Thinking Bigger About Life & the Universe with Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at SETI Institute

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute and co-host of the Big Picture Science podcast, about what we know about life beyond our solar system. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:19) You've been at SETI for thirty-five years?

(Seth Shostak at 00:00:23) It's not quite that, but close. Close. Three decades. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:28) When I lose something, I usually stop looking for it after fifteen minutes. You've been searching for thirty years. What have you learned over these thirty years?

(Seth Shostak at 00:00:38) Well, it's not just me, actually. The idea that you might be able to find the aliens by eavesdropping on, say, radio or television radar broadcast, that's an old idea that goes back about sixty some years. Right? Frank Drake did the first experiment to try and do that. So that idea is an old one, but it's worth continuing to try it because the equipment keeps getting better.

(Seth Shostak at 00:01:05) So every year, you're doing an experiment that's a lot better than the kind of experiment you could have done a couple of years prior. So that's what keeps everybody going on this particular experiment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:16) Yeah. You know, I was talking to Ryan Graves a few months ago, and he said that he was working with a fund to build, invest in different technologies that would help detect these types of UAPs. Have you interacted with Ryan at all?

(Seth Shostak at 00:01:33) No, I haven't. And by the way, we don't study UAPs. Those are aliens that have supposedly come to Earth, but I don't think there's any science in that. It makes for good late-night radio, but I don't know that it has any science basis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:47) Would you agree that the general public kind of conflates that idea with SETI?

(Seth Shostak at 00:01:51) They do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:52) Because that's—

(Seth Shostak at 00:01:53) They do. Yeah. And polls show that something like 70% of the public think that not only do the aliens exist, but they are visiting Earth. But you have a hard time, I think, finding any scientists who think they're visiting Earth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) You don't think—what about the stuff that we see in the news about off-world vehicles and things like that?

(Seth Shostak at 00:02:14) Well, do you ever find them in the local science museum? If you go to the Smithsonian, do you see any parts from UFOs or anything like that? The alien bodies? You don't. You don't.

(Seth Shostak at 00:02:25) And the reason is there isn't any.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:29) What's the origin of the reports? Why do they do this?

(Seth Shostak at 00:02:32) Well, people like the idea that we might be important enough to the aliens that they would come, you know, who knows how far, light years, just to, I don't know, land on Earth, mostly in the United States and mostly in the Southwest. They don't visit Belgium too often, for example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:50) We have better weather.

(Seth Shostak at 00:02:52) We have better weather. Yeah. As if they care about that. But, you know, they come here, usually their intentions are, I don't know, just to molest the populace. But, you know, again, you can ask astronomers, is there any evidence for this kind of thing?

(Seth Shostak at 00:03:08) And they'll tell you no. You can go on Google Earth, and I can find my automobile. I can find my car on Google Earth. I mean, without any difficulty. It has quite a bit of resolution, even though publicly available satellite photos. But if, you know, aliens were landing, I think you would see something.

(Seth Shostak at 00:03:29) Right? It's rather remarkable with the something like 8,000 satellites, something similar to that, that are making photos of the Earth all the time, that we don't see any evidence of aliens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:40) Right. And I've got some questions about that too. But first, have you seen the—I mean, it's been on Joe Rogan, it's been all over—the videos of the FLIRs and the navigation systems tracking these objects. And when you see that, what do you think?

(Seth Shostak at 00:03:58) Well, I mean, they're objects. That's for sure. But what makes them extraterrestrial? They're—I don't know. They're mostly aircraft.

(Seth Shostak at 00:04:06) You can find explanations for everything that are seen in those videos that are very prosaic in the sense that they are aircraft or balloons in some cases. You know, there's a whole laundry list of explanations, but I don't know of anything about them that would convince you that they're due to extraterrestrial presence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:27) Yeah. I'd agree with that. I'm curious to know—well, I'd say that the reason why people chalk it up to extraterrestrial intelligence is because it defies our known laws of physics. Correct?

(Seth Shostak at 00:04:42) Well, I don't know that it does that. I mean—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:45) Or at least our ceiling of technology. Like, if Ryan Graves, you know, that pilot, he's got objects that are suspended in military airspace with 200-mile-an-hour crosswinds with no heat signature, standing still. And he's just trying not to run into them. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:04) He's not saying they're aliens, by the way. He approaches it—I don't know how much you've looked into his work—but he approaches it from a safety standpoint. He's like, hey, we're flying these multimillion-dollar planes at the speed of sound. And in restricted airspace, there are these objects that are there, and we don't want to run into them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:21) Let's approach it from a safety standpoint, not from an alien standpoint.

(Seth Shostak at 00:05:25) Yeah, Joel. I think that's legitimate. I mean, that's what I think is the government's interest in so-called UAPs. That's what they're called now. It's not because they think they're aliens.

(Seth Shostak at 00:05:36) If they were, you'd have tens of thousands of scientists working on that. Right. You know? Yeah. It wouldn't be something that, oh, it's all secret.

(Seth Shostak at 00:05:44) That kind of thing. It's not anything you could keep secret. But beyond that, you wouldn't want it secret. You'd want every scientist who had any capability to look into this to spend some time doing so. The government's interest is indeed, as you say, you know, you're flying not just military planes around, but you're flying—you got United Airlines up there too.

(Seth Shostak at 00:06:04) You really need to know what's in your airspace, and I don't know what that might mean in terms of the UAPs except that, you know, you do want to know what they are. And as I say, there are explanations that don't involve aliens at all. So if you have to choose, oh, aliens or aircraft? Aliens, aircraft. You know, what are you going to choose?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:26) I don't know why the alien—even if it was alien aircraft, I would send my drone. I send my drone places now that I want to see, that I don't want to go. It's like, yeah.

(Seth Shostak at 00:06:36) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You could make those kinds of argument. But all of those arguments, of course, say something about what you think are priorities for the aliens, and, obviously, we have no idea about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:47) Oh, I have no idea. Yeah. No. And by the way, I don't—I'm just a curious person. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:52) I don't have a strong leaning of belief in any specific way. I just like to ask questions and play with ideas. So just so you know where my root is for this entire conversation.

(Seth Shostak at 00:07:02) Got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:04) Now, I am curious to know, when these news cycles happen and things get like, "off-world vehicle," does that affect your funding at all? Because, I mean, it's affecting public thoughts. Does that impact you guys?

(Seth Shostak at 00:07:19) Well, it's hard to say. I don't think so. Most of our funding comes from a few people who have wealth, who think it's an interesting idea to try and find evidence for intelligent beings elsewhere by, as I say, eavesdropping, if you will, on signals. And whether they're light signals, you know, lasers or that sort of thing, or whether they're radio or whatever, in any part of the spectrum, but they just find that interesting to do. Now are they affected by all the attention paid to UAPs?

(Seth Shostak at 00:07:54) I don't think so. Most of them are fairly savvy scientifically, but I don't know. Maybe they are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:00) Oh, so most of your donations—you're not government funded heavily? No. Oh, really?

(Seth Shostak at 00:08:06) No. In fact, there was a NASA SETI program when I joined the institute, but that is thirty years ago or more. And that was killed by Congress a long time ago, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:18) Have you ever had any false positives where you're like, oh, we found them, and then—

(Seth Shostak at 00:08:23) Well, if you build a receiver that's very sensitive, you connect it to a big antenna, and your receiver is capable of monitoring tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions of frequency channels simultaneously, of course, you pick up signals. You pick up signals every minute, but that doesn't mean too much. I mean, you have to check out where those signals are coming from. And to the extent that we can do that quickly, you know, you always find that they're terrestrial. They're—yes, it's intelligence, but it's human intelligence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) What would it look like if it were alien intelligence?

(Seth Shostak at 00:08:57) Well, I mean, it probably wouldn't look very different to a spectrometer. I mean, it would just be a radio signal, for example. Radio doesn't mean that it's just audio. It just means that it's in the radio part of the spectrum. But what you would find, the way to check it out is to say, well, okay.

(Seth Shostak at 00:09:13) We got this signal coming in at this frequency. Where is it on the sky? Right? And that you can tell if you have the time on an antenna or you have more than one antenna. You can tell where it's coming from on the sky.

(Seth Shostak at 00:09:27) And, you know, you can look at that part of the sky and say, is there anything there? Is there a nearby star system? That's one thing you can do. But the other thing is, of course, the sky rotates around the Earth every twenty-four hours. It's not the sky doing the rotating, of course.

(Seth Shostak at 00:09:41) It's the Earth. But any signal should also change its position. You know? In twenty-four hours, it ought to go all the way around the sky. So these are very simple tests to tell you that, oh, this is not coming from some sort of, I don't know, an airport or Air Force base or something that's a hundred miles down the road. It's coming from something in space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:02) Let's say that I go out—and I live in Florida—and I go out to a lake or a body of water and I cast a net. And then I say, alright. Here's my net, and I cast it, and I pull it back, and there's nothing in it. And I say, alright, because there's nothing in it now, there's no sharks in here. There's no alligators in here. Right? So what I did was I sampled such a small—I had an observability of such a small section of the total surface area of the body of water on the planet. Right? And then I made some assumption from that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:31) I'm curious with that in mind, how much of the observable universe in relation to Earth can we see? And then how much can we continuously monitor? And how do you even talk about the numbers? Because I'm kind of meandering with the question because I don't know exactly how to ask it. Do you know what I'm trying to get at?

(Seth Shostak at 00:10:52) Yeah. I mean, it's a question of sample space. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:54) Okay.

(Seth Shostak at 00:10:55) You know, how much of the sky are you sampling to look for these signals? And, obviously, it's not the entire sky because there's no money to do that. Right? So it's a small part of the sky, but you do tend to try and optimize the chances of finding anything by pointing your antennas in the directions, again, of nearby stars, star systems that are within 100 or 200 light years. Those are our neighbors in space.

(Seth Shostak at 00:11:19) And, so if there's a signal coming in, you might expect that it's coming from something nearby. Otherwise, it might be too weak for you to find. So those are the kinds of things you can do, but, I mean, there's no way to rule out that the signal is coming from some place you haven't thought of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:34) Can you give me an example on sample size? Like, are we able to observe continuously 1% of the observable sample?

(Seth Shostak at 00:11:45) I really don't know. But, I mean, it's just, again, a matter of money. Where's the money coming from to do this kind of sampling? I mean, who's paying for that? Right?

(Seth Shostak at 00:11:55) Because it takes people. It takes equipment. Right? And there's also an opportunity cost because, you know, you could be using that equipment to do astronomy research. You could be, like I used to do, studying galaxies.

(Seth Shostak at 00:12:07) Yeah. Right? And the National Science Foundation may give you a little bit of money to do that. But, you know, who's going to give you money to look for aliens?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:16) Yeah. Well, I don't know. You tell me. You're the one that gets the money. Well—

(Seth Shostak at 00:12:20) Nobody has the money to tell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) So wait. Maybe I'm not asking the question correctly because, you know, this isn't my field of expertise, but you don't track how much observable space there is versus how much you're able to observe. Because I would imagine that if we were trying to find something, we'd be like, alright. Here's how much space there is to look. Our technology and our finances can currently continuously follow 1%, and we want to get that to 10% in the next year or 50%, or the technology improving is going to allow us to get it higher and higher and higher.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:55) Because the idea, I would think, with my very little experience here, would be to continuously observe all the time.

(Seth Shostak at 00:13:04) Yeah. But what? What are you going to observe all the time? Yeah. Well, that would be in the best of all possible worlds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:11) That's where I live, man.

(Seth Shostak at 00:13:12) You can walk away. Yeah. Yeah. If this were the best of all possible worlds, you know, I'd be driving a better car, I suppose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:19) But this—

(Seth Shostak at 00:13:21) You know, you can't do that. I mean, you're right. What you really want to do is monitor the entire sky at every possible frequency all the time. Mm-hmm. But, you know, that's like saying, okay.

(Seth Shostak at 00:13:32) We're going to look for Bigfoot, and we're going to get a hundred thousand people to tramp through the Pacific Northwest looking for him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:40) Yes.

(Seth Shostak at 00:13:41) But, you know, you can't do that. I mean, it's just a practical matter. Right? Well—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:47) Yeah. But there's—You don't have— There's no limits in physics that prevent us from doing that.

(Seth Shostak at 00:13:51) No. No. No. No. No.

(Seth Shostak at 00:13:52) No. No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:52) It's just—

(Seth Shostak at 00:13:54) Yeah. It's a matter of money. I mean, we could have high-speed rail transport all across the country if you had the money to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:03) Yeah. Interesting. Do you think—are there aliens? Do you think there—have you seen—Well—

(Seth Shostak at 00:14:07) We don't know. We don't know. But I—I would know. It would truly surprise me if there weren't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:12) Right? So much space. It's actually really hard for me to comprehend. My day-to-day brain is not geared towards—when I watch those science videos of Neil deGrasse Tyson or that English dude, when they start explaining the scale into which the universe is, it hurts my head.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:30) It's like, alright. I get it. But I also—my brain's not tuned to think at those sizes.

(Seth Shostak at 00:14:35) Yeah. No. It's true. That's true. Astronomy deals in big numbers, and big numbers are not our daily experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:44) What would happen if you found something today?

(Seth Shostak at 00:14:47) Well, we kind of know that actually because we've had false alarms in the past when the equipment was a little less sophisticated. And what happens is that the media call you up because there's no secrecy here. So everybody knows about it. As soon as you find something that looks interesting, you know, you start emailing your buddies or maybe your mom or somebody. And the newspapers will call you up, and they do.

(Seth Shostak at 00:15:16) You know, what is it that you're looking at, and can you tell us anything about it? So you couldn't keep it secret. In my experience, when we find a signal that looks even remotely interesting, usually the media are calling you within 48 hours.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:31) Yeah, that was my question to Ryan Graves when he said that he was on a military training flight in restricted airspace and there was an object that at 200-mile-an-hour crosswinds was standing still with no heat signature, and it didn't make any sense. Then he almost ran into it. And I said, how did not the entire military get called into action immediately?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:53) Like, that's what I would think would happen. If, like, if I'm a fighter pilot and I'm up there and I see this thing, I'm gonna radio in and say we've got — and then you would imagine that everybody in the world would try to go observe that space and find that thing. You would imagine that there would be this huge sense of urgency, but there simply wasn't. So I asked him about the chain of command, and he goes, well, you know, when we notice this, we radio it into this specific department, and then they make the decision on what to do, and then that's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) Like, I mean —

(Seth Shostak at 00:16::24) Yeah, I think that also history plays a role there, because all these sightings, including the infrared camera sightings and all that sort of thing of objects, they're all easily explained as very prosaic phenomena.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:38) I don't know that word. What's that? What's prosaic?

(Seth Shostak at 00:16:41) Ordinary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:42) Ordinary. Okay. So I'm learning. Yeah.

(Seth Shostak at 00:16:44) Yeah, don't involve any alien activity, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:48) That's actually kind of what he said. He said there wasn't, like, precedent for it. I was like, why didn't you guys react? And he's like, well, I guess there just wasn't precedent for it. And I was like, oh.

(Seth Shostak at 00:16:57) Also, the evidence isn't good, right? That doesn't prove that it's extraterrestrial, right? They'll often claim that, for example, objects are moving faster than any of our aircraft and so forth.

(Seth Shostak at 00:17:09) But you can't say — I mean, it's easy to say that, but it has no validity unless you know how far away the object is, because otherwise you can't say anything about how fast it's moving, right? It could just be a balloon moving at two miles an hour. I mean, so you need to know that, and in general, they don't know that. You just see something, but you don't know how far away it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:29) My whole argument or conversation with him was, like, just completely eliminate extraterrestrial or UAP out of it. How do we know, like, if there's an object there — like, it could be adversarial. It could be some other thing that, you know, like, if it's in restricted airspace and the person who's allowed to be in restricted airspace isn't expecting it to be there, like, why didn't we respond?

(Seth Shostak at 00:17:54) Well, to begin with, I'm not sure what restricted airspace actually means. You might have restricted airspace over, you know, a military installation, so nothing can get within five, ten miles, whatever it is, that sort of thing. But, you know, the sky is big.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:10) Sky's very big.

(Seth Shostak at 00:18:11) You know, I don't know. But the fact that you see something that at first you don't explain — sorry, you don't understand — doesn't tell you anything about whether it's extraterrestrial or not. Just means you don't understand what it was. If I go home tonight and, you know, at three in the morning I hear sounds coming from the attic — aliens.

(Seth Shostak at 00:18:30) Yeah, you could say aliens, and some people would. Could be rats.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:35) But it's most likely some mice or something like that. What made you want to get in, like, study this? Are you just — have you always been science fiction type curious, or what's the drive for you?

(Seth Shostak at 00:18:48) Well, I did see a lot of cheesy sci-fi films as a kid, and I was always interested in that. We tried making our own, in fact. But I also had an interest in astronomy. I built a telescope. I guess I was 10 years old. That's a very common story, actually. There are thousands and thousands of Americans who could give you the same story. And the idea of aliens, of course, that came from the movies part of it. But working here at the SETI Institute, our job is to try and find life — maybe not, you know, the little green guys, maybe just bacteria — but try and find biology elsewhere, because that would answer a really interesting question. I mean, is biology some sort of miracle, or is it just something that will happen every time?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:30) Do you specifically only focus on radio waves? Or, because I mean —

(Seth Shostak at 00:19:35) Personally, because my background's in radio astronomy. I used to study galaxies using radio telescopes. But there are people who do — even here at the institute, there are people who do what's called optical SETI, where they're looking for, you know, flashing lasers or something like that. That's another way you could communicate or the aliens could communicate, so maybe there are such signals.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:54) Is the technology getting a lot better?

(Seth Shostak at 00:19:57) Yeah, yeah. The technology is better. Usually, you find that the technology follows what's called Moore's Law. That's named after this guy Moore, who was a Silicon Valley pioneer, Gordon Moore. And it says that, you know, the speed of electronics — this is a simplification — but the speed of electronics doubles about every two years. That continues to be the case. That's been the case for three decades. And that means the experiment that you're running now is, you know, far better than anything you could have done five years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:32) How many people are there on the team?

(Seth Shostak at 00:20:35) The total number of people in the world that are doing this kind of work, SETI, might be a dozen. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:45) A dozen? Maybe fewer, if you prefer fewer. No, I was thinking there'd be thousands.

(Seth Shostak at 00:20:48) Well, there are a lot of — yeah, that's the public perception, but that's due to the TV shows and, you know, the radio shows.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:56) Really? That's what — what's the —

(Seth Shostak at 00:20:59) Do you guys — there's no money. I mean, how are you gonna pay all those people?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:01) Well, how are you gonna pay a thousand people?

(Seth Shostak at 00:21:07) I don't know. You gotta sell some T-shirts, man. Sell some highs. Sell T-shirts, actually.

(Seth Shostak at 00:21:11) But you have to sell a lot of T-shirts to get the salaries for a thousand people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:16) Yeah. See, it's less than 12 people in the world. And then just in our U.S. base, like, just on your team, how many people are there?

(Seth Shostak at 00:21:22) Well, I think the majority of them are here in the U.S. And the SETI Institute SETI efforts involve, indeed, you know, maybe 10 or 15 people, but most of them are not doing SETI all the time. They're mostly doing radio astronomy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) And what's that?

(Seth Shostak at 00:21:41) Well, it's astronomy, but done at radio wavelengths, not with visible light or infrared light or X-rays or anything like that. It's just being done at radio frequencies. As I say, I used to study galaxies at radio frequencies, and you can learn a lot about galaxies. You can find, for example, how quickly they spin around. And that's what led to the discovery of dark matter, which is an interesting puzzle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:08) What's the most interesting discovery that you've seen in the past 30 years?

(Seth Shostak at 00:22:15) Well, for me personally, because I've, you know, was involved in it, it would be the whole matter of dark — well, the question of dark matter — that, you know, there's a fraction of the universe, a sizeable fraction of the universe, that has mass, but we can't see it. It's nonluminous. That's why it's called dark matter. And we still don't know what that is, right? It could be some sort of exotic elementary particle. I mean, there are all sorts of things, but, you know, we still don't know what makes up the majority of the universe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:48) But it's not nothing.

(Seth Shostak at 00:22:50) Well, it has mass.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:51) So the dark matter has mass.

(Seth Shostak at 00:22:51) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:51) Oh, okay. Yeah. Interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:59) So that's the most interesting discovery in 30 years, dark matter.

(Seth Shostak at 00:23:02) Well, in my personal experience —

(Intro Narrator at 00:23:04) I mean —

(Seth Shostak at 00:23:05) There are lots of interesting — I mean, you know, the Higgs boson, you could say finding the Higgs boson was interesting. But primarily, that applies to particle physicists, not to the general public.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) I watched that video. So I'm a — I'm a nerd, but, like, very armchair nerd. But I did watch that video of the Higgs boson when they discovered it, and I think they had that — one of — I think if I'm — if my memory serves me correct, the actual guy that proposed it, he was super old. And they, like, brought him in in a wheelchair and, like, we discovered it.

(Seth Shostak at 00:23:33) Was that Higgs himself?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:34) I think so. But it was either that or, like, his son or something like that that was really old. I don't know about the timetables. I don't study it too deeply. But yeah, that's — now exoplanets, right? These little planets that could potentially support life. We've been finding a lot of those lately, haven't we?

(Seth Shostak at 00:23:53) We've found, I think, in total somewhere between four and five thousand exoplanets. And most of them tend to be large, you know, like Jupiter, that sort of thing, because those are the easiest ones to find. But we know that there are plenty of planets out there around other stars that are at least the same, roughly, the same size as the Earth and with the same kind of temperatures. So those are planets that could have oceans, atmospheres, and maybe extraterrestrials. We haven't found any evidence for extraterrestrials late — ever, actually. But that, you know, that's not surprising given the limitations of what you can learn about something that's going on on a planet that's 10 light years away and it's no bigger than the Earth. It would be hard to know if anybody is there unless they built big trans — sorry, big transmitters for airport radars or who knows what. Then you might find them. But —

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) And how? You can?

(Seth Shostak at 00:25:00) Bacteria or anything else? Or do we just — are we just able to see, like, the ingredients of the exoplanet and then we can —

(Seth Shostak at 00:25:00) Well, you might find bacteria. You would, of course, not see them directly. But bacteria, you know, do some sort of chemistry, right? A lot of the oxygen, the majority of the oxygen in our atmosphere is due to, you know, basically algae, plants, right? And you could detect the oxygen in the atmosphere of another planet, and that would be a big discovery. That would tell you something's going on involving biology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) That's true. And we can see that happening, right?

(Seth Shostak at 00:25:34) Well, see it happening. You would get evidence of it because you would study the light that's coming from some other planet. And if there's oxygen in the atmosphere, that has a signature in the spectrum of that light. In other words, you would see proof that there's oxygen in its atmosphere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:50) That's interesting. And what's that study when you're studying the light from it?

(Seth Shostak at 00:25:50) Spectroscopy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:50) Oh, interesting. Interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:00) All right. Did we go to the moon?

(Seth Shostak at 00:26:04) I think we went to the moon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:06) Do you?

(Seth Shostak at 00:26:07) Oh, absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:08) Nice.

(Seth Shostak at 00:26:09) I'm not gonna make any sense. You can go to the moon now and find stuff left there by previous expeditions. It's like saying, did Captain Cook really go to Hawaii?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:20) I know. I have no idea.

(Seth Shostak at 00:26:21) Yeah, but in fact, people who, you know, study history do know, right? Because there's just evidence for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:30) Yeah. This is interest — I'm so surprised. I'm really so surprised by the size of SETI, because, you know, I've been interested in this type of stuff my entire life, and SETI has a great brand as far as being known. And so to find out that there's, like, a handful of people and that's it is just kind of — I guess I just made it bigger in my head than it was.

(Seth Shostak at 00:26:55) Well, one should be careful, because I'm talking to you from my desk here, and it's at the SETI Institute. And there are, like, a hundred PhD scientists here outside my office door that work for the SETI Institute, but they're not doing SETI, right? They're doing what's called astrobiology. They're interested in life on Mars, for example. A lot of them study Mars because Mars may have had life. It may even still have life, but it, you know, it'd be bacterial. It'd be the kind of life that isn't gonna write the great American novel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:27) Yes. Oh, speaking of writing, I saw that you had done some books, and then you kind of stopped in 2009. Why did you stop writing?

(Seth Shostak at 00:27:33) Well, I didn't stop writing, but I stopped writing books. And it wasn't very deliberate. I might write another book at some point, but it's a big job to write a book. And in the end, the number of people that read the book is, you know, fewer in general, fewer than the number of people that would read a magazine article. So I tend to write articles now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:54) Oh, okay. What's your favorite publications?

(Seth Shostak at 00:27:57) My favorite publications. You mean for publishing my own stuff?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:01) Yeah, like, where do you like to put your —

(Seth Shostak at 00:28:04) Well, I mean, sometimes you don't get a choice in that. I've had, you know, essays in the New York Times and things like that. But in terms of magazine articles, most of them will appear in something like Astronomy Magazine or Sky and Telescope Magazine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20) Why do you find — or when you look at the people that enter this field of astronomy, like, what is their motivation on a macro? I know everybody has their own things, but what's a trend that you see from people entering?

(Seth Shostak at 00:28:29) They're just curious. They're just curious. Just like any scientist, any research scientist — yes, a lot of them are what are called applied science types, and they're working on a particular problem. But research scientists, you know, they're doing basic research. In other words, they're just trying to understand something, or they're just trying to catalog, say, you know, all the Earth-like plants — or how commonplace are Earth-sized planets, for example, in the universe. That's a question that, you know, just about anybody would ask, and they might be able to figure out a way to, you know, sort of give you a number on that, a percentage, right? Twenty percent of all stars have an Earth-like planet or 0% or 1% or whatever it is. That's basic research. And that is always getting better because the telescopes are getting better and, you know, there are more people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:27) Have you gotten to use that James Webb Telescope?

(Seth Shostak at 00:29:30) I don't think it's actually operational yet, is it? I have no idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:34) Oh, yeah. We have — we have the first pictures back from it, don't we?

(Seth Shostak at 00:29:37) Well, yeah, there are some pictures, but I think it's being — I don't know. I may be wrong. I didn't know that it was already doing work that is proposed by scientists and —

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:48) Oh, okay. I have no idea. I have no idea. I just remember seeing those first pictures come back from it. I talked to somebody on the project that was working at a higher level on the project, and this was, like, two or three years ago, I think. And then they had some initial images back, you know, at some point. Yeah.

(Seth Shostak at 00:30:04) Yeah. It takes a while to get a telescope, particularly in space, to get it going. To begin with, you can't get your hands on it to make any adjustments or repairs or things like that. It's hard to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:14) So help me understand this. I'm starting to learn more about SETI. So there's SETI, the actual search for the extraterrestrial life through the radio waves. And then there's the SETI Institute, and there's people that study different things at the SETI Institute. So those are separately funded things?

(Seth Shostak at 00:30:30) No. They're not separately funded, but they're somewhat different. Look, the first SETI experiment was done in 1960 by a guy by the name of Frank Drake. And he just pointed an antenna in West Virginia.

(Seth Shostak at 00:30:44) He pointed it at two very close by stars, hoping that, you know, they might have planets and that some of those planets might have spawned life and life that might have evolved to the point where it was able to do things like build radio transmitters. So that was the first SETI experiment. And the SETI Institute, when it began, was simply an organization to do that kind of work with NASA money because there was NASA money in the nineteen seventies, eighties and a little bit into the nineties. Okay. But then that was all killed by a congressman from Nevada.

(Seth Shostak at 00:31:22) So that SETI is no longer, you know, a NASA project or funded by the federal government. But that's how it got started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:30) Aliens spend a lot of time in Nevada. You think there's any connection?

(Seth Shostak at 00:31:35) I think they like the Tex-Mex cuisine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:39) Alright. So you've got all these PhDs studying Mars. Have you ever talked to Elon Musk about what they're learning or shared any knowledge there?

(Seth Shostak at 00:31:48) I have talked to Elon Musk, but not about that or really anything substantive. I just had to introduce him at a conference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:57) Yeah. What did you think of him?

(Seth Shostak at 00:31:58) Good guy? Well, it's hard to tell in, you know, five minutes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:01) You've only got five minutes to figure it out.

(Seth Shostak at 00:32:03) Yeah. That's what I got. And then I got to listen to him. Now he seemed okay. I mean, he's obviously a clever guy, and he's also one who's interested in new ideas, new possibilities. You know, what can you do now that you couldn't do twenty years ago that you would like to do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19) And what does an average day look like for you?

(Seth Shostak at 00:32:23) Well, there is no such thing, but I come in mostly, I have to deal with email. There's always, you know, a couple of 100 emails. And, you know, after that, a lot of what I do is writing, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:35) What are you writing about right now?

(Seth Shostak at 00:32:37) Well, in fact, I'm writing about a whole new—well, it's not new—a whole different approach to SETI rather than looking for signals, light, or radio. Look for artifacts. Right? The universe is much older than our planet, for example.

(Seth Shostak at 00:32:51) So there's been plenty of time for advanced beings to, you know, restructure, for example, their own solar systems or build massive constructions orbiting in space, that kind of thing. And maybe you could find such things. And that would be another way to prove that we have some company out there without requiring that they, you know, send some signals in your direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:14) Interesting. And so how are you going? Like, what are the proposed changes from this, or is it just ideating?

(Seth Shostak at 00:33:23) It's just another way to search. And maybe the best way to do it is just write some software that'll go through astronomical imagery, you know, pictures made by telescopes looking for things that clearly aren't natural and, you know, to do it that way. Yeah. There's not much being done there, but it's an approach, and it might tell you, you know, something about societies that are much more advanced than we are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) Yeah. I'm really interested. I talked to a guy who was building hypersonic missiles. Essentially, you don't even have to have propulsion. They just kind of drop and you angle them as they're being pulled to Earth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:08) But I was asking him about how much of Earth is observed with satellites. He said a very small percentage is continuously observed with the satellites. It's weird that I talk to all these people in all of these high places, and it's like, I would think that there would be more urgency to get a situation where, like, we're observing our border as far as, like, Earth goes, like, continuously or at least observing the sky continuously. I guess—

(Seth Shostak at 00:34:37) For what reason? How would you justify somebody putting in money to do that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:44) Good point. I mean, we're getting all the questions answered today. I guess you're so right because you're in this all day. So you see, it always just comes down to money. Does anything generate money?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:56) Like, for example, these 100 PhDs that are researching this Mars stuff. Will any learnings from that generate money, like when NASA invented power tools or something and it goes to private industry? Is there any conveyance of research to commercialization?

(Seth Shostak at 00:35:10) Yeah. Well, again, this is basic research. And in general, basic research doesn't result in products. Right? It simply produces papers, you know, professional papers, if you will.

(Seth Shostak at 00:35:23) So in other words, it produces knowledge. And a lot of that knowledge isn't terribly useful at first, but it might eventually be useful. I mean, think of the history of quantum mechanics, which is a branch of physics that basically was developed in the nineteen twenties. Right? And at first, I mean, even the scientists themselves who were doing this, they said, well, this is interesting, but it has absolutely no practical benefits.

(Seth Shostak at 00:35:48) But it turned out that quantum mechanics ultimately did have practical benefits. You know, without quantum mechanics, it's tough to build transistors and things like that that underpin our entire society now, all this electronics. So there's always a payoff from basic research, but it can take a while before you see what it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:07) And then you have a podcast. I wanna make sure I give a shout out to your podcast. Can you tell me about that?

(Seth Shostak at 00:36:13) Yeah. It's called Big Picture Science. People can easily find it by just doing a Google search. And we typically do that once a week, one hour, and we talk about, you know, new research, not necessarily having anything to do with SETI, just in general, new research.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:32) Nice. And how long have you been doing that for?

(Seth Shostak at 00:36:34) Oh, fifteen years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:36) Really?

(Seth Shostak at 00:36:37) Think so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:38) You get some of that sponsorship money from it?

(Seth Shostak at 00:36:41) We get a little bit of advertiser money, but a lot of the audience is listening on the NPR stations, and you can't have advertising on a show on NPR. So, you know, that limits the revenue stream a bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:57) Oh, interesting. Interesting. Is your information about the, like, finances on SETI, is that all public knowledge or is it private?

(Seth Shostak at 00:37:07) Yeah. Totally public.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:08) Nice. How much money is SETI pulling in to study everything it studies in a year? Are we talking about—

(Seth Shostak at 00:37:15) The annual budget.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:16) Yeah. What's the annual budget?

(Seth Shostak at 00:37:19) Yeah. It's, you know, maybe 5 to $10,000,000.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:25) That's it?

(Seth Shostak at 00:37:26) Wow. Well, again, you know, where's that money gonna come from?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) I don't know. We gotta raise some money. Do you guys do fundraisers?

(Seth Shostak at 00:37:35) We do, but it's not easy to raise an additional $10,000,000. For that, you need somebody who has a lot more money, who finds this interesting, and simply donates it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:46) Really? And that's 80% of your budget is people that just find it interesting and donate it.

(Seth Shostak at 00:37:51) I don't know if it's 80%—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:53) But it's like—do the Pareto thing. You know?

(Seth Shostak at 00:37:55) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:57) Interesting. Wow. You have taught me so much today. I actually don't think a lot of people knew all this information about SETI. But do you guys have, like, individual donors on your website?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:07) Like, if I go to SETI, do they have, like, a, you know, contribute $25 a month type thing?

(Seth Shostak at 00:38:12) We do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:13) And what's the website? Seti.org. SETI dot org. That's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:21) Okay. Cool. So everybody go to seti.org. Give them some money. Because we gotta find these other life forms wherever they may be before they find us and we find out that we're just like a food factory for an advanced civilization.

(Seth Shostak at 00:38:37) Yeah. I doubt that they would find us interesting to eat. You only eat—you only eat things that are actually closely related to you in general.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:47) Oh, really?

(Seth Shostak at 00:38:48) Well, think about it. Yeah. You have a steak tonight. This comes from some sort of, you know, ungulate. I don't know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:55) I don't know that word either. What's ungulate?

(Seth Shostak at 00:38:58) Oh, cows are ungulates.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) Oh, I—

(Seth Shostak at 00:39:00) You've had two new—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:01) Two new words today. This is a good day, Seth.

(Seth Shostak at 00:39:05) But, you know, if you look at from an evolutionary point of view, you're not so different from the cattle that are turned into steaks. So you don't—you don't eat too much. I don't know. Maybe you do eat some bacteria if you're from Australia or something. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:22) There's always—oh, he's eating bacteria. That's what they're known for. Yeah. My favorite Australian bacteria is the bloomin' onion ring from Outback Steakhouse.

(Seth Shostak at 00:39:34) Yeah. I never encountered that in Australia, I have to say. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:38) I know. I know. I know. Well, this is great. So, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:42) I actually—I'm on the website right now. There's a giant red give now button. So I'm a big fan. Go to seti.org. Give these people some money so they can keep doing awesome work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:53) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.