All Episodes
Previous Next
March 2, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:35
Edition 195 - Seth Shostak & Lemoard Nimoy Tribute

Top Hollywood reporter Jeanne Wolf on the life of Leonard Nimoy and Seth Shostak - head ofSETI.

| 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.
Well, look, thank you very much for all of your kind suggestions about my chest infection.
I continue to be in the grip of it, and every so often when I'm on the radio, I get overtaken by a bit of a coughing fit.
Many of my colleagues are also affected by this, and an awful lot of people I know as well.
It seems the viruses and bugs this winter season here in the northern hemisphere maybe have been a little bit worse and possibly a little more pervasive than they have been before.
They seem to hang around.
But you've sent me some great suggestions, including echinacea and golden tea and various other things.
So I'm going to give them all a try because I really want to get rid of this thing.
It's becoming a real bore now.
Thank you for all of the emails and for your donations.
Please keep those coming.
You can make a donation or send me an email with your thoughts and guest suggestions.
Go to the website www.theunexplained.tv.
That's www.theunexplained.tv.
The website designed and created by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot.
There you can follow the link and leave a donation or send me an email.
And I love to hear from you.
Please keep spreading the word.
I know a lot of you are telling your friends about this.
And it's lovely to hear the ways that you use the show, the places that you're at.
When you listen, maybe you're doing a night shift in a hospital, or you're jogging around Copenhagen, or whatever you're doing.
Really nice to hear your stories.
I'm going to do a lot of shout-outs.
We have some important stuff to do this time.
First up on the show, we're going to remember Leonard Nimoy with one of the top Hollywood correspondents who knew him.
And then after that, we're going to talk with Seth Szostak from SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence institute, of which he is the boss.
So all of that to come on this edition.
And in the next edition, we have a very important guest.
We have Whitley Streeber.
So two good shows coming up, I think.
Okay, shout-outs.
Richard Pace, good to hear from you again, Richard.
He's got a question that he wants me to ask Russell Brand if he comes on here.
We're still trying.
Claire Broad in Hampshire, thank you.
Marlene wants us to move the site, the website I'm talking about, to HTML5 Protocol.
We could do that, but funding would have to be enough to allow us to do that.
It simply is too expensive a thing for us to do on such a small show at the moment, Marlene, but we're thinking about it.
Michael Bowl, good to hear from you.
Kurt in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Tom B in Gloucester.
Rick Barts in Illinois.
Good suggestion.
Rick Becky in Liverpool tells me about the haunted Dolby Hotel.
I know Becky, the Dolby Hotel.
My dad used to drive me past there a lot, and I think that when he was in the police in Liverpool, he used to visit that place from time to time, I think.
James Cheadle, nice comments, thank you.
Irene in Adelaide says you may like to talk to psychic Rosemary Waller in Adelaide.
She was on 5AA radio, and she spoke all about the Twin Towers before they even happened.
Thank you for that thought, Irene.
I'm going to get in touch.
And if you know Rosemary Waller, then, you know, oil the wheels for me in advance if you can.
This is from a listener.
I'm not going to give your name because you asked me not to, but I'm going to read the experience.
He says, I live in Ohio.
I love the show.
I thought you might be interested in my experience.
About a year ago, I was doing some yard work in the backyard, and it was dark when I finished.
So I had some tools that belong in the garage, and I figured I would just put my tools in the wheelbarrow and push it up to the garage.
So as I was pushing the wheelbarrow across the yard, I noticed a white light near the pine trees.
It looked like a car headlight going up and down.
And then it went out.
When I got to the side of my house, I saw three white lights about 100 feet up, a perfect triangle, probably 40 feet wide.
As soon as I saw the triangle, I heard a sound of locusts, but not an audible sound.
It was in my head.
And it was way too cold for any insects to be out at that time.
As I made my way along the side of the house, I almost walked directly underneath this thing.
Then another smaller craft came out of the triangle, around four foot long with a white light at each end, and I watched that object fly over the house and disregard, or rather disappear, behind some trees.
And that's all I remember.
I don't even remember putting the tools away, and the next day I was going to take a shower, and I noticed a scab about two inches below my belly button, but it wasn't like a normal scab.
It was flush with the skin, hard as a rock, and it wouldn't peel off like a normal scab, like it was a part of my skin.
I managed to dig this scab off, and it looked like it had a root attached to it.
This is a staggering story.
There was also a scab on my right arm, same kind of thing, really weird.
I don't know what happened that night, but since then I've seen other strange lights in the sky.
He says, keep up the good work, buddy.
Boy, I think you need to tell somebody about that, and thank you very much indeed.
You know who you are, I know who you are, and please take care of yourself.
Rob and Nylmer in Hertfordshire, thank you for your email.
Good suggestions from Henrik.
Roger Ludwig loves the show.
Good to hear from you, Roger.
Kerry suggesting a longer show with Dr. David Clark.
He was the sceptic, of course, at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK.
Together with somebody like Steve Bassett, that is a very, very good idea.
Thank you.
John O. has some marketing ideas.
Thank you for those, John.
Brandon Martinez wants to hear more of my views.
I don't think we've got time to hear what I think about this world, Brandon.
Don't get me started.
Dan W. Some thoughts about Tinnitus possibly being caused by power supplies.
I've heard that before, and I often worry about all of the gear and gizmos we all have.
Rebecca in America, suggesting William Bullman on out-of-the-body experiences.
Thank you, Rebecca.
Brent in Texas, great email, thank you.
Niall in Derry, offering voluntary help.
Thank you, Niall.
Matt Thalwell, good thoughts.
Mark, hello.
Ms. Schoner in Kent, UK.
Good to hear from you.
Tony Wyndham in Australia.
Great marketing idea, Tony, and we're looking at it.
Thank you.
Adam Bukafusco.
I hope I pronounced that right, Adam.
Good to hear from you.
Lorraine Lawrence in Canada found Dr. David Clark a bit annoying.
Okay.
Karen in Ohio says, please, whatever you do, don't do Ouija.
Thanks, Karen.
Thank you for your thoughts.
I've read your emails carefully.
Vladimir in Serbia, good to hear from you.
Jeffrey Comello in Colorado, you too.
Dan Wager, some thoughts about the Twin Towers.
Thanks, Dan.
Amen.
Broncao.
Again, I hope I've said that name right.
It may be Broncao.
Thoughts on funding.
Thank you, Amen.
Georgia in Ontario.
Carmen in Los Angeles.
Your podcast is awesome.
Carmen, thank you very much.
And helps me pass those graveyard shifts.
Wow, thank you.
And Crystal in New Hampshire.
Nice to hear from you again, Crystal.
Going to do more shout-outs in future shows, but please keep those emails coming.
And as you can hear, I'm still a little wheezy.
I do apologise for that, but I think I'm getting my voice back.
And very slowly, my mojo, which has been affected by this virus, is returning, I hope.
But boy, it saps your enthusiasm and everything, doesn't it?
Let's start this edition then, as I promised, with a conversation with Jeannie Wolf, recorded yesterday after the death of Mr. Spock, Leonard Nimoy, a man universally liked, it seems.
So here's Jeannie Wolfe, top showbiz correspondent in Los Angeles.
She's at the very head of her profession, one of the best-known people doing this in the world.
Here are Jeannie's thoughts.
It's a pleasure to tribute to Leonard Nimoy in any way.
You know, he was a, I interviewed him many, many times.
I've known him for years.
And I don't know if you remember that Mr. Spock, Jenny probably knows this, that Mr. Spock wasn't really allowed to smile on the show.
But then when I think of Leonard Nimoy, I think of his sort of witty, dry humor, and I think of his deep, deep laugh.
So, you know, Spock couldn't smile, but Leonard could.
I heard a lot of, I've been going back through loads of archives overnight because this is part of all our lives, Jeannie.
And one of the interviews that Leonard Nimoy gave in America, and it was almost a throwaway comment, but it made me think, he said that when he was filming the original series, the Dessilu series for television of Star Trek, he was visited by some people, he called them, on the set, who told him that his role, his character, was there to prepare the public for the reality of alien contact.
Well, I think what happened on that show and through the years is that it attracted a wide variance of fans.
And you have to remember that Gene Roddenberry didn't want to just put on a show.
That was the creator of Star Trek.
He was kind of putting a philosophy out there in the world.
And the fact that Spock played half alien, you know, half Vulcan, half human, was very much purposeful on the part of Gene Roddenberry.
He wanted, you know, he wanted to spread the message of kind of worldwide unity and we should, you know, forget differences.
And how would he know when he was picking an actor that he would pick Leonard Nimoy, who that kind of message meant a great deal to?
And many of the attributes that Leonard Nimoy had, and from what people like George Takai and other colleagues of his on the series have been saying overnight, the man Nimoy was very much like the man Spock, but Nimoy had the sense of humor which Spock lacked.
But in terms of the kind of people they were, the dependability and the solidity, they were the same person.
Well, in some ways they were, but you have to remember that, you know, what Leonard Nimoy told me was that it took him years almost to realize how much Spock had influenced him and how much, I guess also, that he influenced Spock.
You know, it was Leonard that came up with the Vulcan salute.
And I don't know about you, but I've never been able to do it.
I'm trying to do it now, but the problem is all my fingers spread out.
I always felt it was a great favor to him because he was a little weary of pointy ear jokes.
And believe me, if I could have done that salute, I'm sure I would have done it to him.
So I saved him and me from that embarrassment.
But what I said at the top of this was that part of our lives, there are not many people who are so much embedded within all of our lives.
And this man and his character absolutely are.
And that's been reflected, isn't it, with the number of people who are leaving flowers and tributes at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, loads of them overnight.
The President of the United States had to make a statement and say, I loved Spock.
And you would expect his castmates.
But he talked about the fact, look, there was a period of time where he was very fearful that he would be limited, his creativity would be limited by this character, and that he wouldn't be asked to do other things.
But what Jenny told you is that he directed movies, he wrote poetry, he's done so much, he did so many things.
And so once he kind of calmed down about that, I think he gained a great appreciation for the way his character and his familiarity and the love of his character allowed him to spread some of the messages about technology, about science, about humanity that were very central to his life, believe.
And just quickly, Jeevie, the one thing that his colleagues and cast members and people he directed, all of them have enormous respect for him.
That's the one thing that's come across in all the interviews that we've heard overnight.
Oh, no doubt about it.
I mean, look, he was a creative perfectionist.
He was not always an easy guy.
He wanted, you know, he wanted things done right.
But he also was very joyous and much sort of wise and mellow in his later years.
Like he finally caught on.
And he said, Spock kind of influenced him to step back and not be reactive.
And do you remember in the movie, Quinto played him, and he comes back and he does a scene.
He comes back and he does a scene as older Spock talking to younger Spock.
So I said to him, okay, I saw that scene.
Now what would you say, older Leonard talking to younger Leonard?
And he said, I'd say the same thing I said in that scene.
Follow your instincts.
Be true to yourself.
The great Jeannie Wolf in Los Angeles on the sad death of Leonard Nimoy, a man who had a part in so many of our lives and somebody who seems to be such an all-round good guy.
Thank you very much, Jeannie, for helping out.
Okay, let's get to the main guest on this edition of The Unexplained, a return visit, and a lot of things have changed in the last couple of years to Seth Szostak, the man who in California runs the SETI Institute, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Seth, thank you very much for waiting and thank you for coming back on The Unexplained.
It's my pleasure.
Now, Seth, an awful lot has happened in the two, maybe three years it is now since we last spoke.
And it seems to me that nothing as regards space is quite the way that it was.
We seem to know so much more.
As a scientist, a man who knows more about these matters than I ever will, is that how you see it?
Well, there certainly has been progress.
Of course, you could have said that anytime since the Renaissance, I suppose.
But certainly, if you're talking about the kind of science that bears on the question of whether there's any life out there, yeah, there's been a lot of progress.
And most of it is in the field of what we know about planets, both near and far.
And we seem not only through looking at planets, observing them from afar, which is what you do, but also going to them, like the expeditions to Mars that we've had, we seem to understand a great deal more.
But in terms of the search for anything or anyone that may have lived on planets or comets or whatever, we don't seem a whole lot further advanced, or are we?
No, no, you're absolutely right.
The bottom line, it's kind of a, I don't know, some people would say a discouraging bottom line, but it is the honest truth, is we still have no real compelling evidence for any life beyond Earth, whether you're talking about, you know, intelligent aliens or whether you're talking about pond scum on Mars or some other place.
I mean, there have been suggestions in the past that we could have found some life, in particular Martian life, but that hasn't held up very well.
So at the moment, the only life we know about is right here on planet Earth.
However, I think that there's good reason to think that that situation will change relatively soon.
But of course, there will be people listening to this saying, well, Seth Szostak said that on the radio with Art Bell in 1996, and it's 19 years later now.
Yes, indeed.
Well, my optimism is perhaps maybe it's over the top for some people, but for myself, I mean, I don't know.
No, but really, the optimism isn't just pie in the sky, wishing for the best and hoping to have an interesting story to tell at my next cocktail party.
I think that the optimism is really based on the sorts of searching that we're able to do now that we couldn't do in 1996.
I mean, obviously, we have, you know, rovers on the surface of Mars and they're prowling around.
They're not looking for life, actually, but they are looking for places that you could look for life.
So that's, you know, kind of the first step.
And, you know, it's not ruled out that Mars has life, but there are now a half dozen other places in the solar system where you might find life.
And within the next 10 years, there'll be spacecraft going there.
As far as SETI is concerned, looking for intelligent life, well, you know, the equipment keeps getting better.
In fact, it keeps getting faster.
So when the equipment gets faster, the chances that you'll have success sooner rather than later seem to improve.
The last time we spoke, I think was 2012.
What sorts of technology, without avalanching me in stuff that I'm not going to understand, but what sorts of things are you able to do now that you weren't able to do three years ago?
Well, in the field of SETI, which of course being the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is our attempt to eavesdrop on aliens that are at least clever enough to build a radio transmitter, what's changed is mostly computers, mostly the march of technology.
You might say, well, computers, I mean, yes, they're faster than they were three years ago, but so what?
I mean, they're about a factor of three or four times faster than they were three years ago, even three years ago, right?
But what that means is that, for example, whereas in 2012, we would look at some star system with our antennas and we would examine 20 million channels at once.
You know, it's kind of a man's dream.
No longer do you sit there ruining your marriage, going through the channels one at a time.
But you get 20 million at once.
Well, because of the improvements in computer technology, fundamentally, now we can look at 60 million.
All right, that's a factor of three.
So that means that you can look at three times as many star systems in the same amount of time.
So, you know, it's like going through a haystack looking for needles, and you've replaced your spi teaspoon with a spatula, if you will, which you're soon going to replace with a shovel and eventually with a skip loader.
So, you know, that speeds up the search, and that improvement is actually exponential with time.
So that's a very quick improvement.
But isn't part of this a little bit like looking for a small part that fixed the headlight to the front of a Chavet 1977 model in a huge junkyard somewhere in New York?
In other words, you've got an awful lot of digging to do, and the chances that you're going to find the thing you're looking for are pretty minimal.
Well, they may be minimal.
I mean, I can't gainsay that.
Nobody knows, though.
And the point is frequently to the point of perhaps tedium made that if you don't do the experiment, if you don't look, well, you probably won't find anything that way.
And it's pretty much like telling, I don't know, Captain Cook, look, Jim, you know, the Admiralty wants to send you into the South Pacific there, and your job is to go find islands we don't know about.
And he might say, I think the chances that there are any important islands that we haven't found so far are pretty slim.
And, you know, he could argue that one way or the other.
You could argue that one way or the other.
But in the end, you have to do the experiment.
So no matter what we think the chances might be, we don't know how many societies are out there waiting to be found.
So it certainly is worth some effort to try, even without that knowledge in advance.
And the other thing is, part of the knowledge that we have today that we didn't have even three years ago is that it seems that something like one out of five stars will have a planet where you could have liquid oceans and atmospheres and in biology.
Now, that means in our galaxy, there are tens of thousands of millions of cousins of Earth or maybe distant cousins of Earth, but cousins of Earth.
That's a very big number.
And consequently, it's hard to believe that if you buy tens of billions of lottery tickets, they're all losers.
it could happen, but it doesn't sound likely to me.
Now, news stories about space seem to me, and I've been doing news for more than 25 years, so I've seen most news stories, and I've seen them come round and round and round again, like a Ferris wheel.
They rotate.
We had a news story, I think it was a week, maybe two weeks ago now.
Time is marching on in this year of 2015, but it was about, say, two weeks ago.
And the news story said that we have located what we think is a planet in a way, way out system that we couldn't see a few years ago.
And this is a lot like Earth.
When you hear stories like this, and you may well be aware of the story that I'm talking about, do you go yippe?
Well, this put me in a bad mood.
I'll say that.
I mean, but we've heard this story before.
Almost a year ago, 10 months ago or so, there was a story about a planet called Kepler-186F.
Very appealing name.
I don't know if you'd want to name your kids Kepler-186F.
But this was considered the first planet that had been found around another star that might be somewhat similar to the Earth.
It was certainly the right size.
It's 10% bigger than the Earth, so that means it takes a little bit longer to fly halfway around the globe than it would here.
But it was also at the right distance from its star.
It was a star not quite like the sun, but anyhow, the right distance from its star where the temperatures would be, you know, between freezing and boiling of water, which is what's called habitable, and it might be habitable for some forms of life, even at the high end of that range.
So this was the first time we found a rocky, you know, which is to say a kind of a stony planet, somewhat like the Earth, same size, more or less the same temperatures.
We don't know whether it has oceans.
We don't know if it has an atmosphere.
But this made headlines because here was, you know, sample number one or example number one.
Now, finding one doesn't really mean too much.
What you really want to know is what fraction of planets out there would be like that.
And we still don't know the answer to that.
But as I say, preliminary estimates are that that could be as high as one in five.
So that's the real result.
The likelihood is greater.
But when you hear that stuff, do you go into another kind of mode there at SETI?
Do you say we better get our Yagi antenna pointed in that direction because that's looking pretty hot?
Well, yeah, we don't use Yagis.
I have one on my roof for cheap TV.
Well, we do, actually, Howard.
Whenever we find, or whenever, for example, Kepler finds another planet that might be attractive to life and maybe has some intelligent beings on it as a consequence, of course, we swing our antennas in the direction of this thing and check it out to the extent that we can.
But it pays to be realistic.
I mean, think about it.
You know, if you were a Klingon SETI researcher, you could have pointed your antennas at the Earth for four and a half billion years without picking anything up.
It didn't mean that the Earth wasn't habitable.
In fact, it didn't mean that the Earth didn't have life.
In fact, it might not have meant that the Earth didn't have intelligent life.
We just hadn't invented radio yet.
So the fact that you have one and you don't find anything really doesn't matter very much.
What you need to do is have a large, large number of these things or simply say, look, one in five star systems might have an Earth.
So we'll look at five million of them and then we will have willy-nilly looked at about a million Earths.
So it's a process of elimination.
It is.
It's a matter of big data in some sense, not to use an entirely trite term.
Big data and getting bigger all the time.
And that's amazing.
And it's fantastic that we're able to do that.
Of course it is.
And any other superlatives that I can find, I will chuck in as and when I find them and they come into my head.
However, the problem is the human interface, isn't it?
There's only so much that you, Seth Szostak, and you're cleverer than me, how much you can take on board.
At the end of the day, the buck has to stop with you, doesn't it?
You have to select from all that data.
Well, I suppose the buck stops with me.
The real problem, however, is, I mean, that's a problem in some sense, but the real problem is that the bucks have stopped.
The real difficulty is funding for SETI.
It's very difficult to get funding.
And our SETI experiments here are all privately funded.
I think a lot of the citizenry in the United States has the impression that when we talk about, you know, pointing our antennas at the sky, hoping to hear ET, that that's their tax dollars at work.
And it's not.
It hasn't been supported by tax dollars.
It hasn't been a NASA program since 1993.
So that's a long time ago.
Just to take you off a little cul-de-sac sidetrack here, do you think that NASA, the government, are actually doing this, but they're not telling you about it?
It would be somehow comforting to think that, but I honestly don't.
I mean, obviously we have close connections with NASA.
I mean, they have a major research center, the NASA Ames Research Center, just a mile from where I'm sitting here.
So we have plenty of contact with NASA.
The problem is money.
So if they're doing it secretly, it's not going to be any cheaper for them to do it secretly than to do it in the open.
So no, I don't think that there's any sort of black ops kind of SETI project.
It would be, as I say, somewhat heartening to think that they thought enough of the idea to actually do it, even if on the sly.
But while Americans love conspiracy theories.
I was going to say that.
Look, you wouldn't believe the conspiracy theorists that I speak to.
And although one of them hasn't voiced this particular one, I guess a scenario could be created whereby there were those in the know who knew what was out there and were possibly in contact with it or about to be.
And they'd be quite happy for you, a band of people privately funded by people's generosity to keep on searching while they've got the real hot technology funded by huge amounts of black budget money.
And, you know, they're closer to it than you are.
But you're like a smokescreen.
Has anybody ever put that to you?
I know it sounds crazy.
It probably is.
Well, somebody once did accuse me of being a mouthpiece for NASA, to which My reaction was: Well, they owe me back pay if that's true.
No, I honestly don't think that.
I mean, it's pretty much like hypothesizing: you know, there are a lot of private organizations trying to find cures for cancer.
For example, it's probably the case that the federal government has already found the cure for cancer.
They've got this secret project and they're just keeping it quiet.
I mean, there's no motivation for that.
If you find a cure for cancer, you know, you just want to let everybody know.
If you were to find ET, you know, that evidence is right up in the sky.
You can't keep it secret forever.
Anybody with an antenna can go find it too.
So I cannot understand any motivation for keeping it quiet.
I mean, you just want every scientist in the world who had some ability in this field to go study this stuff.
What about the project that started, I think, about 10 years ago, to get all kinds of people like myself with our little computers at home all connected together in a big network, hopefully to aid the search?
I know that wasn't your project, and that's not what you do, but you were aware of it.
What happened to that?
I heard nothing else about that.
Well, it's still very much alive.
It's called SETI at Home, and that was an initiative that came out of the University of California, Berkeley, which is, you know, like 50 miles away from where I am here.
And it was actually the idea that you could use people's home computers to process data coming from SETI experiments, that was actually pitched to us.
Some guy I knew up in Seattle called me up one day and said, hey, look, got this idea, and what about it?
It turns out that the way we take data, it doesn't actually work very well for our experiments, but it does work well for the Berkeley SETI experiments.
We're not the only ones doing SETI.
You use the word experiment.
Yes.
So their experiments are similar to yours.
Yeah, in many ways.
I mean, they're also doing radio SETI.
They also do some other kinds of SETI, looking for flashing lights.
But let's restrict ourselves to the radio for a moment.
So they're using a big antenna.
In fact, the one down in Puerto Rico at Arecibo, they collect data on that, but they don't control the telescope, so they can't control where it's pointing.
So they just, you know, the thing just sort of randomly sweeping around the sky, and they collect all these data, and they distribute some fraction of those data to the public, which has this free downloadable screensaver, set at home.
And then they process it and send the results back to Berkeley.
So it turns out that this is probably largest computer if you reckon the size of a computer on the basis of how many operations it can do per second, something techno-weeny like that.
So it's very, very useful for them because they can process these data in ways that they couldn't do if they had to do it real time with the computers they have over in Berkeley.
I have a vision of you, and I once passed Mountain View when I visited California years ago.
I have a vision of you sweeping up to the office in a soft-top car in the sunshine every day.
Maybe this is a romanticized view of California, closing the door in the dust there, walking in and saying, okay, let's go through the program.
And each morning you do the same list of things and checks that you do.
In other words, what is a typical day at the office?
What do you do?
You know, I kind of like your vision better than the reality, Howard.
I got to tell you.
Well, no, I just kind of had this vision of sort of Clint Eastwood in his Gran Torino sweeping up the driveway, you know?
Yeah, well, I don't have a Gran Torino to begin with.
I don't even have what you call a soft-top car.
I've got a beat up old used car.
It's like 11 years old and whatever.
But, and sweeping up, I mean, I just, you know, sort of stumble out of the car, come up here and make myself a cup of coffee, at which point I'm awake enough to do what occupies the first part of my day, which is dealing with email.
So look, the observations, the idea that we sit around with earphones on or looking at computer screens, looking at last night's data, that's not the way it works because that would be extremely tedious, let me assure you.
So all that's been automated.
You know, the computers are doing all the listening, if you will.
And consequently, you're dealing with far more mundane things, but less boring, perhaps, such as email, for example, or fundraising or thinking about where should we be pointing the antennas?
I mean, that's something I like to think about.
Where is ET hanging out?
What can you say about that?
Anything?
Or do we just randomly search the sky?
That kind of thing.
Well, that has to be a human judgment call, doesn't it?
A computer can't do that.
No, the computer can't.
And while the Klingons could do it, they don't seem to touch the state.
So, yeah, no, that's a judgment call.
But, you know, your judgment might change with time because you learn things thanks to the work of other astronomers.
So where are you looking at the moment?
Well, at the moment, we still look at nearby stars that are pretty much like the sun.
But we're starting another program where we look at what are called red dwarf stars.
Now, red dwarf probably resonates in the UK because I think there was a famous television show.
Oh, there was.
And I think it's probably on public television day.
Well, you are.
Yes, I think it was.
In any case, but red dwarf stars are just stars that are a little bit smaller than the sun.
Okay, maybe they're only 70% the diameter or 60% or something like that.
But it turns out that for stars, when you make a star a little bit smaller, it gets a lot dimmer.
But it also has the advantage that, yes, it's dimmer.
It's a dimmer bulb.
But on the other hand, because it's using less energy to shine, it takes a much longer time for it to run through its fuel.
Now, you might say, so what?
I mean, who cares?
But the sun, for example, it runs out of fuel in another 5 billion years.
So it had a lifetime of roughly 10 billion years.
That's the sun.
But these little red dwarf guys, they'll take 100 billion years to run through their fuel.
The relevance to SETI is this.
Every red dwarf star that was ever born in the cosmos since the Big Bang is still out there burning away today.
That means on average, they're much older than the sun.
Well, this is one case, the only case I can think of personally, where older is actually better.
Because if it's older, it's had more time to develop intelligent life.
And the other thing is there's so many of these little guys.
I mean, you know, three quarters of all stars are these little guys, that on average, they're closer.
So, you know, I think there are a lot of advantages.
And we're going to, you know, look at these red dwarf stars.
I think that those are the places where ET might be hanging out.
The reason you were in the news over here, I think it was three weeks ago, four weeks ago, and I played the audio cut of you saying what you were saying is that you seem to be saying that we need to be getting more proactive in all of this.
We need to be reaching out more, perhaps, than we are.
Yeah, that seems to be a bit of a fashionable topic these days, and it generated a lot of interest because there were actually sessions on the matter of what's called active SETI at a meeting here in San Jose, California, which is like 15 miles down the road here, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Now, active SETI is a little different than just listening for E.T. song or voice or whatever else on the radio.
It's an experiment by which you actually transmit interrogatories into space.
You send out a message, hi, we're the earthlings and get back to us or whatever.
And you aim these transmissions at, say, nearby stars.
I think a lot of the public thought you were doing that already.
Yes, they did.
Well, the stories, you know, I perhaps don't have to tell you about the media that they often get things wrong.
Really?
They think they already understand the story.
And the fact that you haven't actually said that is, you know, just too bad.
In the office where I work, you know, the general view was that we were doing that already.
And I think they were fairly impressed, by the way, when I told them I know that guy.
But that's by the by.
Oh, well, you know, it has been done in the past.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
NASA in 2008 broadcast a Beatles song to the North Star, right?
Across the universe.
If you're a Beatles fan, you may know that one.
Okay, so they sent it with a big antenna down in Southern California.
They aim the antenna at the North Star, and they transmit this thing.
And I think that Paul McCartney actually sent NASA an email saying, you know, give my love to the aliens or something like that.
I don't know what it was.
All right.
They didn't check with anybody about whether this is a good idea.
They didn't try and do any research to find out if Klingons are partial to the Beatles' repertoire.
They just did it.
Okay.
That's not the only case.
There's been a Doritos, which is a kind of crisp here in the U.S. advertisement broadcast into space.
I mean, there have been a lot of such broadcasts, and some of them much more powerful than those.
But this was, you know, to decide, look, is this a good idea?
Should we do this?
Should we seriously broadcast into space?
And if so, there are really two questions you have to answer.
One is, what should you say?
And secondly, should you do it at all?
Because maybe it's dangerous.
So that's what the discussions were about.
But the decision sort of taken with the general view being that maybe we ought to be doing this.
Well, no, no decision has been made, actually.
You know, to me, it's unclear how you make the decision.
Obviously, you can make it on the basis of how you feel about it.
And you can just, I mean, I have an amateur radio license, so I could, I suppose, construct a big antenna in my backyard and, you know, connect up my ham transmitter to it and send my personal philosophies up into space.
I mean, you know, nobody could stop me from doing that at the moment.
I hope that they never would be able to stop me from doing that, to be honest.
But if you're going to do this in a serious way where you're sending a signal that's so strong that it might conceivably be a bad thing to do because it alerts the aliens to where we are and who knows what they might do, Stephen Hawking is weighed in on that possible danger.
Well, how do you decide whether you should do it or not?
Do you just poll the entire populace of the earth or do you have the UN decide?
I mean, it's very, very difficult to know.
And conversely, and this is a conundrum, isn't it?
That if there is an intelligent civilization like us or better out there, then they will be having the same debate about whether they should be sending signals out.
And if life goes on like that, nobody will ever contact anybody.
Yeah, well, that's been pointed out, and that's been used as a justification for us to broadcast, actually.
I mean, if I go to a party and I agree reluctantly to go to a party, but, you know, I say, look, I'm not feeling very sociable.
I'm going to go to the party, but I'm not going to talk to anyone.
And if everybody adopts that point of view, it's going to be a fairly dull party.
So you could say maybe everybody's keeping quiet.
Actually, I find it hard to believe that nobody is willing to leak some signals into space.
And in fact, in fact, if you look at the strongest signals coming off of Earth, those are, yes, television, yes, FM radio.
But the strongest signals are actually our radars, right?
You know, the radar being used down at Heathrow to keep planes from smashing into the trees when they land in bad weather.
Those radars, those signals just, you know, shoot right off the edge of the Earth and go into deep space.
And, you know, any aliens that have rockets that could go from one star system to another could easily pick that stuff up.
And you don't want to shut that off.
At least I don't.
So in a sense, we're already broadcasting.
But if you wanted to deliberately broadcast, if you wanted to send them some information, then you get back down to, you know, is that a good idea?
And what should you say?
And obviously, it's a very interesting discussion.
I'm not sure where it's going to go.
I'm assuming that the aliens sorted that out, you know, a couple of million years ago so that they are on the air.
And there's a lot of technical stuff you'd have to sort out.
For example, as you said, it would need to be a powerful transmission.
What kind of power?
What kind of frequency will you broadcast?
What kind of modulation will you use?
And what kind of message will you put on that modulation?
That's four things, and that's just for starters.
Yes, indeed, indeed.
Those are all good questions.
And, you know, there aren't too many answers that we can know for certain.
Certainly, you couldn't know what they might want to send us.
Maybe they just want us to join their book club.
I have no idea.
But that's the thing, isn't it?
We assume, if we assume anything, that the frequencies that we have and have discovered are the sorts of frequencies that others would discover, and that that's how you would communicate by radio waves.
They may not do that.
Well, that's true.
And I get emails about one, Howard, in which people say, you know, you guys are using radio to look for the aliens.
That's so old school.
And I think that what they're actually saying is that with the advent of television, that radio is in some sense a medium of the past.
Well, I would beg to differ on that one.
I actually listen to a lot more radio than I watch television, but that's me.
But I think that that's what they're saying.
That doesn't carry any weight because radio and television are the same, same as laser beams flashed at the sky.
That's all what's called electromagnetic radiation.
It's all the same stuff.
But maybe what they're really saying is: no, no, no.
You know, all that goes at the speed of light.
Radio waves zoom into space at the speed of light, but no faster.
And that means that to reach the nearest aliens, you know, if you broadcast a question, hi, where are the earthlings?
Are you interested in talking with us?
It might take hundreds, maybe even a thousand years to get to any place where there are any aliens, and then another couple of hundred or a thousand years for their response to get back to us, by which point your personal interest in the whole project is somewhat less.
So, you know, people are saying, look, I've seen enough science fiction to know that this speed of light limit is just, you know, bonkers, and the aliens won't be using it because it's too slow.
They're using hyperdimensional physics or something similarly impressive sounding for their transmissions.
And that would be just great, except that nobody knows what that is.
So there's the problem.
You can hypothesize they have some physics we don't have that allows them to do that, but without the physics, you certainly can't do an experiment.
You have to grapple with something that periodically all of us think about, but most of us just dismiss it because it's the kind of thought that gives you a big headache, so you move on to something else or you turn the TV on.
You constantly are faced with the reality of infinite space.
How do you get your head around that?
The fact that when you look up there, it's fast.
I mean, I'm looking out at it tonight.
And in fact, I am on the flight path to Heathrow Airport.
So apart from the stars and a certain amount of rain tonight and the trees blowing in the wind, you know, it's a vast infinity out there.
But the thought is, isn't it, for all of us, how far does that go?
Well, nobody knows how big space is.
It could be infinite.
I mean, that's actually not ruled out by the observations.
It could be that the universe is finite, that you could count up all the stars, all the galaxies, that sort of thing.
I mean, it's possible you could do that, and the number is not infinite.
It's just finite.
We don't know.
But what is absolutely finite is how much of the universe you have a hope of seeing.
And, you know, that's out to a certain number of tens of billions of light years.
That's all you can hope to see.
We can see 125, 150 billion galaxies.
That's all we're ever going to see.
And because the universe is speeding up in its expansion, that number will get smaller with time.
So I urge you, Howard, to go out tonight and look at the universe because tomorrow night when you go out, you'll see less.
Not much less, but you'll see somewhat less.
Yeah, but how do you get your mind even around that?
And the answer is, I don't think you ever do.
I mean, you don't.
You can write down the number.
That's one of the good things about science.
You can write down a number, 10 to the whatever X or something, and that's the number of star systems or the dimensions of space or the amount of time.
You can write these numbers down, but it's sort of like, I don't know, confronting the national debt.
You know, it's a number and you can write it down, but your head isn't really around it.
But does it not depress you that the action, if there is alien action, if there is another civilization, may be going on in a place that we can never be aware of?
Certainly not with technology that we can envisage now.
Yeah, that could happen.
In fact, I'm sure that that's happening.
Look, the number of stars, as I said, in our own, sorry, the number of planets in our own galaxy is on the order of a trillion.
Okay, that's a million, million.
That's our galaxy.
There are 100 billion other galaxies.
So 100 billion times a trillion is really a big number.
And that's the number of planets, more or less.
And even if only one in a million of those planets is very interesting, it's an enormous, I mean, again, kind of incomprehensiblely large number of planets that have biology and some of those will have intelligent biology.
So yeah, there's probably a lot of action.
It's like, I don't know, I could sit here and worry about the fact on Saturday night that there are literally tens of thousands of parties going on in the U.S. that I'm not invited to and will never know about.
But I mean, you know, I try not to lose sleep about that.
So you've got to just keep on keeping on.
I guess that's the answer to that.
And this brings me to a question that I've never asked you before and should have.
Is the ultimate aim to take SETI off this planet, to maybe get a base on Mars and explore further from there?
Well, you could do that.
I don't know that the cuisine is going to be any better on Mars.
And in fact, moving to Mars doesn't get you any closer to the aliens, of course.
I mean, that's, you know, Mars is 35 million miles away.
That's nothing.
But it's like, you know, there's a good restaurant on the other side of town I want to go to, but I'm just going to move to the other side of the living room to get closer to it.
It doesn't really help you much.
But what would help you quite a bit is forget about going to Mars.
Just go to the back side of the moon, right?
The backside of the moon, the side of the moon that you never see from Earth, that is shielded by the moon from all this radio noise that we make here on Earth, all this interference that's such a problem for our SETI research.
So it's kind of a radio quiet zone.
And the reason, of course, most of us ordinary people know that is when the Apollo missions went up there, they would be in radio silence when they went around the back.
That's right.
That's right.
They're shielded by the moon.
Okay.
So, you know, it would make sense to move SETI to the back side of the moon.
The problem is somebody has to write a check to do that.
And, of course, it's going to be uncomfy for the people who have to go, you know, be part of the crew there.
Right.
Do you think it is something that will ever be done?
Is it something that is going to be done at some point?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I think so.
I mean, it has such obvious advantages that at some point it will be done.
But at the moment, look, the amount of money being spent on SETI research worldwide is very small.
I think that a lot of people misunderstand this.
The total number of people who are doing this kind of work in the entire world is far fewer than work at the local car wash here in the Silicon Valley.
Okay.
I mean, it's a very small number of people, maybe a dozen, something like that.
Okay.
And the amount of money involved, I mean, I think Americans burn up more on cat food every hour than is spent every year on SETI.
I mean, it's a tiny amount of money.
So it's a very, very limited effort.
So to say, hey, you guys would do a heck of a lot better by packing up all your equipment, not to mention yourselves, and hie yourself off to the backside of the moon.
Yeah, I'm all For it, but I don't see it happening.
Somebody's got to pay for it.
Because there are so few of you, and because the budgets are so paltry and small, a lot of people would say, What's the point?
So, Seth Szostak, what is the point?
Why should we bother doing this?
Well, that is a question that you get quite frequently, and it isn't just about SETI.
I mean, people here will ask me sometimes, you know, why are we spending all our tax dollars?
Because in this case, they are tax dollars, to put motorized skateboards on Mars, for example.
You know, we've got problems right here on Earth, and you're spending all this money to, you know, look for pond scum on Mars in the end.
So what's the point in doing that when there are so many problems here on the Earth?
And the answer to that is, look, yes, there are problems here on the Earth, but there have always been problems on the Earth.
You know, in 1491, there were plenty of problems in Spain, and yet they came up with the money to send this guy, Chris, across the Atlantic in the hope of shortening a trade route to the Far East, but in fact, opening up an entirely new continent, two continents.
Exploration is something that I think Homo sapiens is very hardwired to do.
In that sense, we're like ants.
You have a lot of ants, and most of those ants just follow other ants along in a line.
That's what ants are programmed to do.
But one in 100 ants, or whatever it is, are the kind that just sort of wander off across your kitchen countertop looking for this sugar, whatever they're doing.
If it weren't for those ants, you know, the whole hive would die.
So exploration, and you can just look into history and see this is true.
Without exploration, your civilization eventually stagnates and is either taken over by somebody else or just sort of fades away.
Exploration is essential because either it finds new resources or it results in the development of new technologies or it just opens up, as in the case of the discovery of the Americas, an escape hatch for Europeans under a surf system.
And that's what broke up the medieval social structures in Europe was the result of exploration.
So I'm a big fan of exploration.
And if a Philistine or a hard heart or any combination of the two said to you, Seth, what have you achieved so far?
What would you say?
I'd have to be quite candid.
We haven't found the aliens.
We really haven't.
On the other hand, I will follow that up usually in the interest of self-defense by saying, look, if you'd ask Chris Columbus two weeks out of Cadiz, hey, Chris, what have you found so far?
Nothing but water.
That's what we found.
It's just this aqueous environment that always seems to surround the ship.
So, you know, it's one of those things that until you succeed, you've, in some sense, failed.
And fortunately, I don't get discouraged by that because to begin with, we're learning more about, you know, the prevalence of planets and what kind of planets are out there.
And all those signs are go, you know, all the signals are thumbs up for the possibility of life in space.
But beyond that, as we've mentioned earlier, the equipment keeps getting faster and faster.
So, you know, you're not doing the same thing today that you were doing five years ago.
And that's an encouraging thing as well.
These big money donors, the people who put money in to keep it all going, presumably you have to report back to them from time to time.
What sorts of things do you say?
Well, it depends on in what sense they are donors.
If they're just, you know, look, I like the idea, SETI, I'm going to send you guys $100 to help you out or whatever it is.
We send them a thank you letter, I should say, and something they can use to make a deduction on their taxes or whatever.
We're a nonprofit organization.
And that's all that's required there.
If you're talking about big donors, though, then indeed, they usually have given you the money because they have some interest in the project.
And so you try and keep them informed about what you're doing.
If they've given money to build new equipment, you tell them how that development is going.
You invite them up to the observatories.
You invite them to the Institute.
You take them to dinner and talk to them about what you're doing.
I mean, I think that would be true for donors to any cause, really.
I'm not medical research, whatever.
I'm just interested that when you get them there and you have them in the cafeteria, if that's where you take them or the VIP room, what do they say to you?
What do they ask you?
Are they like kids in a sweet shop?
What is their motivation?
I suppose is what I'm trying to ask in a roundabout way.
Yeah, I wish we did have a cafeteria.
Usually you take them to some place for a bad lunch in the neighborhood here.
But, well, usually their questions are very, they tend to be more technical than anything else.
If they've given a lot of money, they're usually people who are technically inclined.
Because, look, we're here in this Silicon Valley.
We're surrounded by high-tech industry.
So, you know, there's a kind of a selection effect there.
A lot of the donors are people also in technology.
And so they'll say, so tell me about how these antennas work or whatever.
They have, you know, the kind of questions you get from the propeller head crowd.
And that's perfectly fine.
Some of them have their own theories about how we ought to be looking.
But I have to say, you know, we very seldom get donors who come in and say, I'm going to tell you how to do this experiment.
That doesn't happen.
They seem to be enlightened enough to, you know, let us do our job.
If you had a wish, apart from $20 million, I guess, what would you like?
A piece of equipment or something that you could do with right now that would aid the search?
Well, to be honest, the most pressing need is simply for money to fund the ongoing search.
In other words, not capital equipment so much as operational money.
So yes, money is just to pay people to continue to do the experiment.
That's the less glamorous part of funding for any research project.
People love to have their name put on a building or an accelerator or some other instrument, right?
Because, you know, there's a big plaque there and they can point to it.
But the really hard thing to raise money for is just to pay the people who are doing the job.
That's not so glamorous and that's hard to find.
So that would, of course, be my wish.
But if you're talking about what kind of equipment could we use to really speed up the search, then the answer to that is simply more of the kind of equipment we have now.
We need more antennas, we need more receivers, and of course, you know, computers, software, stuff like that.
All the stuff you need to look.
It's sort of like asking Galileo, look, you know, you found four moons of Jupiter.
What would you like to do next?
And you say, look, get me a bigger telescope.
I'll find other things.
And those people, those hard hearts, who would say to you that if ET was out there, we would have found ET by now.
Yeah, I don't agree with that, actually.
I mean, you can say that, and it's easy to say, but, you know, the problem is the hypothesis here is that there is somebody out there, that there is ET out there, if you will.
But unlike in kind of traditional science, you have some hypothesis and you go and try and falsify it.
You know, an hypothesis being maybe there's something called the Higgs boson.
So you build this huge machine in France, Switzerland, whatever, and then you try and, you know, look for it.
But if you don't find it, you can say it doesn't exist.
We can never say ET doesn't exist, no matter how much experimenting we do.
There are gazillion ways in which you can miss it.
I mean, you might be tuned to the wrong frequency.
You're on the air at the wrong time.
You don't have enough sensitivity.
You're looking at the wrong time.
Whatever.
I mean, it can make a very long list.
So you can't falsify this hypothesis.
On the other hand, you have some hope of proving that it is true.
And so that's kind of what keeps us going.
Not the idea that, you know, gosh, you haven't found anything.
No, we haven't found anything.
But on the other hand, it's very early days.
We've looked at a few thousand star systems.
The galaxy has, you know, a couple of hundred billion star systems.
So to give up now would be very short-sighted.
Talking of these news reports, which we were talking about earlier, the planets that are periodically reported in the news, wasn't there a story about two weeks ago about a signal being out there that people were excited about?
I know this periodically appears.
There is a signal.
And people say, I wonder if this signal is the signal.
Were you aware of that story?
I'm sure I read that on one of the wires about two weeks ago.
Really?
Two weeks ago?
Then I don't know what it is.
I mean, about a month or two months ago, there was a strange signal that had been found using a radio telescope down in Parks, Australia, down in the so-called Tish.
If you saw that movie, and people had mined the data from that antenna and they'd found this signal, which is a rapid radio burst kind of signal, kind of thing.
And nobody knows what that is.
The chances are that it's colliding objects in space, most likely.
But of course, it could be ET.
There's no way to know.
But I haven't heard about any signal that was suggestive of finding ET on the radio.
I mean, if somebody finds something like that and it's credible, you can be sure that we hear about it because people will say, look, use your antenna.
You go look for it.
Because you've got the best antenna.
Well, I don't know if we have the best antenna.
For some things, we do have the best antenna.
But we do have antennas.
We have, you know, the equipment that would allow us to search very quickly.
And, you know, we obviously know what to look for when it comes to signals that might be artificially generated.
This is your life's work, Seth.
Are you going to continue doing this until retirement?
Well, I think.
Whenever that might be.
Yes, I was going to say, well, you should talk to my boss about whether that's likely.
No, I honestly, yes, I think that that's true.
You know, people say, why are you doing this?
Because, you know, you might die and you never found anything.
And, you know, was your life wasted there or that kind of thing.
It's very hard to know what a wasted life is, really.
But, you know, what I find interesting about it and its own reward is the fact that we're addressing a problem that's a big picture problem.
A lot of people, you know, I'm going to repair automobile transmissions for a living or I'm going to be a certified public accountant or whatever.
That's all fine.
Sell insurance.
But here, you're addressing a question that everybody, you know, the cavemen would have asked this question.
I'm sure the cavemen would step out of their cave at night, look up at the sky and kind of wonder without knowing anything about what they were looking at, kind of wonder, is there anybody up there looking back this way?
And there was no way they could answer that question.
And of course, today, at least in principle, we could answer that question.
So in a way, I regard my job as kind of a privilege, really, that can at least deal with this big, big question.
And whether we answer it or not is a little unclear.
I remain optimistic, of course, but that may be delusional.
I just think it's a very interesting, very interesting question to ask.
Very.
You said to me, I think you said to me, that there were six people in your area doing what you do.
A very small number of people, more people working on car washes and that kind of stuff.
Are you bringing up the next generation of Seth Shostaks?
Well, I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but, you know, I hope we are.
You've touched on a fundamental problem, and that is that the SETI Institute, which is a nonprofit research organization, is not like a Bristol university or something like that.
We have students, where you have grad students in particular.
So, you know, how do you bring in the next generation?
And I think everyone here is well aware that we need to do that.
We do get students in this summer, and many of them are very keen.
In fact, every time I go give a talk at a university, and that happens fairly frequently, to be honest, students come up and they say, how can I get a job with you guys?
So the interest is there.
There are plenty of people who would like to do this.
And the bottleneck now is just, again, the money.
I mean, you can't bring them in and say, well, you get to work for free here for three years.
They can't afford to do that.
You wouldn't want them to do that.
So the problem is, unfortunately, very mundane, but very real, and that is money.
And I guess for anybody young coming into this, unless they are incredibly motivated, which I guess some young people are, would be, number one, there's the remuneration part of it.
And number two, if you're a science person, then presumably you want to invent something, create something, be part of something that you can hold it in your hand or point to it.
Your field of research is, I want to try and find a word better than nebulous because that's not quite what I mean.
But you know what I'm saying?
It's hard to quantify what you're doing.
Yeah, a bit ephemeral, perhaps.
But yes and no.
I mean, yes, certainly here in the Silicon Valley, you'll find plenty of young people who want to make a million dollars before they're 30.
Well, these days it'd have to be more like 10 million.
A million won't buy you much anymore.
But, you know, and that's what they want to do.
And that's fine.
They want to write that next killer application.
And they're busy doing it away.
You can see it all around us here at the SETI Institute.
We're right in the smackdab middle of the Silicon Valley, and we're surrounded by high-tech companies employing young people who work till midnight every night hoping to do just that, make an application that generates a lot of money.
But that's not the only thing that motivates people.
And people who go into science, they're not doing it for the money, let me assure you that.
And they know that they're going to be relatively modestly paid.
But on the other hand, they might be the first to learn something new.
There's always that little teaser that they might be on duty the night or the day when the discovery is made.
Yep, that's exactly right.
And indeed, you can see that even in the people that come to visit and watch, right, whether that's a television crew or whatever it is, a reporter or just somebody that you met on the bus, and they want to see the SETI Institute, not that there's a heck of a lot to see here, but they do want to see it.
And when they come, particularly when they would come to the observatory itself, they would sit there and they would all, all of them, would think this is going to be the night.
This is going to be the night that that signal is going to roll in.
We're going to see evidence for ET for the first time.
Doesn't happen, but everybody has the feeling that this could be it.
It's maybe like going to Las Vegas.
Your number could come up or your numbers.
Seth, you've been very good again to give me your time, which you've done a number of times in the past, and I'm really pleased that we've kept up this contact.
Just finally, the last thing I'll ask you this time round, what would be your perfect day at the office?
What would be the sequence of events for you?
I mean, the day that you make the discovery and you're on duty.
How would it run in your head?
Well, it doesn't have to occur only in my head because we have had some false alarms that were fairly interesting and where we thought that maybe we had found the real deal.
And so I have some idea of how that works.
And the way it works is that you're getting a signal that maybe it happened the night before, whatever, and you're looking at the reports or somebody's looking at the reports.
And it turns out that there's a signal that passed all the tests.
And no matter how often you looked at this signal, it still looked like it was really coming from one spot in the sky, you know, one spot on the radio dial that had all the characteristics of just what we're looking for.
And if you find that, then the way it plays out is that you would immediately get back on that telescope and look at it again.
And, you know, in the best of all worlds, you would find it again and you would continue to find it for, I don't know, two or three days.
And then you would have the temerity to call up somebody at another observatory and say, you know, Bob, I'm sorry to break into your observing program over there, but would you mind looking at this spot on the sky?
I'll give you the coordinates over this range of frequencies and see if you can find this signal.
And if that were to happen, well, it would ruin my whole week, of course, because all the dinners and so on I had planned would have to be thrown out the window.
But doggone, that would be very satisfying.
And those false alarms that you talked about, and we know that you've had them from time to time, the moment when you realize it's not what you thought it might have been, what's that feeling like?
Well, of course, there's a bit of a disappointment.
I mean, on the other hand, you know, when you've gone as many years as I've gone now without finding a signal, you know, the fact that, okay, you got all excited about this, but no, it's no once more, it doesn't actually bring me down too much.
It's disappointing.
But on the other hand, it's sort of an interesting story in of itself, you know, how it seemed like it was the real deal.
And it does torture test the system in the sense that you see what would happen if you did pick up a signal.
You know, a lot of people in the United States would say, you know, if you guys got a signal, the federal government would move in, shut you all down.
Right.
I never have understood that because, you know, why would they do that?
But, you know, the usual response is, well, the public couldn't handle the news.
Well, I think the public could handle the news personally, but whatever.
But when you have these false alarms, you get to test that hypothesis because here's a signal that you think might be real.
And you might believe that for a few days and you can see whether the feds are showing up to shut you all down.
And guess what?
They don't.
What actually happens is the newspapers start calling you up.
I hope that when the big one happens, which I'm optimistic too, I think it will.
I hope that you're on duty.
Me too.
And I hope you give me a call.
I'll leave you my number because I'd like to be the first journalist to break that news.
Some hope, eh?
Seth Szostak, thank you very much indeed.
If people want to know about SETI, where do they go?
www.seti.org.
You know we'll talk again.
Thanks very much, Aaron.
Seth Szostak, a good friend of mine, and this show from SETI.
If you have any thoughts about our guests or any suggestions you'd like to make or you'd like to make a donation to this show, please go to the website www.theunexplained.tv.
www.theunexplained.tv.
And the website, designed by the excellent Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thank you very much for your support.
Guaranteed more good shows coming and hopefully this virus is finally going to go or certainly diminish, fade away, do whatever it needs to do because I could do without this.
And I know a lot of you've had it too.
So hopefully the next time you hear me, I might be a little bit better again.
Thank you very much for all your support and all the good messages.
And until next we meet on The Unexplained, please stay safe, stay calm and stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection