
It would be one of the most interesting discoveries ever.
So why would they want to keep it quiet?
If you discover Antarctica, do you want to keep it quiet?
Oh, I've got a lot of answers for that.
Okay.
And you know, we've had this argument before, or this discussion before, but there are obvious answers.
It would, depending on the nature of the contact, it might well very much upset religious faith across the world, not just here, but across the world, and it would just depend on the nature of the contact.
If it's just some You know, dot, dot, dot, we're here, dot, dot, dot, we're here, dot, dot, dot, we're here, but we're a hundred light years away, dot, dot, dot, no problem.
A hundred light years seems like, you know, plenty of separation.
But if it's, we're here, dot, dot, dot, we're going to take over, dot, dot, dot, get your armies ready, they'll last about five seconds, dot, dot, dot, that's a different kind of signal, right?
Well, to begin with, that's a signal that we couldn't pick up, right?
Because that one has modulation.
That's a signal with a message.
Remember, we're only listening for the dial tone, if you will.
We're listening for the carrier.
Okay, so the carrier doesn't carry any information.
It's just part of the signal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But once you get the carrier, you're going to be looking for the modulation real quick.
It's a completely different instrument to do that, and it would take 10 years to build that.
What?
You mean to tell me, if you got a signal that amounted to a carrier of whatever nature, You couldn't examine it for any modulation for 10 years?
You serious?
No, you could try.
You could try.
But the thing is, I mean, if they were just modulating the carrier, this is getting a little bit technical.
Modulation, folks, just means information.
Right.
Right?
Think of this carrier, this signal.
You can look at the carrier, it's like a whistle.
It's a single tone.
Yes.
Like that.
And they could turn that on and off.
That would be some kind of modulation.
Right.
You know, interstellar Morse code.
Right.
If they had a slow fist, if these guys were really slow in sending their Morse code, you know, maybe you could pick that up.
They're only sending a few words per minute, but they're not going to do that.
If they're going to the trouble of building a transmitter that's, you know, sending information into space, they're going to send a lot of information.
You're not going to waste time, you know, sending a few words per minute.
Any more than you want to dial a modem anymore.
Well, when we transmitted from Arecibo in that very controversial transmission, we sent information.
Very little information.
1,679 bits.
That's not much.
Any page of text in a magazine has considerably more.
More than a blank carrier, though.
It was done with two carriers.
It was done with two carriers.
And you might be able to get that, but the point is really a different one.
The point is, you're picking up a signal.
There's no danger in picking up the signal.
If somebody tunes in their favorite talk show host, right, in their car radio, you don't have to worry that that talk show host is going to jump into the car and start giving them a hard time just because they got tuned in.
The talk show host doesn't know who's tuned in, right?
So, that would be the same with us.
We pick up a signal, of course they don't know that that... I mean, the signal may have taken a thousand years to get to us.
The guys who sent it might be long gone, but... I sometimes feel like strangling my callers, occasionally.
In any case, Mr. Greer, I've had to occasionally debate him on the radio, but he just makes stuff up.
I hate to say this, but he just makes stuff up.
So that's where you stand in response to that statement, he made it up?
Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
You can talk to Frank Drake himself.
Ask him, hey Frank, did you ever talk to this guy Steven Greer?
I asked him that, actually.
And he said, I don't know who that is.
That was his response?
Well, yes, and you would think if he made a statement of the kind of magnitude we're talking about here, certainly he would have recalled it.
Oh, well, not only that, but if we picked up a signal, it doesn't matter whether he recalled, you know, Stephen Greer or not.
Unless Frank, like, turned around after you asked him and thought, oh my God, how does he know?
You don't think so, huh?
I don't think so, no.
Nope, really don't.
We do have to talk about protocols.
You say you have written the protocols that would be used if a signal was detected.
When do the protocols kick in?
How many people have to verify it before the protocols begin?
Well, the protocols are simply, if you will, a code of good practice.
It sounds like something for a television.
Code of good practice?
It does.
I mean, it's no force of law.
And there have been protocols that were set up during the NASA SETI days.
So even back, you know, in the early 90s, these things have been drafted.
Sounds like something you'd for an outline for a sitcom or something.
Listen, hold tight.
We'll be right back.
We're at a big point.
Seth Shostak.
the senior astronomer and director of the Center for SETI Research, my guest.
In that darkest time between dusk and dawn, the sun is shining. The stars are shining.
dusk and dawn. From the high desert, it's Art Bell's Midnight in the Desert.
Now, here's Art.
Well, okay.
I'm going to sort of semi-open the phone lines, even though we've got a lot to talk about with Seth.
So, if you have a Skype call you want to make, and you're in North America, it's so easy.
M-I-T-D 51 is what you put in.
It's like you're gonna dial something.
M-I-T-D 51.
And call us.
Here is Seth Shostak once again.
All right, well, so we've got to face at least the possibility, Seth, that we are all alone.
Although we did recently, I saw this amazing photograph.
In fact, it was too amazing to be true.
They called it Earth 2.
I guess you probably saw that headline somewhere.
There's this planet they found.
But it's really far away, I think.
And they call it Earth-2.
Do you see that headline?
Well, I think you're probably referring to a planet called, you know, its other name other than Earth-2.
Hmm.
Kepler-452b.
That's the one.
Okay, all right.
Well, that probably doesn't look quite as impressive on the library card as Earth-2.
No, and they actually showed a picture of it.
You know, it had an atmosphere.
You could see continents.
Yeah, well, all of that is an artist's impression.
Yeah, you got it.
They haven't actually seen this thing.
This was found by the Kepler Space Telescope, which is a NASA telescope up in orbit, and it was launched, what, four or five years ago?
And what it did, up until part of it broke, Up until about a year ago. It would just stare at a hundred
and seventy thousand stars and just measure the brightness all the time
every 30 seconds it would download you know the brightness of each one of those hundred and seventy thousand stars and
if you know what a Particular star had planets going around it and they were
oriented the right way Well that planet would get in front of the star and just
reduce the brightness of the star An Earth-like planet doesn't reduce the brightness very much because it's small compared to a star.
Right.
It will reduce it by about one part in 10,000, so 0.01% typically.
And this was one that they found in the data that did that.
And it was about the same size as the Earth.
It was also in the same sort of orbit as the Earth because it's year.
They know that because of the time between, you know, it dims the star and then a certain period of time later it dims it again and dims it again.
And the period of time was 385 days.
Pretty close.
Yeah, it's pretty close.
So, you know, if you lived on that planet you would age a little bit less quickly.
At least the birthdays wouldn't come quite as quickly.
And it also is orbiting a star that really is very similar to the Sun.
A little bit brighter, but not much different than the Sun.
So here you have a planet.
It turns out to be about the same size as the Earth, a little bigger, 60% bigger.
It has the same year.
We don't know if it has the same day or anything like that, but we know the temperatures on that planet are going to be somewhat similar to Earth because it's the same distance from its star.
So that's why it's called Earth 2.
It's a cousin of the Earth, we think, maybe.
Okay.
That is neat stuff.
So it's very much like Earth in most ways that we can see, including perhaps the temperatures.
I guess we have no way yet to detect if it has water, right?
Yeah, that's hard to do.
The problem is, there are ways you could think of to determine if it has water.
If you could get a little bit of light from that planet, That means, folks, that if you could travel at the speed of light, you would have to travel for 1,400 years to get there.
these are things that astronomers do all the time.
You might see water vapor in the atmosphere, that sort of thing, but you have to get some light
from the planet.
And the problem is this star system is, what is it, I think it's 1,400 light years away.
All right, that means, folks, that if you could travel at the speed of light,
you would have to travel for 1,400 years to get there.
Correct, Seth?
That's right.
Well, if you could travel at the speed of light, you know, you get there essentially instantaneously from your point of view.
But from anybody watching you go, they say, well, you know, Luigi took 1,400 years to get there.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
What have I got wrong here?
If it's 1,400 light years away and you're traveling at the speed of light, It takes 1400 years to get there.
Depends on whom you ask.
You know, that's just special relativity.
You know that clocks don't all run at the same speed, at the same rate.
This is what Einstein figured out and published in, what was it, 1905.
If you're in a car, you've got a watch, and it's set to the same time as my watch,
and I'm just standing on the side of the road watching you drive by,
I would see that your watch seems to go slower than my watch.
Now, at 60 miles an hour, that doesn't make really much of a difference.
No.
But if you're going at the speed of light, then your watch stops.
So from your point of view, it took you no time to get there.
But of course, you can't go at this speed of light, so maybe that's not the right way to look at it.
Maybe the right way to look at it is if you could go, say, 99% of the speed of light or something like that, then from the standpoint of somebody on the ground, they would say, OK, it took a little over 1,400 years to get there.
But from the standpoint of the crew on the spacecraft, they would say, well, that only took a couple of months.
They would have only aged a couple of months.
They would have only aged a couple of months, but still, they would have spent 1,400 linear years in travel, wouldn't they?
Only by the calendar and the clock back on Earth.
The clocks on their ship would have said, well, you've been here for three months.
Oh, really?
Or whatever it was.
Yeah.
That's relativity.
I mean, it's non-intuitive.
Well, that's relatively cool.
Yes, it is relatively cool.
It's also relatively strange.
But, I mean, in some sense, that's the big hope for ever going to the stars.
All right, listen, you want calls.
They're ringing off the hook.
So let's take a couple, OK?
OK.
All right.
Here you are.
It's midnight with Seth.
Hi.
Hello.
Hi there.
Yes, sir.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
But some of us, you know, having to go through the art of withdrawal.
Well, thank you.
Where are you?
Where are you located?
OK, I'm calling from Niagara Falls, New York.
OK, well, here's Seth.
Go ahead.
Yes, Seth.
Number one is I've been a big fan of the study at home software.
I've been running it for years and I recently stopped for a while but that's beside the point.
You guys started to address what I was about to ask.
I see one of the problems is that while you're searching for a signal, if you're trying to
get a signal from a star system that is, say, a million light years from here, well then
you're betting on a civilization that is a million years more advanced than us, because
is going to take a million years for that signal to reach you.
That's a pretty good point.
Is that a correct thinking?
I think it is.
Relatively speaking.
Just a couple of things.
I didn't get your name.
Mario.
Mario, okay.
Are you super?
Okay, Mario.
Well, you're absolutely right about that.
That means that if it was from a million light years away that the signal was sent a million years ago, and that means that they would have had to have developed, you know, powerful radio transmitters a million years before we did.
That's not impossible.
You know, the universe is 13 billion years old.
The earth is four and a half billion years old.
In other words, The universe has been here three times as long as the Earth has.
So most of the stars out there are billions of years older than our own.
So, you know, what the heck?
Why couldn't they be a million years more advanced?
But, but, but, but, but, but, okay, but, just like our television signals have left this
planet and it's traveling throughout space, okay, someone could be watching I Love Lucy,
even though I don't think it's gotten that far to another star system yet.
Okay, so that race really doesn't have to be that much more advanced than us.
But the idea is trying to pick up a signal that race would have to be a million times more advanced than us for that signal to have left that star system for you to receive.
Got it.
I really do have it.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mario.
Well, all right.
Let's take off from there.
First of all, why does everybody use I Love Lucy?
That always has to be the thing received.
Anyway.
Yeah, I think it's written into law somewhere.
If we received a signal from, you know, a planet that far away, what did he say, a thousand light years?
He said a million light years.
A million light years.
That's kind of overdoing it.
Overdoing it.
Say a thousand light years, that would mean That we were essentially looking a thousand light years into the past when they had radio.
And so if they still exist now, in the now now, they will have been that much more advanced and to them, if they even paid attention to our puny little answer, assuming we sent one, we'd be to them as ants are to us.
Well, that's a lot, yes.
I mean, that could be.
It could be, yes.
A couple of things.
To begin with, in general, we're looking tens, hundreds of light years away, so the difference isn't that enormous, but the point is still valid.
But so what?
Well, what do you mean, so what?
They would wish us gone, and we'd be gone, if that's what they wanted.
That's how powerful they would be.
They could be very powerful.
But again, all we did was pick up their signal.
They didn't know that we did that.
And the other thing is the fact that it's old information.
In this case, your example there, Art, a thousand years old.
So what?
I read Julius Caesar in high school.
That information was 2,000 years old.
It was still interesting to read and Julius Caesar wasn't going to attack me for it.
And I didn't have to worry about the fact that if I talked back to him, he was now more advanced than anything like that.
So what?
I mean, the fundamental point is that if you pick up a signal, yes, it's old.
It might only be 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 or 500 years old.
It might be a thousand years old.
A million is much, much farther than any of us ever have looked.
Let's stay in the middle, but 500.
500 years, my God, Seth!
Think of us, if you can even try and imagine us, 500 years from now.
It's scary.
Well, I hope we have the cure for death, Art.
But yes, okay, but there's an advantage to all this too, and Mario may have been going in this direction, that if you hear from a society that's very much more advanced than we are, Right.
I mean, maybe you hear from them just when they're at the same level that we are, but it's more likely they're more advanced because they really need those powerful transmitters for us to hear them.
Then maybe they can teach us something.
And the fact that they're not there anymore or their society has moved on to who knows what, you know, well, that's just the way it is.
But it might still be very interesting to hear from them, even though you're reading newspapers, if you will, from last week or last month or 10 years ago.
But if it's the only newspaper you get, It's still interesting to read it.
It would be interesting.
I certainly agree with you, but it also could be catastrophic.
That thought in mind, Walnut Creek, you're on the air with Seth.
It's midnight.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
It's an honor to speak to you.
And I'm calling from Walnut Creek, California.
Good evening.
Seth, I'm not a comedian.
I'm not trying to be funny.
There's just some weird things that pop up in my head every so often, and I've I've wondered, nobody can seem to answer this question.
All the email people, nobody gets back to me.
Nobody has an answer.
I'm wondering, is there anything slower than not moving?
Is there anything slower than not moving?
That's an interesting twist on how high is the sky, right?
Yeah.
You know, by definition, if you're not moving, that's about as slow as you can go.
But maybe it's worth pointing out that it's impossible not to move at all.
Okay?
I mean, you might think you're not moving, but of course, if you're just sitting there
in a chair, you are moving because the Earth is rotating, and then the Earth's going around
the Sun, and then the Sun is headed off into the galaxy, and the galaxy's moving, so everything's
moving.
You say, well, wait a minute, there must be something that's not moving.
Turns out that there's really nothing that's not moving.
You can take a bunch of atoms and you cool them down, and they slow down when you cool them down.
And if you could cool them to absolute zero, then they would stop in theory.
But in fact, they never stop.
They never stop.
So everything is always moving.
So I guess in that sense, you know, a complete stop is kind of a misnomer.
OK.
Caller, are you worried you're lazy?
I guess he's gone.
Yeah.
No, wait a minute.
Here he is.
Stop listening.
Yeah, yeah.
Maybe you just weren't moving quick enough.
No, I know I'm lazy.
I just... There are subatomic things moving really slowly, and so slowly you can't see them.
Or so tiny.
Yeah.
Okay.
I've never heard anybody, thank you, I've never heard anybody ask that question, so just based on that alone, Uh, you, you should win something.
I, I don't know what, but you should win something.
Um, let's see.
We have to, uh, take a quick break, so why don't I go ahead and do that?
Oh, baby.
Keith, let this roll for a little bit.
It's been so long.
I'm Art Bell.
Come on men and women, Skype up!
Call Midnight in the Desert at MITD 51.
That's MITD 51.
That's right, folks, Skype up!
I love that term, Skype up!
My guest is the Senior Astronomer and Director of the Center for SETI Research.
Seth Shostak.
And he admits that in all the years, including the wow signal, which probably wasn't as wow-y as we think, that we haven't heard anything yet.
And we'll explore those implications as well, too.
Seth, welcome back on.
Thanks, Art.
It's always fun to have you on the air.
I really enjoy you on the air.
You've got a certain bounce back to you that I like.
Well, it keeps me awake.
I hear your computer making little noises, by the way.
Really?
Yeah, I don't know where that is.
I've been trying to turn it off, but I'll just... It's alright.
I'll just turn off this Skype connection here.
Oh no, be careful.
Don't turn me off.
Alright, so lots and lots and lots of people want to talk to you, and I have stuff I want to sprinkle in.
For example, if Donald Trump were to give the SETI Institute enough money, would you be willing to call it the Trump Dish Set?
You know... Connie, I need an answer here!
Well, the answer is yes!
The answer is yes.
Look, I could make excuses and so forth and so on, but the facts are we would do that.
There's a lot of historical precedent for naming telescopes after the guy who writes the check.
He really likes stuff named after him, so there you have it.
Let's go where to?
I don't know.
Wilmington, North Carolina.
Hi, it's midnight.
You're on with Seth.
Hi Art, thank you for taking my call.
This is Gabrielle with Eastern Paranormal.
And I sent you a message through the wormhole.
What I would like to ask your guest is Frank Sumption, he was the developer of the first Ghost Boxes that we had, and now we have the Shack Hacks and Ghost Boxes and people are making them.
We're getting voices coming through them claiming that they're interdimensional beings.
Alright, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
This is a really cool story, but I'm not sure it fits in for Seth.
Yeah, this is the question.
I was about to finish it.
Okay.
And we're getting a lot of them saying they're space aliens, which is a type of alien being.
And so my question to him is, what does he think about that?
Where does he think these voices come through?
I posted a video in the DM Talk thing here that he can look at if he's on it.
But I'll get off and listen to it.
No, no, no.
Don't go away yet.
Actually, I'm glad you have asked this question.
Now, Seth, You're listening with very powerful dishes and computers looking at millions of frequencies, but how can you rule out the possibility that the communication will come in some way that we simply don't expect, maybe even one like she's talking about right now?
Well, I don't know the details of the ghost box, as I have to say.
I don't have one in my home.
But, in terms of, could it come, you know, in a different way?
Could the signal, could the proof... Come through a ghost box?
I mean, really?
Well, maybe I should look into it.
Maybe you should have a ghost box.
Young lady, can you get Seth a ghost box?
I absolutely could get Seth a Ghost Box.
There's also another question is we have these apps you can download on your iPhone.
I have an iPhone 2 and you can get them on Android.
Really?
They're saying it on the apps.
You should have Danny Big Beard from the Echo Vox.
Danny Big Beard?
Danny Big Beard.
He's got the Echo Vox on.
And they come through and they talk through them.
And like I said, some say we're ghosts.
We admit it.
I have one of those.
But I have a ton of them that say we're aliens.
We're on the moon.
They say they're on Mars.
They say they're in all kinds of places.
All right.
All right.
If you would, please send a ghost box post-haste to Seth Shostak at SETI Research Center.
And I know he'll be looking for that box.
I will.
Just to follow up there a little bit, because you asked, could it be that the proof that there's somebody out there comes out of, if you will, left?
No, I wasn't totally joking, Seth.
Really, I wasn't.
Well, I'm not joking with my answer, because the answer to that question is, yeah, could happen.
In fact, again, if you look at some of the most interesting discoveries in physics or astronomy, those are the fields that I personally know best.
You know, some of them came out of experiments that weren't designed to find what they found.
Exactly!
That could happen.
And in the case of finding ET, one thing that I think is a good contender for turning up something that we're not expecting is simply the increasing amount of imaging of the sky being done with really big telescopes.
They keep building big telescopes. You know, when I was a kid, the biggest telescope was the one in Mount Palomar,
the 200-inch telescope in Southern California.
Today, there are telescopes that are much, much bigger than that.
They're building one in Hawaii that's... the mirror is 30 meters across.
Well, that's like 100 feet. You know, the Palomar telescope is 200 inch.
It's 100 feet across.
And, you know, when you have those kinds of instruments looking at the sky, I mean, who's to say?
They might trip across something that we don't expect.
Moreover, who's to say that somebody doesn't invent some silly little thing that they call a ghost box that resonates in some crazy way that would make you and I laugh just thinking about it right now, but actually works?
Well, I wish them the best of luck.
I mean, personally, I'm not sure they have a ghost of a chance for doing that, but I wish them the best of luck.
All right.
Ken, on Skype, you're on the air with Seth.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
Good talk with Seth.
It is, yes.
I couldn't think of a better show to pose this question.
Okay.
It kind of goes along with the line to your last caller.
In regards to the frequencies that you span, I know most of it's in microwave spectrum, but From what I understand, gravitational waves travel much faster and another thing that you might want to add to that comment from the other caller is our brains have magnetite in them and we're subject to magnetic field influences and possibly gravitational waves.
Could it not be that what she's trying to relate to is that Mental communication with the brain is a possibility, and much faster than speed of light if it's on a gravitational wave.
I sure don't rule it out, Seth.
Well, Ken, here's the thing.
I do get quite a number of emails, maybe one or two a month, from people who say, you guys are wasting your time with radio waves or light waves because they only go at the speed of light.
So, why not use gravitational waves?
Why not look for gravity waves coming from deep space?
There are experiments, by the way, to look for gravity waves.
Even, Seth, from another dimension.
It could be spooky matter, related to spooky matter.
Spooky matter.
Well, there is spooky action at a distance.
That was Einstein's way.
But, Ken, just to make sure that you get this, according to Einstein, gravity waves travel at the speed of light.
They don't go faster than light.
They don't go faster than radio waves.
And they're really hard to detect, because we haven't even detected them yet.
We've got, you know, millions of dollars worth of equipment looking for gravity waves, and they still haven't scored.
And to generate a gravity wave that's strong enough for somebody to pick it up, you know, on some other star system, you know, requires doing something really impressive, like shaking your planet or shaking a star, something like that.
It's hard.
What if it's brain-to-brain communication?
I mean, ESP has been long known as a possibility.
Yeah, but it's not been demonstrated.
I think there's a big experiment, Ken, you may want to consider, that's testing whether, you know, ESP actually works.
And that experiment is called Las Vegas.
Well, there's also something that's called the Spirit and the Holy Spirit in the Bible.
Okay, well that's yet a different direction, although you can also use that in Vegas.
You can try that in Vegas too.
But you know, if somebody did, here's my answer, if somebody did win a lot of money in Vegas, I mean tons of money, using some special power like ESP, They probably wouldn't advertise it, Seth.
They wouldn't?
No, but the casinos might toss them out after a while.
I don't know.
But you know, ESP has been tested.
Occasionally, you know, they've run some experiments and they say, OK, look, you claim you can do it.
And they put people who claim they can do it into a testing situation where they're trying to send the color of a card or whatever it is to somebody in another room.
And it doesn't work.
One last comment.
The CIA has used it in remote viewing, so I know that some of it's proven, some of it's not, but I appreciate all those answers, and it was really good talking to you, and keep up the good work.
All right, Cam.
Thanks.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you, Seth.
Hold on.
We are at this nice longer bottom of the hour break.
I'm Art Bell.
Midnight in the desert, raging in the nighttime.
Stay right where you are.
I'll tell you what you're gonna do.
We've got a full bank of calls here.
But we love Skype calls.
Really, we do.
We love Skype calls.
So, MITD51 is the way to do it.
That's MITD51.
That's what I want to encourage.
We've got a full bank of calls here, but we love Skype calls.
Really, we do.
We love Skype calls.
So MITD51 is the way to do it.
When you come in on Skype, you know, if you're wearing a headset, mic, boy, do you sound
And if you're not, then just get up really, really close to where the microphone is on your computer.
If you can find it, it's like a little hole or something, and you can use that.
But you have the potential to sound really good on Skype.
And by the way, here once again is the Senior Astronomer and Director of the Center for SETI Research, Seth Chostak, along with somebody named Michelle somewhere else in the world.
Hi, Michelle.
Where are you?
Hi, I'm from Japan.
I actually called you last week, I think.
Oh, that's right.
Japan.
From Japan.
Okay, excellent.
First of all, did you get the picture of Mount Fuji I sent you?
I have not yet.
You sent it to Art Bell at artbell.com?
Hopefully you'll get it.
Okay.
So the question I had was a couple years ago I heard a news story about a research telescope like this that had detected signals that they determined were not natural.
It was somewhere in South America and when they brought it back and I guess they demodulated it or something, they found that it was Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s that had gone out to space And the signals had hit an interstellar object of some sort, and bounced back, and come back, and they were really excited because these episodes had all been destroyed by the BBC.
And I hadn't heard anything about that since, and I thought, who better to ask?
I haven't ever heard about this.
No, that's really cool.
Stop right... Migel, hold on.
Hold on.
Stop right there.
Seth, have you heard anything about this?
No.
The news of Doctor Who has not made it to me.
Okay.
I mean...
Michelle, I could say this.
You know, you send out a TV signal and it's true.
It goes out into space.
That part's right.
And if it hits something, some of the signal bounces back.
But even if it hit the moon, right, which is a pretty big object in the sky compared to anything else that you can
think of, much bigger than, for example, Saturn looks in the sky and
so forth, even if it hit the moon and bounced back, and that would
take three seconds, you would get the show three seconds later.
It's hardly much of a delay at all.
But the real point is it would be very much weaker.
Because only part of the signal actually hits the object, and even less of what hits the object actually makes it
back to you.
It's kind of a poor man's radar, really.
And to do radar with Doctor Who, I don't know, doesn't sound right to me, Michelle, I've got to say.
Well, like I said, you know, this was a news story that I had heard that was all over the internet for a little bit and then went away, so who knows?
It could have been fake or something, but... Could be misunderstood.
I figured it would be better to ask.
Oh, Michelle, if it's on the internet, it's got to be true.
Everybody knows that.
Oh, of course, right?
And I believe the BBC was actually talking about it because they were hoping that in the future they would be able to get some of these back because the tapes were destroyed, and so there's all these missing episodes.
All right, well listen, thank you very much for the question and for calling.
And Seth, what about that?
I mean, it is possible, isn't it, that something out there could... I'm going to give you one.
Seth, you're a radio guy, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
I swear to you, what I'm about to tell you is the truth, okay?
I used to operate very high power On the 75 meter band, which is 3.5 to roughly 3.9 megahertz.
Yes?
Okay.
On singles high band.
I would love to have you explain this.
There were several times, Seth, that I heard my own signal come back to me three or even for almost four seconds later.
I swear to you this is true.
They're called LDE's, Long Delayed Echoes.
It's not an echo when it comes that long.
Nobody knows how it's done or how it could be done because after all radio travels at slightly less than the speed of light, right?
Well, it depends on the medium, but normally we travel at the speed of light, at least in a vacuum.
Actually, it's slightly under, I think, the speed of light.
Anyway, whatever.
It goes fast, right?
So, it couldn't even be the moon.
If you do the math, three, almost four seconds, it couldn't even be the moon, Seth.
And there are a lot of ham operators that back me up.
This is true.
I grant you I'm operating high power, legal limit, all that stuff, big antenna, yeah.
But it's not possible.
Now, you're gonna say, somebody was screwing around with you, playing you back to yourself.
No.
Because in order to prove it to myself, I went sliding up a few kilohertz one way or the other, several times, and each time it came back on the same frequency.
How could that be?
Well, Art, I'm not sure I can answer the question.
Long delay echoes, I've certainly heard about them.
And, you know, depending on the angle of the antenna and all that, it's conceivable maybe the signal bounced from the ionosphere back to Earth and back up to the ionosphere, all the way around the Earth.
Maybe, maybe.
That doesn't sound... Even so, even if it did, the math doesn't work.
Well, it depends on the angle of the bounce.
But, you know, the moon, you ruled out the moon, but you shouldn't rule out the moon.
The moon is a quarter of a million miles away.
So to go there and back is a half a million miles.
So the 500,000 miles, the speed of light is 186,000 miles a second.
So to go to the moon and back takes a little over three seconds.
Right.
There you go.
Well.
Maybe you did moon bounce.
All right, fellow hams.
Hear me when I tell you my own signal coming back to me was 20 over 9.
Now that that's a strong darn signal, Seth.
Well, it is.
I don't think it was moon bounce because of that, because you wouldn't expect it to be so strong, but not even close.
Not even close.
All right.
Back to the phones we go.
Mount Pleasant.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello there.
Turn your device off, please.
It is off.
OK.
Excellent.
Thank you.
All right.
It's midnight.
You're on with Seth.
Go ahead.
Hello, Art.
How are you doing?
This is Wade.
How many radio operators around the world are listening to you this evening?
And I've got a question about the reason you need high-powered transmitters to listen.
The spacecraft that just did the Pluto flyby has a maximum output of 12 watts.
12 watts isn't a lot of power.
And it's got about a 30 dB gain antenna.
That's one.
And the other one, it is called Long Path.
And the signal does skip around the world, and a lot of times I've been unable to work stations, pointing my beam-type antenna directly at them, but been able to operate with them through the long path.
Right.
Opposite direction.
So the signal doesn't go all the way around the world.
Opposite direction.
It does go all the way around the world, but no way in the world does it take anywhere near three to four seconds.
So that's inexplicable.
And even if it does, it doesn't arrive back at 20 over 9.
No way.
No.
And another thing, a quick invitation.
Come back 3973 and sit back to the show.
All right, all right.
Thank you very, very much for the call.
No, there's just really no way to explain it, Seth.
No way.
I wouldn't give up, Art.
I think there is a way to explain it.
But I got to say, the moon would work, but the 20 over 9, which, of course, is Hamalingo for a really powerful signal.
Yes.
You know, that's the hard part.
It's impossible, Seth.
It's just not mathematically possible, but I guarantee you it happened.
All right, James.
James on Skype.
You're on with Seth.
It's midnight.
Go.
Yes, sir.
All right.
How are you doing tonight?
Really well, thank you.
All right.
Hey, since we're talking about outer space, and hopefully this question wasn't asked earlier, but I saw something in the news about a live feed for the ISS.
Okay, a golden orange UFO of some type, and of course NASA cut the live feed.
I was just wondering if Seth or you had seen that or had a comment on that?
Let me explain that to Seth.
Thank you for the call.
Seth, again this is the truth, or at least here's what I saw.
They had a live feed from the ISS.
It was just a static feed.
You could see part of the little piece of the space station.
And then beyond it, clearly, you could see objects leaving our atmosphere and going to space.
Two or three of them.
And by the time about the third one came along, NASA cut the feed like that.
Now, for some folks out there, Seth, that makes them really suspicious.
Well, I think I did see this.
I actually looked at the video, and what you see is indeed this fixed camera there on the ISS, and it's looking at the limb of the Earth, and you see these little, you know, little dots, these white dots, and they're moving.
It looks like they're coming up out of the atmosphere kind of thing.
But of course, to draw that conclusion, that they're coming up out of the atmosphere. You need to
know how far away they are.
And I've talked to plenty of people in the space program about these things,
which they see all the time. And what they are, are drops of oil or water, whatever,
that are actually coming off the space station. And they're like, you know, 30 feet away or 20
feet away, and they're catching a little bit of sunlight.
So they're not far away at all.
They're not, you know, craft coming off the earth. So you see these a lot, actually.
And so if you see them a lot, and then, you know, the transmission goes down for whatever reason,
maybe they're over a part of the earth and they don't have a good downlink,
and you know, the signal goes away. I'm sure that's it.
Yeah, it's very, very convenient to say, well, alright, NASA doesn't want you to see these saucers.
Right.
Well, maybe NASA doesn't want you to see oil drops.
Well, maybe not.
But there are a lot of us who look at something like that, and frankly, it really did look like they were coming up out of the atmosphere.
Well, it does.
It does.
But that's a common problem, actually, in the whole UFO realm, that people will say, you know, well, it was moving at thousands of miles an hour and it was this far away and that kind of thing.
And, you know, if you're going to say that, you need some way to gauge that.
You can't just say because that's what it seemed like to you that it was moving very fast, because, you know, you can only tell how fast it's moving if you know Well, you need to know how far away it is.
You need to know how far away it is.
And if it's something in the night sky, it's pretty hard to tell how far away it is.
You know, it might be a hundred miles up, and it might be a thousand miles up, and it might be ten feet up.
There's a drop of oil, huh?
Or water, yeah.
Maybe water.
Okay.
Virginia, all the way to the state of Virginia.
It's midnight for you, and you're on with Seth.
Seth, this is a plasmon in Richmond, Virginia.
I'm listening on shortwave on 5085 kilohertz, and I've got a question for you.
I saw a UK NEAR reporter ask you an article that was published kind of worldwide on August 4th about this creature, alleged creature, crab creature on Mars, and you kind of dispensed with that very abruptly according to what she reported.
I don't know if you recorded correctly as Being this paraidolia thing, and you know, that's sort of a reptilian brain thing.
Now, there's four images that were taken by the rover, and they were taken on Sol 710, which was on August 5, 2014, over a year ago.
It was widely reported to be taken in July.
I think that caused a lot of confusion.
So about 372 days ago, Rover's driving by this cliff face, and it's taking photos, and I caught four photos of this object, which was why I'm reporting it as a crab.
In reality, I've done some analysis, and I can assure you I'm not, you know, seeing things that aren't there.
I'm doing a exo-bioanalysis, a reverse engineering of exo-bioengineering to try to see exactly what this creature is composed of.
And I found that it has 50 ball joints and sockets.
It's limbs.
It's got ten limbs and they're bifurcated like legs at the knee that split out into two lower leg segments with opposable arms.
Yeah, this is a very detailed analysis.
It really is.
It's really there in four different pictures that's on the raw data.
And I'd like to dispense with the idea that this might just be Somebody conjuring up an image in their reptilian brain, because it's real.
It's in all forms.
Have you presented this to Richard C. Hoagland?
I wouldn't really want to do that without further analysis.
What I'm trying to do is put together a multi-layered image showing all the different body parts and how they fit together.
Alright, well when you get that, send it to me immediately.
This thing has to have About two and a half times the limb motor function control, and therefore it's got to be probably more intelligent than a human in terms of its motor control lobes in its brain.
And if you're looking for intelligence, I'd be happy to give you any data that I might have and let you look at it, because I think this is really important.
Send it to me.
I'm serious.
Be my guest.
Send it to me.
It's hard for Seth to comment on this.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, I did comment on the crab.
It's always good to talk to a fellow Virginian, I have to say.
But, you know, what I saw in the crab photo, the whole body of data, and no pun intended there, the whole body of data was, you know, a few hundred pixels.
Right.
So how you can do all this analysis about how many ball joints it has and so forth.
But let me put it to you this way.
You know, I've seen photos on Mars where there was one today about, you know, some little woman standing there on Mars. I think that these are all
the same phenomena. I really do think they're periodogia.
But if you were to see something that looked like, I don't know what, a carburetor lying on the surface of Mars,
you'd say, well that's a pretty unusual carburetor. But would you believe that? If somebody claimed,
I found a carburetor sitting on Mars, you'd say, you know, you're just seeing things in the rocks.
It's like looking in the clouds and you're seeing things that look familiar to you.
Jeff, I agree with you about the woman's image. What that looks like to me is very thin layers of dry ice
that's been sublimated so thin it looks just like a kind of sea.
McCaller, with the number of pixels that he mentioned, the resolution, how can you possibly be coming up with this analysis?
Well, I have actually many more pixels than that.
These are very high-resolution pictures taken with the Mastcam, and the data is in there.
I've been able to tease it out Uh, and, uh, and look at it.
Very, very many different layers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But when you go to, when you go too deep with not enough pixels, you're the one who gets teased.
Yeah, but, but there is enough pixels, uh, and we've been able to look at the, uh, at the, uh, the ball joints themselves and how they're configured.
All right.
This is not imaginary.
This thing is great.
All right.
Send it to me.
Okay?
I will promise to send it to you and I'll send it to Seth as well.
All right.
Excellent.
Thank you.
I do think that's what happens when you go too deep with not enough pixels, you begin to see, frankly, what you want to see.
Or your imagination can run... it's like looking at clouds, kind of.
Do you agree with that, Seth?
No, absolutely.
That's the problem.
I mean, our brains are really good at recognizing things that we already know about I mean, you can see why we're so good at that, because 100,000 years ago, it was really important that you recognize things like predators, for example, in a complicated landscape.
And yet a lot of times you would think, oh man, that's a lion, I better get out of here, and it's not a lion, but it's better to err on the side of caution from the standpoint of your own survival.
Hi, how are you?
I'm very well, thank you.
I missed the first part of the show, but I had a question for Seth.
that we're good at seeing things with very little information. We are. Denton,
Texas, your turn. It's midnight for you. Hi, how are you? I'm very well, thank you.
I missed the first part of the show, but I had a question for Seth. Mm-hmm. Are you
publicly funded? Well, the SETI Institute, which is where I work here, is, you know,
it's a nonprofit research organization and most of the scientists down the hall
here from where I'm talking to you are what are called astrobiologists.
So they're studying things like the history of water on Mars, the possibility of microbial life on some of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, that kind of thing.
And that is funded mostly by, you know, they get grants.
So that money does come from the government, mostly NASA.
The SETI project, Which is, you know, the listening experiments to try and find intelligent life elsewhere.
That's funded by donations.
That's all.
There is no government money there.
Okay, I was curious if you had to, like, give a presentation to a board or something, and then, you know, what do you present on your progress to get funding?
Well, you do have to present... Actually, that's a very good question.
Yeah, but the board doesn't really give you too much money.
I mean, it would be nice to have a board that consists of people who could, in fact, Help out in a very, you know, significant way in the funding of the organization.
Yes, yes, yes.
But Seth, if you had to go in front of them and say, look, you haven't found a darn thing yet, you've been looking since, what was it?
70... Well, the first modern SETI experiment, Frank Drake's, was 1960.
1960, okay.
Since 1960, what kind of argument do you make in front of that board?
Well, the board is well aware of that, of course.
They know the history of SETI, but they also know this thing that we actually discussed very briefly at the
beginning of the show, and that is that whatever experiment you're doing this year
is faster than every previous experiment.
Because of the improvement in mostly compute power, what you can do every year gets faster.
In fact, every two years, you can more or less double the speed of your search.
Okay. Caller, would that be enough of an argument to get you to approve the money?
I honestly...
No.
All right.
That's what I thought.
All right.
Well, see?
That's what you're up against, Seth.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
I'm Art Bell.
And boy, are we rockin' tonight.
Stay right where you are.
I'm gonna take the last of you and take me away from you.
Pay attention.
And that a hundred men or more could ever do This is Midnight in the Desert. To call the show, if you're
east of midnight, call 1952.
Call Art, if you're west of midnight, call 1952-225-5278.
Ha ha ha ha. Love that. Um, pay attention.
And by the way, Skype is MITD51. MITD51.
If you've got good audio, boy, you'll just sound great on Skype.
All right.
Once again, the senior astronomer, and we're kidding around with him a lot.
This is a very serious scientist, actually.
Senior astronomer and director of the Center for SETI Research.
Seth, that last caller at the end said, frankly, no.
Wouldn't fund you.
Yeah.
So... Well, you know, he might not have funded Captain Cook either.
True, true, true.
And you don't know when you're going to discover something.
And the fact that you've sailed around for a couple of months and haven't found anything, I mean, that might mean there's nothing to find.
Might mean that you shouldn't give up too early.
No, fair enough.
All right, let's return to those that are there.
Oh, boy.
Dave?
Yeah.
Hi, Dave.
I heard you say, oh, boy.
Yeah, well, you were just talking about something very dear to my heart, and that's prospecting.
And we have a saying, you're going to lose.
You're not going to win anything.
You're not going to find anything if you just don't go out.
And if you don't go out, you can't complain.
Never find anything.
So, for Art, remember your antenna story where you were saying you were developing a voltage, a static voltage?
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Well, you know, if you could commutate that with one of those Tesla commutators, those Tesla static motors, then you could get a voltage on a transformer and maybe use it to charge a phone.
I know, and maybe for more than that.
Listen, there is a company, I found out, sir, there is a company Actually working with antennas like mine that are producing voltage like mine, and they're working on You know putting it to practical use so Tesla wasn't going crazy He actually knew that this could be done and and just a little bit of antenna wire could prove it But we're talking something a little longer than that to be useful for the United States and for Seth man I don't want to just
You're a man of great inspiration for me.
But in order to communicate with these folks so far away, we should be using light, and we should be modulating the light by phase.
Maybe even with this time stamp, periods of light on and off, representing the distance between, say, the core of our galaxy and our Earth.
What do you think?
Well, light is perfectly okay with me.
In fact, we do some light and we have a whole project.
We're developing some new instruments for looking for light flashes in the sky.
Light works.
I mean, it's just, you know, it's another form of radio, if you will, or maybe radio is another form of light, whichever way you want to look at it.
And it's true.
I believe that it's the other way, that radio is a form of light, yeah.
It's close, you're saying, just because you can get more bits per second on a light beam than you can get on a radio beam.
And if you want to send a lot of information, better to use a fiber optic than a radio wave.
I've also got to say that there's dust hanging between the stars, so if you're trying to send stuff from great distances, the kind of light that you can see with your eye is not really the best way to do it.
Sure, there'll be occlusion.
Now one more thing, this idea of LDE, reflection of radio waves, what if enough electromagnetic bodies were floating in our greater ionosphere that creates occasionally a reflective cone?
I'm not talking about, you know... Maybe, but again, you know, the distances involved...
Just, they don't work with the math, even if you're talking about it bouncing all the way around the Earth.
Of the Van Halen belt?
Oh.
I'm just saying.
Oh.
Well, you're getting further out now.
Well, I see that's far enough where you can get that kind of reflection, and it's got an electromagnetic wave to it, and it could build up enough to reflect ions spherically.
Okay.
Alright.
I'm just saying.
Anyway, brother, it is so good talking to you.
Welcome back.
This is a bellwether day indeed.
Thank you very much, that's very kind.
Art, if I can say, somebody sent me a link to a BBC article on those 47-year-old television signals, you know, of the Doctor Who signals coming back to Earth, that were supposedly picked up, according to the article, using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and the BBC was happy about this, because indeed the tapes were gone, and this sort of thing, and they could get Doctor Who back into their archives.
However, It's maybe worth noting that this article was published on the first of April.
Okay.
First of April.
Well, I bet that's a bad day for you all around, isn't it?
Let's go back for a second to protocols.
You said you wrote the protocols.
Well, I didn't write them, but I was the chair of the committee that revised the protocols.
Yeah, we never got to the protocols, did we?
Well, no.
And I want to get to them.
In other words, if you received a signal, give me the official version of what would happen.
Well, official.
First, I've got to make a disclaimer.
There is no official version.
There are these protocols.
Indeed, they're a document that fits on, I don't know, three sheets of paper or something like that.
But they are a gentleman's agreement in the sense that there's no force of law.
It isn't that the UN has stamped these babies and said, Everybody's got to pay attention to this.
In fact, there's some people doing SETI who never even signed these things because they said, you know, come on, I don't have to sign a piece of paper to be honest about what I'm doing.
Okay, hold on one second.
Marty, I know you're there.
Just be quiet and listen.
We'll get you on the air in a bit, okay?
Okey-dokey, thanks.
Okay, good.
Proceed.
Okay, maybe we better not because Marty can't be quiet.
Marty, where are you calling from?
I'm calling from Bristol in the UK.
Okay.
Since we took it, you've got a little background noise, so I can't have you be quiet, so just go ahead and ask your question, and we'll go back to protocol.
Sorry about the noise.
It was basically referring to the caller a couple of calls ago about the Napa footage that was suddenly cut.
Yes.
Abruptly.
Yes.
My main was cast back 20 or so years ago, About a similar situation of NASA footage which shows objects entering and leaving the Earth and then a blast seemingly looked like maybe a projectile of some sort was fired and these objects changed direction which couldn't be explained.
So it seems to me that they are under intelligent control.
Okay, I've got it.
And let's address that, Seth.
He's right.
I have seen objects like your oil that you were talking about, like the oil, and they've changed direction.
Now, how do you account for that one?
They've changed direction?
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
You know, we're talking about these little things that were leaving the atmosphere, right?
Yeah.
And many times you see film footage of those things that don't go straight like the ones we saw, but they suddenly take a right-hand jog.
How about that?
Oh, OK.
You're talking about these ISS photos?
Yes, yes, yes.
OK, sorry.
I was still on the protocols.
We'll get back to the protocols.
I'm sorry.
It was England, so I answered.
OK, OK.
I don't know that they change direction.
I haven't seen that, so I can't speak to that.
I really can't.
Oh.
The videos I saw, they were just slowly drifting, which is what you expect, because they don't, you know, unless you give them a big push somehow, they're just going to slowly lift off.
They're, you know, in free fall, just like everything else in orbit there.
Okay, so if I were to show you a similar thing with objects that actually change direction in the trajectory, would that Make you go hmm?
I would definitely go hmm.
Okay, good.
Good, good, good.
All right.
Look forward to it.
I'll get it to you.
All right, so back to protocols.
Signal comes, then what?
Yeah, well, that's exactly what I said, but you check it out.
And you check it out as thoroughly as you can on your own instruments.
Sure.
Because, you know, you don't want to bug somebody else if it's just some sort of equipment failure, a software bug, who knows what.
Or, more likely than any of that, is it just some satellite that's gone overhead that has a transmitter, of course, and it's just fooling you.
But at some point, it might take a couple of days, but after you've done everything you can and you're still convinced this is the big one, or could be the big one, Then you call up somebody at another observatory, more likely than not they're probably in another country, and you just say, look, you know, we don't want to force you to interrupt what you're doing, but here's some coordinates on the sky in a frequency range, see if you can find any signal in there.
And if they find it too, then at that point you probably would just I would like to believe that what you're telling me is the absolute truth of the way it would come down.
that by then it's already in the papers. It's already out there. That's our experience.
Because there's no policy of secrecy. So every time you find a signal, you know, people are
putting it on their blog or they're sending emails to their friends.
Hmm. I would like to believe that what you're telling me is the absolute truth of the way
it would come down. But if it was obviously a really big signal,
It was intelligent life.
Yeah, I guess it might leak out, but also I'm thinking that you would have to notify.
I mean, there would be an official chain.
I'm sure there is.
In your protocols, there's got to be more than a press conference.
You don't go straight to the press, do you?
Really?
Well, we don't go to the press, actually.
The press comes to us.
That's what happened.
You know, when we've had these false alarms, it isn't that we started calling the papers because we still hadn't checked it out.
You know, we found this really interesting signal and we thought, you know, this has all the hallmarks.
Maybe this is it.
You know, I wasn't going home and going to sleep.
I was just staying at the Institute looking at the computer screen.
Sure.
OK.
And everybody else was, too.
I was pretty sleepy at nine in the morning.
I'm half asleep at my desk.
We couldn't follow the signal at that point because, you know, the Earth rotates and the star just dropped below the horizon.
So we had to wait something like 12 hours before we could see it again.
But, you know, when I'm half asleep on the desk, at the desk, the phone rings and it's the New York Times.
So that's what actually happens.
It's, you know, the media are calling you.
And the difficulty here is not due to secrecy.
It's the fact that they're going to be interested in stories even when you haven't verified the signal.
So you can expect that there are going to be false alarms.
So I'm Frank Rothschild calling you from the New York Times.
Now, we understand you've received a signal.
Is that true?
Yeah.
Well, I don't lie to the New York Times.
It wasn't Frank Rothschild, whoever Frank is.
I have no idea.
I just picked a name.
Okay.
Well, it was Bill Broad, actually.
He still writes for the New York Times.
And he said, so what about that signal you're following?
That's what he said.
That was his first sentence.
And I said, well, we are following a signal, but you know, we're trying to check it out and I'll know more in three hours.
Can you wait three hours?
He says, I'll call you back in three hours.
And in three hours we had tracked it down.
It was a European Solar Research Satellite and the telemetry, the signals coming back from that satellite with the data that was necessary for that satellite happened to be on the same frequencies we were looking and it was in the right part of the sky and all that.
So there was little doubt that that's what it was.
So you flatly deny That you would have to, you know, if a big thing came in, you'd have to notify the government before whoever from the New York Times.
Yeah.
I will flatly deny that.
It's true.
There's no law that says if SETI finds a signal, the first thing you do is call the White House or call the State Department or anything else.
You know, call the IRS, call whoever you want to call.
But no, no.
I don't know how you can deny this.
I saw the movie.
Okay, all right, you got me there.
But, you know, the facts are that this is research.
I know.
And research is, you know, it's fun to think that there's all this kind of conspiracy, but the facts are it's a very open process.
Well, don't discard conspiracy completely.
Massam, is that correct?
On Skype?
Yes.
Hi, how are you?
I'm fine.
Get very close to the microphone on your computer, please.
You sound like you're hollow.
Of course!
I'm very glad listening to your conversation and lecture from SessioStack.
I'm one of your fans at SessioStack since 2013.
Where are you calling from?
Actually, I'm in Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles, all right.
Do you have a question for Seth?
Actually, I wanted to just say something.
It was last year, I experienced something very strange.
I was listening to Statue of Sighs lectures.
I don't remember what that was.
Something strange happened.
I have the video that was recorded from my office.
Actually, he was talking about lots of things related to astronomy.
And then the voice changed to a robotic voice, and after just very short sentences, It just went like robotic noise and then something happened, very strange, was that I think the electromagnetic wave around my office just influenced the electricity and the power in my office.
It changed the light in my office.
I wanted to talk about this instead.
All right.
Well, Seth is here.
I don't know what he's going to make out of that, nor what I make out of it, but we will find out right now, Seth.
Well, Tom, I don't know.
You said that my voice turned into a robotic voice?
Is that what you heard?
It suddenly became robotic?
Yeah, I can play to you.
Let me do that.
Well, let's hear a little bit of it.
Okay.
Alright, I can handle it from here.
the okay alright i i i can handle it from here
uh... that was a uh... digital recording
or a digital playback that obviously began to get in trouble
And it wasn't a robotic voice you heard.
You heard digital stuttering is the way to put it.
Seth, you want to back that up?
Yeah, no, that's a real effect.
I mean, I don't really talk like that.
There are people who are, you know, their eyes glaze over like doughnuts when they listen to me.
So maybe they think I have a robotic voice, but it doesn't suddenly do that.
No, I wasn't actually sure.
He said an astronomer.
I wasn't sure whether it was you or somebody else.
The tape was not clear enough, but the digital stuttering was really easy to nail down.
So that's what you heard.
It was not like something from another planet.
I guarantee.
Well, almost guarantee, anyway.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
The hair is hollow gold, lips sweet as pie.
The love you gave me, nothing else can save me, it's so rare.
When you're gone, I cannot even try to go on.
Midnight in the Desert.
Exclusively on the Dark Matter Digital Network with Art Bell.
Invite you to call now.
1-952-CALL-ART.
That's 1-952-225-5278.
Or if you're on Skype and in North America anywhere, you can call us at MITD51.
That's Midnight in the Desert 51.
Don't spell it all out, just the initials.
MITD51.
And it's a free call on Skype.
All right, back now to Dr. Seth Shostak.
He is the Senior Astronomer and Director of the Center for SETI Research, no small matter at all.
I've been having a lot of fun with you, but we're very honored to have you here, Seth.
Well, thanks, Art.
Thanks.
You should mention that that's at the SETI Institute, by the way.
They might want to know where the organization is.
Sure.
Sure.
And you're actually located in?
Lovely, glamorous Mountain View, California.
It's the Silicon Valley.
Not a bad place to be, actually.
Well, Google's about a mile away from where we are, actually.
Really?
Yeah.
I'm going to resist making a wise remark and just say, I think it's Dallin.
Is that your name?
Yeah.
On Skype?
Hi.
Hi.
You're on the air with Seth.
Midnight.
Go.
I just wanted to see what your thoughts were on the idea of a multiverse and it being fractal and the idea of a simulation theory existing within a multiverse.
Well, that's a whole bunch of stuff.
I can't say much about whether it's fractal or not fractal.
The idea of a multiverse, the fact that there may be more than one universe for people who are not into multi-universes, there's something appealing about it in that it kind of provides a natural explanation for why so many things in our universe are kind of niftily set up for life.
You know, the value of The gravitational constant, to give a very trivial one, if that were a little bit stronger, you know, then you'd have problems in one direction with planets and life.
And so if the gravitational constant was a lot smaller, then you might not have stars or planets at all, that kind of thing.
And if you have a lot of universes, when I say a lot, I don't mean 10 or 100, but if you have, you know, a gazillion, whatever that number is, you have an enormous number of them.
Then, by chance, some of them are going to be just right for life, and those are the ones where we're going to be sitting around asking the question about, why is our universe so great?
So, that's the appeal of the multiverse.
It kind of provides a possible explanation for that, but nobody's been able to prove whether they exist or not.
I mean, that's something.
It's just an idea at this point.
You had another question in there.
Can you remind me what the third question was?
Because the second one was about fractals.
Uh, just my thoughts on it are that it could be fractal in nature.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I don't know if it's fractal or not.
I think, oh, now I know what you were saying.
You were saying the idea that there could be simulations.
This is the idea of a guy at Oxford University by the name of Nick Bostrom.
He's the one that's made this perhaps best known.
The idea that, you know, what we think is reality, our daily lives and so forth, is not real at all.
It's just a computer simulation being run in the future by maybe our descendants, right?
It was called an ancestor simulation when computers are very much more powerful and they seem to be getting power
more powerful all the time You can imagine that in 50 100 200 years. You might have a
computer powerful enough to simulate, you know It kind of like sim earth kind of simulation, but a much
much better one that can simulate Everything that you're experiencing and you're just cold
running in a computer It's not real what we're experiencing.
It's not really sitting there, you know, in Nevada, and I'm not really sitting here in California.
This is all just computer code.
And, you know, it's hard to disprove that, but it leads to some, I mean, it's a real head-scratching exercise.
I don't know what it really says.
I asked the guy, Nick Bostrom, once, if this is true, do I have to lead a moral existence?
Can I just have fun?
If I'm just computer code, I mean, what's the harm?
And he said I should lead a moral existence.
All right.
At the very least, it's fun to think about.
It is.
It is.
Can I?
All right.
Thank you, caller.
Can I ask a fractal question?
You can, but I may give you only a partial answer.
Well, all right.
Here we go.
They're making fractal antennas now, and I was wondering if you might not get a really big bump If that thing out at the end of the dish contained some new version of a fractal antenna in what it was sending in to you, you know, that's a much higher gain potentially.
Is that something being looked into?
Well, we have looked into fractal antennas.
In fact, a guy by the name of Nathan Cohen in Massachusetts, I think he started a company to make fractal antennas, so he was certainly into it.
And he was also very much into SETI, and he was looking into the application of fractal antennas for SETI.
You know, it turns out, in a way, there's no free lunch.
If you really want to be able to pick up very weak signals from the cosmos, you just need a big bucket.
And so, you know, you need just a big antenna, and it's hard to get around that.
I mean, the fractional antenna may help you in some ways.
High gain, low noise, you know?
Yeah, it might.
It might be broadband, that kind of thing.
Those are things that you might look at.
We're building some new feeds, some new receivers, if you will, that are able to tune the radio dial all the way from 1 gigahertz to 15 gigahertz, thanks to a gentleman down in San Diego who's giving the money for that.
Very exciting.
Very exciting.
They don't use fractal antennas.
It's kind of straightforward antennas, but they have very much better amplifiers.
Okay.
So many calls, so little time.
Hello there.
You're on the air with Seth.
There you go.
I'm sorry.
I didn't have you turned up.
Try again.
Where are you calling from?
I'm from Indianapolis, and I wanted to ask some kind of challenging questions to Seth.
Okay.
All right.
I heard him on Larry King five years ago make a statement that to me was a bit indicative of his wanting to find out for sure if life was out there or if it wasn't out there.
What did he say?
Well, I can give you the exact quote, I think, if my screen comes up here, but he said that He wanted to finally find out if Earth was a miracle or if it was actually just an accidental infection of life.
And basically he was saying, you know, by doing SETI, he would find out if we have an atheistic Evolutionary origin, or if God had to be involved for us to be the only ones there.
Kind of like what Arthur C. Clarke said about how it was terrifying either way.
Listen, we're out of break.
I want you to hold on.
Don't go anywhere, okay?
Alright, good.
Seth, did you actually use the word infection?
Cosmic infection?
I very well could have.
I've used that term.
I'm not sure I like being referred to as an infection.
Alright, hold on.
We'll connect you from the high desert.
Great American Southwest.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
I'm Art Bell.
My guest is Seth Shostak.
Thanks for watching! Please subscribe!
Thanks for watching! Please subscribe!
Look how dry you are.
Midnight Matter can be explored on Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
If using Skype from your computer, please be sure to use a headset mic and call MITD-51.
That's MITD-51.
Really hard to get people to use a headset mic.
It really is.
But, folks, when you do, you sound like you're right in the studio with me.
So, if at all possible, when using a computer, really do get a headset mic.
There's some good ones.
You know, you can go out to I don't know, Walmart or wherever, they've got them all over the place, and boy do they make a gigantic difference.
All right, back now to our guest Seth Shostak and our caller who was talking about a quote that he read from Larry King.
Caller?
Yes, this was an exact quote.
He said, the big question is, Is the Earth a miracle, or is life just a cosmic infection?
I think the latter is probably true, but let's go look and prove it one way or the other.
And you kind of pressed him on this earlier, where you wanted to know at what point was he going to give up.
And he said, I think he said, even in the year 2050, he still wouldn't give up.
And he just looked for a different way.
But that means he's philosophically bound to the idea that life must be out there.
And that isn't a falsifiable question.
And science, you're supposed to have falsifiability.
And he's never gonna falsify his belief.
That's my challenge for him.
Is there any point where you would answer the question one way or the other, and the other might be, yes, we are alone.
It might be terrifying.
It's kind of related to his answer about the multiverse, too.
Yes, there are a lot of nifty just-so features of our universe.
And if you reject the idea of God making it just so, then you pretty much do have to resort to something crazy like a multiverse to explain that.
And I appreciate that he said that.
So anyway, I'm going to challenge him.
How do you falsify the idea that we're not alone?
Yeah, well, the caller is right in the sense that this is a little different than, you know, I don't know, middle school science where they teach you you have a hypothesis and then you try and falsify it.
And he's quite right.
You can't falsify the hypothesis that there's somebody out there.
There's no way you can prove that they're not out there.
Okay, so I agree with that.
But keep in mind, this is not that kind of science.
This is exploration.
This is exploration.
And in exploration, you know, you can send Captain Cook out there and he sails around the South Pacific for three months and he doesn't find anything.
That doesn't mean that there aren't any islands out there.
He didn't falsify that hypothesis.
He just didn't find any.
Okay?
If you send him out again, maybe he will, maybe he won't.
If you send him out enough times, the chances get pretty good that he'll find something.
So, this is exploration.
Or you'll find nothing and still prove the null hypothesis.
No, no.
All you can do is prove that it is true.
You can't prove that it's not true.
And by the way, I would say this, you know, I did say 2050, if we don't pick up a signal with our study experiments, I would say, you know, I'd be inclined to think, all right, are we doing the right experiment?
But I think long before 2050, we're going to find life in space and not of the intelligent variety necessarily.
You know, it could be that we will find microbes dead or alive on Mars.
But there are six other places in the solar system besides Mars that we know about already where you could have life.
Microbial life, it's true.
It's not going to be, you know, something that holds up its side of the conversation.
But if you found biology, for example, on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, You know, what would that say?
Well, they'd say, well, at least biology is not anything terribly special, because, you know, there's several worlds in our own solar system that have it, and there are a trillion planets in the galaxy, and a hundred billion other galaxies, each with a trillion planets.
So, I guess that's what I'm really saying when I say a miracle.
When I say a miracle, you shouldn't interpret this as some sort of religious statement.
It isn't that.
What it is, is saying...
If, you know, did we win an incredibly, you know, a lottery ticket out of 10,000 billion, billion lottery tickets, we got the winner?
Or are there a lot of winners out there?
That's really the question.
But your statement was you want to prove it one way or the other.
And wouldn't you agree that when Frank Drake first turned on his radio telescope or whatever he used, he expected probably within a week to hear I've never heard him say that.
Well, no, but I'd say if it was as pervasive out there as what was once thought, first of all, it's been proved that there's not a single ET civilization who wants to broadcast itself to the galaxy And has the capability to do it.
Wouldn't you agree to that, Seth?
No, absolutely not.
No, not proven.
Not proven.
Now you're on the wrong side of it, Caller.
Not proven, Seth.
Yeah, no.
The fact that you haven't found a signal doesn't prove that they're not doing that.
It means you haven't found a signal.
Right.
Maybe you've been listening to the wrong part of the radio dial.
Maybe you don't have enough sensitivity.
Maybe you've been pointing the antennas in the wrong direction.
That's just to name three things you could be doing wrong, and there are many more.
So, the fact that you haven't found them yet, you know, I wouldn't lose hope.
If this is something you hope for.
I wouldn't give up just because you've looked at, you know, one, this is what it comes down to, you've looked at one acre.
Well, I think there's actually a faith-based component to all this.
I didn't want to get into an argument about religion because this isn't about religion.
in that one acre. I had more of a feeling that he was hoping you wouldn't find
anything. Well I you know I think there's actually a faith-based component to all
this. Yes. I didn't want you know to get into argument about religion because this
isn't about religion. When I say a miracle what I mean is a some sort of
incredibly improbable event that in a trillion planets in our galaxy this is
If E.T.
the only one where anything interesting is happening. That makes us very special.
And ever since Copernicus, scientists are always a little bit cherry of believing
that they're that special because in the past every time we thought we were
special we were wrong. Let me modify a statement I've made in the past and here
it is. If ET contacted us and then landed and the ramp came down and a little guy
and we were in communication with him and a little guy came down and somebody
before he got to the bottom of the ramp said, hey do you believe in the Bible?
And he said, ha, ha, ha, Bible.
He'd be so full of lead.
Actually, he'd be full of lead either way.
But he'd be so full of lead that he'd just roll down the rest of the way of the ramp.
Well, I appreciate your sunny interpretation of what would happen with contact.
I do, and you know I'm not wrong.
Deep in your heart, you know I'm right.
No, there's probably a lot of truth in that.
Alright, let's go to iCamp Tawala, is that right?
Yes, hey, Art.
Yes, Tawala, where are you?
I am in Chicago bearing the noise and having flyover surveillance currently going on.
Don't we all.
Oh, it's kind of crazy.
I can email you.
So I'll get to that.
But for Seth, you know, living next to the airport, there's been a lot of different things flying over the back.
You know, let me see.
Mostly airplanes, right?
I mean, four or five years.
Um, like stuff out of the ordinary that's very quiet.
You would say it's probably at about two to 4,000 feet.
And I don't know if Seth is, um, familiar with different types of formations or anything of that sort, because one time I've seen a bundle that was in a trapezoid shape.
And what they did was they stayed in a formation, very quiet.
And once they were probably about 15 miles up out of sight, they all came together, bundled, swirled really fast, and just shot in every direction.
Caller, you're not preaching to the choir here at all, because Seth doesn't believe that they're here.
So no matter what you say, it's really not going to matter.
He's searching for signals out there and is absolutely convinced they have not yet come here.
But I mean, there's so many things that people have seen and so much footage and I just don't understand why, you know, just because we haven't heard a signal.
I mean, is the government testing something?
Maybe, but I really doubt that we're that advanced to make something like that and look like a firework and then just every bit just shoot very nicely into every direction.
Alright, thank you very much for the call, but you're not going to get any more of a Seth on this one.
As a matter of fact, let me go to the I've got this thing called the wormhole.
They send me messages during the show.
Mart in Bakersfield is obviously a big Seth fan.
He says, this Seth is a, quoting here, fast-talking paid propagandist whose mission it is to explain to the world that there is no such things as UFOs or extraplanetary intelligence based upon not hearing them send any electromagnetic RF waves.
There you have it, Seth.
Yeah, well, I'll respond very briefly.
I'm glad to hear that I'm at least paid to do this.
Intriguing, at least.
A disinformation officer.
Well, you know, this is what my job description is, but it's an interesting interpretation.
There are several misstatements in there.
To begin with, I'm quite sure there are UFOs.
I hear from people every day who've seen something, and those are UFOs.
They're unidentified.
The question is, what are they?
They're not people calling up to tell me about a hoax.
They've seen something.
The question is what they've seen.
But I point out this to Mark.
that you know we everybody has really good cameras now uh... thirty years ago you would see something in the sky
and you get this kind of blurry photo and usually didn't have very much
information in it today people have very good cameras with them and on their
phones and video and all that
and the pictures of the UFOs haven't gotten any better as far as i can tell
so i think that that that says something but you know i'm not saying that there's nothing on planets
out there i think quite the contrary but unlike
the UFO community The SETI community does not claim that we found them.
You've heard me say all night, we haven't found them yet.
We have not.
I remain optimistic we might find them, and maybe we won't, but we don't say that we have.
Whereas the UFO community says they do have good evidence, and so that's what it really comes down to.
If you have really good evidence, take it to the local, you know, science museums if they'll put it on display.
Okay.
From Trenton, New Jersey, midnight for you.
Here's Seth.
Hi.
Hello?
Hey, Seth.
Yes.
Go ahead.
Hey, Seth.
I just dedicated an Alienware laptop that I have to Boynik for SETI at home, and I was hoping he can talk a little bit about that and how it works.
You bet.
Of course he can.
Seth, We haven't talked about SETI at Home, and we haven't talked about it in a long, long time.
What is SETI at Home?
How can people help?
Is it still a viable thing to be doing?
Well, it is.
It's not our project, though, I have to say that.
You're talking about BOINC.
That's the operating system for it, the environment in which it runs.
But that's a University of California, Berkeley project.
They do SETI as well.
In fact, they just got a very large private donation to do more SETI.
But, SETI at Home, I think, has had on the order of 10 million people that have downloaded the SETI at Home screensaver.
And it's used to reduce the data that they collect.
They use the Arecibo telescope primarily for those data.
And, you know, you get tremendous compute power when you have 10 million people running their home computers.
Sure.
So, it's a great project.
It's a great project.
We don't do it.
What we do, because we control the telescope, we When we find signals, we don't farm out those data to, you know, the public and have them process it, because we want to know right away, should we continue to spend time looking in this direction?
So we check it out right away.
We have the ability to do that.
Okay.
All right.
Tiffin, Ohio.
You're on with Seth.
Hi.
Good evening, gentlemen.
Yes, I got a real quick question for Seth.
If he's ever heard of the Black Knight satellite that's supposedly orbiting the Earth, And, uh, you know, has he seen anything or know anything about it?
I don't have.
No?
What do you know about it, Caller?
Um, well, it's just been on different talk shows before.
Um, supposedly it's, uh, this ancient satellite, black, you know, satellite that's orbiting backwards from all the other ones, from pole to pole.
Um, and, uh, you know, it's supposedly supposed to be there.
They got pictures of it and stuff, so, um, you know, I just wonder if Seth knew anything about it.
I don't.
I guess I don't have the right clearance to know.
No, I don't know anything about it.
It's a good answer.
It's hard to launch.
By the way, just as a point, you know, launching a satellite that goes, if you will, the wrong direction is a little bit harder than launching one that goes in the right direction.
Well, I think you might have been intimating that it wasn't launched at all, Seth, that it was put into orbit.
That's harder yet.
Well, not if you've got the technology.
Gosh.
Skype, you're on the air with Seth.
Hi.
Hello?
Hello.
Hi, Art.
I guess this question is reflecting the mindset of a lot of the callers and your fans, but is there anyone else at SETI that has this sort of mindset that we have, that a lot of the callers are calling for?
Yeah, you mean that thinks that there's good evidence for visitation?
You mean that kind of thing?
Yeah, are you dealing with this with co-workers?
as well? I doubt it.
I mean, they certainly get questions about it.
You know, I don't think they get as many questions as I do, but I might be wrong. Maybe they're keeping it quiet,
but I don't think that they would. I mean, they occasionally ask me,
they say, what do you say when somebody calls you up and asks you about Roswell,
or something like that? But look, I think that the bottom line here
is that if people, you know, the scientists I know, who are all very skeptical that we're being visited,
if they thought there was good evidence, They'd spend all their time working on it.
And they've said that.
They've said that.
You know, it'd be incredibly important if you could prove that we are being visited.
What could be more interesting?
But, you know, the evidence is not good enough to convince many scientists and you certainly don't see it in the science museums and, you know, that kind of thing.
What would it take to convince you?
Some good physical evidence.
You know, witness testimony is absolutely worthless in science, so that isn't good enough.
Photos, if they're unambiguous, are really good photos.
That might be convincing.
Ah, you can't depend on photos anymore, not with Photoshop.
Well, it's hard.
I agree with you, but, you know, that's a difficulty.
So, yeah, we have physical evidence.
You just pick something up that you can cart to a local lab.
Thank you.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for the call.
I want to give you a moment.
We're coming to the end of the show already so quickly, but I want you to talk to people and tell them how they can contact you, how they can help, what they can do.
People are interested, Seth, in SETI.
They really are.
What do you say to them here at the end of the program?
Well, listen, I welcome their interest.
I really do.
I think it's important that people be interested in this.
And, you know, we're an open research organization.
Our observatory is open to visitors, all that.
I mean, there's no secrets here.
And if they want to get in touch, I mean, the first thing they should do is just go to the SETI Institute website.
It's just SETI.org.
It's a non-profit.
SETI.org.
And, of course, you can find my email address, but I'll give it out on the air.
Art warned me not to do this years ago, and I got, you know, hundreds of emails, but... Include your cell number.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm going to... What am I going to do?
I'm going to have to drop my cell off at a six...
Well, my friend, as always, having you on the air is just such a pleasure.
I really enjoy it.
It's just as simple. It's sephetsebi.org. That's it. That's all there is to it.
And I'll try and answer as many as I can.
But, hey, look, you know, we're interested in science.
We're interested in hearing from you.
Well, my friend, as always, you know, having you on the air is just such a pleasure.
I really enjoy it. I know I have a lot of fun with you.
And you're welcome to have fun back.
And we'll have you back again if you're willing.
Seth, take care, my friend.
Thank you.
Good night.
From the high desert, Great American Southwest, good night all over the world.
All the world's time zones have a great night.
▲
Export Selection