Date: April 5, 2010
Title: Sightings: Seth Shostak and SETI
Podcaster: Ted Judah
Organization: SETI: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – www.seti.org
Description: Ted Judah speaks with Seth Shostak about SETI
Bio: none
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Transcript:
Sightings, Seth Shostak and S.E.T.I.
George Hrab: Here’s someone we have not heard from in quite a long time – Ted Judah, thank you Ted, Bless you…
When I was about nine I took a pair of binoculars outside at night. I saw an interesting moving light over the distant mountains to the south west. Through the binoculars I saw an amazing sight… There as plain as my eyes could see was a flying saucer! Now, I could not actually see the extra-terrestrial craft because it was night but I could make out the peculiar lights that the space aliens put on the edge of their spacecraft. They were rotating around and changing brightness and little bits of light seemed to dissolve away from the trailing edge of this slow hovering interplanetary machine. I just saw a saucer from another planet!
You might be able to tell from my story that I am not being totally sincere. But, I’ll tell you, at the time I was convinced, totally convinced, that what I had seen was, in-fact, a spacecraft visiting Earth. It was so compelling to me, I told and retold my flying saucer story for nearly a decade but all that changed one day while watching a TV show with some friends. The show was about UFOs and at one point during the program they showed footage of the very spaceship I had seen, exactly how I remember it; rotating lights, dissolving and changing brightness. I pointed to the screen, “There! There’s the saucer that I saw. That’s exactly it.!” Then the camera deliberately zoomed in and features on the flying saucer became perfectly apparent. It was a blimp. A blimp with electronic, lit-up scrolling letters – of advertising, of Earth-based advertising! The saucer shape had been a convincing optical illusion from a distance but up close it was clearly human technology.
This changed everything – I had fooled myself. I don’t know if it was because I had seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind that year but, at the time, I could not explain what I had seen and I jumped immediately to the ET hypothesis. I held to this belief for a decade. Had I not seen that program when I did I might still be a believer in visiting space aliens.
Seth: I have to say that I’ve been fooled by the same object actually. Driving down the 405 as they call it in Los Angeles it’s the San Diego Freeway. An I thought, “What the heck!?” Then I got closer and, indeed, it was a blimp.
This is Seth Shostak – Senior Astronomer at the SETI institute. You may know that SETI stands for: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. I had a wonderful opportunity to speak briefly with Seth at the SETI open house in 2009 and we discussed UFO’s, the SETI search for extra-terrestrials and what we may do if we find them.
Seth: All right Ted, it’s all yours man.
Ted: How are you doing Seth?
Seth: Just fine Ted.
Ted: What would you say is your expertise and contribution to the SETI institute?
Seth: Well I often ask myself that question to be honest. Of course a lot of what I do is outreach so it helps to be able to write interesting prose or be able to give a talk that people find interesting at least for a lot of the things I do. But in terms of the SETI program, my background is in radio astronomy. I’ve done that for a very long time. So I understand about interferometry and correlation receivers and stuff like that. But also, the background in astronomy helps me to think about, perhaps even in a useful way, about where we might look – in other words – how might we improve the chances of success in our SETI experiments by not just sort of looking randomly at nearby stars but could we do better than that. Could we sort of second guess where the aliens might be hanging out.
Ted: And you say ‘Success’ and would that simply mean receiving a signal from an extra-terrestrial source?
Seth: Yeah. That’s good enough for me. Yeah. [Laughs] If we could pick up a signal, you know, an unambiguous signal coming from space that’s due to somebody that’s clever enough to build a transmitter, then that’s a win. I mean, people often ask well what are you looking for in terms of a message and so forth, and all that is extraordinarily interesting, but the success is finding that they are on the air. Whether the program is worthy of being listened to or not, that is a secondary consideration.
Ted: Some people think that you’re wasting your time listening for extra-terrestrials far from earth – they think they might already be here. What do you say when people say that?
Seth: Well I listen to their reasons for believing that. A lot of people do believe that – it’s close to half the American populous so it’s not such a fringe belief, if you will. I say belief and that already betrays my skepticism that it’s actually happening. Because what I will ask people is: you know there are thousands and thousands of sightings every year and people don’t quite know what they are but if you actually investigate these things usually you can find that 90 percent of them are easily explained and the other ten percent remain unexplained – doesn’t mean those are extra terrestrial craft, of course. But what I’ll ask people who feel this way is; what is your most convincing evidence – give me your best shot, your best example and then we talk about that for awhile.
On the subject of UFO’s and aliens visiting Earth, well I too am skeptical. It’s an extraordinary claim that has yet to produce any extraordinary evidence. If you have some extraordinary evidence-please contact your nearest scientist.
Ted: If you do receive a signal and it is undoubtedly of extraterrestrial origin, what then happens? Will the SETI institute focus all it’s energy into trying to decipher what it is? Can you explain what would happen?
Seth: Well at first, of course, you’re scrambling to prove that it is what you think it is and that might take a bit of time. It might take four or five days – six days- something like that, anyhow on the order of a week. In all that time of course your very excited and if you remain convinced, the evidence keeps pointing in the direction that this is truly what you are looking for, then I think that, yes, you would look at the signal. The first thing you do is, of course, send emails to every observatory in the world and tell them; look in this direction – because there something interesting there. So you would have other data that might be useful. I mean your trying to make sense of what you could. I think in the first instance about all you could expect to learn is; which star system are we talking about. You could probably narrow that down pretty quickly which will tell you how far away they are. Uh you would look very hard for planets around that star, of course, but in terms of any message in the signal, that would require building a very very much larger instrument. That’s just a technical story but in order to get the message, the bits, you have to slice up the incoming static into very narrow slices – a millionth of a second or smaller undoubtedly because there sending a lot of bits per second of course they’re going to do that. And that would require a much much bigger antenna so that you could do that unless the signal was truly a honking signal which I doubt it will be.
Ted: Do you think the public will would be there to build an extraordinary receiver if such a message were received?
Seth: Oh Yeah. No, I do… maybe I’m just whistling in the dark and fooling myself but I do think that… yes, if the papers were to announce tomorrow, doggone it, these guys have found a signal coming from 800 light years away everybody would want to know what are they saying?, what do they look like?, tell us something and the only way you could really answer that is to build this very much larger instrument. But what could be more exciting?
Ted: Tell me a little about the Allen telescope array and why is it better than what existed before?
Seth: Well one of the problems that SETI has had since it’s beginnings, almost half a century ago, is that we’ve always had to use somebody else’s antennas. That’s almost invariably been the case. And, you know, other people’s antennas are pretty darn good, I mean we use the biggest antennas in the world. But on the other hand, it’s very hard to do an experiment when you don’t have control over the equipment – when you can only use the equipment a few weeks a year. It’s going to be very slow going and you know you turn it on, it doesn’t work and you’ve got two weeks to fix it before you’re kicked off the antenna again. So there you are, using borrowed equipment all the time… The big change now with the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is that we have our own equipment. It’s designed in a way to be very effective in doing SETI searches in the sense that it can look at more than on star system at a time, it can cover a very wide range of frequencies – it’s, in short, very much faster than any of these other antennas and we get to use it 24-7 so that will speed up the search in such a way that I think it not unreasonable to expect to find a signal within the next couple of dozen years.
Ted: Thank you Seth for taking the time to speak with me, I’ll let you get back to your duties.
Seth: Thank you very much Ted, it’s been a pleasure.
SETI searches, whether successful in finding intelligent life elsewhere or not, will tell us something important about our galaxy and our place in it.
If you want to learn more about SETI go to www.seti.org
Check Seth Shostak’s book: Confessions of an Alien Hunter – it’s a great read.
Thank you to the band: Something From The Planet Hell for allowing me use their song – Take Me To Your Leader
See you next time.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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