Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Seth Shostak: Alien Hunter 👽

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Since the first Martian “canals” were charted in 1877, space aliens have captivated sky-gazers, night travelers, and television watchers worldwide. Polls show that nearly half of all Americans believe in extraterrestrials, and many are convinced they’ve visited Earth. A fair number of scientists also suspect that aliens exist, and for decades they’ve been seriously searching—using powerful antennas and computers to scan for radio waves coming from other star systems. Recent interest in alien craft sightings, documented in my interview with @Mick West is at an all time high: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJtTgIKDUZw. Thanks to our sponsors! https://magbreakthrough.com/impossible http://betterhelp.com/impossible Please join my mailing list to get *FREE* notes & resources from this show! Click 👉 http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Dr. Seth Shostak (@SETI Institute) joins me to discuss his engaging memoir revealing the true story of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and discloses what we may very soon discover. Chronicling the program’s history with insight and humor, SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak assures us that if there is sentient life in the universe, we are within decades of picking up its signal. Methodically busting urban legends about alien crash landings, crop circles, and the like, Shostak pits scientific truth against speculation and delivers important news on the state of our knowledge. He answers a host of questions about SETI, including where its antennas are aimed…how we know which frequency to monitor…what our response might be…and why, if a signal is detected, “it will be one that’s deliberately beamed into space, not the Klingon equivalent of I Love Lucy.” Contrary to popular opinion, any aliens found by SETI will not resemble the squishy, big-eyed creatures on cinema screens. Rather, they will have already invented their successors: super smart post-biological thinking machines vastly beyond our own capabilities. Edgy, amusing, and remarkably profound, Confessions of an Alien Hunter addresses the startling possibilities awaiting us in deep space and in humankind’s own future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. From the SETI Institute in Mountain View. How are you, Seth? Well, I'm possibly okay. I think I'm all right. Still above ground. That's what people tell me is the correct answer. Yeah, I always say, you know, people say, oh, that's my birthday.

And I'm like, well, another year older, but I guess it's better than the alternative of not getting older. You're perennially juvenile, you know, juvenile, but in a good sense, youthful, Seth. You never seem to age. It must be studying the billions of year old cosmos that you and I both study. It's always a treat to be with you. And I thank you. This is Alien Week on the Into the Impossible podcast. Yesterday we had on Mick West, noted debunker or classifier of unidentified alien phenomena or unidentified flying phenomena.

And I made note today on Twitter that he got his start. He was a video game designer. and he started off by making Tony Hawk's video game, which has to do with an identified flying object. Have you ever seen Tony Hawk, he like hovers in space and like orbits and rotates around? So that's pretty cool. And I thought we talked a little bit about it because, you know, in the news lately, or all these phenomena have to do with potential alien techno signatures in the form of UFOs. And I'm hoping to have on some of the some of the, some of the,

pilots of various military aircraft that have come to be featured in 60 minutes, another fora, and hopefully we'll get some of your feedback on it. So have you had a chance to see any of the footage from these military infrared cameras or any of the other eyewitness accounts? Have you followed any of that, Seth? Well, I have looked at the better-known videos. Maybe they're the only ones, at least three different, maybe four, different ones. several made with these FLIR, F-L-I-R, which means, you know, forward-looking infrared cameras,

you know, rotating tick-tacks and stuff like that, things setting over or settling into the ocean. Yeah, there are some, you know, ones that are more credible than others. I tend to think I'm a pilot. You remember you, you met me at the airport once I flew a little plane up there and when I spoke at the SETI Institute. And one of the things I, you know, kind of have thought about is, you know, has anyone looked at the simulation, not of the UFOs, but of actually the pilots and what they would have experienced from inside of a high-performance jet vehicle capable of almost mock two speeds.

They're not designed to go super slow, and they're not designed to cruise very low over the ocean. But I want to point out that in your book, Confessions of an Alien Hunter, I love this book, I read it, I listened to it, I read it in Kindle. I think I have a signed copy by you, too. It could be. all these things. It's now a collector's item. One of the editions, the so-called collector's item edition on Amazon is like $500, as is one of Mick West's books, so that's pretty cool. But anyway, you talk about what would be the implications if true. So first thing I hear, Seth,

a lot, why are they visiting us now? And so what you've said in the book, and I want you to elaborate on it, one reason purported by people that are enthusiasts about the alien actually explanation, is that they see our path as one of heading towards destruction. They see the blast of nuclear detonations in the 50s, 60s, et cetera, and they see us on a path towards destruction, and they come to save us in a certain sense. How do you respond to that? Well, you know, one could argue at length

that the aliens probably don't care what we do ourselves any more than I care what the mosquitoes outside this building are doing. Maybe they're doing things that are not in their best interest, but I'm not going to go out there and try and save them. So you could argue that, but that's an argument about alien sociology, right? And we don't know much about that. So what I would say is this, just stick with the physics. Yeah, maybe they've seen our nuclear tests, and they go back to 1945, right?

I mean, it turns out that it's a lot harder to find somebody's nuclear test than it is to find their radars, because the radars are on 24-7. The nuclear tests are over pretty quickly. But, you know, leave all that out. Maybe they did see the detonations beginning in 1945, you know, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Nevada, all the places where we set off atomic bombs. Maybe they did. Let's assume.

So that means 1945, since 1945, 55, 65, 65, 75, 75, 76 years ago. All right. So it's just going out into this information. The flashes are going out into space at the speed of light, and they hit a planet where there's some Klingons on there, and they say, oh my god you know these guys have nuclear weapons we got to do something about it sure it's going to cost 70 trillion zillion galactic cruceros to do it but we're going to do it right okay so what they're going to do is they're going to send some saucers to earth to fly around as far as i can tell they haven't done anything with regard to our nuclear capabilities but let's say that they just

decided to do that well okay their spacecraft can't go faster than the speed of light that's the limit. So let's assume they go at the speed of light, right? 76 years to, for them to get the information another 76 years to get back here or whatever, it's, that wouldn't work because we wouldn't see them yet. But what if they were half that far away? Instead of 76 years, right, they were 38 light years away, right? So, all right, the bombs go off. 38 years later, sorry, 38 years later, they see the flash, they make a quick decision we're going to intervene, and it takes them 38 years to get here at best. So that means they have to be within 38 light years of us.

And the total number of stars within 38 light years is, well, it's a few thousands, a few tens of thousands. That's a small number in astronomy. And the chances that there's some, you know, civilization with these capabilities within that distance, strike me, is rather small. So I think it's remarkable that they're here. The argument is even stronger if you go back to, you know, siding scene in the late 40s or early 50s. It becomes almost impossible for them to be here on the basis of anything they might know about humanity.

Or maybe they're coming here for exploitation of some resources that they might need or that they might want to extract from us in some sort of conserved quantity that they might lack. Is there any reason to expect that aliens might have, we might have something that aliens want, perhaps a Kardashian or two? Yeah, well, if they took them, I mean, I'm not sure my life would be altered greatly, but, you know, I've been on panels where we've discussed, what do we have to offer the aliens? In the movies, it's often water, but that's kind of a stupid thing for them to come here to get, because water, you know, what is it may, weigh 65 pounds per square, or per cubic foot, or whatever.

Water is very dense, it's heavy, and it's expensive to get it. And the facts are the universe is chaka-blog with water, because water is H-2-0, hydrogen is three-quarters of the year, universe 5-8. So there's plenty of hydrogen out there. And oxygen is the third most common element in the universe. So H-2-O is everywhere. We find it everywhere in the solar system. It's going to be everywhere in their solar system. They're not going to come here from water anymore than I'm going to, you know, walk to bed to get lunch. I can get lunch a lot more easily than walking to the bed. So and these panels kind of kind of came to the conclusion that it was actually nothing

in terms of resources that they could find here, that they couldn't find. find much, much nearby their home planet. So that doesn't make sense. They might come here to breed with us. That's a frequent theme. It's a frequent theme because it's something that scares people, and that's why it's often offered is what the aliens are here to do. But it wouldn't work.

You know, it wouldn't work any more than you could, you know, kidnap a roach from your garage and breed with it. You're not going to be able to do that, and it's going to be uncomfortable. So that's not a reasonable scenario for them coming here. There's essentially nothing. We have culture that they might be interested in. You know, they like what they find in the art museums and so where they don't have exactly

that. They might take that. Or maybe they're just here as explorers, you know, they just want to know what's in the galaxy. That's fair enough, but then why now? And finally, they might just be coming here to proselytize. They want to convert us to the Galactic Church. That's something that's certainly incentivized a lot of our exploration. Now some say that's exactly what we'd expect you to say, because

the SETI Institute is not prepared, even if this were to be true, because you are used to searching for electromagnetic signals, which is kind of your grandmother's type of technology. You're not used to searching for techno signatures, the type that Avi Loeb, past guest on the Into the Impossible podcast, has spoken about. What do you say? Is there a protocol? Let's say this turns out to be actually what it is depicted by many of the proponents of the alien visitation hypotheses. Is there a protocol or are we basically going to start, you know, kind of, you know, building the, building the roadmap as they introduced themselves for dinner? Yeah, well, I think so. I think the latter. I have been asked, I don't know how many times, does the Pentagon have some

sort of protocol, if you like that term, for dealing with, you know, visitors from outer space? I don't know what's in the depths of the Pentagon. I've been in the Pentagon many times, actually, because I lived two miles from it, and my father worked for the Navy, and as a consequence, I used to go over to the Pentagon to use the swimming pool, that kind of thing, but that doesn't tell you what they're doing there.

I don't know what they're doing there, but I doubt that there's a protocol, because in fact, it's just a very simple argument. If they can come here, it doesn't matter what your protocol is. Whatever they want to do, they can do it, because they have the technology to do things that are centuries away,

if not farther, for us. So it's a bit silly, would be like the Native Americans on Watling Island and the Caribbean in 1492. Do they have a protocol in case some Spanish ships come over the horizon? I don't think they did. They didn't anticipate it. But in any case, if they did have a protocol, it wouldn't have mattered. I mean, these guys get out of the ship and they look at them and they, you know,

try and talk at one another, and neither one can understand the other and so forth. So I doubt that there is a protocol, but it doesn't matter if there is. the only protocol that would work is maybe to negotiate. Now, on the other hand, some of the research that's done at the SETI Institute, which I urge folks to support as I do, I have a long-term donor, not only a client, I'm also a member, but the SETI Institute has done pioneering work on what's called extremophiles and so forth. We used to think that life was very chauvinistically, would have to look like us. on the cover of your book is a three-fingered, one-thumbed, four-digited alien finger, you know, kind of handprint.

We don't now think that aliens, or even life, has to look very much like us. Talk about the research that your colleagues have done at the SETI Institute on extremophiles that suggest that life could survive. Radiation-hardened environments, deep-sea environments, acidic environments. Talk about how life finds a way, as Dr. Jeff Goldwell. Old Bloom described in Jurassic Park. Yes, well, Jeff had that line written for him. Well, indeed, life is tough. No, spoilers, come on.

It's not much of a spoiler. You know, once you get life started, it's very hard to stop it. I mean, you think of what's happened on the earth. Of course, there were the ice ages. Oh, yeah, there was that big rock that landed 66 million years ago in the Mexican Yucatan, and, you know, wiped out the dinoes and essentially three-fourths of everything else. You know, that was a bad day. We've had snowball Earth episodes at least once where the whole planet is covered in ice and so forth. None of this has stopped life. Yeah, it slows it down, you know. You lose those big sauropods with their big teeth. Yeah, yeah, but life goes on. So that's a very obvious demonstration of the fact that once you get life started, you know, it just spreads around and it just fills all the niches that it can. And it's very hard to get rid of. So, you know, I think the real question is not, can life survive, and that's the study of

extremophiles, you know, you find bacteria and the fuel tanks of jet liners and stuff like that. It isn't whether it can survive. The real question is, can you get it started in the first place? Because if you don't do that, it doesn't matter whether it could have survived. The question is, how do you get life started? And that's a difficult subject because the evidence is always very, very tenuous because, you know, single-cell organisms don't make great fossils. So we don't know how that happens. And, you know, we're interested. For example, in finding life on Mars and everybody knows about the perseverance rover rolling

around the landscapes of our little ruddy buddy out there, you know, trying to find evidence for life and it might do so or it might not do so. You should ask yourself, what happens if it doesn't find life, right? there was once bacterial life on Mars, that would be a big downer. Because if we find it, we can say, okay, well, at least it looks like getting biology started isn't so hard. And yeah, exactly. I want to look at that. People talk about finding evidence of water. Actually, just today, there was an announcement of two missions to go to Venus.

And I've had Sarah Seeger on the podcast, hoping to have Jane Greaves, authors of Venus, phosphine discovery. What have you made about that? We haven't spoken since those discoveries were announced late last year. Does that, obviously the NASA missions were long in the planning. They're not just sort of responding to late last year's news, although that would not be a bad reason to develop the mission. NASA is less kind of a reactionary than that. But what do you make the possibility of life on Venus as an extremophile

or as a different modality to look for missions to go to Mars? What do you make of these missions? Are they even looking for life, first of all? Well, I think that they are, at least one of them is, because they're looking for this phosphine, this gas that was found in the atmosphere of Venus at an altitude, you know, like 20 miles up or something like that, where the temperatures are, you know, completely comparable to the temperatures in Austin, Texas. I mean, they're very, you know, they're okay. They can support life. And the phosphine gas itself was a clue because phosphine is a hard gas to make, or at least it's not made frequently by many reactions. in volcanoes. Volcanoes make phosphine, and bacteria make phosphine.

So if there's phosphine there, the question is, well, where it come from? It could come from volcanoes, but if you just do the numbers, it turns out you'd need to have Venus completely pockmarked with volcanoes, active volcanoes, in order to account for the phosphine. That doesn't seem to be the case.

And the other possibility is it was made by bacteria, floating in the upper atmosphere of Venus where the temperatures are salubrious and so forth, that's extremely enticing. because that shows you an example of where life got started, where the conditions were really horrid, but it still got started somehow. Well, for me, the problem is that the detection of phosphine, I think, is somewhat tenuous because it involved some spectral work, radio spectral work, and they fitted a ninth order polynomial or something to the spectrum, and I've done a lot of that sort of research, and you never fit a ninth order polynomial to any, uh, any spectrum that you've obtained with a radio telescope because you can fit anything.

So, anyhow, I think the thing is NASA decided to go to Venus because Venus has been kind of, you know, in the background here for a long time. It's been Mars, Mars, and more Mars. And now there are two things going to Venus. It's a tough environment. It's hot there, but doggone it. I think it's going to be interesting. Yeah, if it can cruise around in the clouds of Venus, it could add a nice blurb to NASA's

resume. A question that you and I talked about earlier in a recorded interview that we did for later retransmission on the same Into the Impossible Network Station. I'm a reminder. I'm talking to Dr. Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Northern California, a good friend of the show, and a host of the Big Picture Science podcast and radio show. And you should all subscribe to that as well and follow him on Twitter and other social media outlets. We were talking earlier about, you know, why use electromagnetism at all as a search for, as a search modality? And people are asking that as well in the chat as we speak. So you want to talk a little bit about that. We did discuss that earlier today, but for the benefit of the audience members who aren't

able to travel back in time with us. Is it possible to, you know, that we're too kind of recency focused? There's this primacy, recency bias that human beings have, that the most recent thing that we encounter, we're going to fixate and sink all of our resources into. Might it be that we should think other ways of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence other than the shiny newest thing that we just invented? At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV.

Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is ours. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N-EX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.

Well, you know, that's an enticing thought, right, that we're too anthropocentric, we're too fixated on the technology of the day. And the technology of the day, and when I say day, I mean the last maybe century or something, is electromagnetic radiation. In other words, radio waves, lasers, anything like that. And you could say, well, maybe, you know, 100 years an hour, or a thousand years from now, we'll look back and think, oh, that's so quaint. They were using this, you know, this silly technology of the time to find the aliens. And meanwhile, they're on, you know, some other transformational. I don't know.

I can't even remember the terms that are used in science fiction for these communication modes that go fast in the speed light. There is no such communication mode as far as we tacky. Well, Tachyons, yes. A lot of people seem to think that quantum entanglement would allow instantaneous communication, but that's a misunderstanding of quantum entanglement. It doesn't actually allow that. But be that as May.

You go with the science you have. So that explains why all these experiments are always using, if you will, the trendy science of the day because, you know, that's the best science they've got. And I think that that applies here. Very good. So another question that I'm getting is, you know, if they had advanced technology that could potentially, you know, outdo our technology, et cetera, traveling throughout the galaxy, perhaps, that, you know, as they would travel, wouldn't they encounter many, many hazards along the way? You know, we think about the Star Wars, you know, kind of the warp drives,

the Star Trek, Star Trek, Star Wars, but aren't there other hazards? interstellar travel, even if they could master warp drive and handle that very, very perilous deceleration phase at the very end? Are there other hazards, aren't there other hazards, rather, from just basic physical principles that they would have to face along their journey at close to the speed of light? Well, if they're going, you know, with the physics we know, which it says, is to say they're not going quite the speed of light, let alone, you know, three times the speed of light, whatever. then they're moving through space very fast.

And you can say, well, so what? I mean, space is empty, and it is largely empty, but it's not entirely empty. There's what's called interstellar material in space. And even in the, you know, the most unappealing, the deserts, if you will, of the Milky Way, you still have at least one particle per cubic centimeter, right? Now, there are particles of hydrogen, if you will, particles are just atoms of hydrogen. And normally they wouldn't bother you. they don't bother me. I don't disturb my sleep or anything. So what would these, you know,

atoms of hydrogen, or actually little molecules of two atoms of hydrogen? You know, and they hit the spacecraft at 99.9% the speed of light or whatever. They're going to punch through the skin of the spacecraft, punch through you and, you know, disrupt the cells in your body, and you probably just kill yourself. So there are hazards of going through space at very high speed. And the mitigation for that, according to your most recent guest on the show, or at least at the institute, Mityo Kaku suggests that there'd be no reason for physical entities for aliens to travel at all whatsoever. In fact, there'd be just a digital code, an avatar that you would be be beamed literally, but only in digital code. A clone, Seth, would be traversing, traipsing about the galaxy.

what do you make of that as a prospect? And perhaps now we're back to electromagnetic formulations of extraterrestrial intelligence as a detectable signature. Yeah, well, I think it makes sense to some degree. I mean, you know, the number of base pairs in your DNA. In other words, the information in your DNA would fit on a CD. You don't even need a DVD, just a CD. Sorry, I use Betamax.

Damn it. Yeah, well, that's too bad. You're probably not recording your entire genome, but you could fit that onto a CD. So it's not a lot of information. You could broadcast it into space, you know, in the course of minutes. So why send the barons when you can – why don't you just send the information? If somebody across the country has a book that they want me to read, they could mail the book, or they could send me a PDF file, if you will, right?

And by doing that, it gets to me much more quickly, and at lower cost, everybody involved. So I think what Professor Kaku was saying is that, you know, we won't build rockets to go into space. We'll just send the information. Now, you could take that CD of Brian Keating, right, and, you know, your DNA, and just send that to some other place and say, well, now, you know, Brian's going into space at the speed of life, which it would be. but it does presume that at the other end, at the alien end, that they can do something with that sequence of your DNA. Did they know what to do with it? Do they know that, okay, so I need a phosphorus atom here

and a nitrogen atom there and so forth and so. Could they reconstruct it at the other end? Maybe not. I mean, I don't know how clever they are, but they might not be able to do that. They might not be able to figure it out. And if they did, even if they did, what they would end up with is Brian Keating's genome,

And, you know, they culture that on a petri dish, and then they would get Brian Keating as he was when he was born with essentially no information. They would miss the college education. Let me question from Scott Brown, ITF in the flesh. I don't know what that stands for. He asked, does Seth feel that the idea of an advanced race of beings or life forms observing and interacting with humans is completely impossible? And if so, why? Well, I don't think it's completely impossible. But it's, you know, it's not going to be like it is on TV where they just sort of stand in front of you and, you know, talk to you in perfect colloquial American English.

They don't even have British accents. I always wondered about that. But in any case, yeah, I think we could interact at a certain minimum level of IQ, if you will. I mean, I can't interact, for example, with the hummingbirds in my back yard very well. And I walk out there and they know I'm there. They've seen me. They sense my presence. And I sense theirs because they immediately begin.

into defending their territory, which usually includes my entire backyard. You know, they didn't pay that mortgage. But in any case, there's some level of interaction always possible, but in terms of communication, that takes a little bit longer. I think if they had any interest in that, they would give us a picture dictionary or something like that. And maybe we could find some common denominator, if you will, in language. But language is already something that's slightly anthropocentric.

So I don't know. But I cannot imagine that we find some other creatures and couldn't communicate with them in some ways. I mean, you know, we understand a little bit about dolphins when they come up and ask for another fish. So I think at some level, you might be able to communicate. What do you make of Professor Adam Frank's suggestion that one way to look for the civilization is by looking for a techno signature in the form of atmospheric chemistry. changes via terraforming, global warming, atmospheric chemistry, methane signatures, et cetera. What do you make of that hypothesis? Well, I mean, that's certainly interesting.

I actually have a paper that's in Astrobiology magazine, I think, in January. Anyhow, when I say that actually maybe a better way to do study is to indeed look for artifacts, because then the aliens don't have to be alive now. It's like, I think I'm making an analogy. It's like finding the pharaohs of Egypt. Very hard to do. I mean, they are there. They've just been moved to a new museum, but they're just lying in a box, not making much noise.

So it's maybe less than satisfying. But at least you could find the pharaohs in a sense. But a better way would just be to go to the outskirts on the west side of Cairo, and you'd find these big pointy buildings, and you say, well, you know, the pharaohs have built this thousands of years ago, and so this is good evidence. I mean, I think you could do that, but the idea that you could find, for example, hydrofluorocarbons in our atmosphere because of hairspray or whatever, and it's something that doesn't belong in our atmosphere, and they would do spectral analysis and find that stuff.

I think that's maybe a little too simple, because actually how long were the fluorocarbons in our atmosphere? You know, it was recognized as a problem was destroying the ozone, and that problem was solved within a few decades at most. So most of the things that are in our atmosphere that would indicate that we are here, things that we're responsible for in the atmosphere, are very short-lived, right? Even global warming, all that's CO2, right? The hope is that we will solve that problem within, you know, 50 years, 100 years, 500 years, whatever.

And so the fraction of time that a planet would have these kinds of signatures in its atmosphere strikes me as fairly low. Mm-hmm. So Cryptalicious, which was the name I was going to choose for my secondborn child, is asking, Seth, you have unlimited fun. Let's not make it unlimited, because I think that's a little bit of a stretch. But let's say you have 2X, the Allen Telescope Array funds. You have one new project that you can spend it on. Only one. You can't develop an endowment for the Seth Shostack Library Wing and endowed hovercraft. You have one project. What do you spend it on? Well, if it's just twice what was spent to build the Allen Telescope array, then I would use that money to build the Allen Telescope array. I would finish it. The original design had 350 antennas.

In fact, we have 42. And with 350 antennas, it's actually a qualitative change in what it could do. So if you're talking about that order of magnitude, that's under $100 million. So with that order of magnitude, that's what I would do. If you really had unlimited funds, if that's really the question, you'd put some sensitive radio telescopes on the backside of the moon, the side we don't see from Earth, because that would be shielded from all the interference here on our home planet. And it would be radio quiet, and you'd have a much better chance of finding something. My first guest on The Into the Impossible podcast was my late great friend Freeman Dyson. and Starduster is asking,

how would you go about searching for a Dyson sphere? I think that's a cool question. Yeah, well, a warm question, actually. It's actually been done many times. People have tried this, and people have looked for, if you will, Dyson spheres in the galaxy. In other words,

for those who don't know what a Dyson sphere is, it's just, you say, if you really want to solve the energy problem, what you do is take a part of a planet that's not so useful to you like Neptune, and you just rebuild it as a shell around the Earth, way beyond the orbit of the Earth, so you don't interfere with the Earth.

And you just align it with solar cells that turn the Sun's energy into, well, electrical energy, and you just radio that back to Earth. So now you have all the energy you can possibly use, much more than you can possibly use, and there are no emissions and no waste products, no pile of ash at the other side of the boiler. I mean, yeah. And so Dyson said that this is what advanced societies would do. And these things are, in principle, detectable because the outside of these things always emit some infrared. And people have looked for infrared in surveys of the Milky Way. And they find a few things. The trouble is that infrared is produced in many star systems because of dust. So it's hard. It's hard. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So let's see, we have more questions coming in from, do you believe?

that intelligence is an evolutionary advantage or a disadvantage? And do we expect it to be rare or common outside of Earth? I guess that's predicated on a prior of whether or not you think life is common outside of the Earth or not. Well, I mean, I think that it is a somewhat different question than saying, you know, is a biology going to be common? I mean, we could answer that if we found any evidence for a previous biology on Mars. But it's rather doubtful that there was ever intelligence on Mars, although maybe Elon Musk will change. that soon. Yeah, I mean, that's a very legitimate question, actually, and it's one that for which the answer is not very clear. You could say that nature's not interested in intelligence,

right? We've had life on this plant for four billion years, roughly, and for almost all of that, none of the life was very clever, right? Never building anything, no technology, no smelting of metals, any of that. So nature's not interested in intelligence, and that's a thesis you can prove to yourself by walking around your neighborhood. Nature's not interested in intelligence, but it is interested in survival. So if intelligence increases your chances of survival, then, you know, nature will go along.

And that's what's happened. I mean, obviously humans have come to dominate the planet. And, you know, our Simeon friends and ancestors, they're pretty clever compared to most life on Earth. And there are other, you know, crows are pretty clever, and dolphins are pretty clever, and so forth. So it looks like nature does keep trying, or it doesn't try, but it allows the evolution of intelligence in species. And if it turns out to pay off, then it keeps making that. So I think

that intelligence might be very, very common, but there's no proof of that. You have to ask yourself, if the dinoes hadn't been wiped out 66 million years ago, there would still be dinosaurs here, and they weren't really all that smart. Yeah, absolutely. So let's see, we've got, right, looking out further. So I don't think you commented very much on Omuamua lately. Is that something we can discuss? There's some interest in that from some of my listeners. Is Omuamua credible? Is it more likely that it comes from a techno, as a techno signature or a naturally occurring phenomenon within our solar system or an exosolar system as a icy body or something like that? And then I'll have a follow-up about icy bodies later.

Okay. Actually, I'm supposed to be in another meeting at this point. So I may have to pop out. But let me just say this. Amu Amu, you know, I'll be low at Harvard, after all this. He's a very smart guy, has said that Amu Amu might be a solar sale or some remnant from somebody else's solar system. It's clear that it comes from somebody else's the solar system. What's not clear is that it's some sort of manufactured item.

And we'll never know, because Amu Amo Amo was seen when it was a solar system. already on its way out of the solar system. And, you know, it was only seen as a dot, one pixel in the campus. It's pretty hard to say what it was. And actually, the colors of this thing, and you could measure the colors, were very consistent with it being an asteroid. So I think most people in the research community think that's what it was. But you have to say, gee, that's pretty lucky. You know, somebody throws a rock into space and it comes right into our solar system as closely as it did. It just, you know, wheeled around the sun and head on on out, and the chances of that happening are very small unless there are a lot of these rocks.

And I think the answer to a muo-o-muh will become clear if we, in fact, find more rocks. And we're beginning to do that. All right, so the last question of you'll indulge me, Seth, is a follow-up to that. So, Oviya said that there'll be many of these discovered with Virabin Observatory, and that we should send CubeSats to go do it. And I said, well, it'd be great. You know, if you knew a billionaire who happens to want to send, you know, spacecraft to Proxima Centurray, just get them to send the money to chase after Omuamua, catch up to it pretty quickly.

Do you think we should be spending money to chase after these potentials technosignatures or spend more money observing them with upcoming astronomical observatories? Well, the latter, to just keep an eye out, is not anything that costs money because we're doing it anyhow. I mean, it costs money, but that money is there. If you were to go to somebody like Yuri Milner, indeed, and ask for money to catch up with Amua Amu, I'm not sure that's actually. worthwhile. I mean, it's very unlikely that if Muamua was, you know, deliberately sent this way,

that it's the last thing to be deliberately sent this way. You have to ask yourself, we finally had a telescope there on the island of Hawaii that could find something like a Muamua, and it found it within a year or two of opening up. So if there's only one of them, that's a tremendous coincidence in time. So I think, you know, it's very hard to build a rocket to catch up with the Muamua. None of our rockets could. You'd have to build a whole loom rock. And, you know, I think you do better to spend the money on observations. That's right. Well, Seth, I know you have to go.

Thank you for being so generous. I point out I have another interview with Seth. We recorded earlier. That'll be out. Tune in, subscribe to Seth's podcast, Big Picture Science, and the SETI Institute YouTube channel is available. Subscribe, donate to the SETI Institute as I do. Seth, I want to thank you so much.

I'll stick around, answer a couple more comments and questions from my audience. Love talking to you, Seth, as always. Have a wonderful day. Say hi to Jill Tarter and Frank Drake, and hopefully we'll get you back on soon. Thanks so much, Seth. Thank you. Brian, it's been a pleasure. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating.

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