Somewhere in the Skies - Reinventing SETI (w/ John Gertz)

Episode Date: July 27, 2025

We welcome John Gertz to the podcast. John is the former President of the Foundation for Investing in Research on SETI Science and Technology and former Chairman of the Board of the SETI Institute. We discuss his new book, Reinventing SETI: New Directions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. We discuss the outdated SETI paradigms such as Fermi's Paradox, the Drake Equation, and METI, as John argues that scientists should approach the pursuit of extraterrestrials in a more effective manner. We also discuss what happens when we finally make contact on a global level and so much more. Buy the book here: https://a.co/d/4sdOH2R Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey guys, Ryan Sprague here, and I want to tell you all about an exciting event that I'm going to be speaking at in Hexham, England, on August 9th. It's called Cosmic Frequencies. Cosmic Frequency is going to be an unforgettable evening, of mind-expanding science, live cosmic funk music, and of course, UFOs. The event is bringing together leading voices from the frontiers of space exploration, UFO research, and science communication.

Curated by the SKX Funkinots Band, in collaboration with Kielder Observatory, this immersive event features powerful live music interwoven with talks from astrophysicists and SETI Researcher, Dr. Beatrice Valoreal, representative of the Kielder Observatory Dan Pye, Emmy-nominated filmmaker and former executive producer for the BBC, Steve Crabtree, and yours truly,

talking all about the human side of UFO experiences. With stunning celestial visuals and a special panel discussion in Q&A, this evening celebrates the intersection of art science, and curiosity, and a journey through space, sound, and the unknown. There will also be a special VIP meet and greet after the talks. Cosmic Frequencies is being held at the Forum Cinema in Hexham, England. Join us on August 9th.

For more information and to purchase your tickets, visit cosmic frequencies.org. Once again, that's cosmic frequencies.org. and let's get funky. Today on Somewhere in the Skies, we are joined by John Gertz to talk about his new book, Reinventing SETI, New Directions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. John is a leader in the field of SETI,

having served three terms as chairman of the board of the SETI Institute. He currently serves as the only layman on the Breakthrough Listen Advisory Board. He has published a number of peer-reviewed theoretic papers on the subject of SETI. Here is our interview with John Gertz. You are now Somewhere in the Skies with your host, Ryan Spray. All right, guys, welcome to Somewhere in the Skies.

And a welcome to first-time guest on the show today. I'm really excited for this one. We're going to be talking all about his brand new book, Reinventing SETI, New Directions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And the author of that is John Gertz. John, welcome to somewhere in the skies. Ryan, thank you so much for having me. Of course, of course.

Now, I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of your book, and I'll say this. You know, in the UFO field, SETI is often looked at as an antiquated sort of thing. There are so many of these UFO people who will tell you, John, I've seen them. I've seen them here. I know they exist.

The aliens have. already visited this planet, but for the rest of humanity, who's not quite there yet or believe that, that's what SETI represents. But you have come out with this brand new book that is kind of reimagining SETI, because as we all know, they really, in the past, only looked at this in one way, and that was through radio signals. But we're going to dive into all the different ways that you envision a new SETI, a fresh perspective on all of that. So before we get into it kind of, you know, chapter by chapter,

because I love how you broke this thing down. What was the impetus for the book? Tell us a little about yourself, your connection to SETI and all that, if you don't mind. Absolutely happy to. Listen, I came to SETI first as a businessman. You know, I'm an entrepreneur, mirror and and, but I'm also an amateur astronomer. So by happenstance, I happened to live in Berkeley, California, which was at the time, it still is, a world center of SETI. I happened to meet Jill Tarter, who was the lady who inspired the Jill Foster character in contact. And it was one of the original steady scientists, a radio astronomer, and a lovely lady who lives here in Berkeley. And she basically met me to solicit me for money for a telescope that she was planning to build

at that time, which eventually was building called the Allen Telescope array after Paul Allen, who donated the most money to it. But I said, Jill, you're being, you know, penny wise and pound stupid, you know, invite me onto your SETI board, the board of the SETI Institute, where I can, you know, help you, you know, solicit more money and, and so forth and so on and so on. But in the course of a conversation, realized that I actually had a very deep layman's knowledge of a field of study. And one thing led to another, and I, in fact, was, you know, invited on on to the board and eventually became served three terms as the chairman of the board of the really world famous setty institute in mountview california i then left the setty institute

after about a dozen years on the board and founded a new organization with the idea of raising a hundred million dollars for seti uh research worldwide frank drake was my uh co-ed by vice president there were two Nobel laureates and MacArthur Genius fellow, and really a who's who of SETI and luminaries who were on that board. And eventually, Uri Milner stepped up, a billionaire from Silicon Valley, and put up the $100 million. And I serve today as the only layman on the advisory board that advises on how to deploy that money. All right.

So I have a deep experience with Seth. over very many years, about 25 years now. But I'm at core a businessman. And so I take an entirely different look at SET. And I try to get into the brain or the CPU or the ganglier or whatever of ET and ask the question, what makes best business sense from ET's perspective? What would be its best strategy? And to cut to a bottom line here,

and I'm sure we'll talk about it in much greater detail as this interview goes on. You know, I came to the conclusion that, and frankly, I agree with your listeners and your viewers, that sending signals from its own home star system is a dreadful idea. It's a lousy strategy. It's not what ET would be doing. It's far better strategy would be to send robotic probes, what you guys call UFOs or UAP, send them here to make contact with us. And so I'll stop here, if you will, and let you ask some more questions.

But let's dive into the weeds of that if you'd like. Yeah. Oh, I like that idea of kind of, you know, flipping the tables. And the UFOs are these probes, as you mentioned. You know, we send probes to Mars. We say, you know, so like we are technically the UFO to a other alien planet. if there were to be some sort of life on these other planets. So that's an interesting way of looking at it.

We've sent probes already to the stars. And the two voyagers, Pioneer, New Horizon, they're on the way out of our solar system. So we're sending interstellar probes with 1970s technology. So we're certainly capable of doing a lot better than that. I would hope so. I would hope so, John. Well, that's a good way of sort of starting off how you started the book. And that's with this idea of not radio signals or something like that, radio signatures, but techno signatures.

Now, our techno signature per se would be something like a probe or, you know, the satellites, the millions of satellites around our planet, all of our space junk and all this. you do talk about in the book this idea of techno signatures. Now, some of our listeners and viewers may not know what that is. Would you mind maybe sort of painting us a picture of that and why you decided to kind of start the book with this idea of techno signatures? Okay, well, the original paradigm for SETI is that we would, like Jody Foster did in the movie, put on our headsets and listen to radio beams that were ET was sending to

was from its own home planet, okay? That they would broadcast to us or transmit to us their encyclopedia galactic or whatever that is they wanted to send us. That would be a technical signature. That would be if we detected that, that would be a sign of intelligent life, obviously. But that requires intentionality on the part of ET.

It means that they specifically are looking at Earth and sending a signal specifically to Earth. Earth. But there are lots of, but that's a very, very, very tiny subset of possibilities. The broader possibility is that we detect something, anything about ET, without necessarily them intending us to know it. A simple example would be, with a very powerful telescope, we might be able to see the city lights of their city lights. Okay. They could do this. that with us, by the way. With a large interferometer telescope and outer space around their planet, they could look at Earth if they weren't too far away as a star system and actually possibly see our city lights.

We might be able to detect large structures, artificial structures orbiting their star. These are sometimes called Dyson Spheres. They may be living habitats, they could be energy gathering power plants, but whatever they are, they could be much, much larger, you know, very large objects that we could detect by their, by the shadows that they cast as they go across their, their stars orbit relative to our line of sight from Earth. We could detect the gamma-ray contrail, of their interstellar spaceships, or we could detect perhaps a laser that they were using to shine on a solar sail

of one of their spaceships that had spilled over the solar sail. We can detect possibly molecules in the atmosphere of their planets, molecules that are not just biogenic or like biologically indicative, but also technologically indicative, you know, that are basically artificial chemicals like we, like we have unfortunately in our atmosphere. We could detect the spectra of it. Now I'm saying we could detect these things, not with today's technology, but with perhaps near future technologies. Larger telescopes than we have. All of these are techno-sign signatures.

And frankly, they're easier and more likely for us to detect because the chances of us detecting a radio transmission or a laser transmission directed to right at Earth are not large, to be honest. And that's why we failed. We've looked at, oh, easily, a million stars already and detected nothing. Right. A million stars if we consider the foreground and background stars and the background stars and the fields of you, you know, certainly at least a million stars. And it did that did nothing

in terms of a directed signal to Earth. And there's a reason why ET, well, maybe you want to ask for a question, but I can go on for quite some time as to why that's not. You want me to continue, fine. Please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the, there are many problems with this idea, of this notion of ET is going to be signaling us from its own home planet. Let's start with a simple one. It's potentially dangerous. You know, if the ET were to send a robot,

a robotic probe or a little or a man probe, and I don't believe they would be man, but I believe they'd be robotic for reasons we could get into. But whatever it is, that probe need not detect, tell us its home coordinates. It has no reason why it needs to tell us where its home civilization is. It can give us encyclopedia Galactica,

it can threaten us, it can do whatever it wants with us, but it needn't give us its home coordinates. By, virtually by definition, when a civilization transmits from its home planet, it tells us where it is, obviously. Obviously, it's pretty obvious. Well, there may be some very dangerous actors in the galaxy. And ET may know this.

And it may be downright dangerous to signal because any signal they send us, there's going to be foreground star systems, background star systems. They're not going to just illuminate Earth with their signal. So danger is one issue. Another very significant problem is, aligning the their transmitter and our receiver in time. Now, when I say we've looked at a million

stars, our paradigm, our classic paradigm is to point at a star, wait 10 minutes, see if we hear, get a signal, then point to the next star and the next star and the next star, the next star, the next star, the next star, the next star, and the next star, and the next star, and on and on. If they're doing the same thing, they're transmitting to this star and that star, the next star and the other star, and the chances of our two, their transmitter and our receiver lining up at the same 10-minute space are essentially zilch. Right. Okay.

So then the problem gets worse, too, because however many planets or how many star systems are on their target list, there's no reason why they'd be just transmitting to Earth. they have no reason to know when or how or if any civilization would arise that could detect their signal. But whatever time it takes for them, however much time they're going to devote to it, let's say they devote a billion years to transmit it to Earth. For that same billion years, they need a telescope, a receiver, you know, dedicated to Earth. And if they've got a million stars, they're going to have a million that they're interested in and they're targeting. They've got to have a million transmitters and a million receivers.

I mean, it becomes preposterous. They use up all the raw materials in their solar system, just building transmitters and receivers. It makes no economic sense. Then the cost of sending a probe is much cheaper than the cost of transmitting a huge energy. resources over potentially a billion years or whatever however long they need to transmit to us. It's much cheaper to send whatever information they want on, you know, their version of a thumb drive or a hard drive or whatever in the cargo bay of a probe. So a probe, sending probes completely circumvents the problem of,

of Drake's, what Frank Drake in the Drake equation called the problem of L, L for the lifetime of a civilization. You know, because transmitters and receivers have to line up also in terms of civilization times. So if epics, if a civilization only exists, let's say, for 100,000 years for the sake of argument, and then goes extinct. and our civilization is only 10,000 years old. But there are chances of our, in the 13.8 billion years of the universe, of the two civilizations lining up in time are negligible.

But once a probe is sent, it's gone. It's one and done. It's gone. And the progenitor civilization need no longer exist. It can go extinct, I mean, whether it wants to or not. I mean, we've sent Voyager, we've sent Pioneer, we've now sent new horizons, headed towards interstellar space. They're going to go for millions of billions of years.

They're gone out of our solar system. What happens to Earth in their absence is irrelevant. If we go extinct, they're still gone on their merry way. They don't need the progenitor civilization anymore. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

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It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Right. That's such a good point. You know, when we think about sending these things out and where they might end up and who or what we might make contact with, by that point, it may already be too late. You know, humanity might already be gone by the time it reaches something. So, I mean, there's that whole conundrum too. There's the problem of the lack time of communication.

Exactly. Let's say, for the sake of argument, we get a. a message from a from a civilization that's in the Kepler field which would be 1500 light years away let's use that as an example now to make the example easier let me roll back the clock and imagine that that it's you know three thousand years ago that we received this information okay we were I understand we don't have we didn't have telescopes back then but let humor me for a moment.

Okay. So we get the information 3,000 years ago, and we're happy to send a response back. And what do we respond? We show them our most advanced mathematics, which would be arithmetic, addition and subtraction and subtraction without any zeros, because that hadn't been invented yet. We send them our top, you know, best-selling literature, Gilgum, and we teach them how to properly pray to the sun god raw. Okay.

And we told them how, you know, we take great pride in the height of our highest pyramid at that point. And what do we do? So we send the message out. It takes 1,500 years to get there. It takes 1,500 more years to come back to us. Okay. And so today we receive the response, these low these 3,000 years later. And so what is what is ET saying to us?

They're saying, well, you know, here's a better way to, here's a way to do long division. They're trying to help us. So they're showing us long division. They give us their critique of Gilgamesh. they they tell us how to build a pyramid that's a little bit higher than what we've already built and how to break this to us gently they you know they tell us that us the sun is not actually a god it's a star and you know they turn our they know i heard our feelings but you know and so this time lag can cause a huge you know disconnect in many ways right exactly now um

You mentioned the word messaging a couple times in there, John. I'd love to touch on this. It's a very controversial thing, and I know you've spoken about this in the past, your sort of criticism of this, and that's Medi. Now, what exactly is Medi, again, for our listeners who might not be familiar with a lot of this sort of setty lingo? What is Medi, and why don't you think that's a good idea for us to be doing something like that with this? reinvention of SETI, as it were. METI stands for,

there's SETI which stands for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And METI, that stands for messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence. It's a point of view that we haven't heard anything from E.T., so why don't we take the bull by the horns and we'll send a message to E.T. will initiate the contact. I and most other seti scientists or theorists think that this is an absolutely dreadful idea. Okay? And I entitled my chapter.

I don't have the book in front of me, but it's something to the effect. I think many, this is, I think, the title of the chapter, Medi, beyond the foolish to this dangerous, arrogant, delusional, ethical, unscientific, illegal, quasi-religious and cultic, and downright stupid. Okay. So, and not to mince words. Now, my book I should say, you know, even though, let me just take it as a quick aside, my book, although being published by Oxford University Press, which is big academic

presses, you know, is actually not for academics. It's academically rigorous, but it's written with a lot of, I think, a sense of humor. and it's absolutely approachable by any layman. And my idealized audience is some 30-something congressional staffer because I'm ultimately trying to influence public policy because I think we're utterly unprepared for contact. And that's what I want to do. Okay, anyway, that's an aside.

Going back to many. Well, so I don't hardly know. where to begin with what a bad idea it is. Okay, let me start by going through their arguments. They say, well, after so many years of failure and setting, maybe it's, maybe it's time to try a new approach. Well, there haven't been that many years of failure with setting. We're still, you know, it's a very, I say we've looked at a million stars for 10 minutes each. That's the tiny drop in the bucket. There are 400 billion stars, and we need to look at them for more than 10 minutes each. It's disingenuous to say that we've tried for a long time.

The SETI today is so powerful that we do more SETI in one 24-hour period today than we ever used to do in a year because of more money that we have now. Thanks to Uri Milner's beneficence, the SETI Institute also received a big request recently. There's more funding. more SETI programs. There are more telescopes using more telescope time with better algorithms. Anyway, so we're, this is a golden age of SETI

that we're in right now. Then their arguments is, well, let's, somebody has to be the first, why shouldn't be us? Well, the reason it shouldn't be us is, is for one thing, we're the newest civilization in the galaxy. That's it. Really we are.

We're the newbies on the block. Listen, the universe is 13.8 billion years old. The first rocky planets came into existence about a billion years later. Let's say that we're average, we took about four and a half billion years to become technologically a technological species on our planet. Let's say it took them about the same. So that brings you down to about eight or not eight or nine billion years ago. That would be the earliest ET. That would be twice the age of the earth since the earliest ET arose. Not only that, but 95% of all stars are older than our

sun. There's no question that in the billions of years available, the ET we might encounter will be eons ahead of us, the chances of us encountering an ET that also is in the first hundred years or so of technological competence are zero, or essentially zero. You know, we are absolutely the youngest civilization in the entire galaxy. It's not incumbent upon the newbies to be the ones to do all the shouting in the forest. And speaking about the shouting in the forest, you know, or in the jungle. You know, what? Maybe that's all the silence that we're encountering out there

is because E.T knows something that we don't, and there really aren't some dangers out there. And you shouldn't be shouting in the jungle. But the people, the Mediists, I call it mediists, because they're really kind of a religious cult. We'll argue, well, we're already sending messages. I Love Lucy, you know, left our planet in 1950. And there's no getting it back or anything like that.

And the answer to that is, yes, it is true that our omnidirectional, in every direction of transmissions of television and so forth, and that leakage is out there and there's no bringing it back. It's a whisper relative to what they propose doing. It's a really quiet, quiet whisper, because what they propose doing is using the most powerful transmitters in the world to send directed messages, not just everywhere, but just individual stars. They would be at least 10,000 times more intense and more likely to be picked up. So they will argue, but ET is so benign and Benethyst and the methods and the, you know, The earlier we get into a relationship with ET, the earlier will benefit from all the wonderful

glories and the science and technology and culture and everything they're going to download to us and all they care about is love and peace and so forth. And whenever anybody says that ET must be benign, ask them to show you the database on which Let me give you all the data right now. Silence, silence, silence. Yeah, that's it. I just downloaded all the data. There is none.

Yeah. Whether ET more resembles, you know, Steven Spielberg's vision of ET, or more resembles Ridley Scott's vision of the alien or aliens, you know, is strictly a matter of your personal taste. I mean, it's, we have no idea. It could be argued either way. I mean, so then there becomes the, the question of how, how dare they?

Okay, so, I mean, basically, don't we all have a say in this? Why a few lonely third level, you know, astronomers. I would just call them third levels, but the, but the eminence of the people that are I would argue that the people that argue against Medi are far more eminent than the people that argue for Medi. And on top of that, they're the preponderance of them. But who gets to decide what are we going to say to ET? Who gets to? And whether we should. Once we press the send button, you know, there's a basic responsibility. I mean, I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but it's dangerous. Maybe ET will not, you know, greet us with all the wisdom in the world.

Maybe they'll greet us with a, oh, they know we're here. Let's zap them before they zap us. Right. Okay. And, you know, let's shmush them first. Okay. And so, you know, that's a roll of the dice that we all deserve to. have a say in, presumably through the United Nations. And so maybe, you know, the security

council or the general assembly with three quarters of the member states or whatever, however we decide to decide this, it shouldn't be just a few lonely astronomers, okay, making the decision for all of mankind. But they argued, but what harm could ET do to us? After all, the astronomical distances are, well astronomical okay and uh uh you know sure i mean the hittites would have argued the same thing i mean they would have been incredulous at the thought of anybody harming them from the from the you know from a greater distance than their arrows could fly okay they they wouldn't be incapable of imagining ballistic missiles helicopters tanks and on and on you know and and let's be clear on this. So to say that ET cannot harm us from a distance is ridiculous. They don't,

again, show me the database. There is none. There is none. Well, look at the difference between us today and let's say a small group from the 101st airborne standing up against all of Napoleon's great armies of just barely more than 250 years ago, or not even, not even less than that. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, Napoleon's finest army would be wiped out in minutes, okay? Wouldn't have a chance against a much, much smaller force of modern troops. Okay.

There's no balance between E.T. and us. If they want to do us harm, we're in trouble. We're in a world of trouble. Yes, we are. Well, that's actually a good jumping off point, John, for another chapter in the book, where you sort of discuss if the military. was to ever get involved. My new book, Atlas of Unidentified Flying Objects, is now available to pre-order

whatever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Waterstones. Explore the UFO phenomenon through 34 cases from throughout the world, with accompanying pictures and maps in a beautiful hardback edition or download for your Kindle. Links available in the podcast description below. Oh, that's actually a good jumping off point, John, for another chapter in the book where you you sort of discuss if the military was to ever get involved with steady you know like how could this be militarized how could this be weaponized what is the true danger and risk in the military getting involved i mean um so yeah what what is sort of that

uh debate or argument you pose well yeah here's here's the argument um there um we in the SETI community are by and large privately funded. There's very little government money going into it in the Western world. Now, I should say the Chinese are now in the field of SETI, and they're using the largest single-disch radio telescope in the world to do SETI, and that's the vast telescope. But I have felt for a long time that NASA, I should say that NASA basically does not fund SETI.

The National Science Foundation does not basically fund SETI. But I've argued for some time that we should stop looking to them for funding. Their real funding should come from the Defense Department. Because SETI is situational awareness in the military sense of the work. We really should know what the hell is out there. It's period. I mean, we're just, you know, even though they're, as I've said, you know, ETI's eons in advance of us, nonetheless, you know, it's bad for Napoleon to pick a fight with 101st airborne, but it'd be worse for Napoleon to say, okay, troops, let's everybody put on our blindfolds and start the fight, you know, we should know what's out there. But there's another problem here.

And this is one that needs to be solved by treaty. And really basically with a military or security point of view. Let us assume, let's take for the moment that I'm correct and your viewers are correct and believing that ET is not out there. They're here. They're here in our own solar system. They're not just in their home planet. What do we do if, well, let's take a simple situation that ET is benign.

E.T. is that these probes have been in our solar system, monitoring our television stations for and have learned their English from Sesame Street and their math, our Earth's math from Khan Academy and all the rest they pick up from watching this YouTube podcast and so on. And finally, they deigned to make contact with us now that they understand us. You know, they've decoded us. And finally, the day has come with it where ET, and I believe the robotics of their algorithms have come to the conclusion that they know enough to make contact and they do so in the Queen's very own English or or in Urdu or Hindi or Swahili or China or Mandarin.

I don't care. And the and the and the and the messages again extremely benign. We've been watching your eye love Lucy. It gives us, give us a lot of laughs and we want to give you the wisdom in return the wisdom of the of the universe. Encyclopedia Galactica and oh yeah and it's on a thumb drive in our cargo bay come and pick it up Yeah now we're in a world of trouble The Chinese and the Americans maybe private actors like X you know like

SpaceX you know all you know rush to retrieve the probe Whoever gets it first gets a cornucopia of who knows what the technological knowledge or whatever. I mean, it's, we can't even imagine how, what would be on that hard drive. What happens if the Chinese get there first? What happens if we get there first? Will the Chinese be incentivized to shoot down our spacecraft when it returns with the, with, with that thumb drive or hard drive or something? less the Americans receive that technological advantage that they lack, will lack. You know, this is, you know, these are, and this is a good case scenario that ET is very benign and wants to help us.

Even then, the military implications are profound. This has got to be thought out now in advance of contact, and a treaty needs, or treaties need to. to be entered into that govern our behavior after detection. Now, there's a couple more approaches, John, that you stress in the book. I don't want to give them all the way because we definitely want people to read about each of these, but there were two more that really stood out to me. Before we get to the big question of actually what happens when we make contact, we're getting there.

We're inching closer. But the other big one I wanted to ask you about is this thing everyone's talking about now. Everyone's using in some iteration, some love it, some hate it, and that's AI. Now, what role do you think artificial intelligence will play in the reinvention of SETI? Well, here's the first role that I think is really important. We live in an absolute golden age of astronomy and of astronomical databases. There are enormous databases already existing and others that are coming online imminently. The Ferro-Rubin telescope is creating a massive database of the entire sky viewed every three days.

No human being could possibly look at it all. Artificial intelligence and machine learning is the way to go and trying to determine, look at all of these databases, looking for anything, anything anomalous. We don't even know what questions to ask, just anything out of ordinary. We've got good photos of the moon. you know i think at half meter half meter uh resolution or something like that but nobody's no human being can look at all those photos inch by inch to see if a rock isn't really rock like you know you know that um yeah and to sit through all those photos looking for anything that doesn't look like it's like

anything else that looks different. You know, that's where machine learning and artificial intelligence immediately can be applied and should be applied. And not just on the moon. I mean, you know, the asteroids, for goodness sakes, why do we believe that asteroids are asteroids? Well, they reflect light. You know, they, so our best telescopes look at these things and they see it tiny little dot of light reflected from the sun that tells us that there's that there's an asteroid there but how do we know it's an asteroid well we don't we just assume that it's an asteroid because what else is going to be in the asteroid belt right well you know any of them could be uh uh you know probes uh artificial ET probes or especially the small ones awesome so that's the role

sort of AI will play in all this John but uh my last one for you in terms of the approaches in the book. Opening the doors to the public, you know, citizen science almost. Now, what role can the public play in this newer version of SETI as you see it? Like what role, like sort of like a, almost like a crowdfunding or crowdsourcing, I should say, of the public's knowledge of this stuff? Well, look, in my opinion, when ET wants to finally make contact with us from its local probes in our solar system, it knows where to find us and reach us and knows how to make contact. You know, in my opinion, the signal will be brightened and unmistakable because it's nearby. So if it's a laser signal will be the brightest star, star in quotation, in the sky,

and it will be monochromatic, you know, so it has to be a laser, not an actual star, which is broad band, and it's light. So there's no question that will detect it. So I don't need crowds for that. I'll tell you where a crowd could come in awfully useful, right? now. If the UAP community, the UFO community wants to seriously convince me that UFOs are real, I'm just John Q public, so to speak, you know, take better pictures and take more of them, okay? I mean, one of the things that bothers me about the, is that, you know, there was a, a, a, a, meteorite or a piece of space jump that flew through the southeast, I don't know, a week or two ago.

And there were 30 different pictures of from, from, you know, dash cams, you know, on the, on the internet, on the nightly news or whatever, it was, it was easy to see. Everybody provided pictures. You know, if it was only one person, you know, I could say, maybe, maybe it was photoshopped or whatever. But if it's, you know, if 40 or 50 people on the window seats of an airplane are all taking a picture of this, and they're all strangers to one another, and they're all taking pictures of the same anomalous thing out the window with their iPhones, albeit it could be poor quality, you know, because the iPhones may not take a very good quality picture of something that's zooming by. But if there are 50 of people, strangers to one another doing that, that would impress

me mightily. Okay. So that's where the, you know, the crowd could probably help a lot here. You know, that's where nobody takes pictures taken by a single person terribly seriously so far. And they're too subject to fraud or photoshopping or, you know, miscommunication or misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Well, okay, so we have the approaches to how we could possibly make contact, John. But the big question, I think, and everyone's mind is, even when we do make that contact, do you think, personally, that will be ready for that? Or what can we do to prepare for that?

Like, you did mention several things in terms of a protocol, whether it's militarily or scientifically or whatnot. But if and when we do make contact, what comes next after that? Actually, in my considered opinion, it's what comes before that. Okay? Yeah. Let me explain. First of all, SETI up to the point of contact is pure science.

But from the very moment of contact, it flips into becoming public policy. But at this point, it would be public policy based upon the enormous befuddlement of the moment. Instead, we need to sit down now and, in my judgment, convene a large group of experts in a standing committee of expertise that perish to thought are just astronomers. You know, they should just be, yeah, they can have a seat at the table, but there should be game theorists, economists, military experts, linguists, cryptologists, behavioral psychologists, evolutionary biologists, and on and on. There are many disciplines that should be brought to bear. And we need to do that now so that people can start planning for every manner of contingency on the day after contact. Presumably that should be organized under the United Nations and reports to the United Nations. There is a standing committee at the United Nations that studies space,

the committee on the peaceful use of outer space, it's called it. But it meets irregularly. They've never taken up SETI in earnest. They don't necessarily have the right expertise. So I'm not sure that's the right home for it. But these, and this committee needs to produce work product. And work product can be first a draft treaty, a treaty that all nations can be a party to. I've actually drafted such a treaty in my book.

I've taken the, you know, the opportunity to say, you know, it doesn't take a committee necessarily to draft the committee, a treaty. So I have drafted one. I based it upon the current outer space treaty. And I've adapted and adopted some of it. But a treaty should be formulated. That's one word product of this group. They can use my first draft if they'd like to as a starting point.

You'll see it published in my book or you'll find it on my website. Johnverts.com. And the second thing is contingency planning. You know, what, you know, what the decision that needs to be made in advance, let me give you a simple problem that has to be solved now. We receive a message from ET. The message is, and let's say I'm wrong that it doesn't come from a local probe, but it comes from a star, a thousand light years away. Okay? The message says, peace be upon you. You know, we'd love to get to know you. Okay. Should we respond? Simple question. It seems benign. But maybe it's echo location. like a bat would use to triangulate on or find its prey.

You know, we need to make a decision. Are we going to respond to that message? Yes or no? And then what are we going to respond to? And we need to know that now before we get the message. And the reason for that, why now is that, remember, our paradigm, or is our standard study protocol is we look at each starts one by one by one by one and we go around. You know, each one for 10 minutes.

If ET is doing the same thing, you know, they send our message. How long are they going to wait for our response as adjusted by the speed of light and all that? That entails the delay time that that entails. Are they going to, if they're a thousand miles, a thousand light years away, are they going to wait for 2,000 years plus a day, plus a minute, plus a century? Or how long are they going to wait for our response? We have no idea. So our best solution is the second we get that response, hit the send button. But we can't have done that unless we've just debated whether we should hit send and voted that we will hit send.

And we've constructed a message of return, like we know what we're going to say in return. And all that takes years to figure out. So that's why we've got to do it now. We can't wait any longer. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd. But too often, life gets busy or the price hold you back. Price Line is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can do.

Go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. Right. I like that. It's like, you know, being proactive instead of reactionary to something that might just happen.

And, you know, too, maybe they do send that message. And we don't answer or we don't answer. in time and they just think we gave him the cold shoulder and they're like, okay, fine, we're passing them by. Who knows? Who knows? They'll move on. I like that. I like that.

So, I guess, John, to sort of kind of wrap up our talk on the book and the reinvention of SETI, what do you think is the most important thing about possibly making alien contact? Like, what would that

mean for humanity over? I mean, like you mentioned, you know, having scholars and military and scientists and, let's say even theologians, you know, we haven't even talked about religion in this conversation. Like, what do you think would be the most important thing of making alien contact? The short, the, my honest answers, I have no idea. Okay. Now, you know, the obvious, you know, the obvious. thing is, of course, I would want to know about their maths, whether they see the universe mathematically the way we do. I would like to, of course, know about their religious beliefs, if any. I would love to know about their science, what is their theory of everything if there, if there is one. But truthfully, culturally, maybe the most interesting, their science may be so

advanced that we can't even contemplate. It's a little bit like trying to teach, you know, general relativity to Homo erectus or something, you know. We can't teach them general relativity and we don't have a whole lot of use for their stone scrapers. And, you know, we and we and ET may be talking right past each other in terms of science. But, you know, but they, when I say that they're vastly more advanced than I am, than we are, That's true scientifically, mathematically, and so forth, but it's not necessarily true culturally, you know, because we might play better piano or play better basketball, you know. So, and frankly, because we're so new, we have nothing to offer them except our culture.

we do have something else to offer them. I should talk about that in a second. But, you know, if we told them, oh, you know, E.T. We want to tell you that E equals MC squared, they're going to say, oh, yeah, guys, I think we know that already. Little pat on the head. Good job. So, you know, it's like the millionth time they've heard that one before. No, we're not going to teach them any.

science, whatever, but they might be interested in our music and our culture, but we can't give it all to them. We might give them a piece by Mozart, another song by the Beatles, a picture by Monet, some Gamelon music, whatever. And then let them horse trade for the rest of it. You know, as a business man, I'm totally offended by the mediists who say, when I've said to the Medellists, say, well, or somebody else has said to them, you know, well, who gives you the right to decide with the message? He said, well, let's be Democratic. Well, I upload the entire internet. And I say, as a businessman, go, oh, that's a terrible idea. You know, if we give them everything all at once, what impetus do they have to give us

anything in return? Right, right. You've got a horse scrape with them. You barter. But besides culture, because I really don't think we have much to offer them mathematically or scientifically, there is something huge. that we have to offer them. And that is

something we should hold as precious, and something we should trade judiciously for, because it's very important to them. And it's a reason why, frankly, I don't think that they will destroy us,

even though, you know, after they've watched our nightly news on top of I Love Lucy, they know us to be a pretty wretched place, you know? But But they need us in a core and fundamental way. I argue in my book that it's not good enough for them to send probes. They have to have a communication system because a probe is a message in a bottle. It goes one way unless there's some way of getting information about Earth back to their progenitor civilization.

For that, they're going to need a whole communications network of relay stations, probably around every star and even in between stars to send back. So there'll be communication nodes. It's a vast galactic internet. It's much larger than any one civilization could possibly maintain. They need us to manufacture, to launch these probes and communication nodes and help maintain the galactic internet, at least in our sector of the galaxy. So they will need us for that.

They can also use us to broadcast or transmit our own messages because we can build a bigger telescope here, or transmitter here, the Mayecath and they have in outer space. You know, ET is very advanced. No question about it, but the laws of physics or names, are the same for them as they are for us. And a viable transmitter for ET to get information back to its progenitor civilization, it's got to be humongous, okay,

and in the absence of a communication system or relay stations. Anyway, so that's what they need us for. Cool. Cool. Yeah, I never would have even thought about that. Wow. Okay, John, well, to kind of, you know, we'll let people know where to get the book and everything, but I can't let you go without asking, if anyone's watching this on YouTube right now, they see these two beautiful posters behind you. You are the man, everything Zorro. So I got to ask you. What is your connection with Zorro?

And what can you tell us about that aspect of your life? Well, okay. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, somebody owns Mickey Mouse and somebody owns Batman. I happen owns Zorro. So I make Zorro movies and Zorro TV shows and Zorro stage productions and books and toys and games and clothes and theme parks and commercial endorsements and on and on. So that's my day job.

Okay. So, yeah, my, and, you know, my office has got lots of Zorro posters on it here. I'll just show you around. Oh, cool. See the costumes there? That's really. That's just my office. If you go into Jason offices,

you'll see a whole lot more of this kind of stuff. Cool. That's it. That's what I do when I'm not doing SETI. I love that. There's the day job, and then there's the John by night, the SETI guy,

kind of like me as well, John. Kind of like Zipo. different night exactly it's it's apropos it is it is yeah um well this has been really fascinating I think you know

for a lot of the UFO people out there seeing a fresh perspective on SETI and how it can contribute to the possibility of us finally discovering alien life you know like I mentioned in the beginning a lot of people do believe it's already been here but for the rest of

humanity who's not quite there yet. I think SETI is a great way to get there. So the book is a very good, I think, jumping off point for that. So I'd love to know where can where can we find the book and book is being published on August 11th by Oxford University Press. It's currently available for pre-order on Amazon or if you go to my website, Johngerts.com, where you'll find lots of more information and lots of videos and different aspects of SETI and stuff. There are also links to pre-order the book there. So it can be pre-ordered before August 11th. After that, I guess, you know, it's available.

Okay, so. Perfect. Perfect. And we'll put links in the show notes and everything as well. Strongly suggest people go check all of that out. But like I said, John, this was a very refreshing conversation when we don't have often on the show. So I got to thank you for that. And I have to thank you for coming on Somewhere in the Skies.

My pleasure. All of us. Bye-bye. Somewhere in the Skies is part of the Somewhere Podcast universe. Please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. To learn more about all of our shows, visit the SPU.com. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week.

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