May 1, 2024 • 18 mins
George Noory and researcher Seth Shostak discuss his work with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) organization, how the group is developing new ways to make contact with alien life, and if radio signals originating here could attract hostile aliens to Earth.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you,
one of our favorite guests. Back with us, Seth Jeff
Stack directing the search for extraterrestrials at the SETI Institute
in California, trying to find evidence of intelligent life in space.
He is also committed to get into the public, especially
young people excited about astrobiology and science in general. A
(00:26):
couple of his books include Life in the Universe, Confessions
of an Alien Hunter, Cosmic Company, Sharing the Universe, Perspectives
on extraterrestrial life. Seth, welcome back. How are you just
find George?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
And it's great to talk with you again.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's in a long time, my god. But how many
years we've been doing this now?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Well, I'm not so sure of, but I think one
of the first times I spoke to you, I was
found at the Arecibo Radio Observatory, you know, using the
big dish there to try and eavesdrop on et. And
my gosh, that's at least twenty years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
At least I was doing my local show in Saint
Louis at the time.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
That would have probably made it around ninety six, ninety seven.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah, that could be. I was around. I was around.
It shocks me to say that when I think of
how long ago it was.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Is there a sebull functioning at all anymore?
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Well, I don't know that they're using it. I honestly,
that's a very good question for which I have a
last no answer. But you know, anybody can do a
quick search to see if they are. They had problems
because you know, the parts of the dish collapsed and
so forth, and the problem was to fix it. Well,
(01:44):
let me back up a moment. A piece of the
antenna actually came loose and it dropped through the reflecting
dish underneath, you know, creating a big hole and a
lot of damage. And the estimate was that it was
going to cost you know, many millions of dollars to
fix that, And okay, many millions is not so much.
(02:07):
But you know, many of the people involved figured, look,
instead of spending that money fixing arecibo, why don't we
use that money to build something else. So I don't
know what's going to happen.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Tell us about the late Frank Drake and how this
all started.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Yeah, Frank Drake, Frank Drake, whom I usually referred to
as the world's last nice guy. Unfortunately he's gone now,
so you know there are no more nice guys, I guess.
But he was a guy who actually had studied radio
astronomy at Harvard and he got a postdoc position at
(02:46):
the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Okay,
that's a lot of words, but it was an observatory
that had a lot of big antennas and some new ones.
And the director of the observatory, guy by the name
of Otto's Roof. He met this guy, Frank Drake, the
new kid. He was twenty nine, thirty years old. Something
I got and he said, look, here are some new antennas.
(03:08):
Think of something to do with them. And Frank, it was,
you know, a very smart guy. He thought, instead of
using it to study galaxies or gas in the Milky
Way or stuff like that, he thought, why don't I
try an eavesdrop on signals that maybe aliens are broadcasting.
And that was the start of the whole SETI discipline
(03:29):
began with Frank Drake. That was back in nineteen sixty and.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Since the beginning of SETI, have you heard strange anomaly signals?
Speaker 3 (03:38):
We hear signals all the time, George, I wish I
could tell you that we heard a signal that, you know,
looked like it might be what we're really looking for,
which is of course a signal broadcast by some aliens.
But we have not. And you know, what can you
say about that one? Maybe it just means there aren't
any aliens. I don't believe that. I don't think you
(03:59):
believe that. I don't think anybody believes that. The other possibility,
of course, is you're not pointing the intent in the
right direction, you're not tuned to the right frequency. You know,
maybe you don't have enough sensitivity. There are lots of ways.
There could be plenty of radio traffic in the space,
but you could still miss it. So that kind of
(04:19):
an experiment continues today. We continue to hope to find
a signal that would tell us, essentially overnight, that we're
not alone.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
What are the possibilities, seth that their technology is way
advanced and they don't even use the kind of technology
we still use to pick up these signals.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yeah, I mean that's a legitimate point, and Actually, I've
heard it from a lot of people. Say, you guys,
you know you're looking for radio signals or radio. I mean,
come on, the aliens are way beyond all that. Well,
you know this may be comforting to you being in
the radio business, but radio will never be obsolete because
it's just a good way to send information from one
(05:01):
place to another, particularly if you're talking about one place
in the cosmos to another place in the cosmos. So
you know, there's always going to be radio. I mean,
it doesn't mean it has the same youth. Maybe they're
not broadcasting top forty or anything like that, but radio
will always be used. And you know that's what we
(05:23):
look for because radio radio signals just go right through space.
They're unhindered by the fact that there's a lot of
gas and dust between the stars.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
How does the universe make sounds anyways.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Well, universe doesn't make terribly many sounds. I mean, you know,
you can go out into space and take off your
spacesuit if you really want to do that and take
a listen. You won't hear much. But there are things
that do make sounds. Actually, some of the activity, for instance,
on the Sun, these big flares and so works. Now,
they undoubtedly make some audio, but you'd have to be
(05:58):
very close to the sun hear them. Remember, you only
hear things, you know in your daily life because we've
got an atmosphere on Earth, and the atmosphere, you know,
the air actually allows sound waves to go through it,
so you know, it conducts the sound from wherever it's
being made to your ear. So somebody honks their car
behind you, you know that sound wave goes through the
(06:20):
air between that car and you. But in space there's
not too much air, so they could honk and you
wouldn't hear them.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Instead of using any kind of new technology these days.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Well, I mean there's always I don't know that there's
any radically new technology, but there are always new technological approaches.
One of the things, I mean, we could even talk
about it, but that's being tried, is to kind of
pickyback on other kinds of radio observations of the sky.
(06:54):
The sky is often being studied in the radio part
of the spectrum because you can learn a lot about
things like that quays, are as, pelsars, even planets and
things like that. They all make some sort of natural
radio emission. But you could also you know, tap off
a bit of that signal and analoge it and see
if there are any signals in there that are not
(07:14):
made by nature but are made by you know, et
So that is being done.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Oh, tell us about artificial intelligence and how SETI is
using that.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah, well, artificial intelligence. I mean I kind of figured
that the aliens will be examples of artificial intelligence. I
think we've talked about this in the past, but occasionally
get asked, you know, well, what do you think the
aliens will look like? You know, they're going to be short,
little green guys or whatever, hairless, you know, no clothes,
no names, that kind of thing. Well, actually, when you
(07:49):
think about, you know, what might replace almost sapiens on
this planet, not not next week, but say one hundred
thousand years from now, will we still be this same
species we are now or will we have invented machines
that are better than we are. We upload everything we
know to the machines and they essentially take our place
(08:10):
on this planet. I don't know if you like that idea.
I'm not sure I like that idea, but uh, but
it might happen, and you can assume that the kind
of aliens you might overhear have already done that. So
maybe which you'll actually hear is not little soft squishe guys,
but machines.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I've always thought that the reports of extraterrestrials that people
think they see on this planet might be robots as well.
Is that possible, Well, it's possible.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
I mean, you know, we use robots a lot. I
mean when I say robots, most people think of the
sort of humanoid looking robot, the kind of thing that
might I don't know, change the tire on your car
if they were good at that, which I think in
general they're not. But you know, we think of the
robots that kind of look like us, but actually most
of the robots don't look anything like us. Are the
(09:00):
kind of robots that put together your car, for example, right,
They're very specialized kinds of robots. And you know, one
of the big advantages of robots is that they don't
insist on, for example, round trip tickets. If you send
them into space, you can send them on a one
way ticket and you won't get any complaints.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
And they don't eat, they don't drink water, they don't
have to worry about that exactly.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
You don't need all that life support stuff. So you know,
there's probably a lot of robots around, and it could
be that if we actually encounter the aliens, well, just
as you say, we may in fact just encounter their hardware.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
How did you get interested in all this sets you're
an astronomer or by trade, right, yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I am. I am. Well, it was because you know,
when I was a kid, which was back before the
Crimean War. When I was a kid, I was very
interested in astronomy, you know, I had picked up some
books and so forth, and then eventually, by the age
of ten, I built some sort of telescope that kind
of thing. So I was interested in that. But I
(10:03):
was also interested in aliens, George. And that's because on
the weekends I went to see these sci fi films
were they were making back then, the kind of cheesy
sci fi films, but they very often had aliens in them, right,
because he needed a bad guy, and the big advantage
of using aliens as bad guys is that nobody will complain, right,
(10:25):
nobody's going to defend the aliens, so they would be
pretty bad. They would just you know, sort of try
and flatten earth and kill everybody, and that kind of thing,
so I, you know, got interested in aliens that way.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I'm going to throw out an old movie that my
dad took me to and I guarantee it. I'll bet
money that you know the title when I say it,
the Mysterians.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
I don't know it.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
It was a japan There was a Japanese movie of
ets coming here doing exactly what you said to try
to eliminate us. But the movie was called The Mysterians,
and he brought me to it. I must have been
about six or seven years old. Scared the living daylights
out of me.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah. I had the same kind of a reaction to
these films. They mostly scared me, and yet I insisted
on going. In fact, if I saw one of these
films that night, you know, at home, I would be
vomiting all night. I was really sick. I was so scared,
and I think, you know, two weeks later, there'd be
another film and I'd want to go to it, and
(11:31):
my mother would say, look, why do you want to
go see that film. It's only going to make you sick.
And I said, well, look mom, I just have to
see these things.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
So I went, if we do get a message from
outer space, would it be a message that might have
been sent to us directly, or do you think it
was some kind of old broadcast from the universe from
a long time ago.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah, well, of course you can't say until you pick up,
you know, the signal. My guess is that were more
likely to find a signal that was not intended forced, right,
because if they wanted to send a signal to us directly,
you know, attention all humans, we wanted to tell you this,
or maybe we want to sell you something or whatever,
(12:16):
they would need to know about us. And it's not
so easy to know about Homo sapiens. If you're a
bunch of aliens on a planet that's one hundred light
years away, right, you're not going to know. So I
think it's more likely, but this is just a guess,
of course, more likely that we'll pick up a signal
that's you know, just sort of radio traffic for whatever
(12:37):
purpose the aliens have for that kind of communication, and
that means we probably won't understand it. But on the
other hand, we'd at least know somebody's out there.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
With Seth Shostak from the City Institute search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence Seth tell us about the WOW signal. When did
that pop up? And what was that?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah, well, I've kind of forgot when it was. It
was in the nineteen seventies, but in any case, it
was picked up by a big antenna in the Midwest.
You know about the Midwest.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
George, Oh, yeah, that's where I am right now.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Are you really okay? Yeah? This was picked up I
think at the Ohio State They had a big antenna.
It's gone now, but they used it for radio astronomy.
But they also, you know, would just use it to
scan the whole sky or as much of the sky
as you could see from Ohio and you know, trying
to pick up a signal that would tell us that
(13:32):
somebody out there has a transmitter. And the output of
this antenna and the receivers and all that stuff was
directed to what was called a line printer. And there
are unduly people in the audience who remember line printers.
That's the way you got output from your computer. You
don't do that very much anymore. But it was just
(13:52):
this big, very expensive printer that could print you know,
one hundred lines a minute or maybe a south and
you know, it would just print out numbers and that
was you know what was coming out of the computer.
In any case, there was a guy that worked there,
guy the name of Jerry Amen, and he would come
in every couple of days to this little shack next
to the antenna where this big printer was, you know,
(14:14):
printing out whatever signals are coming into that thing. And
you know, in general, it was just a noise. I mean,
it wasn't anything terribly interesting. But one day he came
in and it was this big signal and he wrote
wow next to it, and so ever after it was
called the Wow signal. The sad thing is that maybe
that was et, but nobody was ever able to find
(14:35):
that Wow signal again. It was never seen a second time.
And I got to tell you that that's kind of
like seeing a ghost in your attic, right, but only once.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah, you know, for radio stations, if you're on a
fifty thousand wats AM station, you go a little farther
than you would if you're on a different watted station.
In radio waves that go off into space, whether we
send them or they come to us, do they ever
die off or just simply run out of energy and
(15:06):
they just stop moving?
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Yeah, Well, they don't take vacations and they don't really die off.
What happens is they just get weaker with distance. Right,
It's like, I don't know, if you could go up
to the moon with a flashlight and just aim that
flashlight at the sky and you know, turn it on
whatever that beam of light. You know, if you're fairly
(15:30):
close to it, you can easily see it. But as
you get farther and farther away from it, of course,
the light becomes dimmer. And it's the same with radio waves,
and you know, all of a sudden, they never stop.
It isn't that they sort of give up the ghosts
after traveling a million miles, but they are possibly so
weak that you couldn't you know, really pick them up
(15:51):
with any kind of equipment that we have.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
And is a radio wave of traveling at the speed
of light, isn't it?
Speaker 3 (15:57):
It is? Yeah, radio wave is just another formal lay right.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
That's intriguing, it really is. Since we began broadcasting in
this country, in this world, our signals could be millions
of trillions of miles out there by now.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Well, yeah, they're moving at the speed of light, so
that's about one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a second.
So every second, the signals are that much farther out
into space, and that means that you know, early television broadcasts,
for example, beginning in the late nineteen forties and the
nineteen fifties, and those signals are like sixty seventy light
(16:36):
years out. That's a long distance. A light year is
like six trillion miles, so you know, it's like sixty
times that, and that means that those signals have actually
reached undoubtedly many planets in our galaxy. Now, whether anybody's
watching that stuff, I mean, obviously we don't know. Nobody's
(16:57):
complained about the programming yet, but maybe they will eventually.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Maybe they'll call in one day on the show.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Huh, they might do that. Yes, is the.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Orson Wells wore the world's type program of possibility that
the wrong type of ets could show up.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Well, I have to say, George, I'm a big fan
of The War of the World's in particular the movie.
There was a movie made in nineteen I think it
was nineteen fifty three. Yeah, War the World's End. You know,
the Aliens come down and they used their machines to
flatten Los Angeles, Yeah, flat in Los Angeles, right, And
of course I wasn't living in Los Angeles at the time,
(17:37):
but when I saw this on the screen, I thought, well,
I mean, it's only Los Angeles, right, It isn't that
they've done anything really terrible, like flattening Trenton, New Jersey
or something like that. But in fact, you know that
idea was based on events that were actually happening on
Earth that you know, wells converted to this format in which,
(18:01):
you know, he kind of he packaged this story in
terms of a battle between societies there are on different
planets and so on. But the whole premise that aliens
might want to flatten you know, Los Angeles and everything
else here on Earth. I mean, nobody knows what they
find interesting to do, but it's not clear to me
(18:23):
why they would want to do that, because what's in
it for them? I mean, you know, they go out
and flatten Earth, well, you know, how do they benefit
from that? I think they would probably find it more
interesting to try and establish some sort of communication with us.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you,
one of our favorite guests. Back with us, Seth Jeff
Stack directing the search for extraterrestrials at the SETI Institute
in California, trying to find evidence of intelligent life in space.
He is also committed to get into the public, especially
young people excited about astrobiology and science in general. A
(00:26):
couple of his books include Life in the Universe, Confessions
of an Alien Hunter, Cosmic Company, Sharing the Universe, Perspectives
on extraterrestrial life. Seth, welcome back. How are you just
find George?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
And it's great to talk with you again.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's in a long time, my god. But how many
years we've been doing this now?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Well, I'm not so sure of, but I think one
of the first times I spoke to you, I was
found at the Arecibo Radio Observatory, you know, using the
big dish there to try and eavesdrop on et. And
my gosh, that's at least twenty years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
At least I was doing my local show in Saint
Louis at the time.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
That would have probably made it around ninety six, ninety seven.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah, that could be. I was around. I was around.
It shocks me to say that when I think of
how long ago it was.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Is there a sebull functioning at all anymore?
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Well, I don't know that they're using it. I honestly,
that's a very good question for which I have a
last no answer. But you know, anybody can do a
quick search to see if they are. They had problems
because you know, the parts of the dish collapsed and
so forth, and the problem was to fix it. Well,
(01:44):
let me back up a moment. A piece of the
antenna actually came loose and it dropped through the reflecting
dish underneath, you know, creating a big hole and a
lot of damage. And the estimate was that it was
going to cost you know, many millions of dollars to
fix that, And okay, many millions is not so much.
(02:07):
But you know, many of the people involved figured, look,
instead of spending that money fixing arecibo, why don't we
use that money to build something else. So I don't
know what's going to happen.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Tell us about the late Frank Drake and how this
all started.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Yeah, Frank Drake, Frank Drake, whom I usually referred to
as the world's last nice guy. Unfortunately he's gone now,
so you know there are no more nice guys, I guess.
But he was a guy who actually had studied radio
astronomy at Harvard and he got a postdoc position at
(02:46):
the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Okay,
that's a lot of words, but it was an observatory
that had a lot of big antennas and some new ones.
And the director of the observatory, guy by the name
of Otto's Roof. He met this guy, Frank Drake, the
new kid. He was twenty nine, thirty years old. Something
I got and he said, look, here are some new antennas.
(03:08):
Think of something to do with them. And Frank, it was,
you know, a very smart guy. He thought, instead of
using it to study galaxies or gas in the Milky
Way or stuff like that, he thought, why don't I
try an eavesdrop on signals that maybe aliens are broadcasting.
And that was the start of the whole SETI discipline
(03:29):
began with Frank Drake. That was back in nineteen sixty and.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Since the beginning of SETI, have you heard strange anomaly signals?
Speaker 3 (03:38):
We hear signals all the time, George, I wish I
could tell you that we heard a signal that, you know,
looked like it might be what we're really looking for,
which is of course a signal broadcast by some aliens.
But we have not. And you know, what can you
say about that one? Maybe it just means there aren't
any aliens. I don't believe that. I don't think you
(03:59):
believe that. I don't think anybody believes that. The other possibility,
of course, is you're not pointing the intent in the
right direction, you're not tuned to the right frequency. You know,
maybe you don't have enough sensitivity. There are lots of ways.
There could be plenty of radio traffic in the space,
but you could still miss it. So that kind of
(04:19):
an experiment continues today. We continue to hope to find
a signal that would tell us, essentially overnight, that we're
not alone.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
What are the possibilities, seth that their technology is way
advanced and they don't even use the kind of technology
we still use to pick up these signals.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yeah, I mean that's a legitimate point, and Actually, I've
heard it from a lot of people. Say, you guys,
you know you're looking for radio signals or radio. I mean,
come on, the aliens are way beyond all that. Well,
you know this may be comforting to you being in
the radio business, but radio will never be obsolete because
it's just a good way to send information from one
(05:01):
place to another, particularly if you're talking about one place
in the cosmos to another place in the cosmos. So
you know, there's always going to be radio. I mean,
it doesn't mean it has the same youth. Maybe they're
not broadcasting top forty or anything like that, but radio
will always be used. And you know that's what we
(05:23):
look for because radio radio signals just go right through space.
They're unhindered by the fact that there's a lot of
gas and dust between the stars.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
How does the universe make sounds anyways.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Well, universe doesn't make terribly many sounds. I mean, you know,
you can go out into space and take off your
spacesuit if you really want to do that and take
a listen. You won't hear much. But there are things
that do make sounds. Actually, some of the activity, for instance,
on the Sun, these big flares and so works. Now,
they undoubtedly make some audio, but you'd have to be
(05:58):
very close to the sun hear them. Remember, you only
hear things, you know in your daily life because we've
got an atmosphere on Earth, and the atmosphere, you know,
the air actually allows sound waves to go through it,
so you know, it conducts the sound from wherever it's
being made to your ear. So somebody honks their car
behind you, you know that sound wave goes through the
(06:20):
air between that car and you. But in space there's
not too much air, so they could honk and you
wouldn't hear them.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Instead of using any kind of new technology these days.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Well, I mean there's always I don't know that there's
any radically new technology, but there are always new technological approaches.
One of the things, I mean, we could even talk
about it, but that's being tried, is to kind of
pickyback on other kinds of radio observations of the sky.
(06:54):
The sky is often being studied in the radio part
of the spectrum because you can learn a lot about
things like that quays, are as, pelsars, even planets and
things like that. They all make some sort of natural
radio emission. But you could also you know, tap off
a bit of that signal and analoge it and see
if there are any signals in there that are not
(07:14):
made by nature but are made by you know, et
So that is being done.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Oh, tell us about artificial intelligence and how SETI is
using that.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah, well, artificial intelligence. I mean I kind of figured
that the aliens will be examples of artificial intelligence. I
think we've talked about this in the past, but occasionally
get asked, you know, well, what do you think the
aliens will look like? You know, they're going to be short,
little green guys or whatever, hairless, you know, no clothes,
no names, that kind of thing. Well, actually, when you
(07:49):
think about, you know, what might replace almost sapiens on
this planet, not not next week, but say one hundred
thousand years from now, will we still be this same
species we are now or will we have invented machines
that are better than we are. We upload everything we
know to the machines and they essentially take our place
(08:10):
on this planet. I don't know if you like that idea.
I'm not sure I like that idea, but uh, but
it might happen, and you can assume that the kind
of aliens you might overhear have already done that. So
maybe which you'll actually hear is not little soft squishe guys,
but machines.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I've always thought that the reports of extraterrestrials that people
think they see on this planet might be robots as well.
Is that possible, Well, it's possible.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
I mean, you know, we use robots a lot. I
mean when I say robots, most people think of the
sort of humanoid looking robot, the kind of thing that
might I don't know, change the tire on your car
if they were good at that, which I think in
general they're not. But you know, we think of the
robots that kind of look like us, but actually most
of the robots don't look anything like us. Are the
(09:00):
kind of robots that put together your car, for example, right,
They're very specialized kinds of robots. And you know, one
of the big advantages of robots is that they don't
insist on, for example, round trip tickets. If you send
them into space, you can send them on a one
way ticket and you won't get any complaints.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
And they don't eat, they don't drink water, they don't
have to worry about that exactly.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
You don't need all that life support stuff. So you know,
there's probably a lot of robots around, and it could
be that if we actually encounter the aliens, well, just
as you say, we may in fact just encounter their hardware.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
How did you get interested in all this sets you're
an astronomer or by trade, right, yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I am. I am. Well, it was because you know,
when I was a kid, which was back before the
Crimean War. When I was a kid, I was very
interested in astronomy, you know, I had picked up some
books and so forth, and then eventually, by the age
of ten, I built some sort of telescope that kind
of thing. So I was interested in that. But I
(10:03):
was also interested in aliens, George. And that's because on
the weekends I went to see these sci fi films
were they were making back then, the kind of cheesy
sci fi films, but they very often had aliens in them, right,
because he needed a bad guy, and the big advantage
of using aliens as bad guys is that nobody will complain, right,
(10:25):
nobody's going to defend the aliens, so they would be
pretty bad. They would just you know, sort of try
and flatten earth and kill everybody, and that kind of thing,
so I, you know, got interested in aliens that way.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
I'm going to throw out an old movie that my
dad took me to and I guarantee it. I'll bet
money that you know the title when I say it,
the Mysterians.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
I don't know it.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
It was a japan There was a Japanese movie of
ets coming here doing exactly what you said to try
to eliminate us. But the movie was called The Mysterians,
and he brought me to it. I must have been
about six or seven years old. Scared the living daylights
out of me.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah. I had the same kind of a reaction to
these films. They mostly scared me, and yet I insisted
on going. In fact, if I saw one of these
films that night, you know, at home, I would be
vomiting all night. I was really sick. I was so scared,
and I think, you know, two weeks later, there'd be
another film and I'd want to go to it, and
(11:31):
my mother would say, look, why do you want to
go see that film. It's only going to make you sick.
And I said, well, look mom, I just have to
see these things.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
So I went, if we do get a message from
outer space, would it be a message that might have
been sent to us directly, or do you think it
was some kind of old broadcast from the universe from
a long time ago.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Yeah, well, of course you can't say until you pick up,
you know, the signal. My guess is that were more
likely to find a signal that was not intended forced, right,
because if they wanted to send a signal to us directly,
you know, attention all humans, we wanted to tell you this,
or maybe we want to sell you something or whatever,
(12:16):
they would need to know about us. And it's not
so easy to know about Homo sapiens. If you're a
bunch of aliens on a planet that's one hundred light
years away, right, you're not going to know. So I
think it's more likely, but this is just a guess,
of course, more likely that we'll pick up a signal
that's you know, just sort of radio traffic for whatever
(12:37):
purpose the aliens have for that kind of communication, and
that means we probably won't understand it. But on the
other hand, we'd at least know somebody's out there.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
With Seth Shostak from the City Institute search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence Seth tell us about the WOW signal. When did
that pop up? And what was that?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah, well, I've kind of forgot when it was. It
was in the nineteen seventies, but in any case, it
was picked up by a big antenna in the Midwest.
You know about the Midwest.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
George, Oh, yeah, that's where I am right now.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Are you really okay? Yeah? This was picked up I
think at the Ohio State They had a big antenna.
It's gone now, but they used it for radio astronomy.
But they also, you know, would just use it to
scan the whole sky or as much of the sky
as you could see from Ohio and you know, trying
to pick up a signal that would tell us that
(13:32):
somebody out there has a transmitter. And the output of
this antenna and the receivers and all that stuff was
directed to what was called a line printer. And there
are unduly people in the audience who remember line printers.
That's the way you got output from your computer. You
don't do that very much anymore. But it was just
(13:52):
this big, very expensive printer that could print you know,
one hundred lines a minute or maybe a south and
you know, it would just print out numbers and that
was you know what was coming out of the computer.
In any case, there was a guy that worked there,
guy the name of Jerry Amen, and he would come
in every couple of days to this little shack next
to the antenna where this big printer was, you know,
(14:14):
printing out whatever signals are coming into that thing. And
you know, in general, it was just a noise. I mean,
it wasn't anything terribly interesting. But one day he came
in and it was this big signal and he wrote
wow next to it, and so ever after it was
called the Wow signal. The sad thing is that maybe
that was et, but nobody was ever able to find
(14:35):
that Wow signal again. It was never seen a second time.
And I got to tell you that that's kind of
like seeing a ghost in your attic, right, but only once.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Yeah, you know, for radio stations, if you're on a
fifty thousand wats AM station, you go a little farther
than you would if you're on a different watted station.
In radio waves that go off into space, whether we
send them or they come to us, do they ever
die off or just simply run out of energy and
(15:06):
they just stop moving?
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Yeah, Well, they don't take vacations and they don't really die off.
What happens is they just get weaker with distance. Right,
It's like, I don't know, if you could go up
to the moon with a flashlight and just aim that
flashlight at the sky and you know, turn it on
whatever that beam of light. You know, if you're fairly
(15:30):
close to it, you can easily see it. But as
you get farther and farther away from it, of course,
the light becomes dimmer. And it's the same with radio waves,
and you know, all of a sudden, they never stop.
It isn't that they sort of give up the ghosts
after traveling a million miles, but they are possibly so
weak that you couldn't you know, really pick them up
(15:51):
with any kind of equipment that we have.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
And is a radio wave of traveling at the speed
of light, isn't it?
Speaker 3 (15:57):
It is? Yeah, radio wave is just another formal lay right.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
That's intriguing, it really is. Since we began broadcasting in
this country, in this world, our signals could be millions
of trillions of miles out there by now.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Well, yeah, they're moving at the speed of light, so
that's about one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a second.
So every second, the signals are that much farther out
into space, and that means that you know, early television broadcasts,
for example, beginning in the late nineteen forties and the
nineteen fifties, and those signals are like sixty seventy light
(16:36):
years out. That's a long distance. A light year is
like six trillion miles, so you know, it's like sixty
times that, and that means that those signals have actually
reached undoubtedly many planets in our galaxy. Now, whether anybody's
watching that stuff, I mean, obviously we don't know. Nobody's
(16:57):
complained about the programming yet, but maybe they will eventually.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Maybe they'll call in one day on the show.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Huh, they might do that. Yes, is the.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Orson Wells wore the world's type program of possibility that
the wrong type of ets could show up.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Well, I have to say, George, I'm a big fan
of The War of the World's in particular the movie.
There was a movie made in nineteen I think it
was nineteen fifty three. Yeah, War the World's End. You know,
the Aliens come down and they used their machines to
flatten Los Angeles, Yeah, flat in Los Angeles, right, And
of course I wasn't living in Los Angeles at the time,
(17:37):
but when I saw this on the screen, I thought, well,
I mean, it's only Los Angeles, right, It isn't that
they've done anything really terrible, like flattening Trenton, New Jersey
or something like that. But in fact, you know that
idea was based on events that were actually happening on
Earth that you know, wells converted to this format in which,
(18:01):
you know, he kind of he packaged this story in
terms of a battle between societies there are on different
planets and so on. But the whole premise that aliens
might want to flatten you know, Los Angeles and everything
else here on Earth. I mean, nobody knows what they
find interesting to do, but it's not clear to me
(18:23):
why they would want to do that, because what's in
it for them? I mean, you know, they go out
and flatten Earth, well, you know, how do they benefit
from that? I think they would probably find it more
interesting to try and establish some sort of communication with us.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
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