After a day off recovering from jet lag, which I somehow end up investing whizzing up and down the hills of San Francisco on a Segway, I head off down Highway 101 to Mountain View to record the first interview in my Tiny Atoms road trip. I’m meeting Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Seti Institute and presenter of their excellent Big Image Science radio show and podcast.
Seth is the public encounter of Seti, he’s the SETI Guy. At least that is what it says on his car registration plate. Seti is an abbreviation of Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence, and that is what Seth does. He’s a complete-time alien hunter.
Founded in 1984, for 10 years the Seti Institute was at first component of a wider Nasa-funded search for alien intelligence, until the space agency’s project fell victim to price range cuts. Since then the institute has relied on personal donations and endowments to maintain it going, and judging by its headquarters, they are doing ok for funding. The institute is in the middle of a large industrial estate, albeit the richest, most progressive and manicured industrial estate in the globe, otherwise identified as Silicon Valley.
The search for alien radio signals is only a small element of the work accomplished by the Seti Institute – most of its scientists are astrobiologists who are hunting for life of a less intelligent, more microbial kind elsewhere in the solar system, primarily on the moons of the outer planets.
However, it is the image of a scientist listening out for a message from the cosmos, probably one who seems a bit like Jodie Foster, which tends to catch the public’s imagination.
I meet up with Seth in his office (he doesn’t look like Jodie Foster). He asks if I’d like to record the interview in the institute’s own recording studio. This is the place Seth, Molly Bentley and the group record Massive Picture Science, of which I’m a massive fan, so I’m delighted to take him up on the supply. It later transpires that Seth is a thing of an audiophile and has constructed this studio himself, so do not expect the rest of the recordings on this trip to match this one in sound quality!
“The present day thought of employing antennas to eavesdrop on ET goes back to Frank Drake’s authentic 1960 experiment named Project Ozma,” Seth tells me. That’s Frank Drake of the eponymous Drake Equation. He’s still a component of the institute, and though he’s not in on the day of my visit, I later get a glimpse of his office.
Drake’s Project Ozma focused on just two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Nowadays, SETI uses the Allen Telescope Array, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, to monitor thousands of stars. Nevertheless, even prior to Project Ozma, Seth reminds me, Edison, Tesla and Marconi had all deemed the chance that radio waves might be receivable from Mars or elsewhere.
I am interested to know how the news of alien life – be it of huge intellect (hopefully not “intellects vast and awesome and unsympathetic”) or just microbial – would be greeted on Earth, and no matter whether this would provoke some wonderful existential change. Seth thinks that unlikely.
“In a sense we’ve run that experiment. In 1996 there was an announcement by Nasa that they had discovered dead microbes in a meteorite that had come from Mars. No doubt it had come from Mars the doubt was regardless of whether these had been genuinely microbes of course but, at least for the couple of days of that story, the assumption was: Nasa is announcing this, these are reputable researchers.”
Of course we know how that turned out, but as Seth points out: “It was the biggest science story of the year – folks did not riot in the streets. Nor did peace and brotherhood break out.”
But this very situation remains one of the principal concerns of the conspiracy theorists, who believe that the US government would not trust the public with such understanding. According to Seth: “There are a lot of men and women who think that finding life would be enormously disruptive. In this country folks say, well if you guys find a signal, the government would shut it down, you’d hold it quiet, and the cause given for that is that it would disrupt society. Well there’s no evidence for that at all.”
Seth Shostak talks about the influence of Nasa’s ‘discovery’ of Martian microbes. Listen to the total interview right here:
Whilst it is easy to image researchers sitting about waiting to be stunned by an incoming signal, the reality is that the Allen Telescope Array is consistently bombarded by radio waves. The trick is to filter out the wheat from the chaff, most of which is as Seth describes, “all from an intelligent society, namely ours”.
And of course we have not identified a signal from an intelligent alien species but. We’d undoubtedly know about it if we had, despite the doubts of the conspiratorially minded.
Of all of the a lot of false alarms, I inquire Seth, which one was the most interesting? He tells me that “there was one that we got in the summer season of 1997 … It had us fooled for most of a day.
Sources and more information:
• When Aliens Attack: ‘Battleship’ Strategy with SETI Astronomer Seth Shostak
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• Depth Change: What Do the “Battleship” Aliens Want From Us, Anyway? | The Crux
• How would the public react if Seti found evidence of alien life?