Talking SETI with Dr. Seth Shostak

If I told you that we are going to have proof of intelligent alien life within the next 12 years, proof that we are not alone in the universe, why would you believe me? It's a bold claim to make, and it's a specific claim, too. But first, I'm not the one making it. This idea that we will have certainty of intelligent life by 2035 or sooner isn't coming from me or some obscure corner of the web or your slightly crazy uncle who's been obsessed with UFOs since the 70s.

This claim is rooted in science, in reality. And in this episode, you'll hear it for yourself. They got a small beam of light again. True Weird Stuff Ahh, the news cycle is exhausting. More and more people are telling me they've stopped watching. It's so depressing, so divisive, so overwhelming. I get it. But, if you've been following a strict news diet, you might have missed what feels like some of the wildest stories of our lifetime.

Stories like Air Force officer and former U.S. intelligence officer, David Grush, blowing the whistle on what he describes as the federal government's top secret UFO retrieval program. We're definitely not alone. Absolutely, the data points empirically that we're not alone. Well, naturally, when you recover something that's either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots.

And, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it's true. And then there's the news coming from Harvard's Galileo project, which sent an expedition team to the Pacific Ocean to trawl for evidence of a crashed interstellar object. Using magnets, the team, led by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, found bits of wire, tiny aluminum shards, and metallic spherules, whose composition suggests an unearthly origin?

Amazingly enough, we found basically what is called the spherules. These are particles that are spherical, perfect spheres made of metal. And we can put them into what is called an X-ray fluorescence analyzer that allows us to infer the composition. And the composition appears to be different than commercial metals that we use here on Earth, anything that humans produce.

But it's also different from asteroids, from rocks that previously were analyzed. And that makes, first of all, it implies that perhaps indeed it originated from a completely different environment. And moreover, perhaps it was manufactured in an artificial way. And in case you're thinking, oh Lord, here comes some fringy UFO kook stuff, think again.

The story has moved beyond us, hashtag UFO Twitter followers, right on into the mainstream. Take Senator Marco Rubio, who has long advocated for transparency on the whole UFO, UAP, are we alone situation. He recently told NewsNation that others in the intelligence community have come forward with first-hand accounts of UFO hardware?

Or have first-hand knowledge or first-hand claims of certain things. Some are public figures, you know, and we've heard from them in the past. Others, you know, have not shared publicly. And so we're trying to gather as much of that information as we can. And the reason why I'm being cautious, I'm not trying to be evasive, but I am trying to be protective of these people.

Some of these people still work in the government. And frankly, a lot of them are very fearful, fearful of their jobs, fearful of their clearances, fearful of their career. And some, frankly, are fearful of harm coming to them. What is happening? UFOs and aliens and anything connected to either has pretty much been considered territory for kooks my whole life.

And now suddenly it's in the real news. It's exciting and surprising. And if we're honest, a little bit unsettling, even for those of us who have always believed and hoped for real disclosure. The universe is so incomprehensibly vast and ancient. On the one hand, the heck wants to be alone and all of that. On the other hand, an intelligent race capable of interstellar travel could probably annihilate us without even having to land their craft.

There's some wild speculation out there about this subject. But there's also some very real science. I'm living at a time when you can answer a question that's truly profound. You know, is there anybody else out there? You can actually try and answer that. And there's some chance that you will. The fact that I think we will do it before 2035 or thereabouts is only because by that point, the number of star systems that SETI scientists have actually tried to eavesdrop on is about a million.

And it just seems to me intuitively, but nothing more than that, that if you look at a million star systems, you have at least a decent chance of looking in the direction of somebody else's society. That's Dr. Seth Shostak. He's the senior astronomer for the SETI Institute. SETI as in Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

We had a chance to talk with Dr. Shostak about the work of SETI and about his own views based on his decades of research and study on what is or isn't out there. And as someone who tunnels around in the UFO Twitter rabbit hole for funsies, I know how easy it is to get caught up in the woo of all of it. Non-human intelligence, dimensional entities, secret government deals with those hidden reptilian overlords.

I love all of it, but I love the science too. So let's look at the science behind SETI and let's find out why Dr. Shostak says with such casual conviction that we'll know by 2035 that we aren't alone in the universe. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. That's us, humanity, doing the searching. Radio astronomy.

What is it exactly? And what is it a radio telescope can see? Well, radio telescopes are actually not so different from the mirror and lens telescopes that everybody knows about, right? Except instead of gathering light, we've got to gather radio waves, which are light. Light is radio waves, radio waves is light. And they're just, if you will, different colors.

They're different frequencies. So radio telescopes and there are plenty of them around. Radio telescopes just look like big antennas. And they look like that because they actually are big antennas. So we use these big antennas. We point them at the sky. We point them in the directions of, say, some nearby star and hope that that star has planets on which there are some maybe some aliens that are on the air.

And we could eavesdrop on them. So we're eavesdropping on what exactly? Our own solar system, our galaxy, the whole universe. Well, as they say on Star Trek, space is big, really big. And that means it's just a lot of places where, you know, you might you might find aliens. Right. The Milky Way galaxy, that's a galaxy we live in, has several hundred billion star systems, several hundred billion with a B. So that's that's that's a big number already.

And it turns out that, you know, maybe 10 percent of those stars is maybe it's between about five and 10 percent of those star systems. We'll have a planet that's about the same size as the Earth and also about the same distance from its home star as we are from the sun. So, you know, you can have oceans that aren't permanently frozen or that don't just boil away.

So, you know, that that's still a big number. I mean, it's the number of cousins of Earth in our star. Sorry, in the visible world, just in our galaxy. The number of planets that might be, as I say, cousins of Earth, you know, that's already measured in the tens of millions and we can see 200 billion other galaxies. Right. So there's just all this real estate.

And it would be hard to convince me that with that much real estate, that it's all sterile except for the Earth. This is the only place where anything interesting is happening. I've never been accused of being a mathematician, but it's hard to look at numbers like that and not think the odds are astronomically against Earth and humanity being some kind of miraculous one off.

Yeah, I think that's fair to say. I mean, you know, if that's true, then Earth is a miracle. Now, there are plenty of people who like to think that Earth is a miracle. They like to think of themselves as being some some sort of miracle. That could be you can't rule it out as long as you haven't found anybody else. Right. So it is a possible interpretation of the situation today to say that, you know, life is tough to get started or life is, you know, very fragile or, you know, whatever.

It's a hard thing to do. And consequently, yes, we have it here. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But you're not going to find it anywhere else. You can say that and people can argue against that, as you have just done by saying, yeah, but that makes us maybe too special. And if you think you're special, normally in science, you're wrong.

So, you know, that's all we can say at this point, though. A big part of the reason we wanted to have this conversation with Dr. Shostak is that for us anyway, it seems utterly horrifying and twilight zoney for humanity to be all alone in the universe. All alone, rocketing through the void, our brief existence, nothing more than blink to be swallowed whole in such an unspeakable, unfathomable loneliness.

Pop culture has stepped up to fill that bottomless darkness with little gray beings and flying saucers and terrifying death lasers or on the occasional good day, helpful alien ambassadors landing on the White House lawn, bringing gifts like unlimited clean energy and the cures for disease, which is wishful thinking, right?

Isn't it more plausible that any off world life form paying us a visit might just be an intelligence so staggering and well, here's the perfect word alien that we'd struggle to even comprehend it. Yeah, well, we've been indeed we've been indoctrinated by what you see on TV and in the movies that the aliens are indeed very anthropomorphic.

They look kind of like us. I mean, you know, you wouldn't want your sister to date any of them because, you know, they're clearly alien. But on the other hand, you know, they're not that alien, right? They don't look like typewriters or bicycles or anything like that. They kind of look like, you know, us sort of. But that's all fiction. I mean, you know, remember, 66 million years ago, I'm old enough to remember that.

66 million years ago, the dinosaurs were wiped out by a big rocket crash into the Yucatan. And not only the dinosaurs, but something like two thirds of all other species were wiped out, too. Now, if that rocket arrived in the vicinity of Earth, you know, 20 minutes earlier, it would have sailed right by our planet. And the dinosaurs would still, you know, be living in New Jersey today. Right.

The dinosaurs were not a failure. They didn't die because they weren't good enough to survive. They were killed by this rock. So, you know, it could be quite different. We wouldn't be having this conversation. Right. Because didn't it take the meteor and the extinction of the dinosaurs to kind of pave the way for smaller mammals to have a reasonable shot?

And eventually us. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a general interpretation. Look, when you clean the slate, there's plenty of room to, you know, practice with a piece of chalk on some new content. And that's really what happened on Earth. I mean, you know, two thirds of all species gone away. Hey, there's plenty of stuff or plenty of room anyhow for the species that remain to do their thing and eventually evolve into things that we consider more interesting.

Now, I promised myself that I would not try to get the actual set shows that to speculate about aliens, but I could not help it. I just had to ask. So I did. What's the big picture view at SETI about who or what else might be out there? Are we thinking along the lines of sci fi and Star Trek, you know, anthropomorphic beings or looking at the rapid progression of our own technology and factoring in the challenges of interstellar travel?

Are we thinking robotics, artificial intelligence? Surely an advanced species has gotten beyond the meat suit we're all wearing. So what is it that scientists at SETI think? Well, to be honest, I don't know that many, indeed, any of my colleagues ever think about that. They're just worried about how to improve the experiment. They don't care who's behind the microphone, if you will.

But I agree with you 100 percent. I think that, you know, we're just inventing our own successors now in this century where we make machines, artificial intelligence, which, of course, has been in the news a lot recently, that we're inventing machines that have the same cognitive abilities as your next door neighbor. And that means that whatever job your next door neighbor has, at least if it involves, you know, thinking about something, sitting behind a desk and typing on a keyboard.

Those are all things that the machines will be able to do by mid-century. And, you know, they can improve themselves. We have a hard time improving ourselves. I've asked my brother to improve himself for many, many years. He's not been able to do that. But machines can. They can add on more memory, more computational capability and so forth.

So I think you're right. It's probably safe to say that the aliens that we're likely to discover are machines. They're not soft, squishy types. Well, of course, we don't know. Right. We don't know. But the idea that the aliens, you know, climb into a spacecraft and then just zip off to our solar system, which might be tens of light years away from wherever their home is, if not hundreds that, you know, I mean, that that's that's a that's a really tough thing to do.

I mean, you should keep in mind that even our fastest rockets, like the one that we sent by Pluto, the Horizons, New Horizons spacecraft, you know, that took like a decade to get to Pluto and Pluto's in our solar system after all. So if you want to go to the stars, you know, you can't just call up Scotty in the engine room and tell him to put the pedal to the metal.

I mean, our best rockets go like 10 miles a second, which is, you know, maybe OK if you're trying to go to Richmond. But it's not clear why you'd want to do that. But, you know, 10 miles a second is what our rockets can do. That would take seventy five thousand years to get to the nearest other star. So the aliens, if they're really gallivanting around the cosmos, they have to have technologies.

It's considerably in advance of our own or their machines, as you've suggested. And I think that that's right, that, you know, we're only here to invent our successors here on Earth. And they won't be, you know, humans with no hair and no sense of humor, no clothes, no pets, no names. You know, we're here to invent thinking machines. And we're probably going to do that in this century.

We already have machines like Chad, GBT and so forth that can write a credible essay for your English class. But, you know, what's what are the capabilities of machines like that by mid century, let alone the beginning of the 22nd century? You know, those machines will be a lot smarter than humans. They'll be able to do their own thing.

And presumably some aliens have long ago reached this level of synthetic intelligence. And the idea that you need, you know, a squishy bag of meat, as you say, to host intelligence will seem very quaint. And I wonder what an astronomer thinks about a headline like this. Pentagon official co-writes paper saying there is an alien mothership in our solar system releasing probes like dandelion seeds.

So I asked Dr. Shostak if he rolls his eyes at this or laughs or does it have some legitimacy? And I found his answer very interesting because I'm so used to mockery and debunking when it comes to this subject. And that's not what we got. Well, it's hard to argue against it because, of course, we don't know. I grew up two miles from the Pentagon, actually.

Most of the people I knew in school, they're their fathers. It was mostly the fathers. The fathers worked at the Pentagon. My father worked in the Department of Defense. So, you know, they don't usually say very many things that are just totally nutty. But, you know, look, it's a possibility. All we can say is doesn't seem likely to me.

That's my opinion. But it's only an opinion. Then we got to talking about Oumuamua, our solar system's first known interstellar visitor. It's moved on now, sailing past Neptune on its way to. Well, who knows? Oumuamua was a strange thing, about 300 feet long, kind of cigar shaped, lacking the distinctive dust tail of a comet and smaller than one to more asteroid sized.

The Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb suggested that Oumuamua could be an alien probe, which got everyone's attention for a solid minute until the next shiny object hit the news. And our short attention spans went chasing after a fresh bone. I wondered if that sort of thing drove a scientist like Seth Shostak crazy. Well, to begin with, I think it's too late to worry about things driving me crazy because I've already been driven there.

But in terms of whether Oumuamua should be, you know, should you should tell people, look, Oumuamua is likely just an asteroid or a piece of a planet just sailing around the sky, sailing around space that happened to blunder into our solar system. Now, I think that if you had to make a bet about whether that was true, you should bet, yes, it's probably true.

But there is the possibility, as Avi Loeb says, that maybe it's actually, you know, reconnaissance mission for the Klingons or something like that. The only way you could decide that is if he could get up close to it and see a row of portholes with little green faces staring out of them. That would be great. But it's too late for that.

When we discovered Oumuamua was already on its way out of the solar system as a trajectory, kind of like a planet. We're not going to see it again. So, you know, we will never know. However, if there's one probe, there's presumably more. So, you know, we may get a chance to see Oumuamua's cousins, if you will, come into our solar system.

There's no evidence that it was anything other than a rock. But on the other hand, the best pictures of Oumuamua, you know, made with the telescopes, big telescopes. It shows it as a dot amongst the stars. That's what it looks like. And only by analyzing how that the light from that thing varies over the course of the day do we know that it's probably a tumbling rock.

That also kind of mitigates, I think, against the idea that it's actually somebody else's rocket ship, because I think everybody on board would require big doses of dramamine if that spacecraft kept tumbling the way Oumuamua apparently does. When it comes to the question of finding E.T., there are so many theories floating around out there.

Yeah, some of them are a little bit tinfoil hat territory, and some are a little bit of a reach. Some people say that the U.S. government has been hiding the truth for decades, that we are not alone. Now, you might hear that and go, this government could never pull off that kind of elaborate deception. Look how gridlocked and sloppy it is.

I don't know, but listen, have you ever dealt with FAFSA, the whole financial aid program for college? It's so diabolical and deliberately willfully confusing and punitive, that it makes me believe this government is capable of any sort of deceit and obfuscation you can name. Come to think of it, maybe the evil reptilian E.T.s are the ones controlling FAFSA.

Anywho, I ran one conspiracy theory by Dr. Shostak, the one where people believe there are reams of radio telescope data sitting in a locked file cabinet somewhere, data proving the existence of aliens and their home addresses. So, those reams of data, does the government have it? They do not, no. No, it's a nice idea. I wish it were true, because at least, you know, then there would be continued financial support for using radio telescopes to search the skies.

But, in fact, all our funding is basically, when I say our, I mean the SETI Institute. All our funding for SETI, for looking, for E.T., you know, it just comes from private donations of people who, you know, send us a $20 bill or something like that. And you can say, well, that's really odd, given that it's such an interesting topic.

But, you know, I mean, talk to the next ten people you meet on the streets, and asking them where could they best spend their money if they're going to give it to some sort of science project or whatever. And they might mention looking for E.T., but they probably would say, let's find a cure for cancer or something like that.

It's hard to say, but it is an interesting topic. We're agreed on that. If you're someone who thinks, look, whether we're alone or not, the safest and best course of action is to not go looking for trouble. Let's just mind our business here in our little corner of the galaxy, because there's no way of knowing the intentions of any alien visitor.

After all, our own bitter, bloody, violent and tragic experience with colonization suggests we might want to dim the lights and pretend there's no one home here on Earth. But SETI is only listening. There are people engaged in the astronomy version of Horton Hears a Who. METI. METI was founded in 2015. It's based out of San Francisco, and it's in the nonprofit business of designing and transmitting interstellar messages.

The late physicist Stephen Hawking didn't love the idea. And he had and has many who agree with his take. There are people who do indeed think it's a bad idea to transmit signals into space. Mind you, SETI doesn't transmit anything. We just listen. And there's no danger in listening, because obviously if there's at the other end, if you will, behind the microphone are the aliens.

I mean, they don't know that you've tuned them in. Right. So any more than the local DJs know that I've tuned them in. Right. So. But there are people who think that, you know, well, we ought to keep it that way. We ought to remain quiet because there there are people in San Francisco. There's something called METI, the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligences.

And, you know, the guy who runs that, a fellow by the name of Doug Backoach, he's all for transmitting. And he's already done some where we transmit something into space to maybe wake the aliens up or at least draw attention to the fact that we're here with radio technology. So if they want to send us anything, you know, we're all ears.

You know, Stephen Hawking said, well, maybe you shouldn't do that because you don't know what's on the other end there. You don't know whether the aliens are friendly or otherwise. And if you transmit to them, all you've done is marked our planet, you know, so they know where we are. And then they launch their interstellar battle wagons, come to Earth and just flatten Los Angeles, which always seems to be, you know, actually get one.

Yes. Yes. That's it. I lived in Los Angeles area and, you know, I don't disagree with that assessment. But on the other hand, you know, there's still some good restaurants down there. So maybe maybe they shouldn't do it. But, you know, there's there's no shutting us up in any case, no matter what Stephen Hawking might have said or anybody else.

Right. We continue to transmit at high power levels things like radar signals. Right. Television. I mean, it's not that, you know, that the networks think that there's a lot of money to be made by sending their signals out into space to reach the aliens. It's just that, you know, it happens anyhow. Of course, Earth is a noisy planet now.

Whether or not we intentionally signal. We are here. We are here. We are here. Come on, everybody. We are here. We are here. We are here. It's like building the Great Wall of China. Right. I mean, it had a function, but it had nothing to do with aliens. And in fact, the Great Wall of China, if you have a big enough telescope, you could probably see that from nearby space.

Right. But we do it anyhow because it's of interest to us. But we're such a noisy. There's there's no way even if we shut the METI program down, we're such a noisy planet. Right. I mean, I was just reading something about cell towers, radio towers and the and there were all sorts of graphs and charts about how the signal travels and disperses.

What are we? We can't like make the planet quiet. So nobody finds us. It's kind of too late for that, isn't it? I agree. Yeah, no, absolutely. And actually, cell towers aren't that powerful. What's really the signals that really make it into space? What signals make it? Yeah, it's the radar. It's mostly the radar because those are high power transmitters because they've got to find an airplane that might be a hundred miles away.

Right. They have to bounce enough energy off that airplane and then pick up the energy coming back, you know, in order to find the airplane. So those are powerful transmitters and they're usually mounted on antennas which focus the transmissions. So those two things together mean that if you're in the in the beam of one of those transmissions, if you're in the, you know, the wherever the antenna is pointed, you can probably find that signal.

If you're an alien with a big set of antennas, you can probably find that from the distances of the nearby stars. So that's what we're doing. We're making ourselves known. And like you say, I think it's it's not something we're going to stop. I mean, it's too it's too useful to us to make sure that you don't crash at the local airport coming back from vacation.

As fun as it is to guess and try to imagine all of the unknowns, the knowns are pretty thrilling. To begin with, we continue to look for some examples of life that's not on the Earth. And the best candidate nearby is Mars. There are also, you know, a couple of moons of Jupiter and Saturn that might have spawned life. Actually, there's something like seven worlds in our solar system other than Earth, which might have life or might have had life.

Maybe Mars doesn't have life now, but it did, you know, three or four billion years ago when there were oceans and things like that. But that's actually pretty exciting. I mean, you see these rovers, you know, sort of slowly rolling across the sandy deserts of Mars and picking up samples by drilling into rocks and stuff like that, all of which will be returned to Earth eventually with another mission.

And, you know, the drama there is kind of low key unless you're one of the people that built the rover and you don't want it to fail in front of the front of the cameras, if you will. But that's actually pretty interesting because we could only dream about that when I was a kid. You know, people would talk about Mars. There are still people who believe that there were canals on Mars.

I mean, our knowledge of these places was very limited because we didn't have a space reconnaissance of these worlds. So that's that's actually very interesting. As I say, there's seven seven worlds which might have life. Even Pluto. Pluto. You know, are there plutonians? Well, I don't think so. But it could be because underneath the ice that covers most of Pluto, you know, there's a layer there where the the water actually might be liquid.

So there might be liquid water reservoirs even on the Pluto, which otherwise no one seems to consider as a place for life. As I say, there are seven places in our solar system where you could argue because of the possible presence of liquid water, they might have life. But you probably need a microscope to see it. And how can you not be fascinated by the Mars rover and the Voyager probes?

They're still in operation 46 years after launch, and they're now billions of miles from home. Yeah, humans might be a miracle, but the Voyager probes are kind of miraculous, too, aren't they? I'll just pull out my miracle meter here and we'll we'll give it a shot. I mean, they are pretty good. I tell you, the thing that encourages me the most is what you just said, that they usually last years longer than their intended lifetimes.

And, you know, when I look around at the products that America still makes, not all of that stuff is very good quality. But these these rovers are. So there's encouragement in that. The Internet and social media have thoroughly fractured the way we consume news. The days of gathering around the TV to hear some broadcast eminence like Walter Cronkite present the news of the day to a collective audience.

That's gone. Our experience of the news, like our experience of almost everything else, is shaped by algorithms harvesting data on what we click on and for how long. That's why my news feed is choked with Prince William and Prince Harry drama, while my husband's news feed is chock full of college sports pundits predicting a third national championship for the mighty Georgia Bulldogs.

And somewhere in all of that noise was a story out of the University of California predicting contact with an intelligent alien species by the middle of this century. For real. For real. I bet everybody in audiences where I am a speaker, I bet them all a cup of Starbucks that we'll find E.T. by, you know, basically 2035.

Now, that's a strong statement because it isn't just finding life. We might find evidence for life either extant or extinct on Mars, but it would be microbial life. You know, it wasn't around long enough. Mars went bad so quickly that, you know, there wasn't enough time for very primitive life to evolve into things that, you know, you could see with your eye without the microscope. So, you know, the kind of life that you think about, the kind of intelligent life that you see on the streets of Chicago or whatever.

Right. You're not going to find that on these worlds. When I say these worlds, I mean the seven places in our solar system. And that's indeed why we look for E.T. much farther away, because, you know, the neighborhood is not maybe not sterile, but the life on it is about the same level as the pond scum in your bathtub.

OK, again, you are predicting that by 2035 in 12 years or less, humanity will find alien life with more on the ball than pond scum. Yes, I say that. And why do I say that? I mean, it isn't just to provoke the audiences, although that's why I said it first the first time. The audience looked like it was falling asleep. So I tried to wake him up.

I think I bet you all a cup of coffee. We'll find E.T. by 2035. It isn't totally, you know, fiction to have said that, because if you look at the speed of the searches for signals from some other world, they are you know, the speed of those searches is going up very rapidly. In fact, it goes up exponentially, a heavily overused word.

But it does. And the reason is something called Moore's law, which everybody here in the Silicon Valley knows, including Gordon Moore. It's simply that the speed of computers, if you will, doubles about every two years. And that's actually an economic law of the Silicon Valley, because otherwise you're not going to replace the computer you bought five years ago because it still works perfectly good, except that the computer you can buy now is many times faster.

And that might be important to you. So it's on that basis that I think that we might very well find evidence, not just of life, but of intelligent life, you know, by the mid part of the next decade. That's a pretty jaw dropping statement for this girl. I've only been waiting my whole life for it to happen. I wondered if Dr. Shostak thought that any alien civilization we encounter would have to be considerably older and more advanced than our own.

After all, we're babies who've only just figured out how to escape our own planet's gravity to even get into space, right? Well, yeah. Well, encounter. It depends on what your definition of that verb is, because I don't know that we're going to meet them face to face. That involves rockets and things like that, which, you know, aren't very fast.

But picking up a signal could happen tonight. Right. And so if we pick up a signal, it's a safe bet that they're at least as technically advanced as we are. We're not broadcasting very strong signals into space. And if we pick up something from them, it's because their signal is either targeted at us because they know we're here, because they've got big telescopes that show our freeway interchanges or something like that, or, you know, it's because we have better equipment, which we don't have.

But we will have by the mid 2030s. So that's why I made this bet. Aside from, you know, just trying to wake up an audience. And I know this is speculative, but I wonder what Shostak's view is on how humanity might receive the news that we are not alone in the universe. Yeah. I mean, there are people who said that, you know, the government would have to cover up such a discovery because, you know, essentially the public couldn't handle the news.

They'd start rioting in the streets if they heard on their hourly news broadcasts that we pick up a signal coming from some other society here in the Milky Way. I don't think that's the case. As he suggested, they probably say, well, you know, that's interesting. And then turn to the sports news because they have been so accultured to this idea after 50 years of sci fi, both on TV and in books and, you know, movies and so forth, to think that there are aliens out there.

Eighty percent of Americans think it's quite reasonable that there are aliens out there. That won't surprise them. So unless they feel there's some sort of threat, I don't think that they're going to, you know, stop doing the daily crosswords or, you know, I don't know, annoying their spouse or whatever. It's it's something that has already been precooked, if you will, that that there's life likely to be life out there.

And some of it will be evolved to intelligence. That seems to be what the public feels about it already. Which makes you wonder all these decades of flying saucer sightings and the Roswell crash. Project Blue Book, J. Allen Hynek, even the crew on ancient aliens. It's all sort of worked together in a way to lay the groundwork for discovery and disclosure, hasn't it?

Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, you know, the aliens that they would meet on Star Trek, you know, were guys with. Well, they just look like, you know, that neighbor down the street there who's kind of old and doesn't actually make much sense when he talks and never tells a joke. That's that's kind of what we think about the aliens. But that's just our own culture.

So remember, SETI is listening for alien signals, right? Not transmitting messages, not hiding crashed UFOs. I was curious if it makes Dr. Shostak a little bit crazy that the narrative around E.T. has for a very long time been. Never mind us finding them. They found us a long time ago and have kept us under surveillance with the help of very hidden special access programs buried under layers of secrecy by U.S. defense and intelligence, along with certain private aerospace companies.

Well, I mean, it doesn't make me crazy. It's too late for that. But I will say that I don't think any of that is true. Right. Look, if we had found evidence that, you know, the aliens actually came, you know, a hundred light years across the galaxy to visit us and then a hundred feet over the dry landscape north of Roswell, New Mexico, make a navigation error and plunge into the dirt. I mean, if that were true, it doesn't speak well of intelligent life. No, no, they weren't very clever.

But, you know, I don't think any amount of cover up would have kept it from the public. And after all, finding that debris wasn't kept quiet for any more than 48 hours before it was a front page story on the Roswell Daily Record, the local newspaper. So I don't think you could keep that quiet. And remember, if the aliens are really visiting Earth, if their saucers are flying around, they begin with the FAA is going to have something to say about that because, you know, you don't want to take out United Flight 214 with a crash with an alien presence.

We would know that we have thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth. Right. Of which several thousand are actually operational. And, you know, they're basically making photographs of the Earth. Most of them are making photographs of the Earth all the time. And, you know, if they were if we were really being visited, you would see the visitors.

I mean, if we are being visited by aliens, if they really are here on Earth, all you can say is they're the best house guests ever because they don't do anything. They don't kill people. You know, they really don't abduct people out of their homes for unauthorized sex experiments or anything like that. They don't do anything except appear in the checkout line press.

Dr. Shostak has his own experiences that for him argue against the possibility of keeping a discovery of the magnitude of intelligent alien life, any kind of a secret. Yeah, well, that was the late late summer of 1997, as I recall. And, yeah, I mean, we we had picked up a signal that looked like it might be the real deal.

And, you know, I kept waiting for the phone to ring, thinking maybe the Pentagon, somebody at the Pentagon will call us up. That didn't happen. I kept waiting for some other scientists to call up. Remember, there was no secrecy. I mean, you know, the boss here has never said, you guys got to be quiet. We pick up a signal. You got to keep that under wraps.

Nope. You know, you wouldn't keep it under wraps. It would really help your funding situation if you could announce that you'd found a signal from E.T. But in any case, in 1997, you know, I remember not going to sleep all night. And, you know, because we thought maybe we had found something. And at nine o'clock in the morning, the object we were looking at had set.

We had to wait another 10 or 12 hours before we could see it again. And, you know, the phone of my desk finally woke me up. And it was one of the science reporters from The New York Times. And he already knew about it. Right. So I mean, you know, there's no secrecy, as they say. And I simply told him, I said, look, you know, I don't think it's anything real, but we'll know more in three hours when we can look at it again or whatever.

And he said, OK, call me back. And I did when we decided that it wasn't E.T. It was just a European research satellite whose telemetry, whose signals that from the onboard transmitter are coming back to Earth. You know, they show us pictures of whatever that thing was looking at. So it wasn't E.T. It was just engineers in Pasadena, California.

Still, can you imagine what that moment was like for him back in 1997? To think, is this it? Have we have we found E.T.? You know, I remember quite well, I have I made a couple of photos and I brought my camera down to the Institute and, you know, I just took pictures. But they're not very interesting. You just see people sitting behind computer monitors looking at, you know, what information was coming back.

But it was thrilling, except it was also disturbing because I thought, I got these dinners next week and I plan to meet this person for lunch. And so all of that would have to be changed if it really was E.T. on the line. So it was kind of a mixed bag for me. But it certainly showed to me, anyhow, what would likely happen if our antennas were to pick up a signal.

And that is there'd be a lot of excitement. We would call up people at other observatories around the world and say, you look at this position on the sky and see if you see anything, because, you know, it could be just a Stanford undergraduate prank that we found a signal. You have to rule all that out. But all of that would happen.

And within less than a week, we would know for sure that it was truly a signal coming from deep space. You could do that just using the techniques of conventional astronomy. And that would be, of course, a game changer, because at least for us, we would finally have discovered something. Aliens or not, looking at where we are today as a species, at our world, are you a person who's hopeful about the future and the direction we seem to be heading in?

Yeah, I think I am, actually. But I find that, you know, with many people, particularly millennials, it seems, you know, they have this apocalyptic view of the future of humanity. You know, we're going to kill ourselves and we're wrecking the planet and so forth. And to say that there aren't problems, of course there are.

They're chopping down the Amazon and so forth and so on. That's not a good thing. But there's nothing that we can't fix. And particularly in the United States, it seems to be the case that we fix things when they get to crisis proportion. You know, before that, we're kind of apathetic. But when things really become a serious threat, you just look at the history of the country.

When something becomes a serious threat, whether it's, you know, Germany and Japan during the Second World War or whatever, the United States gets its act together and does something. And I think you can extend that to humanity in general. You know, we'll confront something when the situation has become has gone code red, if you will.

Who was it that just said something about code red? OK. And, you know, as a consequence, I'm very optimistic. I think, yes, we could wipe ourselves out. But actually, if you do the numbers and I did them once on the back of a napkin waiting for my lunch once, it's very hard to get rid of all humans. I mean, you know, that might be an appealing project for you this weekend, but it's hard.

Right. You can have a pandemic that's, you know, more virulent than covid and kills ninety nine percent of the people. Yeah, that's that's going to be bad news for a lot of people. But you're not going to get rid of humans that way. You can let loose all 14000, whatever the number is, nuclear weapons that are stockpiled around the world.

Just let them fly and aim them at all the big cities of the world. Again, not a great day, but you can't get rid of all humans that way. You know, I think there was no way you could get rid of more than about a third of humanity. That would be the worst day ever, of course. But there's still homo sapiens coming out the other end.

It's quite hard for us to destroy everything about our culture or for that matter ourselves. As someone who stays good and freaked out by reality. I remember taking a little comfort from something Shostak said about 10 years or so ago in a TEDx talk. We're just another duck in a row. We're not the only kids on the block.

And I think that that's philosophically a very profound thing to learn. We're not a miracle. OK. The third thing that it might tell you is somewhat vague, but I think interesting and important. And that is if you find a signal coming from a more advanced society, because they will be, that will tell you something about our own possibilities, that we're not inevitably doomed to self-destruction.

Because they survived their technology. We could do it, too. That alone would be really hopeful, wouldn't it? You need to know. Right. Not just that there's another society that survived, but you need to know, you know, what fraction of societies reach that point or do ninety nine point nine nine nine nine percent of them self-destruct.

And of course, you don't see those guys. You only see the very tiny percentage that have survived. I mean, there's that possibility when you only have another example. One other example is very hard to say very much statistically. But I still would consider, you know, as you have postulated here, I would consider it good news to find that some intelligent species has managed to survive their own technology and, you know, make it into a brighter, friendlier future.

I'm beside myself with excitement that this discovery could happen in my lifetime. Surely everyone involved with SETI must feel the same. Well, I'm with you. I agree. I think that, you know, of all the things happening here on planet Earth these days, this is one of the more exciting endeavors. I mean, the idea of making a big discovery that, you know, we share the universe with with other thinking beings.

That would be really that would be really interesting. Wouldn't change your daily life. You know, your boss wouldn't become any more likable or anything like that. But on the other hand, you would know something really important. You would know something that sort of defines your place in the cosmos. And, you know, we have religion that tries to do that now.

But if SETI were to find a signal that would have, I think, an effect comparable to religion. There you have it. And like Dr. Shostak pointed out, even this enormous paradigm-altering discovery may not make all that huge an impact on your day to day. We all still have to figure out what's for dinner and why the dog is barking and whether or not that couple on beachfront bargain hunt will ever succeed in finding a place with an ocean view and lots of room to entertain.

Humans have always looked to the heavens for signs and omens and answers. And maybe tonight you'll go outside and look up, maybe with awe or maybe with trepidation, because answers are coming 2035 or sooner. And that's just around the corner. As Dr. Shostak mentioned, the SETI Institute is funded entirely by private donations.

You can join the mission right now. Kick in a few bucks at SETI.org. That's S-E-T-I dot O-R-G. Next time on True Weird Stuff, a cheating minister, a lovesick choir singer, a ghostly haunting on a lonely stretch of highway, and the notorious double homicide that created the template for every courtroom trial circus we see today.

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