Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Confessions of an Alien Hunter with Seth Shostak (2021)

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

What is the current state of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? Why do scientists often raise their eyebrows at UFO sightings? And what might the future of SETI look like with ongoing technological advancements? I had the privilege of diving into these fascinating topics with the professional alien hunter Seth Shostak!  Seth Shostak is an astronomer and author who directs the search for extraterrestrials at the SETI Institute in California—trying to find evidence of intelligent life in space. He is also committed to getting the public, especially young people, excited about astrobiology and science in general. Seth hosts “Big Picture Science,” the SETI Institute’s weekly radio show. The one-hour program uses interviews with leading researchers and lively and intelligent storytelling to tackle big questions like: What came before the Big Bang? How does memory work? Will our descendants be human or machine? What’s the origin of humor? Big Picture Science can be found on iTunes and other podcast sites. — Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro 02:05 Judging a book by its cover  06:49 The Carl Sagan Directors Award and the reorganization of the SETI Institute 09:45 Area 51, Harry Reid and the resurgence of interest in UAPs 11:59 What do you think about new scientific pursuits around UAPs and SETI? 16:47 What do you think about the Drake Equation? 21:18 When can we stop looking? 24:52 What technology could alien civilizations be using?  30:34 How do you handle the criticisms that you are anti-alien? 33:26 What are the latest SETI projects? 37:22 Final questions  44:09 Outro — Additional resources:  ➡️ Learn more about Seth Shostak:  💻 Website: https://sethshostak.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://x.com/SethShostak  📚 Confessions of an Alien Hunter: https://a.co/d/da0IGpk  — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Project Blue Book, Project Grudge, Project Sign, all these investigations into alien spacecraft always come back with, well, 80% of them, 90% of them we can explain as prosaic phenomena. 10% we can't. I think the consequences of that are going to be kind of interesting because suddenly this idea that will prove the existence of UFOs by disclosure is going to be shown to not work. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors. Dr. Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, a friend of mine, a supporter of all things astronomical, of all things, astrophysical, of all things extraterrestrial. And a great believer of the mission of the very first finger puppet I ever got, Seth. You don't have one of these yet, but this is a finger puppet of the late, great Carl Sagan. whose widow, Andrewian, and whose daughter, Sasha Sagan, have honored me by being guests on The End of the Impossible podcast where we talk to billionaires and Brainiacs.

And Sean, Seth, rather, you're both, of course, a billionaire. Am I a billionaire? That's something new. I'm going to go to the bank right after this. It's all that sweet, sweet, sweet setty. Well, you know, in all these movies, there's always some eccentric billionaire, you know, lurking behind the scenes. And, you know, I figure when they, when they come and sit on the setty couch cushions, they might leave some change behind. So maybe, maybe, maybe not. But how are you doing today up in Northern California? Is the pandemic subsided a little bit? It definitely has. You know, the traffic has returned more or less. And people are going to restaurants, although they tend to eat outside rather than inside. But, you know, it doesn't look like the day after nuclear war or anything anymore.

Yes, there are some negative consequences of the pandemic ending. As you mentioned, traffic has resumed and all sorts of things. Kids have gone back to school, so now they're getting ordinary colds around here, which is not to be savored in any sense of the word. But it is good that life is returning to normal. And I thought we'd start today by talking about life, other life forms. This is the roughly 12th anniversary of the release of your wonderful book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter.

I will hold it up sort of here. We'll put a link to it over there in the video. This is a wonderful book. I listened to it. I read it. Everybody should listen to it and read it, multiple copies, multiple tons. This book actually tells kind of a first-person memoir account, not only a history of SETI and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but from the perspective of you and your life story, kind of taking us through it. What impelled you to write that book when you did, you know, as I call it, the Nancy Kerrassie?

arrogant problem. Why did you do it now, or then rather? And how would you rewrite it if you had to re-update it for today's audience? Yeah, people have actually suggested that. Of course, those people are not going to be tasked with having to do it. But, and in my experience, updates seldom are successful commercially. So that's an issue because this book was published by National Geographic. But the impetus to write it when I do. did was that I was at the book fair in New York City and, you know, walking around all these publishers trying to pitch a book about the long-term future of the universe. There have been many books about that since.

I think that pitch was okay, but I stopped at the National Geographic table and the woman there who is now head of the book division for National Geo. She liked the pitch. said, but first I want you to write a setty book. And I've said, I've written one, which I had. And she said, well, I want a new one. And so that was the impetus. And, you know, it, it followed after that. I mean, she said, write this book and we'll give you this percentage of the book sales and so forth and so on. So it was indeed the publisher's impetus that caused me to write that book. Now, yes, Carl Sagan said a book is proof that humans can work magic.

because you have the voice of an author, long dead perhaps, in your mind as you're reading his or her words. Now I say, as you with big picture science, a podcast is proof that humans can work magic because now we actually have literal voices of guests and hosts, such as yourself and myself. But when we think about titles of books, we're always told not to judge a book by its cover. You have a very provocative, three-fingered hand, some sort of alien hand. And it's not confessions of an extraterrestrial hunter. It's confessions of an alien hunter. I want to ask you, what was the choice of that title driven by, not provocative as it is?

Why not searching for intelligence, not searching for an alien? Why do you consider yourself an alien hunter? Well, I think that that's, again, commercial considerations. I mean, in this discussion at the Jacob Javitt Center, you know, we talked about, okay, you want a SETI book, you know, sort of like a confessions of an alien hunter book. And she said, I like that title. So again, the deal here is, and you can, you know, you can say that this is lamentable, that this is regrettable, that it works this way. But the idea is that if the book doesn't have an intriguing title, if it doesn't grab you, well, grab me, grab somebody else, then it may just sit there on the bookshel's and, you know, one or two copies purchased by your relative.

may occur, but, you know, if you want to bring a return to the publisher and, you know, to yourself, a grabby, a grabby title is a good thing. And a grabby cover is also a good thing. And that particular cover, which you mentioned with a three-fingered handprint, that was done by one of the designers at National Geographic. And I liked it at first, I have to say. It's all white, it's very, you know, very simple and simple as elegant sometimes in art. But it was actually a very bad choice in retrospect because, you know, I was on the car, the Colbert report at one point there. And he holds up the book to the camera, but, you know, being nearly all white, the cover didn't come across on television very well. Nobody could see the three-fingered hand. And it just looked like a blank

white book. Yeah. That was a mistake. Yeah. Well, I am glad you change it from your original title, My Story or Mind Kampf. I'm glad that you changed that. That was a poor choice, but I'm glad you changed it. So there's a lot of news. I'm a subscriber, a donor. I encourage everybody to subscribe, donate to the SETI Institute. It's one of my favorite causes out there in the known multiverse. A lot of news coming out of the SETI Institute, including Janice Bishop, who's the recipient of the 2021 Carl Sagan Center Director's Award. Tell us about that. Who is Janice? And what is the Carl Sagan Center Director's Award? What does that have to do with SETI? Well, the Institute's research has been somewhat reorganized when our current CEO, Bill Diamond, came on board.

It used to be, when I joined the SETI Institute for the first time, that was, I don't know, I think the Civil War had not yet broken out, but it was about 1990. And there was only one project. The SETI Institute had one project, and it was SETI. Right. And it was a NASA project. So, you know, it was reasonably well funded to the tune of having 40 or 50 people working on it. But then in 1993, very soon after we built the equipment to actually doce it, the whole program was killed by a congressman from Nevada. Richard Bryan was his name. He didn't know much about the science or the project, but he didn't care about that. He was interested in something that he could seize on to help his reelection chances.

So that's what it was. It was just politics. In any case, that ended that. And so suddenly the SETI Institute had no funding. Fortunately, we had a member of our board. And actually, he was involved in day-to-day operations as well, Arnie Oliver. And he knew a lot of wealthy people. And he was able to get pledges of money from people like Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Those were his former bosses, actually. Anyhow, this is becoming a long story. I didn't mean it to be a long story, but what happened was that the SETI Institute started taking on other projects besides SETI, astrobiology, people who work on, you know, asteroids, for example, these might be important in terms of the development of life on a planet. And one of the big areas of study was Mars. In fact, if you walk down the hall here at the SETI Institute, you know, there are about 100 scientists total, and something like 70 or 80 percent. are studying Mars. There's now a director for all of those. That's Natalie Cabral.

It oversees all those projects. And in order to give the people who are basically astrobiologists, some say in the organization we, you know, propose this director's prize. So she can give a prize to one of these people working here. And Janice Bishop is somebody who's worked on, you know, the study of the clays of Mars and things like that, the composition of the surface of Mars.

Wow. Fantastic. Now, also featured is a piece about Area 51, also, if I believe, correctly, located in the great state of Nevada. It's interesting to note that back then, you know, the senator who canceled the funding for the initial SETI project that you were describing. He was not a fan, but now we have former Senator Harry Reid, who's a huge proponent of at least maybe UFO or UAP. documentation and FOIA and so forth. What do you make of that turn of events from Nevada senator to Nevada senator flip-flopping, so to speak? Yeah, well, it's somewhat, you could say ironic. I mean, it's true. Shortly after canceling the NASA SETI project, this same senator from Nevada, Richard Bryan, went down to cut the ribbon, as it were, on the so-called extraterrestrial highway. Yes. And this is the highway that runs by Area 51 and, you know, the little ALE, N and so forth, where they went to Storm Area 51 and that kind of stuff. So he quickly associated himself with the UFO folk. And they tend to focus on Nevada because of Area 51, of course. And, you know, he was not above encouraging such thoughts as, you know, we have aliens, freeze-dried and stacked up here in Nevada. Because, after all, was good for the state. It encouraged tourism and stuff like that. So, you know, it's somewhat ironic. The guy who canceled the search for the aliens is encouraging tourists to come because of the

extraterrestrial connection. And so he indeed did that. And now Harry Reid, of course, was the impetus again for this somewhat secret Pentagon study for, you know, understanding it was $22 million dollars over five years. Understanding more about whether aliens actually were visiting Earth, sailing around our skies and their saucers or whatever. So yeah, I mean, there's this, you might say it's somewhat disingenuous on the one hand not to support SETI, but on the other hand to encourage people who want to come to the state because they think that's where the aliens are. Right. Yeah, and I see the video with you featured in a very exotic-looking setting with very delightful technology in the background. And then there's a stamp on the SETI Institute YouTube page

courtesy of Wikipedia, of our friends at Wikipedia, describing the context behind Area 51, lest anybody get the wrong idea about taking certain scientific or maybe non-scientific pieces of information out of context. So we have YouTube now telling, and now probably this video will get stamped and earmarked, et cetera. What do you make of the kind of attention? The outsized attention that UFOs are getting nowadays in had a conversation with Mick West on the podcast, generated tremendous attention. I'm hopefully going to have at least one of the pilots,

maybe two of the pilots involved in the famous Nimitz encounter, the Tick-Tac encounter that have been in the news on 60 Minutes and so forth, the subject of the Marco Rubio and other investigations. What do you make of this attention and then sort of the possibility that it's being used, maybe not for nefarious purposes, Seth, but maybe to sort of, you know, agitate for more military budget or more setty budget, even. What do you think about these extra scientific purposes that these releases are perhaps being used for?

Well, I don't know that they are being used to. I mean, whom do you support? If you believe, and one-third of Americans do believe this, that we're being visited, that they're alien craft, you know, sailing through our airspace, you know, How does that affect what you do in terms of your political choices? There's been this idea of disclosure that has come to completely dominate the UFO community, in my experience. That is, you know, 10 years ago, if you were one of those one and three Americans, 100 million Americans, who think that, doggone it, there's something to this UFO stuff.

Some of these craft are extraterrestrial visitors. you would argue on the basis of, you know, particular events. Maybe the ones in Britain at the Randallstrom Forest, maybe Roswell. I mean, Roswell's kind of the poster child for all this. Every year there are more sightings. There are like 10,000 sightings per year. So you would advocate for this, but it might not affect the defense budget. Now you have these videos that the Navy pilots have made with their infrared gun sight cameras.

And they've stirred up a lot of excitement in the UFO community because it looks like their hope for disclosure that the government is going to weigh in and say, actually, some of these sightings are of extraterrestrial craft. That's what they're waiting for. And because of an addition to the budget of $1.3 billion that was passed in December, part of that bill includes, requirement that the intelligence agencies, and particularly the Office of Naval Intelligence, come clean, write a report, drop it on the desks of Congresspeople by the end of this month. So everybody's excited, and I think that this is going to pose a very interesting scenario. I think we're going to see something very interesting in the sense that I've written an article for NBC about what I expect is going to happen.

And what I expect is going to happen is that this is the same thing that happened when we got reports of Project Blue Book, Project Grudge, Project Sign, all these investigations into punitive alien spacecraft always come back with, well, 80% of them, 90% of them, we can explain as prosaic phenomena, balloons, aircraft, whatever. 10% we can't. And I think that's what's going to happen here. And I think the consequences of that, the sequelae of that, are going to be kind of interesting because suddenly this idea that will prove the existence of you, by disclosure is going to be shown to not work. Right. Yeah. Oftentimes I find that, you know, the coda to many of these stories by the UFOs are alien technology, techno signatures.

You know, some of the proof that they are is that no wreckage of the craft was found, you know, near the site of the reported incident. And I always say, you know, my daughter will say something like, you know, there's a unicorn here last night. and it was interacting with me, and, you know, they're invisible. And but, you know, so there's no unicorn scat was found near the site of her visitor the previous night. I try to explain to her, you know, that's not, you know, lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. Or there, maybe perhaps the other way around. But, but I want to tie that into, you know, the famous, the famous namesake of a lot of what's done in SETI, which is Frank Drake, and he just celebrated a birthday recently, according to the new.

newsletter, a milestone birthday. And that is his eponymous equation. The Drake equation, I believe, is 60 years old now. Is that not correct? Yeah, no, that is correct. It was formulated 19, no pun intended, was formulated in 1961, indeed, and it was the agenda for a meeting. Now, if you look at the Drake equation, I always say, and I love Frank as much as anybody, but if I got an equation like that and I got a result handed in by some of my undergraduates, the equation states, and you'll go through it perhaps some of the terms that most apply to the research that you conduct. But if I got a number and it was turned in without an uncertainty or an error estimation, I would perhaps return that with a big red F on top of the student's grade because no number

in science is meaningful without an error associated with it. And I, when I spoke, when I was honored to speak and you hosted me at the SETI Institute in 2016, and I'll put a link here, or maybe there, maybe here, to that talk because it was so enjoyable, that discussion, and I did, I said, well, let's estimate the number of people at the San Diego Zoo right now, because one of the hypotheses, the answers to the Fermi paradox, why they're not here, is that just as my kids don't bang on the cage of the guerrilla exhibit here, they don't make their presence known. So let's do an example calculation. How many people are in the San Diego Zoo right now?

And I estimate like 8,000, but my errors, because I'm not that great as scientists, or about plus or minus 8,000. So no number is meaningful without the error bars. And I wonder, what's your take on Drake's equation? I mean, has anyone done a sophisticated enough analysis? I see things like there are 36 civilizations in the galaxy, but then there's no error bar associated with it. So to what extent can we sign?

My audience is very erudite. I've had nine Nobel Prize winners on the show, future Nobelists speaking to now. Dr. Seth Strasach, Seth, tell us what is the issue, what kind of, from an expert's perspective, what do you think about the Drake equation? Is it just kind of like a back of the envelope? What can we do with it? Yeah. By the way, should I book my flight to Stockholm? I mean, I have some good news, I have my medallion here somewhere for you. Yeah, that's indeed. Well, look, the Drake equation,

indeed, was motivated simply by this meeting that was being held in 1961, because Frank Drake, the year before, had done the first modern SETI experiment, and it generated a lot of interest. It was in Collier's magazine, so forth and so on, which was a big deal at the time. So the public was very interested. He got about a dozen people to attend. These were all, you know, established scientists, bright people. Carl Sagan was among them, although he wasn't as well known back in 1961 as he would later become. But as an agenda item, well, as the agenda, I should say, for this meeting, he devised this equation. And it was actually somewhat similar to an equation that Harlow Shapley, a well-known astronomer,

had devised earlier for other purposes. But it was the same sort of thing where you trying to find N, N in this case being the number of civilizations who are broadcasting signals that we could pick up. And obviously that depends on how many civilizations are out there. And that's determined by the number of stars that have planets that can support life, what fraction of them ever do cook up life and what fraction of those ever get to the stage of being able to build a radio transmitter. So there are six parameters in this equation. Now you could say, well, that sounds great. What's the answer? You know, how many societies are out there? And the answer

to that question is we don't know the answer to that question. Do we know it any better than he knew the values of the parameters back in 1961? In general, not. The only parameter we know better than we did then is the fraction of stars that have planets. That's essentially all stars. But that was what they assumed at the time. So the estimates that come out of this could be one. There's one society in the galaxy that is clever, and that's us. Or, you know, a hundred million.

That's another possibility. And all these things fall within the air bars because the air bars are essentially infinite because we only have a sample of one to analyze. Right. And when I think about that, you know, kind of large-scale uncertainties and applied, you know, throughout the visible, throughout the galaxy, and some even apply it throughout the universe, which I think is even more perilous in application.

Nevertheless, I think it is kind of a tool, useful tool to apply. And I want to segue from Drake to a question that I've asked, you know, at least three of the Nobel Prize winners that have been on the show, Ray, Weiss, Barry Barish, and John Mather. And that has to do with those are all experimentalists that have been on the show. And that has to do with when to pull the plug. And it has to do with experiments that are long duration, possibly high risk,

possibly high reward, but certainly all experiments cost money. And I think it's a fair question to ask. And I asked it of these three noblists, when do you decide to stop an experiment? And by what criteria do you decide to do you decide to do that? to decommission something. So we have to think about that whenever we build an instrument on foreign soil because we don't own the territory in Chile or even in Hawaii or at the South Pole. We have to think about decommissioning. We have to be stewards of the land or whatever. But I want to ask you, you know, bigger picture, when it would be? What would be the Bayesian

criteria by which you would say, okay, we've done it. You're famous for making your coffee bets. Okay, those are great, Seth, but, you know, pretty low stakes. When would you say, okay, it's enough, we can stop looking for SETI? Or is there no criterion to do it? Well, I don't think, yeah. If we were doing the same experiment that Frank Drake did in 1960, you know, I'm sure that we would say, okay, we're going to stop this because we haven't found anything. I mean, it's been 60 years since the first modern SETI experiment. 60 years is a long time to run an experiment.

I'm hard pressed to think of any experiment that's been run that long, actually. And there's no guarantee that in the next 60 years. years, we'll find anything. So you might say, well, let's stop it. And indeed, that's one criterion for stopping it. If you don't have any money to keep doing the experiment, then you will stop it. So in a sense, your hand is forth. But there's a, you know, a kind of another, there's another factor here that I think is extremely important. And that is the SETI experiments keep getting better. That's because they're mostly dependent on computer power. And everybody knows that compute power keeps going up. It follows Moore's law, whatever, doubles every 18 months on average. And

that kind of thing. So that means that whatever experiment you're doing now normally has, you know, gathers as much data as all the previous experiments, but together, right? Whatever you've done the last two years is the sum total of SETI in some way. Not entirely true, but largely true. And as long as the experiment's getting faster and faster and faster, there's no clear point at which you say, forget it. I mean, you could say, oh, well, look, by what date will we have examined all 300 or whatever it is billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, you know, looking for signals coming from those planetary systems they have. And that isn't so far away if things keep improving exponentially as they are doing.

So that would be a natural end. But, you know, even then I don't think we would stop because the conclusion you would make by stopping is to say or come to is that there's nobody out there. You can't find any signals because, you know, we're the smartest things in the galaxy, something that most of my neighbors seem to believe. Now, that could be, it doesn't seem very reasonable. So I don't know that there's any clear-cut end to this. Now, there's an old joke.

I'm just going to read it because if I try to remember it, it won't be very funny. So there's a talk about archaeologists in France. They were digging. They dug down to a depth of 1,000 meters. They found traces of copper wire. and it was a thousand years old. And they came to the conclusion that their ancestors in France had a telephone network that existed a thousand years ago.

Now, the French didn't want to lay claim to this ancient technology. So the British were famously quite, quite obstinate about it. And they said, no, we went to 2,000 meters. And we went all the way down. And we found actually a fiber optic glass cable. And they said, we actually had higher advanced technology that's even older than your copper technology and then a thousand years uh a thousand meters deeper than that the germans dug deeper and they found nothing and the conclusion was they invented Wi-Fi so you know my my question is by what

you know right do we have to expect that alien civilizations will be broadcasting using any resources that we could possibly detect in other words you know perhaps they're not even going to waste their time or they would have gone to you know fiber optics or something in there'll never be a signal that we could detect. So, you know, is the search for optical setting like my colleague upstairs, Shelley Wright, who you know, or even the looking for radio signals, is that possibly, you know, kind of thinking of the past that around the milieu of which setty developed in the radar and also telecommunications there? Is that just a byproduct of that mode of thinking? And now maybe we have to think in some other mode of thinking, techno signatures or something different. Yeah, well, I can assure you I get emails at least.

Well, I get emails every day about this subject, but every two weeks or so, I get an email saying, oh, you guys, you're using radio. That's pretty old school. That's really archaic. I mean, they're not going to be using radio. Well, maybe they aren't. I mean, there's certainly historic precedent for that point of view. 150 years ago, there were proposals for SETI experiments to, you know, let the Martians

in on our existence. And you look back at them and you say, well, they're very quaint, right? They would never work for a host of good reasons, and maybe that'll be true of what we're doing now. But all you can do is the best you can do. I mean, all you can do is say, you know, the best thinking in astronomy and technology and all that sort of thing, and do that experiment because you can't do anything else. People say, why aren't you looking for subspace communication, which is what they use on Star Trek? And that's great. It works on Star Trek.

You know, nobody knows if you go to the Stanford bookstore and I'd like to get a textbook. book on subspace communication please. And, you know, they'll usher you out of the store. So it's, you know, you have to go with what you have. You could say they're not going to use radio technology or lasers or any of that stuff. Maybe not. But I would bet that they do. Not for the same reasons we use this stuff.

These are just good technologies based on, you know, fundamental physics to get bits of information from one place to another. And whether those bits of information are reality television with Klingons or whether it's something else, they will be using it. It's like the wheel was invented a long time ago, and we still use it, and we will probably always use it, right? Even though it's very old technical, wheels, so old school, why don't you do something else to put on the bottom of your vehicles there? So, you know, that's the argument I would make that we're using essentially fundamental physics as the basis for the experiment. And of course, you have a deep background

dating back to your years at Princeton and your connection to my grand advisor, David Wilkinson, who's my PhD advisor's PhD advisor, long ago when you were an undergraduate at Princeton, if I recall correctly, and you played a prank on him or he played a prank on you? Is that right? I seem to recall you telling an anecdote about you playing a prank on David Wilkinson. Do you remember that story? I do. Well, I remember a story. This may not be the story, but yeah, I was one of, well, I think I was David Wilkinson's first student, if you will. But anyhow, and he had lots of good advice about marriage and all sorts of topics, which I actually quite valued then and still. But in any case, I was doing a lab experiment in a physics building with my lab partner, Rudy Toon, who later on became a physicist at the University of Michigan. Anyhow, we went to the window because we heard some noise outside. And down there in the parking lot was Dave Wilkinson with a couple other people, and they have this cart with some sort of apparatus on it that clearly was looking up at the sky.

It had a little microwave horn aimed at the sky. We didn't know what it was about. Turns out he was looking for the three-degree background radiation, you know, the leftover glow, if you will, the Big Bang. But we didn't know any of that. We just saw that he had some sort of equipment that looked like it was some sort of receiver. So we just wheeled over a microwave transmitter. that we were using for our experiment. To the window, we aimed it down at his apparatus,

and I tapped out on the power supply in Morse code, What Hath God wrought, which was Samuel Moore's first telegraph signal between Washington and Baltimore, as I recall. Anyhow, and then we went back to whatever we were doing. Now, we never heard from Wilkinson about this, but then later, you know, the Nobel Prize was given to the people who actually did find the three-degree background radiation,

and he became involved in all that. And I thought, cheapers, creepers, maybe we, you know, caused something terrible to happen here. That was a bank. I later quizzed him about that, and he just laughed. Yeah, you could have cost him a trip to Stockholm, Seth. That is a man you should have a man. You're a merry prankster, but we should all have our limits. One thing that I love about confessions of an alien hunter,

especially rereading it again in preparation for this interview, was, you know, how prescient you were thinking about the, you know, kinds of different arguments that people make for, you know, why aliens, why UFOs are real and why they're coming now, but also why scientists, such as yourself, myself, Shelley Wright upstairs here at UC San Diego, why scientists would be the most excited, you know, if they're actually true, because we would have a chance to shortcut, perhaps, you know, centuries of learning about physics and making mistakes and wrong turns and learning about incorrect theories and so forth, we would have a shortcut, a hack.

And so no one would be more invested in talk about instant shortcut to grants, you know, success and tenure. But actually, we're most often, as you know in the book, accused of being, you know, kind of Seth not sanguine or, you know, kind of Seth Downer. Talk about those experiences, the kind of missives that you get that accuse you of being anti-aliant or anti-ve-an, you know, of an alien hunter. You should be more sanguine about detecting aliens. but you're not. So let's be quite all that. Well, I'm certainly saying about detecting aliens,

but not by looking up at the sky and seeing them sail across the vastness of the night sky. No, most of the criticism, indeed, comes from people who are convinced that the evidence for visitors is very good, and the fact that I'm a skeptic on that. And so, you know, there are two points here. One is that this is a very emotional issue. These people will say things to me that they would, that nobody at a cocktail party would ever say to me. It just isn't polite. You know, it's ad hominem attacks and stuff like that. But they get, you know, some of them are actually kind of interesting because they say,

okay, you know we're being visited, but you can't say it because your job depends on you not saying it. Upton Sinclair, right. Yeah, that's right. You can't blow the whistle on this stuff. That's amusing because, of course, there's no restriction on what you want to say about any of this stuff. But, anyhow, so they're those, but others where they say, okay, you can stop playing around now. We have conclusive proof. Look at these TikTok videos and TikTok videos.

The TikTok videos are better. Look at these TikTok videos. And, you know, you can see for yourself that this is not some earthly craft here. This is something else. That's a tremendous extrapolation from what they see to what they think it is. But at any case, and that leads, and I say, well, I don't really think so. because consider this situation, and that would explain the video, and it doesn't involve aliens, right? And then they usually get angry.

But I do answer all the emails. I do answer. Exema is unpredictable. But you can flare less with ebbglis. A once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month- or longer dosing phase, about four in 10 people taking ebbglis achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Ebglis, Lbrichizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat

adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical topical therapesaries. Ebbglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebbglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe, eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebbglis. Before starting Ebbglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.

Ask your doctor about Ebbglis.com or call 1800 LilyRX or 1-800-545-9. Yeah, yeah, you're noted for your polite penmanship and your gentlemanly pros. Another thing you talk about is sort of the physics behind all this, which I find fascinating to speculate on as all science fiction nerds. And I'm the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Arthur C. Clark knew a thing or two about speculation about the future, and I'm going to ask you some, what I call my thrilling three questions that I ask all my guests at the end of each episode, Seth, in just a moment. But, you know, one thing that he would always, you know, kind of talk

about is that, you know, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And, you know, Michael Shermer, who I know that you know talks about that. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from aliens. And sort of that you can kind of, you know, append on, almost any phenomena, and you can associate it with anything advanced, as long as you say physics beyond the standard model. And I had on recently Michi Okaku, as I know you have, and then I've had on Avi Loeb. I don't know if you've had on, but, you know, these are people working at the forefront of physics, you know, one in string theory, one opposed to string theory.

They both believe in extraterrestrial existence of extraterrestrials. One believes we've been visited by technosignature from an alien civilization. the other believes that we will someday, you know, become avatars, riding on interstellar light beams. And so these are serious scientists, right? So if they're in the mainstream believing it, you know, it kind of takes courage to sort of stand opposed in that, to say that, no, we're actually, there's less evidence for it.

In fact, when, yes, your job in some sense depends on searching for it. So I do just want to salute you for having that courage and standing up as you do so steadfastly. Talk about just in the remaining. minutes before I go into the final questions and we break for our live stream conversation. Talk about big picture science. What kind of things are you excited about project that you're working on at the SETI Institute that our listeners should know about. Well, big picture science, which is our weekly radio show and podcast, takes on all areas of science. It's not restricted to

the kind of science done in the halls here behind me. So indeed, we've talked about a lot about animal behavior. That's always interesting. Plants and things like that. We try and talk about something where there's been some recent development that makes it interesting. Or we also do once a month something called Skeptic Check, where we do sort of a skeptical show. And, you know, obvious topics would be indeed these Navy videos. But we've done, there was a big, Bigfoot press conference about 15 years ago that we covered. We went to the press conference and interviewed the people presenting there. They claim to have found a Bigfoot body in northern Georgia.

Oh, good. I don't know what Bigfoot was doing down there, you know, maybe looking for prelines. I'm not sure. But in any case, you know, so that sort of thing. And we typically, you know, interview three or four people every week. Keep the show lively, that kind of thing. And it's actually the show is recorded in this room that I'm sitting in. I'm in the studio now, and you can't see much because the walls are all lined with black acoustic foam.

So it's not very interesting to look at, but it has better audio calling. But in any case, yeah, it's, you know, it's hard work. People probably don't realize that because they just hear the final product. And the final product is, you know, relatively smooth. But, of course, what goes into it is not at all smooth. And it's hard to do during the COVID pandemic, I have to say, because we can't tell people to go to their local radio station where we can set up an electronic connection that has very high audio quality.

And that's something we always did. But now we have to do it at home with, you know, With the help of Zoom, that kind of thing, we don't actually use Zoom for the show. But anyhow, that's a technical matter. The idea is that the show can cover all areas of science, not just the science done at the SETI Institute. Yeah. Yeah, it is one of my favorite podcasts. I listen to it religiously and skeptically, too.

So now, Seth, we have come to the final three, which I call the thrilling three questions, which I ask all my guests, and I've had guests such as Jill Tarter. and I hope to have many, many more guests from the SETI Institute, from other places around the multiverse. And I'm going to ask you questions, two of which go into the deep future, yours personally, humanities generally, and then we're going to go into the past. And they kind of revolve around Arthur C. Clark in some way or another. But the first one has to do with your future. So it involves you when you leave this mortal coil at the biblical age of 120 years old. I want to ask you, Seth, as I ask everybody, what do you want to leave in your ethical will,

not your material will? I know that's mostly going to go to me and other material, fungible support for me. But what do you want to leave in your ethical will? What wisdom have you accrued that you want to leave to your ideological errors on planet Earth? Well, that's a good question for which I don't have a good answer. I'm not sure what I've done. I mean, they went in to look back on their career at some point and say, well, you know, what's the most important thing I did.

And I've done some things that I thought were relatively not important, but at least, you know, might still be remembered 50 years from now, 200 years from now. I'm sure nothing will be remembered. But it's, you know, the idea that science can be interesting. That first struck me in seventh grade, actually. I was sitting in our science class, along with everybody else. As our teacher, Mr. Chappieffsky, began to, you know, kept lecturing about. something and the material was actually interesting I mean what he was

talking about was interesting but the way he was talking about it was not interesting and you all he had to do was look around at the class and you could see that you know these seventh grade students were not really so interested and I kept thinking to myself why can't you make this interesting right so you know I always try and I've always tried to make my lectures interesting and and articles I write a lot of articles so yeah yeah I think that that maybe the legacy. Arthur C. Clark had some fundamental new ideas. I don't know that I've had any of those, but at least his writings were interesting. Yeah, I think that's more. You've done wonderful work.

We've been together on a couple of occasions. I always treasure being with you in person. We were last together with Alex Filipenko about two years ago at an event about the Nobel Prize and Accelerating Universe. That was really fun. And Alex is another treasured colleague and friend. I hope we have him on the show at some point, too. Next question. This now goes deep into the future based on the Sentinel and Arthur C. Clark's 2001 Space Odyssey has to do with a monolith, this ominous feature that makes an appearance throughout the movie and so forth that's sort of a time capsule, sort of meant to represent a warning or perhaps it's a time capsule or whatever. We don't know what it really is. But it could be like Richard Feynman said, you know, this way to encapsulate in a cataclysm the most dense amount of human information in the shortest, briefest amount of bits possible. I want to ask you, if you had a monolith to last for a billion years like the 2001 Space Odyssey, what would you put on it or in it to encapsulate everything human beings had done or learned? Yeah, well, this question comes up in connection with broadcasting into space called

Meti, sometimes messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And, you know, we've done a lot of that, actually, no matter what you think of, whether it's a good thing to do or a dangerous. thing to do, whatever. You know, we've sent little greeting cards into space, the pioneer plaques on the pioneer spacecraft, and the Voyager record, and, you know, and some deliberate transmissions actually to the sky, too. But most of what we're sending into space are the inadvertent transmissions, like radar and FM radio and television. They all go into space. That's right. And my only thought here is that we tend to think of these messages as being greeting cars. We sent a couple of thousand bits into space and try and decide, well, should we put in

Beethoven or should we put in the Beatles? That kind of thing. I would, because you can get now all the texts of the Library of Congress onto a thumb drive, I would send lots and lots of information because I think that makes it easier on the aliens, because they can decode it a lot more quickly if you send them a lot of material. And also, you know, it's not biased. I mean, you could just send the Internet. I suppose the aliens would figure we'd look like cats, but you know, you could do it. Indeed, yeah, I asked that question of Andruion, and she said, oh, I already did that, you know, I put Carl put my brainwaves on the Voyager Golden Disc, so that was pretty cool to actually have someone who did that before. And they said that would last for a

billion years. Last question, Seth, now going backwards in time for some advice to your former self, and it involves Sir Arthur C. Clark's third law, which states the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. And that's the origin of this podcast, lovely name. I want to ask you, Seth, what mysterious aspect of life perplexed you as a 20-year-old about 10 years ago? But now it makes sense because you had the courage to go into the impossible. In other words, what advice would you give to a younger Seth Shostak? I don't know. Listen to your mom. I don't know. I think I would give them that. that it's actually. But I think that I would also say don't listen to your dad. Not because you

shouldn't listen to your dad, but my dad had, you know, ideas about what his kids should pursue as careers. And, you know, it wasn't that they were bad. They were all well motivated. And in the end, actually came, came to fruition. But the advice I would give anybody young, not just me, but, you know, is pay attention to those things you're interested in. Somewhere between the ages of 8 and 11, I think kids get interested in something. And those interests, whatever they are, are interests that they keep forever. And those don't go away. Those are very fundamental. And, you know, I think that's just evolution speaking. But whatever is the reason for it. I would be sure that you don't give in to the external pressures that you will surely get to switch your interest to

something that has either better job prospects or, you know, allows your parents to say, my son, the doctor, or whatever, you know, follow your interest because you'll do better at it and you'll be happier. That's such great advice, Seth. I always say, you know, and you are a doctor, by the way. Not the kind that helps people, although you do prescribe certain medication. No, I'm just kidding. But I always say, yeah, I mean, curiosity, you know, people say, oh, follow your passion is bad.

But it is good advice. you know, curiosity is, it sustains you. Passion is the spark that ignites the curiosity. That's the fuel. And look where it took us. You know, I think it's wonderful, Seth. You're an inspiration. You're such a cheerful, good-natured ambassador.

I do, you know, it's not good policy. You think about, like, Apple doesn't endorse Google phones, right? Like, I'm endorsing your podcast. It means people aren't going to listen to my podcast. They listen to your, but anyway, it's a zero-sum game, but I love your work. I love the Sedi Institute. Please give to it. Please support it.

And I love it so much. I do it myself. So thank you for being a friend and a supporter and just a goodwill ambassador to the universe.