All Episodes
Previous Next
July 28, 2010 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
47:59
Edition 39 - Seth Shostak

This Edition features Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak at the Search For Extra-TerrestrialIntelligence Institute - SETI. For more than a quarter of a century it has been scanning the "skies" andradio waves beyond our planet for evidence we may not be alone...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for keeping the faith with the website and with the show for your fabulous response to the last show and in general over recent weeks.
I've had some very, very good guest suggestions and I'm working on some of those at the moment.
And you should be hearing the fruits of those labors quite soon here at The Unexplained.
One of the things we do have in train is a possible special about the Billy Meyer prophecies.
Look them up, but what a great story that will be to tell.
And we haven't done that up to now, so we should.
And we're also trying to get David Icon to update us about his work, because we haven't heard from him for a while.
Plus, I have not forgotten the Martian moon Phobos and Richard C. Hoagland's claims about it.
Remember, he claimed that it is not a natural object.
And then we got the guy on from ESA, the European Space Agency, Olivier Vitas is his name, to say that actually he believes, and so do all the scientists at ESA, that Phobos is a natural object.
Well, ESA is holding a conference in Italy in September about Phobos, and that's when I hope to update you about all of this.
I've had a lot of emails from you saying, what is the update on this situation?
They want to hear Richard Hoagland's reply, so we're going to do all of that in a forthcoming edition of The Unexplained.
One other thing is something that happened very recently to a friend of mine, an amazing story that I'm trying to get together to perhaps do an edition of The Unexplained about, or certainly feature in some way on this show.
Now, my friend has a lot of connections in Malta, island in the Mediterranean, very warm and sunny place just off North Africa.
She loves to go there and she loves to swim in the Mediterranean off that island, which is exactly what she did about two weeks ago.
But while she was doing that, she had what I can only call the most remarkable paranormal encounter.
That's about all I can tell you about this.
It is something that she later found out other people had experienced in the same place.
But it has all sorts of connections and all sorts of ramifications.
And I'll tell you about, hopefully, in a future edition of The Unexplained.
Meanwhile, please keep your feedback coming for the show.
Your emails and suggestions, always gratefully received.
Had some fabulous emails from California and Thailand and places all over the world recently and across the UK as well.
Please keep those coming.
You are very, very important to this show.
In fact, you are the lifeblood of the show.
And unlike a show that's produced by some great big corporation somewhere, it is a democratic thing.
So if you suggest something on the show, it's really easy for me to make it happen.
But what I need to know from you now is how you see this show developing.
Do you want me to do more of the serious scientific topics, more of the lighter guests, or maybe mix the two as we've been trying to up to now?
It's entirely up to you.
Let me know what you think about that.
You can email me direct through the front page here.
Just click on the contact section, or you can get to me at unexplainedh at yahoo.co.uk.
Two ways to reach me.
And the front page of the website will also provide you a link for donations to the show, which are vital, again, to the work that we do here.
They, again, are lifeblood of what we do.
And thank you if you have recently made a donation.
Like I say, all that money is gratefully received.
On this show, we're going to catch up with an old friend of The Unexplained, Seth Szostak, the man behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the SETI Institute in the United States.
It has been a while since he was on the show.
In fact, the last time he was on, this was on the radio version of The Unexplained.
So it's been about five years now.
It has been a while since I've read anything about SETI here in the UK.
So let's catch up with him now.
Connecting to the United States on The Unexplained, Seth Szostak from SETI.
Seth, thank you for making time for us.
Well, it's a real pleasure, Howard.
I'm happy to be here.
Well, it's been about five years since you and I communed on the radio, Seth, and I guess an awful lot has changed since then.
One of the things that I was remarking upon right at the top of this show is that certainly this side of the Atlantic, we haven't heard in this last five years or so very much about SETI here.
Am I right about that?
Well, that may be.
Of course, part of that may be the fact that SETI is not a European enterprise.
About the only SETI experiment I know of in the entirety of Europe is in Italy, near Bologna, and there's a small experiment there, a very clever experiment, actually.
But that's all that Europe does in this field.
And maybe that's part of the reason you haven't heard too much.
The other possibility, of course, is that we've been building the Allen Telescope Array.
So a lot of the effort here has been in developing new hardware.
Right.
Okay.
Now, for those who've never heard of SETI and perhaps, like me, have only seen the film Contact and that's all they know, Jodie Foster making connections supposedly with something out there.
Explain what SETI is and what it does.
Well, SETI, of course, being an acronym, stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
And of course, our interest, as is the interest of this entire institute where I work, is the question of life beyond Earth.
When it comes to SETI, of course, we're not interested in pond scum on Mars so much as intelligent life.
That is, life that's at least technologically competent, able to build the kind of equipment we can build, including radio transmitters that might allow us to find out that they're there by simply eavesdropping on any broadcasts they may be sending into space.
So that's the premise of SETI, that you could find the aliens not by going to their home planet, which we can't do, or waiting for them to land on the backyard, which I don't think they've done, but simply by eavesdropping on signals.
Now, this has been tried as far as I'm aware for a number of decades on this planet, and so far we haven't really received anything.
I think there was one signal that showed some promise, but turned out to be nothing.
So it's an awful lot of effort and an awful lot of searching for no result, isn't it?
Well, it's true.
The first modern SETI experiment was done in 1960, April of 1960.
So that's 50 years ago, a half century.
Now, mind you, it's been a very intermittent enterprise.
And if you actually added up all the total SETI observing time since the beginning, since 50 years ago, it isn't very much.
And that's because we've had to borrow other people's antennas fundamentally and then build our own receivers or just use receivers that really aren't optimal for this task.
So that's part of the problem.
It has been a very Long slog without results yet, but on the other hand, and this is something that many people are unaware of, the speed of our searches is increasing all the time, and in fact, it's increasing exponentially, as the news commentators like to say, but in this case, happens to be true.
So that the speed doubles on average every 18 months, and that means that whatever we've done in the past will be trumped by whatever we do in the next two years.
In the next two decades, we'll look at a thousand times as much of the sky carefully as we have in the past.
Does that mean that up to now there's been a big possibility or a bigger possibility that you might have been missing stuff that's actually there?
Oh, well, I assume that we are always missing stuff that is there because the alternative to that is to suggest that there's nothing there.
And that strikes me as that's harder for me to believe than the idea that we may have simply missed it.
And why do you believe there's something or someone there?
What is it that brings you personally to that conclusion?
Well, again, that's not science.
That's my personal belief.
But it really comes down to this.
The universe we know, and this is something we've learned in the last hundred years, is vast beyond easy imaginings.
I mean, our own galaxy has a few 100,000 million stars, and there are 100,000 million other galaxies within our purview.
So, you know, that's a lot of real estate.
What we've learned in the last 15 years or so is that probably the majority of stars have planets.
So that means that the number of planets in the visible universe is more than the number of grains of dry sand on all the beaches of the Earth.
So in all that plenitude, to think that this is the only grain of sand where anything interesting has happened strikes me as very sort of anthropocentric.
That makes us extraordinarily special.
And astronomers are very leery of believing that they're special because they've been wrapped on the knuckles many times in the past when they have taken that point of view and learned otherwise.
Now, assuming there is something out there, a lot of things have to happen in order for that something to make contact with us and for us to make contact with it.
They, first of all, have got to be aware of us and presumably receiving whatever signals you are sending them.
Then, of course, they have to find a way of getting a signal back to us to let us know that they're there.
Is that so?
Well, not really, because to begin with, we don't broadcast anything.
So, you know, that assumption is incorrect.
We're not broadcasting.
We leave that to the BBC.
But as far as being aware of us, I hope that's not necessary either, because I don't think that any of them are aware of us.
We began broadcasting our own presence in earnest at the end of the Second World War.
And so that means that those earliest broadcasts, the Gong show, for example, is 60, 70 light years out into space, to be getting a reply from someone who's picked that up and doesn't like Peter Sellers' jokes or something, they can't be more than 30 or 35 light years away because the signal has to get to them and their reply has to get to us.
Well, within that distance, they're only on the order of a few thousand star systems.
That's a very small number.
I think it's safe to say that no aliens know that Homo sapiens exist, but they might be targeting our planet for other reasons.
We might be part of a galactic-wide broadcast, there's always that, or at least a broadcast to this part of the galaxy, or they may have noted that there's oxygen in the atmosphere of Earth.
That's a very easy thing to find.
And so they know that there's life on this planet, and they may be targeting our planet along with a lot of others simply because it's known to have biology.
This, of course, assumes that they are technologically advanced.
Yeah, well, of course.
But those are the only ones we're going to hear from anyhow.
I mean, there may be lots of, you know, alien Neanderthals, but you're simply not going to hear from those guys.
So what we're waiting for is some kind of signal from them or to have the capacity ourselves to detect signals that they might just be randomly sending out if they're making TV broadcasts or broadcasting to, I don't know, maybe they've got explorations going to other planets in their purview, in their close vicinity, and you might pick up transmissions to them.
Well, that's right, exactly.
And in a sense, we don't care.
People ask frequently, well, are you listening for, you know, what's called leakage, just the accidental radiation that leaks off their planet, because as you say, for example, they may have broadcast to colonies in nearby space or who knows what.
Or are you looking for a broadcast deliberately targeted at us?
You know, in a way, I don't care.
Although the latter might be easier to understand eventually, but really the experiment doesn't care why they're broadcasting, only that they are.
Doesn't this all fall down, and I know you've heard this probably a thousand times before, so here comes the thousand and first time, Seth.
The problem is that we are looking in particular places on particular frequencies and bands that we understand.
They may be using transmission systems that we've never heard of and can't even contemplate.
Well, of course, I get that argument frequently.
People say, well, you guys are thinking of radio or flashing lights and so forth, what's called electromagnetic radiation.
And maybe ET has moved on to something far better for the purposes of communication.
Well, if they've done that, they have physics we don't have.
And of course, there is physics that we don't know, and maybe there is some possibility for doing this.
But having said all that, there's nowhere you can go with that argument.
I mean, you could just say, well, okay, let's just sit on our hands because, after all, maybe this is the wrong approach.
You could do that, but you'll never discover anything that way.
So now we have the capability, as the man once said in the famous TV series, we have the capability to scan the heavens more effectively and faster.
How long do you think it'll be before that delivers some kind of result?
There's a question.
Well, I usually tell people that I'll bet them a cup of coffee we find ET within two dozen years.
And the reason for that is that assuming that the funding holds up, within two dozen years we will have carefully looked at about a million star systems.
And that's a thousand times more than we've looked at so far.
And, you know, a million sounds to me like it might be the right number to give us a reasonable chance of finding ET.
So as they say in the UK, with a lot of luck and a fair wind in your lifetime and in my lifetime, this is going to happen.
And if it does happen, that leaves you with another problem.
How do You break the news?
This was the problem they had in that movie Contacts, which is one of my favorite movies where they discover this thing, but then there's the whole issue of how on earth, how the hell do you break this to the planet, to our planet?
Well, as it turns out, that won't be our concern because we've had false alarms.
And what's interesting about the false alarms is that despite the public's general assumption, at least in this country, men in black do not show up at our offices or at the radio telescopes and try and shut the whole project down or keep it secret so that the public won't be disconcerted and discombobulated by the news.
None of that happens.
What actually happens is that the media start calling up.
And they've called up long, long before we've had any chance to actually verify whether the signal is truly extraterrestrial or not.
We've had these kinds of false alarms, and it's very intriguing to see what happens.
But what does happen is that the newspapers start calling you.
All right.
Well, wind me through one of those false alarms then.
Tell me the chronology of the thing.
What happens first?
Well, the first thing that happens is, of course, you pick up a signal, but there's nothing particularly remarkable about that.
We pick up signals on average every five or ten seconds.
So that's not at all unusual.
But then, you know, the signal is the computers, the algorithms in the computers, the software in the computers, knows how to check all the obvious characteristics of a signal to rule out whether it's artificial, well, I should say, terrestrial interference.
Because all the signals we've found so far have turned out to be our own broadcasts, not ETs.
So you don't want to sort through all those manually.
A lot of it is just done by the computer software.
But the computers try various tests.
And if a signal persists, that is to say it passes all these tests, it tries somewhat more sophisticated tests.
And eventually, the computer throws up its hands and says, well, this signal passes all the tests I know about.
I'm passing it on to you.
Take a look at it.
Now, that doesn't happen very often.
Once every couple of years, you get a signal like that.
And, you know, you get moderately interested in it, but they've all turned out to be terrestrial interference, too.
So you don't get that excited.
But eventually, after six hours or 10 hours or something like that, the signal is still believable.
Then you do pay attention.
And that happened in 1997.
I described this actually in the first chapter of my most recent book because it was so interesting.
And you would spend a couple of days looking at this signal yourself, by which point, by the way, the media know all about it.
How do they know all about it?
If you don't tell them, they can't find out.
But there's no secrecy.
Everybody's emailing their friends.
So the people who are working at SETI are telling their friends who are telling their friends, and somewhere down the track, a journalist gets to hear about it.
Exactly right.
That's exactly what happens.
So, you know, but after a couple of days, if we still think it's for real, and that's never happened, but if that does happen, then the next thing you do is you call someone up at a different observatory, possibly even in a different country.
It depends on, you know, where in the sky this thing is.
You'd want a big telescope that could reach this part of the sky.
And you say, would you mind checking this out?
You know, you don't do that right away because that costs somebody some effort and time and breaks into their observing program, but that's what you would do.
All right, and this happened in 1997.
I am amazed, and I have to say other people may well be amazed too, that news of these things gets out so early in the chain.
I would have thought, for reasons of not panicking people, not alarming people, not getting the media to go into a frenzy, you'd want to keep the lid on things just a little bit more.
Well, you know, there are people who think that that would be a good idea.
They did that in Cambridge, in England, when they found the pulsars the first time.
They kept that quiet for a few months, actually.
But that's not the policy here.
We don't do it.
And in fact, the idea that the public would panic, I think, is simply wrong.
One-third of Americans believe that the aliens are not only out there, but they're here.
They don't seem to be panicking about that.
One-third of the population of Clapham Junction believes the aliens are calling them out of their bedrooms.
No, well, it's one thing to believe that and to answer survey questions in that way, but another thing to be faced with the real-life prospect that here is something that we cannot explain.
That's a different proposition, isn't it, for your average guy on the street?
I don't think so.
I think if it's different, it's different in the sense that it favors being more nonchalant about the signal coming from 1,000 light years away, which of course the transmitters will not know that you've received, than it is to have people landing in Swindon.
The facts are that we've actually done this experiment.
In fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were very well-known astronomers in this country, Percival Lowell, a very clever guy, a very legitimate guy with advanced degrees in this, that, and the other.
And he was claiming there was this vast hydraulic civilization on Mars just 35 million miles away.
And nobody seemed to be terribly upset about that at the time.
They only got upset when there was a radio broadcast at the end of the 1930s.
But, you know, that had different contexts.
World War II was approaching.
It was Orson Welles, and we can forgive Orson for anything, I think, just about.
But, you know, here we have the situation then.
Okay, 1997, whenever.
You receive the signal.
The word starts to get out there.
Now, just assuming that one of these days, and within maybe that 24 years, whatever it might be, you receive the signal.
You think there is more to it than meets the eye.
The public's getting to know about it.
What do you think the chain of events will be then?
In other words, what will governments do about it?
Well, there isn't much they can do.
I think that what would happen, I mean, the real players in all this would be not so much the government, not in the beginning anyhow.
It would be the astronomical community because they have instruments that could tell you more.
The government really, really doesn't.
So you would just, you know, every telescope in the world, I'm sure, would be trained in the direction of this signal, and you would try and collect as much data as you could.
Now, of course, people would be interested to know, well, what are the aliens saying?
And that would probably require the construction of an enormously bigger antenna, because you're looking for the very fast changes in the signal that are, In fact, what's called the modulation, the message.
A television signal varies 5 million times a second.
It's that 5 million times a second variation that produces the picture and sound that you look at.
Now, in order to get that, we'd need a much bigger antenna.
And at that point, I think that indeed the governments would get involved in building this new equipment.
It'd probably be an international effort because it would be quite costly to do this, but I think the motivation would be there.
But you must have played this scenario through in your head so many times.
You get the signal.
Governments work together to decode the signal to try and find out what this means.
We know roughly where this thing comes from.
I guess then the decision has to be made, do we try and emulate what we have received and transmit it back?
Well, you could, I don't know, yeah, that sounds like a movie plot.
I don't know that you would send back to them what they send to us.
That works in movies.
I don't think in real life you'd have to do that.
Also, by the way, I'm not sure that the governments would decode it.
This isn't a war transmission.
I think you would just put all these bits on the internet and let everybody try.
I mean, in the way the hieroglyphics were deciphered, not by a government, but by individuals, right?
And this is something, isn't it, that you've been doing?
The last I heard of SETI was when you launched a thing called SETI at Home, which links together, I think, peer-to-peer networks, people's home computers.
Is that right?
That is true.
There are like eight or nine million people have downloaded the SETI at home screensaver.
That's not our project.
That's a project of a small group over at the University of California at Berkeley.
It's not part of the SETI Institute's research, but that has been enormously successful.
And again, you know, we're fiddling around with open source software for our data detection, or sorry, our signal detection algorithms.
So indeed, you know, bringing in the public seems to be a good thing to do.
But in any event, yes, I mean, it would, I think, be a worldwide effort.
And if you could understand anything that they're saying, if they've made it easy for you to decode, then, of course, you might be getting information from a society way beyond ours, which could be very interesting.
You're going to hate this question, but I know you've been asked it before, so I'll ask you it again.
There are people on this planet starving in places like Zimbabwe and many other countries.
Why are we devoting resources into something like this?
What good could it do?
Well, to begin with, I'm not sure that stopping the SETI program would help displace Robert Mugabe from Prower in Zimbabwe.
I mean, the two are not connected.
I think you could make that argument in, you know, you could have made that argument in 18th century Austria.
You could say, you know, why is the government supporting this guy, Wolfgang Mozart, to just write music?
For goodness sake, we have people starving in the streets.
And in those days, there really were people starving in the streets in Europe.
So, you know, that kind of argument you could always make that, well, I have other priorities for the money.
Sure, but it brings us to the point, doesn't it, that even if we do make contact and all those resources have been worthwhile and the lifelong efforts of people like you have been justified, when we get that knowledge that we're not alone, what do we do with it?
Well, you never know what basic research is going to find and what the practical applications of it are.
There are plenty of people who think, yes, it's, I mean, keep in mind that SETI is totally privately funded in this country.
There is no government money.
So, you know, there's that.
People who worry about their tax dollars going to help our search.
Their tax dollars do not go to help our search.
So, I mean, that's point one.
But beyond that, it's been reckoned here that for every dollar that was spent on NASA, for example, $10 in commercial activity was generated because of new technologies that were developed primarily.
A lot of technology that you need to go to the moon, for example, is stuff that, you know, hadn't been developed before.
And then it turns out to have all sorts of practical applications that the commercial world, that the business world exploits.
So it actually is a great stimulus to economic activity.
But in this case, what you might get out of it, I mean, you could say, why fund astronomy?
Right?
I mean, maybe the British should shut down Jodrell Bank because, after all, that doesn't produce any products you can buy in the store.
And yet, there's something interesting about knowing about the structure and history of the universe that's worth a little bit of money.
The total amount of money spent on all of astronomy in this country is less than the amount spent on cat food, I think.
So, you know, it isn't a whole lot of money, but NSETI is enormously less than that.
And it's all private anyhow.
So, you know, it isn't a lot of money.
And think of the potential benefits.
Suppose you were able to hear information coming from a society that's 100,000 years more advanced than ours.
What would that information be worth to you?
Probably a lot.
It might be concerning to some people, and you said governments were not involved in the funding of this.
This we know.
But at some stage, if you discover something, governments would be involved in it.
But you would be the first custodian of this information, perhaps of some vastly advanced technology, perhaps some destructive technology.
You would be the first people to get hold of that.
And I guess there would be people on this planet who might think, that's not such a good thing.
I want people who are accountable to the people to get this information first.
Oh, you mean because we're a private nonprofit organization that we would get it first.
Well, keep in mind if you find a signal, I mean, whatever you think of the people of the SETI Institute, keep in mind that this information is up in the sky.
It's not stacked up at Area 51 or some government lab somewhere or some private lab somewhere.
It's available to anybody who wants to build an antenna.
Right.
So, you know, if you weren't doing it, somebody else might well be doing it.
And as you say, it's like water, assuming it's out there, it's trickling away and it's free and it's just there to access it.
All you've got to do is drill for it or find it lying on the ground somewhere.
That I understand.
When did you first become involved or interested in all of this?
Was it something that was from childhood?
Oh, yeah, sure.
I think that's true of just about everybody who works here.
I mean, people are interested in...
I didn't actually do any SETI experiments until when I was living in Europe, working in Europe.
And I did that, the first one in 1981, so that's quite some time ago now.
But I only joined the SETI Institute about 20 years ago.
And the technology in that time, as you hinted right at the top of this conversation, has changed enormously, both the ability to be able to see out there and to number crunch the data that you're getting back.
Yes, that's right.
as I say, that's a fact that is rather ill-appreciated by the public because they think we're still doing the same experiment we were doing 10 years ago, and that that experiment is similar to what Jody Foster was doing, which is to say sitting around with a pair of earphones.
Even at the time of that movie, we were monitoring almost 60 million channels simultaneously.
So to have done that correctly, Jody would have had to put on 30 million pairs of earphones, which the Warner Brothers didn't deign to do.
Sure, understood.
But that's popular culture, isn't it?
Now, the technology is improving.
We've all got technology in our own homes.
A friend of mine was showing me his new iPhone 4 the other day, and I was blown away by that.
But technology is developing so fast, there may well come a time when people are able to do this stuff in their own homes.
Do you think that's a good thing?
You seem to believe in the democratization of all this information.
Is it a good thing that ordinary people sitting in their homes in London or wherever might one day be able to do what you do?
Well, I would think it's a good thing.
I mean, in exploration, the more people you have doing it, probably the better the results.
Mind you, just having the digital technology isn't all you need.
You also need the antennas.
And that's something they're not likely to have in their own homes in London because they don't have the real estate to field a very large antenna.
You do need a big antenna.
And so that part of the business will probably reside in the hands of the small number of people who either have the money or the interest or both to build the antennas.
I might point this out.
There are many, many facilities in the world where you could do SETI, but these days it's almost exclusively an American project.
Right.
So not only do you have to have this great big antenna, which you have now, the receiving gear, I presume, has to have a very low, what they call noise floor.
So you have to be able to screen out the sound of the electronics so that you know what you're getting is signals and not just hash.
Well, that's right.
You need very low noise electronics simply because otherwise you just mask the signal.
So indeed, I mean, you know, that's fairly sophisticated hardware even today.
But it's not rare hardware.
I mean, there are plenty of installations around the world.
Every country, well, every first or second world country has this kind of equipment.
It isn't rare by any means.
What they generally don't have are the kind of receivers that would allow them to find and recognize an artificial signal coming from space.
But that equipment can easily be, you can just buy it or build it, and it's not expensive.
We have Richard C. Hoagland quite often on this show, and quite recently he's been talking about Phobos, the Martian moon, and what he believes is something that is not natural, that is there.
When you hear claims like that, what does it make you think and feel?
Well, I've had some run-ins with Richard Hoagland on radio shows and so forth, and my experience with him is that, you know, there's no science in what he's saying, in my opinion.
All right.
And so if that is the case, why do you think that the likes of the European space researchers, Ether, are having a discussion and conference about Phobos in September?
Do you think they're just trying to nail some lies?
No, Phobos has always been interesting.
You know, 100 years ago, people had worked out the average density of those moons, and it turns out to be very, very light.
And there was a suggestion, I think it came out of the Soviet Union, but I'm not quite sure, that Phobos might be a relic, artificial satellite from an early civilization, and it was just hollow on the inside.
Right.
Well, that is almost surely not the case.
We have close-up photos of Phobos, and it doesn't look like any artificial satellite to me.
Looks like another rock.
But it does have a low density.
Now, that may not be quite so surprising anymore because we found that a lot of asteroids are just barely stuck together.
They're very fragile.
They're not these sort of solid rocks.
Some are solid rocks, but a lot of them are actually sort of powder puffs.
And it may be that Phobos is one of those.
It's quite likely that the moons of Mars, or at least it's certainly possible, the moons of Mars are simply captured asteroids.
It's not so easy to do in the inner solar system, but it could be that that's the way Mars got its moons.
You look at Venus, it doesn't have any moons.
Mercury doesn't have any moons.
We have a moon thanks to a big collision, so that's kind of an accident, too.
So Mars may have not produced those moons itself, but captured them, and it may be some of these flaky asteroids.
Of course, it's interesting to learn more about them.
But the idea that there has been an advanced civilization on Mars, something that Richard Hoagland has been promoting for decades and decades, the face on Mars and so forth, there's simply no evidence there that has convinced many scientists.
And what about the claims of UFOs, alien visitations over the years, all the way back to Roswell and possibly a lot longer before that?
Do you think that's all nonsense, too?
I don't think that there's any good evidence that we're being visited.
I honestly don't.
I mean, if there were, you would have tens of thousands of university researchers beavering away on this problem because there's nothing that would be more interesting than the idea that Earth has been visited or is being visited.
So, you know, the fact that they're not doing that is not because they won't look at the data, as is so often claimed, or that the government, particularly the U.S. government, has all the best evidence squirreled away somewhere.
I mean, even if you think that this government, which after all runs the Postal Service rather poorly, even if you think that they can, you know, hide this kind of information, and there's no motivation to do that as far as I can tell, but even if you think they've done it, you also have to assume that every other government in the world is doing the same thing, or you have to subscribe to the idea that the aliens are only interested in visiting the United States.
In that sense, that's completely analogous to the crop circles in Wiltshire and Hampshire.
Why is it that the aliens only want to talk to those two counties?
It's rather bizarre, isn't it?
So I honestly think that if the evidence were there, it would be extraordinary.
If good evidence were there, it would be looked at very, very carefully.
It has been in the past, but not so much because people thought they were UFOs, or rather alien craft, that they thought that they might be Soviet aircraft.
You know, there was a British astrophysicist who said to me once, he said, you know, Shostak, if I thought there was a 1% chance that any of that stuff Was true, I would spend 100% of my time working on it.
Right.
And clearly, he didn't want to spend 100% of his time or any percentage of his time working on it, so he doesn't think it's true.
But what about claims of people like I had an airline or ex-airline pilot contact me very recently to say that he had numerous encounters with something when he was flying at 30,000 feet and was loath to report those at the time because people in uniforms don't like to report those things in case people think they're nuts.
Do you think that's just another phenomenon these people are seeing and experiencing?
Something that we don't quite understand in science?
Well, we might, well, no, I wouldn't say that we don't understand it in science.
All we know is we don't know what it was he saw.
That's a completely different statement, of course.
Yeah, you know, it isn't that.
I mean, I get calls every day.
I get emails, several emails every day from people who have seen things.
That's not uncommon.
And I talk to all these people, and I read their emails, and I look at whatever photos they send me, and I haven't yet either found somebody who I thought was hoaxing me.
I mean, these are not hoaxes.
They've seen something.
The only question is what they've seen.
And, you know, the fact is that it all comes down to a lot of it is eyewitness testimony, often by people who are very reputable, airline pilots, Air Force pilots.
I've talked to several astronauts, even Apollo astronauts who claim they've seen things and they think that they're alien craft and so forth.
These are reputable people.
That isn't the issue.
They're reputable people who will say that they saw this guy Bob over there commit first-degree murder.
But you don't send somebody to the electric chair or hang them because this guy claims that that was the guy who did it.
You need some physical evidence, at least in this country.
Because eyewitness testimony is, unfortunately, highly unreliable.
It isn't that people are deliberately lying.
It's just that eyewitness testimony is unreliable.
I will, you know, Seth, I'm going to get people emailing me because they do about every show that I do.
And they will say, well, Seth Shostak is a scientist and by the sounds of it, a good one, has worked very hard on all of this, and hopefully he'll get his reward one day.
But if he was to admit that some of the UFO sightings and all of that stuff might have a little bit of substance to it, well, of course, it negates all the work that he's doing because if the ETs are already here, what's the point of looking with telescopes and big dishes to try and find them because they're coming to us anyway?
Well, you know, there's some truth in that in the sense that I don't think we would do the SETI experiment if we had good evidence that the aliens are here.
It's a lot easier to find them in the countryside than to find them in deep space.
So I think we would switch gears.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But the idea that the reason that I'm skeptical about the claims of visitation is because we have a vested interest in this project is that doesn't hold any water whatsoever.
Look, the total number of people that are doing SETI in the world is fewer than work at the local fast food restaurant.
It's a dozen.
It's fewer than a dozen.
It's a very small number.
And you can think whatever you want of those people, but the facts are that has nothing to do with the UFO phenomenon, because the UFO phenomenon involves many, many, many, many people.
And they have so far not come up with a kind of evidence that could be put into the museums on Exhibition Road in London.
And why is that?
Is it because the museums in London wouldn't find it interesting to display physical evidence of visitation?
Of course not.
People would be fascinated by that.
It would be enormously interesting.
The people at University College London, the people at Cambridge, Oxford, they would all be absolutely stunned, fascinated, and intrigued by any evidence that you could present to them where they thought, you know, this is really it.
And the fact that after more than 60 years of, you know, many, many UFO sightings, that evidence is just not sitting there on Exhibition Road, I think that tells you something.
All right.
Let's just assume that tomorrow is the day that you get some fairly good data coming down from somewhere, that there is something or someone out there.
You picked up a signal.
It's looking pretty good.
It's looking pretty credible.
It starts to get out to the public because, as you said, through the democratic process, through people telling other people by email and journalists getting involved, information is bound to get out there.
I've always believed you can't really keep secrets like this.
So it starts to get out there.
But then you have all the vested interests, the church, anybody who thinks this stuff is nuts, other scientists all suddenly gunning for you.
Are you ready for the situation where you will have to face down all of that?
Well, there's some truth in that.
I think that there are people who would say, you know, this is the devil trying to fool you or whatever.
I mean, those would be the, you know, the very, very fundamentalist believers in certain religions.
I've talked to many theologians, actually, about this project, and their opinion is that from their point of view, there's absolutely no theological negative feedback to be expected here.
The major religions certainly can accommodate the idea that there might be other thinking beings elsewhere.
But there are some sects for which that isn't, since it doesn't appear in scripture, that's unacceptable, and they will try and poo-poo it.
But will they take it out on us?
Maybe they will, but it really doesn't matter.
The thing to keep in mind is that if you find a signal, you're going to have every astronomer in the world is going to be spending their time looking in this direction on the sky.
This is not a parochial or provincial kind of enterprise.
It becomes an immediately a worldwide enterprise.
It isn't like finding lights in the Randlesham Forest or anything like that where only a small number of people can get to it.
This is something that's up in the sky.
Sure, and everybody will be onto it, as you say, in no time at all.
Which brings another problem, I would have thought.
It means that once you've got this information and it's out there in the public domain and other people and governments maybe are taking it forward, you then have to let go of your baby.
How does that feel or how would it feel?
Yeah, no, I think that that's true.
I mean, the SETI Institute is one of the very few organizations in the world, and as I say, you can count them easily on one hand, that is spending any time doing this.
It's remarkable to me that the Europeans don't spend more time doing this, actually, since I have you on the phone, and they don't.
But this would be an enormously large effort, and maybe we would be subsumed in that.
We would just become another player in a very big game.
And you're happy about that.
That would be okay.
Well, I mean, you know, it would be kind of sad.
But on the other hand, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
Eventually, a lot of people were involved.
It was still a good thing to do.
Why do you think that a lot of countries that you wouldn't have thought would have the money for such things, and I'm thinking about countries like India, are suddenly discovering space and starting to get very, very interested in it?
Well, I can't speak directly to India, but they are.
They have a big effort.
And a lot of it has to do with the commercial applications of space.
Remember, space is an industry.
Not going to the moon so much.
There isn't a whole lot of money to be made in going to the moon yet.
But putting up satellites, being able to develop rockets that can put something into orbit, that can be a fairly lucrative business because there's a tremendous market for telecommunications.
And everybody wants their cell phone, right?
So having your own launch industry means that you have, to begin with, something to sell the rest of the world.
And beyond that, you can control the launch of your own equipment if for some reason you want to do that.
So I think a lot of it may have to do with the launch industry.
And of course, there are also defense implications of developing rockets.
And for a country like India, that may be of a concern.
I don't see that India is going to the moon or Mars, but they may do.
I mean, the Chinese talk about going to the moon.
And, you know, to some extent, that's a prestige issue, I think.
Could be.
Always was in the 60s with the U.S. and Russia, wasn't it?
And the Brits had a little go at going into space for a while, but that fizzled out.
I think we're back there now.
Do you think that there would be a lot of value in putting SETI into space?
In other words, getting telescopes and analysis equipment up onto other planets like, I don't know, like Mars, perhaps?
Well, I don't know why you'd want to put it on Mars.
It doesn't get you any closer to the aliens, of course, and it's very expensive to do it.
The one place in space that does have some appeal is the backside of the moon, because it's at least shielded from all the interference from Earth.
And that would be the only motivation I can think of for getting a radio telescope, at least at the frequencies we usually use, into space.
I mean, there's no reason not to just have it on the ground behind some mountains, so it's shielded a little bit from the domestic interference.
But the backside of the moon would be better.
It would be much quieter.
You wouldn't have all these confusing signals.
The problem is, of course, that costs many, many hundreds of millions of dollars at the very minimum.
And that sort of money is not available to SETI.
20 years from now, you said, well, by that stage, we're going to be very close perhaps to making this big discovery.
Didn't you say 24 years, something like that?
We're quite likely to find what we're looking for.
But 20 years from now, how do you think we'll be doing this job?
What kind of gear do you think we'll be using for it?
Well, the most obvious things to expect is the continued improvement in digital electronics.
And that's being driven by the industries that surround me here in the Silicon Valley.
That's an economic issue.
And they've managed to double the speed of processors every 18 months for decades and decades now.
And they seem to me to be on track to continue that for a while.
So that's basically what you can expect, that you can check out many stars simultaneously, star systems, and over a very wide range of frequencies simultaneously.
Now that will just speed up the search a great deal.
The other thing you'd like to do is to get more sensitivity, to be able to find weaker signals.
That's much harder because that involves building big metal antennas, and those don't get cheaper with time.
The other thing that will happen, I think, is the developments in technology and imaging technology that allow our SETI experiments that are looking for flashing laser pulses, in other words, optical SETI, to get much, much faster, too.
So I think that the name of the game in the next couple of dozen years is speed.
There will be astronomical developments that are easily foreseen as well.
NASA's Kepler mission is up there taking data as we speak, and within the next thousand days, it'll come back with an answer to this question.
What fraction of stars have worlds that are like the Earth?
We don't know the answer to that now, but within 1,000 days we will.
And that will obviously affect SETI, too.
That's a hell of a question to answer, isn't it?
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, you'd only need to answer that question once in human history, and we're going to do it in the next two and a half, three years.
Assuming we get the signal, and assuming we discover that there is something of interest out there, and assuming again that we want to make contact with it, what do you think we should tell them about us?
Well, I've written a little paper on that.
A lot of people say, well, we ought to send them this, that, or the other.
I mean, we've sent things into space.
There have been the plaques on the Pioneer Earth.
Little diagrams, yeah.
Yeah, diagrams, little greeting cards, if you will.
And there have been some deliberate transmissions as well.
Probably by far the most interesting signal we've sent into space is all the unintentional broadcasts, right?
You know, 70 years of the BBC, if you will, that kind of thing.
But I think that if you were making a deliberate transmission in some particular direction, my recommendation would be to just send an enormous amount of information, not just little greeting cards, small sets of data.
I would just send the Google servers, which actually happen to be not very far from where I'm sitting here.
Google happens to be located here in Mountain View.
I would just send the servers, send the entire internet, because it's so redundant.
There's so much stuff there that eventually some of it would be figured out.
It's like why we were able to decode the hieroglyphics, and it's fundamentally because there was so much of it.
Sure.
So you send them all that data, they find out all about us.
What happens if they are not kindly towards us?
What happens if they want to take all that stuff, come here, and grab it for themselves?
Well, I mean, there's always a danger that there are hostile aliens that for some reason find it worth their while to come to Earth and do something terrible here.
That's alien sociology.
We don't have a lot of data on alien sociology, so it's hard to decide whether that's a reasonable thought or not.
But if it's something you want to worry about, it's too late.
The information's already out there.
The signals we've been broadcasting for the last 70 years are out there.
There's no bringing them back.
That horse has left the barn.
And you might say, well, yeah, yeah, but the BBC's television signals are going to be very weak by the time they get to ET, so that's not really a concern.
Well, any society that could launch an attack on Earth could easily pick up those signals.
Just finally, you did tell me, and I was fascinated by the democracy Of what you're doing there, by the fact that this information will be made freely available and there won't be great limits on it because you can't keep secrets like that.
In all the time that you've done the work that you've done, Seth, and the people who work with you, are you really telling me that you've never discovered such things as men in black, as they call them, black ops projects and that kind of stuff?
Are you really saying that everything is open and transparent?
Yep, nope.
I hate to say it.
People just love conspiracies for some reason, particularly in this country.
They just love it.
They do love it.
They do.
Yeah, you know, if the government could afford to pay those men in black, hey, they could afford a little bit of money to support the experiment.
How about that?
That would be good.
You know, I have to say one of the most astounding things in 1997 when we picked up a signal that for most of the day we thought was real was that the government showed absolutely no interest.
And that, by the way, includes the local government.
And I knew the local mayor.
He didn't even make a phone call.
Nobody was interested.
The only people that were interested were the New York Times and some British papers.
Of course, if you were a real conspiracy theorist, you might actually assume, Seth, that perhaps on some level they knew it wasn't the real deal.
So what happened then was not what would happen if it was the real deal.
Well, if they know better than we do whether the signal is real or not, then they're doing the experiment.
And once again, I'm gratified to hear that somebody else is doing a SETI experiment.
That's a good place to leave it, Seth.
Thank you very much.
You've been hearing Seth Szostak from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, otherwise known as SETI, and very gratifying to hear from him that there are no dark forces as far as he's concerned out there sitting on this information.
And if he discovered something and the people at SETI discovered something out there, pretty quickly you would get to know about it and it would happen very democratically.
I hope that is the case because it's a good feeling to know that that is so, don't you think?
But I wonder how would you react if you found out we weren't alone?
Would it make any difference to your life at all?
Let me know.
If you're using an iPhone, by the way, or an iPod Touch, we now have a way that you can listen to the unexplained on that device.
Just go to theunexplained.tv forward slash iPhone.
That's theunexplained.tv forward slash iPhone.
And it'll allow you to download all of these shows for the iPhone or the iPod Touch.
Thanks to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who is my web genius.
The guy who gets this show out to you and the guy who has designed that marvelous website we have here at The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for listening to the show.
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune.
We will return very, very soon with another edition of The Unexplained.
My name's Howard Hughes.
▲
Export Selection