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Seth Shostak X Jemma Foster
Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer at SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) → @setiinstitute
JF: Can you describe the SETI project to date and your hopes for contact?
SS: You may already know Seti began in 1960, so that’s a long time ago. It was begun by this young astronomer, Frank Drake, in Green Bank, West Virginia. And he pointed a new antenna there at a couple of nearby stars, hoping to eavesdrop on radio signals. So that set the technique, or froze the technique in some ways, of SETI to search for radio signals.
More recent projects also search for laser beams that may be aimed our way, but all of the attempts to find company in the galaxy have been to look for signals. And that’s maybe not the only way to do it. Maybe it’s not even the best way to do it, because you could argue it’d be totally speculative. The aliens may not be producing very many signals because that might be dangerous for them or not part of their sociology. I mean, we don’t really know anything about alien sociology, but it is a thought.
Anyhow, since the 1960s experiment by Frank Drake, what has happened is mostly the development of new equipment and secondly, the expansion of our knowledge in astronomy that’s relevant here. Let me take the second one first. The first exoplanet, the first planet found around somebody else’s star – not our Sun, of course – was 1995. And that was a very big story. It was on the cover of Time magazine.
Since then, we found 4,500 exoplanets – you know, that’s okay maybe as a conversation starter at your next cocktail party, but the really important thing is not how many have been found – that just goes up every week. It’s the fact that now you can say with confidence that 80% of all stars have planets or something like that – essentially all stars. We don’t know much about those planets, but on the basis of results from the Kepler telescope, the estimate is that out of every three or four star systems that are stars that are somewhat like the Sun, you’ll find a planet that’s somewhat like Earth.
Now we know that at least the real estate is out there. We don’t know about the aliens, but life developed on Earth very quickly. So that suggests that maybe it’s not very hard to do. As far as what has happened in SETI, itself, keep in mind that there’s been very, very little government funding of SETI, particularly since 1995. There was a NASA SETI programme, but that was killed in 1995. So ever since then, it’s been a long time – two dozen years – that SETI has been funded by people who just send cheques. At the moment, I'm probably the only guy in the building here that’s actually connected more with the SETI programme as opposed to the astrobiology programs.
JF: With the congressional hearing on UFOs, or UAPs, we’ve been hearing testimony from US military and government officials such as Grusch, Graves and Fravor, about decades long UFO missions including reverse engineering programmes of recovered vessels and ‘non-human biologics’. How much is smoke and mirrors?
SS: Grusch nor anyone else claiming to have knowledge of secret government UAP programs has ever been able to publicly produce convincing photos showing alien hardware splayed across the landscape. And remember, we’re not talking about a Cessna that ploughed into a wheat field. We’re talking about, presumably, an alien interstellar rocket, capable of bridging trillions of miles of space, and sporting technology that is obviously alien.
If there really was some physical evidence of visitation, thousands of scientists would be fighting one another to study it. And the government would want it studied. This has always been another big sticking point in the UAP conspiracy theory universe. What is the point of hiding extraterrestrial technology in a Nevada hangar? What would be the goal, at this point, of shutting out the scientific community. The information, technology and — importantly — wealth incentives here seem overwhelming.
Returning to the issue of visual evidence, there are thousands of satellites orbiting Earth. The majority sport cameras aimed downward. Actual alien craft in our airspace bigger than an office desk would likely be visible to satellites that — among other things — supply imagery to Google Earth. Hypothetically, a vast conspiracy to scrub such images could exist. And the American populace readily accepts conspiracy explanations. Ever since the government’s disingenuous response to the 1947 discovery of crash debris near Roswell, New Mexico, the public has decided that the feds will never tell civilians the truth about visiting aliens. I remain sceptical until I see convincing hard evidence.
Having worked for the government, and also I grew up two miles from the Pentagon, and so did everyone in my school. Most of their fathers worked for the Department of Defense, as did my father, actually. What you realise is that the government doesn’t know very much about this because they don’t spend any money on it. Very little, very little.
The Air Force is interested in tracking down these UAPs, simply because they’re in the sky and they want to know what’s up in the sky before they send their own aircraft up into the sky. But they haven’t found anything. I mean, it’s not that there aren’t these videos that are covering something intriguing. You can explain most of the videos on the basis of very prosaic things like aircraft that are in front of your camera, 50 miles away. So as long as you have those possibilities, as long as there's a prosaic explanation, as a scientist, you would choose that first.
JF: Recently scientists discovered that radio blasts have been pulsing towards Earth every 21 minutes for the last 35 years, just that no one had noticed in the data until now. What do you make of that?
SS: Well, it’s unclear what’s causing these regular radio bursts but the fact that they are regular is a sign that they’re due to something that’s either rotating or orbiting another body. This is reminiscent of the discovery of the pulsars – emitters of regular bursts of radio and light. And while no one knew at first, these turned out to have a totally natural explanation. I figure the same will be true here.
The other thing to be said is that this is an example of how discoveries are made in astronomy. They very often they start with observations of something that’s unusual (as Isaac Asimov said, the most important comment of a scientist is “that’s funny.”) Once the phenomenon has been observed, the theoreticians think about it and come up with plausible (usually!) theories about what might be going on. These theories are usually checked by new observations, and eventually you’ve learned about a previously unknown phenomenon in the universe. I suspect that’s the scenario we’ll see played out here. Aliens are on the list, but probably not the explanation!
JF: What would be the protocol and timeframe from receiving a signal to decoding the message?
SS: Well, we know the signal is real, but where is it coming from exactly? And you can use various radio telescopes to sort of narrow in the patch of sky from which the signal is coming. And then you just look at photos of that part of the sky made during routine astronomical observations and say, well, there’s only one star. Or maybe there are a couple of stars there that are sort of like the Sun. They’re not the kind of stars that’ll burn out very quickly. These are stars that hang around for billions of years, so they may have planets, and it might even be known whether those stars have any planets, but if not, you can be sure that the planet hunters will immediately try to find out which of those has planets.
At the same time, the radio astronomers will be using larger arrays of antennae to make the box smaller on the sky from where the signal’s coming. So I honestly think that if you found a signal, you would know. You would know which star system it was coming from within months, no more.
And then you’d also then have a big time delay. So when did they send it? How many light years away is it? You just don’t know. Of course, once you find the star, it’s pretty easy to determine how far away it is because these are all going to be coming from a star system that isn’t very far away. There are probably lots of signals in the Andromeda Galaxy, or one of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies we can see. But they’re very far away and the signals will be so weak that it might be impossible to detect them.
So the assumption, and it is an assumption, is that if you find a signal, it’s probably coming from a star that isn't terribly far away – say 50, 100 light years, something like that. And within 100 light years, there are a lot of stars – thousands. So it may be that you have company that’s not terribly far away.
After that, once you’ve identified it, then of course the public will be asking, well, are we going to say something to them? Or what are they saying to us? It might be impossible to figure out what they’re saying to us for a lot of reasons. Mostly technical, but there will be people who will want to broadcast something like we’ve got all these used cars here and we’d love to sell them to you, or something.
Who knows what to broadcast to the aliens and how to start a conversation? There are also people who think that you should forbid that – serious people say that, and I don’t agree with them, but they do say, “Look, you don’t know what’s out there.” True. So you're just saying, “Hey, here I am,” essentially. And that might be dangerous and you’d hate for your tombstone to read, ‘He was responsible for the destruction of the human race’ or something like that.
JF: Some believe contact brings salvation, others destruction. Isn’t Douglas Vakoch at METI (Messaging Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) already sending out messages?
SS: Yes, Doug actually used to work in the office next to mine. I have known Doug for a long, long time. He now indeed has an office up in San Francisco for METI. The problem is he doesn’t have any money either. And he’s alone. He is interested in sending signals, and the reason he left SETI was because he was so keen to do that, and he ran into opposition from other people in the community who said, “Well, you know, we shouldn’t do that.” Look, you can say it’s dangerous. Who knows if it’s dangerous? But one thing you can say is that even if it were not dangerous, the nearest aliens were 50 light years away, which is pretty close, you know, and then you say, “Well, hi, we’re the earthlings and we’d love to meet you. Could you send some photos?” It would take 50 years for that signal to get there and another 50 years for their response, if they make any response. So nobody wants to wait 100 years for the results of their experiment, so that’s a problem.
JF: Time lag aside, what about the language barrier? My background is in sacred geometry, which to me is a universal language related to mathematics and music of nature, expressed in pattern and form. There have been attempts to create a universal language, or one that aliens might understand, like Alexander Ollengren’s LINCOS, or astrolinguistics for interstellar communication. What form or language would you suggest we respond to a signal with?
SS: The language barrier is maybe not so hard to overcome. I mean people figured out the hieroglyphics by the 1830s. Although that was written by Homo sapiens, which helps. You could send pictures and build up a picture dictionary.
You could just teach them to read English, for example. You send a picture of a star and you put underneath it S T A R, right? They don’t know what those little squiggles mean, but if you send enough of them, they’ll figure out that those are some components of a written language, and you can build up at least a series of nouns. And then verbs are a little tougher, but you could do that too, with simple verbs. I think you could get them up to a thousand words rather quickly if they’re at least as smart as humans, and you would assume they are if they’ve figured out radio and picked up our signal.
JF: There is an assumption of ET life as similar but perhaps more advanced than ours, which on the current trajectory would perhaps be a post-singularity, post-human, mechanical entity. What sort of intelligence are you expecting to find?
SS: Yes, well for them to have a SETI programme that picks up our signal or to broadcast one that we receive, one requires 20th century technology at least. If they’re like cavemen, they don’t know what a radio is. They have no idea. And that was true for the people in the 16th century, too. They were mapping the globe, but they had no way to send information to those ships. So yes, you have to assume they’re at least as technically sophisticated as we are, and the odds are simply on the basis of likely numbers that they’re very much more advanced than we are, so they probably can figure it all out.
If they are more advanced, then we are probably looking at machine intelligence. I have been saying for a long time that if you actually had a photo of the aliens, you might be disappointed because they’re going to look like a box with a switch or a couple of lights, right? I mean, we’re inventing our successors now.
And then people worry about what machine intelligent aliens will do with us, but it doesn’t mean that somehow we’ll all be wiped out. We didn’t wipe out all the dogs and cats. We just turned them into pets. I think I’ll be a pet of the machine.
JF: What is the role of AI in the quest for ET? Might it bridge more-than-human intelligence and language?
SS: Yeah, I suspect so. Although it may not be necessary, do you need AI to bridge the communication barrier between you and your dog? Your dog makes a lot of noise, but it’s not clear that there’s a lot of information in that noise. The total amount of information may be simply that somebody’s at the front door. Of course, people will use whatever technology is available when this problem comes up, assuming it does come up. So I think you would understand enough to be able to communicate. They might not appreciate Shakespeare, but they would understand simple sentences, I suspect, once you’d started this process.
JF: Are SETI looking for other forms of communication beyond radio waves - you mentioned lasers but presumably there are other methods, like gravitational waves or quantum teleportation?
SS: Yes, we assume that we know enough physics to be able to say, look, I don’t care how advanced they are. The fastest way for them to send information from here to there is to do it on a radio or a light beam, through electromagnetic radiation.
We don’t know any way to send the information faster. Some people call me up and say they’ll be using gravitational waves to communicate. Well, maybe, I mean, gravitational waves are very hard to produce, but compared to radio, they don’t go any faster, as far as we can tell. The theory certainly says that gravitational waves go at the speed of light, too.
So, there’s not a heck of a lot of advantage there. We don’t know of any technology that allows you to communicate faster and certainly cheaper than by sending lighter radio waves or television broadcasts or whatever, electromagnetic radiation, to the aliens. And assuming that we’re not missing some important physics, that’s what they’d be sending that what we could pick up.
JF: It’s quite an anthropocentric perspective. What if alien life exists outside our ideas of what consciousness is? Beyond our 3D perception, we just don’t have the right lens to view it, or if we do we’re just not using it? They could be out there in a 5D or 7D reality.
SS: Well, indeed, if there are ways to communicate that we just don’t know about, then of course, all bets are off. I mean, I’m sitting here in my office, but here, right here in the seventh, eighth, and ninth dimensions, there’s a great alien party going on. But you know, I can’t get there.
JF: Back to this reality then, what about extraterrestrial information arriving into our atmosphere on an asteroid, microbes carrying a host of messaging.
SS: Yeah, it’s certainly not beyond the interests of the people here. If you walk around the SETI Institute here, you’ll find people who consider that things like microbes could act as a sort of Johnny Appleseed, spreading life from one star system to another.
Part of the problem, of course, is that asteroids don’t move that fast either. They move at maybe a couple of miles per second or something like that. And that sounds fast. It would be fast if you were going to Birmingham or something like that, but at a couple of miles per second, it would still take you tens, hundreds of thousands of years to go to the next star over. So, you know, maybe there is life in some of these asteroids and even meteors that crash on Earth.
There was a big story back in the 1990s that in fact, some scientists at NASA had found evidence of alien microbes – or at least microbes, whether or not they were alien microbes, inside a meteorite. A meteor that had fallen to Earth. That would be a big story too. It was a big story in 1996. But it would tell you, okay, there’s life out there, but it doesn’t tell you much about intelligent life. Well, that’s the thing with SETI.
JF: What is the SETI definition of intelligence?
SS: I they can build a radio transmitter, they’re intelligent. That’s it. And you can judge your friends accordingly. That’s the definition we use for intelligence.
JF: Let’s imagine you receive a message, as has been simulated by Daniela De Paulis in A Sign From Space. What message would you send back?
SS: Well, you know, a lot of people have debated this over the years. What would we say to the aliens? Bob, here’s your chance. Right? And you get various answers.
I don't think it matters much. I mean I always suggest sending the internet, send the entire web – I mean, it’s a lot of information, terabytes I’m sure, and a lot of it is repetitive and the aliens will probably figure that we like cats because there are a lot of cats on the internet. But just send it all because that will make it easier for them to decode it. Just as the hieroglyphics were able to be decoded, partly, maybe even largely, because there’s so much of the stuff. There’s an enormous corpus of data to look at. So that would help you or your AI buddies to figure it out.
Other people have other ideas. They say, well, you know, we should send something to show that we’re not an aggressive species, and all that kind of stuff. And they mix in their personal politics with this. I don’t think when you read the hieroglyphics on the walls there in the Valley of the Kings, you’re so interested in the politics, you just want to know something about this society. And that’s why I say just send them everything, make it easier for them to understand it and they might learn something about us too.
JF: I can’t imagine they would garner a favourable opinion of us from the internet.
SS: Well, yeah, a lot of people say, well, we’re not advanced enough because we still have wars and stuff like that. Come on. You know, Julius Caesar was writing stuff 2,000 years ago that I had to read in high school. And it was still interesting, even though a lot of this discussion, the Punic wars, was not really contemporary in its appeal, but it told me something about life.
They probably won’t care too much what we are like, or what we need help with. I mean, if the squirrels in my backyard here in Mountain View were to ask me for help in some way, I don’t know that I’d do it. I’d say, “Look, I can’t help you guys. I’ve got things to do.” I’m not sure what ‘help’ would mean to them – find them more acorns or something. I don’t know. Why would aliens have any built-in sympathy for us or the means to help?
JF: Another suggestion is to send music, because it is a sensory message rather than a cognitive one.
SS: Music’s good. I like music. But one of the questions about music for me always is how did we evolve a liking for music, right? What’s the survival value in being musical? Almost everything else, you can point to it and say, well, of course it was important for survival, you know, 100,000 years ago to whatever. But music is a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, what is it about music that appeals to you? Very hard to define.
JF: It can inspire awe and be a reflection of the beauty of existence, of our existence, from the perspective of an alien. Unless they’re into cat videos.
SS: Well, that means you’re interpreting it as something that inspires you. But why is it that dogs don’t have music? Right? But then maybe they respond to music and they haven’t created music.
JF: Music isn’t limited to humans, obviously birds and insects use a form of it. I recently discovered that the visual display of a peacock is actually an infrasonic serenade made with the various vibrations of the feathers. And then there are the studies of plants responding to music despite not having ears, as that is probably the argument for aliens not having music because they lack ears or culture, again it’s very anthropocentric.
SS: The forests are alive with the sound of music. Well, maybe, I don’t know. I mean, when I was a student we used to play music to the plants, my roommate and I would play music to the plants inside our dorm rooms. But the plants all died. It turns out that you also have to water them. We’d forgotten that part, but yeah, maybe they like music. I don’t know why we have music, but I mean, I’m very grateful. That’s one of my deepest interests or loves, if you will, is music, but the point is that maybe the aliens don’t have music.
I remember going to dances in high school. And just looking at the gymnasium with all these couples sort of gyrating around with these sounds in the air. And I said, what if an alien landed? Now what would they think of this? Who knows what they think of it – maybe it’s some sort of religious right or something. So maybe that is what I would ask: One, do you have religion? Two, do you have music? Those are the questions I would ask. If you had had the ability to ask them anything.
JF: I was intrigued about ‘the song of hydrogen’ that creates a sort of background noise on the radio.
SS: Hydrogen, yes. There is background noise at the frequencies that are used for SETI, mostly due to hydrogen between the stars – you know, this thin gas of hydrogen, it’s a very, very, very thin gas. I mean, it’s better than any vacuum you can achieve in a laboratory here, but there’s still always a couple of atoms of hydrogen in every cubic centimetre of space.
And hydrogen is just atomic physics, but hydrogen is known to naturally produce a radio signal. It is useful for astronomers. I got a salary for many years by studying hydrogen, but it doesn’t really affect SETI very much because the signal produced by hydrogen to begin with is really just white noise.
So that’s what it sounds like, but it’s also limited to a fairly narrow part of the radio dial. So it’s easy enough to look for signals outside it, but it has been suggested for a very long time that if the aliens are broadcasting and they want us to pick up their broadcast, they’ll broadcast at a frequency that’s very near to the hydrogen line because everybody will know about hydrogen’s behaviour. Anybody who’s technologically advanced enough to hear them will also know about hydrogen.
JF: And that's around 1.42 gigahertz?
SS: Yes. 1.420.4059, et cetera. So that narrows it down. Well, if you believe that assumption, the assumption is that that’s the frequency they'll choose.
JF: Otherwise you’re just searching for billions of different frequencies.
SS: Yes. Exactly. That’s one of the things that makes SETI hard to do, right? Because you have to check such a wide range of frequencies and that at least at the present, it takes a long time because you’re looking at a certain band and you look for 20 minutes at that band, and then you move the instruments all up the dial or down the dial, and you do it again at another set of frequencies. And if you do this, as you say, for the billions of what seem to be reasonable frequencies, you know, that might take you an hour or two depending on how much time you spend at each frequency. So it slows everything down, but that’s just a technical limit.
JF: Is that not something that machine learning could assist with?
SS: No. AI can help recognise if there’s a signal, but it can’t do the actual listening for you in this sense. It’s just radio technology. It’s not, you know, it’s not very exotic. It means that over the course of the day, maybe you can do two or three star systems, right? And that’s really slow going when you consider that you might have to look at a million star systems before you find something nobody knows.
JF: Do you ever turn up for the day and think, ‘today I feel like going to look at Andromeda’, or are you always just systematically working your way through grid by grid.
SS: No, and keep in mind it’s computer software that’s doing everything, actually. But yes, it’s methodical. You started from one end of the band and you just go up the dial, as it were. You’re never tempted to go, okay, I’m gonna go turn to Andromeda today.
JF: Not even if you had a dream about it the night before, or a very strong intuition to do so?
SS: Well, in the early days, you know, people would do that. I would do it too, but it’s like trying to win the lottery. You know, you’re just picking random numbers and seeing if anything happens. And it might, but mostly it doesn’t.
JF: Do you believe that aliens have made contact with Earth at any point, from the accounts of abductions, sightings, crop circles and so on?
SS: I noticed that the crop circles mostly appear in south southwest England. I think mainly Hampshire and Wiltshire. Although to be honest, it seems to me at least unlikely to say that aliens would come from who knows how many light years, all the way to Earth just to carve graffiti into British wheat. I mean, maybe they do that, but that doesn’t sound like a high-priority project to me.
I am interested in this stuff only because I hear from somebody essentially every day. So people will write or whatever. And last week I was at Contact in the Desert conference and most of the people there, including the speakers, were true believers in all this stuff. So they’re standing up there and telling you about this evidence for the alien. Most of them believe the aliens are here. They’re telling you what the evidence for that is, and you’re sitting there and listening to what they say. It shows that they don’t know any science.
I honestly don’t think that we are being visited. A buddy of mine, another astronomer, said to me once, “Shostak, if I thought there was a 1% chance that any of those stories was true, I would spend all my time working on it.” And I don’t think that’s an outlandish statement. I think it would be true of anybody. I mean, ask Martin Reese, he knows about this stuff. He’s the astronomer royal there.
I think that the sightings – and there are about 8,000 reported every year in the United States; Europe is about the same, per capita – and you can look at them and almost all of them, you can just explain away very quickly. Mostly aircraft, sometimes balloons, like the case of the Chinese spy ship recently, stuff like that – rather prosaic explanations for what they’re seeing. There’s always about 10%–20% that are not so easy to explain. You have to throw up your hands and say, “I don’t know what that was.”
On the other hand, you know that doesn’t mean terribly much. I mean, the police might be able to solve – well, typically they can solve 30%, 40% or 50% of all the homicides in London. But what about those others that they couldn’t find a culprit for? Maybe these are murders committed, not by humans, but by aliens that have landed in the outskirts of town and taken the tube to the downtown area where they would kill people?
Well, that’s possible. Not very likely though. It’s very much more likely that the crimes you didn’t solve were also committed by humans, and you just didn’t put the evidence together. So yes, these people make interesting claims, but there’s no real evidence, something physical here – just show me an ashtray or something from an alien spacecraft and you’ll convince me. But they never do that.
So at this conference, people are saying, “Well, the government has the evidence” – I mean, Americans love this idea that the government has somehow collected all this debris from Alien Craft and has it stacked up in a warehouse at Area 51 in Nevada – I mean, come on. If you work for the government, you realise this is something that they really can’t do.
JF: I think that’s something that bothers me as well, that a highly sophisticated craft travels light years through the galaxy, only to crash at the last moment. I feel more inclined to suggest that flying saucers that haven’t evolved much since the 50s are the smokes and mirrors stuff, while aliens would be more likely to engage with our planet by manipulating matter from an interdimensional perspective or use quantum teleportation or methods beyond our 3D framework.
SS: Exactly, we’ve come 200 light years, but the last 50 feet defeated us. Yeah. Doesn’t make much sense. I was just going to say that with the famous Roswell case, for a long time most people didn’t even bother to read about it because it wasn’t famous, but then some fellow did make it famous by writing books about it.
That crash was actually well known. It was a project – a secret project, but not anymore – a project to use high-altitude balloons to detect enemy missiles, actually the project was called Mogul and it classified in the early ’50s, but not anymore. So there’s a rational explanation for what happened to Roswell, but I think the fact the government was very coy about saying what it knew contributed to the scepticism of government claims about UFOs that you find in the United States. As I said, here, 80% of the population figures that the government would keep information about visitors under wraps. It’s unclear to me why they would do that and they couldn’t do it anyhow. Because even if you think the US government could do that, what about the Belgians and the Botswanans and the Bolivians – are they all keeping it secret too? Or do the aliens only visit America because they like our fast food?
JF: What was your incentive when you were younger to become an astronomer? Were you always interested in the idea of contact and extraterrestrials?
SS: Mind you, I’ve had many different careers, and they weren’t all even in science, because I have a great interest in some other things. I was certainly interested in aliens in science, just because as a kid I was exposed to it. My father was in charge of the Office of Naval Research, so I was exposed to that, and many of my friends were interested, so I always found science and technology interesting. I was always building stuff.
There wasn’t any particular event, but astronomy was something that I was also interested in because I had gone to the Hayden Planetarium many times in New York with my cousins who lived in Brooklyn. When I would go up to the city, we would take the subway over to the American Museum of Natural History and just go to the planetarium shows, which I liked insofar as I didn’t fall asleep in them.
Probably a more consequential inspiration for me was all the movies that I would see on the weekends because when I grew up in the ’50s, there were a lot of science fiction films. You detonate an atomic bomb in the deserts of Nevada, and immediately you wake up some critter that gets to New York somehow and tries to flatten New York. I even started making movies when I was 11 myself, and I was trying to make a science fiction story with a different plot, but people laughed at the films, so we switched to making comedies.
It was all inspired by these cheesy B-movies that were being made in the 1950s. They were mostly made by Hollywood. Somehow, movie makers in Europe and elsewhere didn’t jump on this bandwagon – the exception being the Japanese, of course.
Well the one that made the biggest impression – I mean, these films would make me sick all night after seeing them. My mother was really against my going to see these films because I’d be up vomiting all night because I was so sick, because they really scared me. But the one I liked the most at that time was the original War of the Worlds.
JF: And now you consult on films depicting space, aliens or interstellar travel.
SS: Yes, well, they usually ignore basic physics or light speeds if interstellar travel is required in the storyline. Like in Star Trek, Captain Kirk will call up Scotty in the engine room and say, “Put the pedal to the metal. We got to get over to that sector of the galaxy,” whatever. I mean, we don’t have any way to do that. And it’s faster than light travel at warp speed. So physics says that you can’t do it no matter what technology you have, but they do it anyway because otherwise the show goes on for a really long time, billions of years.
I was confused by Interstellar, but I'm easily confused. I thought there were some interesting things there. I mean, the thing about science fiction is that the hero is not an actor or an actress. The hero is the idea of the story, right? That’s what drives the story forward, and maybe I just like that because it’s easy enough to be caught up by the personalities in the film, but the idea is something that’s much more durable – the ideas or the worlds mentioned in it.
What’s the idea? Well, aliens are looking for water. They’re Martians, right? Because up until the 1970s, most aliens in the movies were Martians. Now we know that Mars is not such a great place for aliens. But the story is they come to Earth, they want the water, and the humans are in the way. So they take care of the humans. Simple, really simple. You got a bad guy and he’s gonna do really terrible things unless you stop him. What could be simpler than that? Like a cowboy film? Well, what have we ended up on Mars? Well, we’re going to go to Mars. I mean, we have a lot of hardware sitting on Mars.
We have an idea of life on Mars now but that wasn’t true when I was a kid. Nobody knew what Mars was going to be like. And there were many people who still thought there were canals on Mars. In fact, there’s a story, it may only be apocryphal, but there was a story that when Mariner 6, I think it was, produced the first detailed images of Mars by the creators, and things like these photos were shown to President Lyndon Johnson by NASA, and his reaction was, “So where are the canals?” So he was still expecting canals. This was the president. He wasn’t a scientist.
So now we know what Mars is like. It’s very dry. It’s very cold. Even on a warm summer day, it’s still pretty cold. And you can’t breathe the air, such as it is. It’s very little air, but you can’t breathe it anyhow, not no oxygen. So it would be a tough environment, but it’s better than most planets. So your future may be on Mars.
JF: Well, as long as Elon Musk doesn’t nuke it. What are your thoughts on terraforming?
SS: The problem is you can melt the ice, but then you need to beef up the atmosphere. You need to put greenhouse gases into Mars’s atmosphere, because otherwise you’ve nuked it and ice melts for a while, but then three years later it’s all ice again. In order to fundamentally change Mars, you have to change the composition of the atmosphere, not just heat up a small patch of Mars.
I mean, you could do it. A lot of people are writing a lot of stuff about it, but it would take an enormous effort and the usual thought is okay, you can do all that, but what if it doesn’t work out so well and wouldn’t it just be cheaper to do it all in the South of England, for example. Just build more houses there, right? I don’t know, build apartment blocks in Cornwall.
Image: #17 ATA by Seth Shostak
Seth Shostak X Jemma Foster
Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer at SETI Institute (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) → @setiinstitute
JF: Can you describe the SETI project to date and your hopes for contact?
SS: You may already know Seti began in 1960, so that’s a long time ago. It was begun by this young astronomer, Frank Drake, in Green Bank, West Virginia. And he pointed a new antenna there at a couple of nearby stars, hoping to eavesdrop on radio signals. So that set the technique, or froze the technique in some ways, of SETI to search for radio signals.
More recent projects also search for laser beams that may be aimed our way, but all of the attempts to find company in the galaxy have been to look for signals. And that’s maybe not the only way to do it. Maybe it’s not even the best way to do it, because you could argue it’d be totally speculative. The aliens may not be producing very many signals because that might be dangerous for them or not part of their sociology. I mean, we don’t really know anything about alien sociology, but it is a thought.
Anyhow, since the 1960s experiment by Frank Drake, what has happened is mostly the development of new equipment and secondly, the expansion of our knowledge in astronomy that’s relevant here. Let me take the second one first. The first exoplanet, the first planet found around somebody else’s star – not our Sun, of course – was 1995. And that was a very big story. It was on the cover of Time magazine.
Since then, we found 4,500 exoplanets – you know, that’s okay maybe as a conversation starter at your next cocktail party, but the really important thing is not how many have been found – that just goes up every week. It’s the fact that now you can say with confidence that 80% of all stars have planets or something like that – essentially all stars. We don’t know much about those planets, but on the basis of results from the Kepler telescope, the estimate is that out of every three or four star systems that are stars that are somewhat like the Sun, you’ll find a planet that’s somewhat like Earth.
Now we know that at least the real estate is out there. We don’t know about the aliens, but life developed on Earth very quickly. So that suggests that maybe it’s not very hard to do. As far as what has happened in SETI, itself, keep in mind that there’s been very, very little government funding of SETI, particularly since 1995. There was a NASA SETI programme, but that was killed in 1995. So ever since then, it’s been a long time – two dozen years – that SETI has been funded by people who just send cheques. At the moment, I'm probably the only guy in the building here that’s actually connected more with the SETI programme as opposed to the astrobiology programs.
JF: With the congressional hearing on UFOs, or UAPs, we’ve been hearing testimony from US military and government officials such as Grusch, Graves and Fravor, about decades long UFO missions including reverse engineering programmes of recovered vessels and ‘non-human biologics’. How much is smoke and mirrors?
SS: Grusch nor anyone else claiming to have knowledge of secret government UAP programs has ever been able to publicly produce convincing photos showing alien hardware splayed across the landscape. And remember, we’re not talking about a Cessna that ploughed into a wheat field. We’re talking about, presumably, an alien interstellar rocket, capable of bridging trillions of miles of space, and sporting technology that is obviously alien.
If there really was some physical evidence of visitation, thousands of scientists would be fighting one another to study it. And the government would want it studied. This has always been another big sticking point in the UAP conspiracy theory universe. What is the point of hiding extraterrestrial technology in a Nevada hangar? What would be the goal, at this point, of shutting out the scientific community. The information, technology and — importantly — wealth incentives here seem overwhelming.
Returning to the issue of visual evidence, there are thousands of satellites orbiting Earth. The majority sport cameras aimed downward. Actual alien craft in our airspace bigger than an office desk would likely be visible to satellites that — among other things — supply imagery to Google Earth. Hypothetically, a vast conspiracy to scrub such images could exist. And the American populace readily accepts conspiracy explanations. Ever since the government’s disingenuous response to the 1947 discovery of crash debris near Roswell, New Mexico, the public has decided that the feds will never tell civilians the truth about visiting aliens. I remain sceptical until I see convincing hard evidence.
Having worked for the government, and also I grew up two miles from the Pentagon, and so did everyone in my school. Most of their fathers worked for the Department of Defense, as did my father, actually. What you realise is that the government doesn’t know very much about this because they don’t spend any money on it. Very little, very little.
The Air Force is interested in tracking down these UAPs, simply because they’re in the sky and they want to know what’s up in the sky before they send their own aircraft up into the sky. But they haven’t found anything. I mean, it’s not that there aren’t these videos that are covering something intriguing. You can explain most of the videos on the basis of very prosaic things like aircraft that are in front of your camera, 50 miles away. So as long as you have those possibilities, as long as there's a prosaic explanation, as a scientist, you would choose that first.
JF: Recently scientists discovered that radio blasts have been pulsing towards Earth every 21 minutes for the last 35 years, just that no one had noticed in the data until now. What do you make of that?
SS: Well, it’s unclear what’s causing these regular radio bursts but the fact that they are regular is a sign that they’re due to something that’s either rotating or orbiting another body. This is reminiscent of the discovery of the pulsars – emitters of regular bursts of radio and light. And while no one knew at first, these turned out to have a totally natural explanation. I figure the same will be true here.
The other thing to be said is that this is an example of how discoveries are made in astronomy. They very often they start with observations of something that’s unusual (as Isaac Asimov said, the most important comment of a scientist is “that’s funny.”) Once the phenomenon has been observed, the theoreticians think about it and come up with plausible (usually!) theories about what might be going on. These theories are usually checked by new observations, and eventually you’ve learned about a previously unknown phenomenon in the universe. I suspect that’s the scenario we’ll see played out here. Aliens are on the list, but probably not the explanation!
JF: What would be the protocol and timeframe from receiving a signal to decoding the message?
SS: Well, we know the signal is real, but where is it coming from exactly? And you can use various radio telescopes to sort of narrow in the patch of sky from which the signal is coming. And then you just look at photos of that part of the sky made during routine astronomical observations and say, well, there’s only one star. Or maybe there are a couple of stars there that are sort of like the Sun. They’re not the kind of stars that’ll burn out very quickly. These are stars that hang around for billions of years, so they may have planets, and it might even be known whether those stars have any planets, but if not, you can be sure that the planet hunters will immediately try to find out which of those has planets.
At the same time, the radio astronomers will be using larger arrays of antennae to make the box smaller on the sky from where the signal’s coming. So I honestly think that if you found a signal, you would know. You would know which star system it was coming from within months, no more.
And then you’d also then have a big time delay. So when did they send it? How many light years away is it? You just don’t know. Of course, once you find the star, it’s pretty easy to determine how far away it is because these are all going to be coming from a star system that isn’t very far away. There are probably lots of signals in the Andromeda Galaxy, or one of the hundreds of billions of other galaxies we can see. But they’re very far away and the signals will be so weak that it might be impossible to detect them.
So the assumption, and it is an assumption, is that if you find a signal, it’s probably coming from a star that isn't terribly far away – say 50, 100 light years, something like that. And within 100 light years, there are a lot of stars – thousands. So it may be that you have company that’s not terribly far away.
After that, once you’ve identified it, then of course the public will be asking, well, are we going to say something to them? Or what are they saying to us? It might be impossible to figure out what they’re saying to us for a lot of reasons. Mostly technical, but there will be people who will want to broadcast something like we’ve got all these used cars here and we’d love to sell them to you, or something.
Who knows what to broadcast to the aliens and how to start a conversation? There are also people who think that you should forbid that – serious people say that, and I don’t agree with them, but they do say, “Look, you don’t know what’s out there.” True. So you're just saying, “Hey, here I am,” essentially. And that might be dangerous and you’d hate for your tombstone to read, ‘He was responsible for the destruction of the human race’ or something like that.
JF: Some believe contact brings salvation, others destruction. Isn’t Douglas Vakoch at METI (Messaging Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) already sending out messages?
SS: Yes, Doug actually used to work in the office next to mine. I have known Doug for a long, long time. He now indeed has an office up in San Francisco for METI. The problem is he doesn’t have any money either. And he’s alone. He is interested in sending signals, and the reason he left SETI was because he was so keen to do that, and he ran into opposition from other people in the community who said, “Well, you know, we shouldn’t do that.” Look, you can say it’s dangerous. Who knows if it’s dangerous? But one thing you can say is that even if it were not dangerous, the nearest aliens were 50 light years away, which is pretty close, you know, and then you say, “Well, hi, we’re the earthlings and we’d love to meet you. Could you send some photos?” It would take 50 years for that signal to get there and another 50 years for their response, if they make any response. So nobody wants to wait 100 years for the results of their experiment, so that’s a problem.
JF: Time lag aside, what about the language barrier? My background is in sacred geometry, which to me is a universal language related to mathematics and music of nature, expressed in pattern and form. There have been attempts to create a universal language, or one that aliens might understand, like Alexander Ollengren’s LINCOS, or astrolinguistics for interstellar communication. What form or language would you suggest we respond to a signal with?
SS: The language barrier is maybe not so hard to overcome. I mean people figured out the hieroglyphics by the 1830s. Although that was written by Homo sapiens, which helps. You could send pictures and build up a picture dictionary.
You could just teach them to read English, for example. You send a picture of a star and you put underneath it S T A R, right? They don’t know what those little squiggles mean, but if you send enough of them, they’ll figure out that those are some components of a written language, and you can build up at least a series of nouns. And then verbs are a little tougher, but you could do that too, with simple verbs. I think you could get them up to a thousand words rather quickly if they’re at least as smart as humans, and you would assume they are if they’ve figured out radio and picked up our signal.
JF: There is an assumption of ET life as similar but perhaps more advanced than ours, which on the current trajectory would perhaps be a post-singularity, post-human, mechanical entity. What sort of intelligence are you expecting to find?
SS: Yes, well for them to have a SETI programme that picks up our signal or to broadcast one that we receive, one requires 20th century technology at least. If they’re like cavemen, they don’t know what a radio is. They have no idea. And that was true for the people in the 16th century, too. They were mapping the globe, but they had no way to send information to those ships. So yes, you have to assume they’re at least as technically sophisticated as we are, and the odds are simply on the basis of likely numbers that they’re very much more advanced than we are, so they probably can figure it all out.
If they are more advanced, then we are probably looking at machine intelligence. I have been saying for a long time that if you actually had a photo of the aliens, you might be disappointed because they’re going to look like a box with a switch or a couple of lights, right? I mean, we’re inventing our successors now.
And then people worry about what machine intelligent aliens will do with us, but it doesn’t mean that somehow we’ll all be wiped out. We didn’t wipe out all the dogs and cats. We just turned them into pets. I think I’ll be a pet of the machine.
JF: What is the role of AI in the quest for ET? Might it bridge more-than-human intelligence and language?
SS: Yeah, I suspect so. Although it may not be necessary, do you need AI to bridge the communication barrier between you and your dog? Your dog makes a lot of noise, but it’s not clear that there’s a lot of information in that noise. The total amount of information may be simply that somebody’s at the front door. Of course, people will use whatever technology is available when this problem comes up, assuming it does come up. So I think you would understand enough to be able to communicate. They might not appreciate Shakespeare, but they would understand simple sentences, I suspect, once you’d started this process.
JF: Are SETI looking for other forms of communication beyond radio waves - you mentioned lasers but presumably there are other methods, like gravitational waves or quantum teleportation?
SS: Yes, we assume that we know enough physics to be able to say, look, I don’t care how advanced they are. The fastest way for them to send information from here to there is to do it on a radio or a light beam, through electromagnetic radiation.
We don’t know any way to send the information faster. Some people call me up and say they’ll be using gravitational waves to communicate. Well, maybe, I mean, gravitational waves are very hard to produce, but compared to radio, they don’t go any faster, as far as we can tell. The theory certainly says that gravitational waves go at the speed of light, too.
So, there’s not a heck of a lot of advantage there. We don’t know of any technology that allows you to communicate faster and certainly cheaper than by sending lighter radio waves or television broadcasts or whatever, electromagnetic radiation, to the aliens. And assuming that we’re not missing some important physics, that’s what they’d be sending that what we could pick up.
JF: It’s quite an anthropocentric perspective. What if alien life exists outside our ideas of what consciousness is? Beyond our 3D perception, we just don’t have the right lens to view it, or if we do we’re just not using it? They could be out there in a 5D or 7D reality.
SS: Well, indeed, if there are ways to communicate that we just don’t know about, then of course, all bets are off. I mean, I’m sitting here in my office, but here, right here in the seventh, eighth, and ninth dimensions, there’s a great alien party going on. But you know, I can’t get there.
JF: Back to this reality then, what about extraterrestrial information arriving into our atmosphere on an asteroid, microbes carrying a host of messaging.
SS: Yeah, it’s certainly not beyond the interests of the people here. If you walk around the SETI Institute here, you’ll find people who consider that things like microbes could act as a sort of Johnny Appleseed, spreading life from one star system to another.
Part of the problem, of course, is that asteroids don’t move that fast either. They move at maybe a couple of miles per second or something like that. And that sounds fast. It would be fast if you were going to Birmingham or something like that, but at a couple of miles per second, it would still take you tens, hundreds of thousands of years to go to the next star over. So, you know, maybe there is life in some of these asteroids and even meteors that crash on Earth.
There was a big story back in the 1990s that in fact, some scientists at NASA had found evidence of alien microbes – or at least microbes, whether or not they were alien microbes, inside a meteorite. A meteor that had fallen to Earth. That would be a big story too. It was a big story in 1996. But it would tell you, okay, there’s life out there, but it doesn’t tell you much about intelligent life. Well, that’s the thing with SETI.
JF: What is the SETI definition of intelligence?
SS: I they can build a radio transmitter, they’re intelligent. That’s it. And you can judge your friends accordingly. That’s the definition we use for intelligence.
JF: Let’s imagine you receive a message, as has been simulated by Daniela De Paulis in A Sign From Space. What message would you send back?
SS: Well, you know, a lot of people have debated this over the years. What would we say to the aliens? Bob, here’s your chance. Right? And you get various answers.
I don't think it matters much. I mean I always suggest sending the internet, send the entire web – I mean, it’s a lot of information, terabytes I’m sure, and a lot of it is repetitive and the aliens will probably figure that we like cats because there are a lot of cats on the internet. But just send it all because that will make it easier for them to decode it. Just as the hieroglyphics were able to be decoded, partly, maybe even largely, because there’s so much of the stuff. There’s an enormous corpus of data to look at. So that would help you or your AI buddies to figure it out.
Other people have other ideas. They say, well, you know, we should send something to show that we’re not an aggressive species, and all that kind of stuff. And they mix in their personal politics with this. I don’t think when you read the hieroglyphics on the walls there in the Valley of the Kings, you’re so interested in the politics, you just want to know something about this society. And that’s why I say just send them everything, make it easier for them to understand it and they might learn something about us too.
JF: I can’t imagine they would garner a favourable opinion of us from the internet.
SS: Well, yeah, a lot of people say, well, we’re not advanced enough because we still have wars and stuff like that. Come on. You know, Julius Caesar was writing stuff 2,000 years ago that I had to read in high school. And it was still interesting, even though a lot of this discussion, the Punic wars, was not really contemporary in its appeal, but it told me something about life.
They probably won’t care too much what we are like, or what we need help with. I mean, if the squirrels in my backyard here in Mountain View were to ask me for help in some way, I don’t know that I’d do it. I’d say, “Look, I can’t help you guys. I’ve got things to do.” I’m not sure what ‘help’ would mean to them – find them more acorns or something. I don’t know. Why would aliens have any built-in sympathy for us or the means to help?
JF: Another suggestion is to send music, because it is a sensory message rather than a cognitive one.
SS: Music’s good. I like music. But one of the questions about music for me always is how did we evolve a liking for music, right? What’s the survival value in being musical? Almost everything else, you can point to it and say, well, of course it was important for survival, you know, 100,000 years ago to whatever. But music is a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, what is it about music that appeals to you? Very hard to define.
JF: It can inspire awe and be a reflection of the beauty of existence, of our existence, from the perspective of an alien. Unless they’re into cat videos.
SS: Well, that means you’re interpreting it as something that inspires you. But why is it that dogs don’t have music? Right? But then maybe they respond to music and they haven’t created music.
JF: Music isn’t limited to humans, obviously birds and insects use a form of it. I recently discovered that the visual display of a peacock is actually an infrasonic serenade made with the various vibrations of the feathers. And then there are the studies of plants responding to music despite not having ears, as that is probably the argument for aliens not having music because they lack ears or culture, again it’s very anthropocentric.
SS: The forests are alive with the sound of music. Well, maybe, I don’t know. I mean, when I was a student we used to play music to the plants, my roommate and I would play music to the plants inside our dorm rooms. But the plants all died. It turns out that you also have to water them. We’d forgotten that part, but yeah, maybe they like music. I don’t know why we have music, but I mean, I’m very grateful. That’s one of my deepest interests or loves, if you will, is music, but the point is that maybe the aliens don’t have music.
I remember going to dances in high school. And just looking at the gymnasium with all these couples sort of gyrating around with these sounds in the air. And I said, what if an alien landed? Now what would they think of this? Who knows what they think of it – maybe it’s some sort of religious right or something. So maybe that is what I would ask: One, do you have religion? Two, do you have music? Those are the questions I would ask. If you had had the ability to ask them anything.
JF: I was intrigued about ‘the song of hydrogen’ that creates a sort of background noise on the radio.
SS: Hydrogen, yes. There is background noise at the frequencies that are used for SETI, mostly due to hydrogen between the stars – you know, this thin gas of hydrogen, it’s a very, very, very thin gas. I mean, it’s better than any vacuum you can achieve in a laboratory here, but there’s still always a couple of atoms of hydrogen in every cubic centimetre of space.
And hydrogen is just atomic physics, but hydrogen is known to naturally produce a radio signal. It is useful for astronomers. I got a salary for many years by studying hydrogen, but it doesn’t really affect SETI very much because the signal produced by hydrogen to begin with is really just white noise.
So that’s what it sounds like, but it’s also limited to a fairly narrow part of the radio dial. So it’s easy enough to look for signals outside it, but it has been suggested for a very long time that if the aliens are broadcasting and they want us to pick up their broadcast, they’ll broadcast at a frequency that’s very near to the hydrogen line because everybody will know about hydrogen’s behaviour. Anybody who’s technologically advanced enough to hear them will also know about hydrogen.
JF: And that's around 1.42 gigahertz?
SS: Yes. 1.420.4059, et cetera. So that narrows it down. Well, if you believe that assumption, the assumption is that that’s the frequency they'll choose.
JF: Otherwise you’re just searching for billions of different frequencies.
SS: Yes. Exactly. That’s one of the things that makes SETI hard to do, right? Because you have to check such a wide range of frequencies and that at least at the present, it takes a long time because you’re looking at a certain band and you look for 20 minutes at that band, and then you move the instruments all up the dial or down the dial, and you do it again at another set of frequencies. And if you do this, as you say, for the billions of what seem to be reasonable frequencies, you know, that might take you an hour or two depending on how much time you spend at each frequency. So it slows everything down, but that’s just a technical limit.
JF: Is that not something that machine learning could assist with?
SS: No. AI can help recognise if there’s a signal, but it can’t do the actual listening for you in this sense. It’s just radio technology. It’s not, you know, it’s not very exotic. It means that over the course of the day, maybe you can do two or three star systems, right? And that’s really slow going when you consider that you might have to look at a million star systems before you find something nobody knows.
JF: Do you ever turn up for the day and think, ‘today I feel like going to look at Andromeda’, or are you always just systematically working your way through grid by grid.
SS: No, and keep in mind it’s computer software that’s doing everything, actually. But yes, it’s methodical. You started from one end of the band and you just go up the dial, as it were. You’re never tempted to go, okay, I’m gonna go turn to Andromeda today.
JF: Not even if you had a dream about it the night before, or a very strong intuition to do so?
SS: Well, in the early days, you know, people would do that. I would do it too, but it’s like trying to win the lottery. You know, you’re just picking random numbers and seeing if anything happens. And it might, but mostly it doesn’t.
JF: Do you believe that aliens have made contact with Earth at any point, from the accounts of abductions, sightings, crop circles and so on?
SS: I noticed that the crop circles mostly appear in south southwest England. I think mainly Hampshire and Wiltshire. Although to be honest, it seems to me at least unlikely to say that aliens would come from who knows how many light years, all the way to Earth just to carve graffiti into British wheat. I mean, maybe they do that, but that doesn’t sound like a high-priority project to me.
I am interested in this stuff only because I hear from somebody essentially every day. So people will write or whatever. And last week I was at Contact in the Desert conference and most of the people there, including the speakers, were true believers in all this stuff. So they’re standing up there and telling you about this evidence for the alien. Most of them believe the aliens are here. They’re telling you what the evidence for that is, and you’re sitting there and listening to what they say. It shows that they don’t know any science.
I honestly don’t think that we are being visited. A buddy of mine, another astronomer, said to me once, “Shostak, if I thought there was a 1% chance that any of those stories was true, I would spend all my time working on it.” And I don’t think that’s an outlandish statement. I think it would be true of anybody. I mean, ask Martin Reese, he knows about this stuff. He’s the astronomer royal there.
I think that the sightings – and there are about 8,000 reported every year in the United States; Europe is about the same, per capita – and you can look at them and almost all of them, you can just explain away very quickly. Mostly aircraft, sometimes balloons, like the case of the Chinese spy ship recently, stuff like that – rather prosaic explanations for what they’re seeing. There’s always about 10%–20% that are not so easy to explain. You have to throw up your hands and say, “I don’t know what that was.”
On the other hand, you know that doesn’t mean terribly much. I mean, the police might be able to solve – well, typically they can solve 30%, 40% or 50% of all the homicides in London. But what about those others that they couldn’t find a culprit for? Maybe these are murders committed, not by humans, but by aliens that have landed in the outskirts of town and taken the tube to the downtown area where they would kill people?
Well, that’s possible. Not very likely though. It’s very much more likely that the crimes you didn’t solve were also committed by humans, and you just didn’t put the evidence together. So yes, these people make interesting claims, but there’s no real evidence, something physical here – just show me an ashtray or something from an alien spacecraft and you’ll convince me. But they never do that.
So at this conference, people are saying, “Well, the government has the evidence” – I mean, Americans love this idea that the government has somehow collected all this debris from Alien Craft and has it stacked up in a warehouse at Area 51 in Nevada – I mean, come on. If you work for the government, you realise this is something that they really can’t do.
JF: I think that’s something that bothers me as well, that a highly sophisticated craft travels light years through the galaxy, only to crash at the last moment. I feel more inclined to suggest that flying saucers that haven’t evolved much since the 50s are the smokes and mirrors stuff, while aliens would be more likely to engage with our planet by manipulating matter from an interdimensional perspective or use quantum teleportation or methods beyond our 3D framework.
SS: Exactly, we’ve come 200 light years, but the last 50 feet defeated us. Yeah. Doesn’t make much sense. I was just going to say that with the famous Roswell case, for a long time most people didn’t even bother to read about it because it wasn’t famous, but then some fellow did make it famous by writing books about it.
That crash was actually well known. It was a project – a secret project, but not anymore – a project to use high-altitude balloons to detect enemy missiles, actually the project was called Mogul and it classified in the early ’50s, but not anymore. So there’s a rational explanation for what happened to Roswell, but I think the fact the government was very coy about saying what it knew contributed to the scepticism of government claims about UFOs that you find in the United States. As I said, here, 80% of the population figures that the government would keep information about visitors under wraps. It’s unclear to me why they would do that and they couldn’t do it anyhow. Because even if you think the US government could do that, what about the Belgians and the Botswanans and the Bolivians – are they all keeping it secret too? Or do the aliens only visit America because they like our fast food?
JF: What was your incentive when you were younger to become an astronomer? Were you always interested in the idea of contact and extraterrestrials?
SS: Mind you, I’ve had many different careers, and they weren’t all even in science, because I have a great interest in some other things. I was certainly interested in aliens in science, just because as a kid I was exposed to it. My father was in charge of the Office of Naval Research, so I was exposed to that, and many of my friends were interested, so I always found science and technology interesting. I was always building stuff.
There wasn’t any particular event, but astronomy was something that I was also interested in because I had gone to the Hayden Planetarium many times in New York with my cousins who lived in Brooklyn. When I would go up to the city, we would take the subway over to the American Museum of Natural History and just go to the planetarium shows, which I liked insofar as I didn’t fall asleep in them.
Probably a more consequential inspiration for me was all the movies that I would see on the weekends because when I grew up in the ’50s, there were a lot of science fiction films. You detonate an atomic bomb in the deserts of Nevada, and immediately you wake up some critter that gets to New York somehow and tries to flatten New York. I even started making movies when I was 11 myself, and I was trying to make a science fiction story with a different plot, but people laughed at the films, so we switched to making comedies.
It was all inspired by these cheesy B-movies that were being made in the 1950s. They were mostly made by Hollywood. Somehow, movie makers in Europe and elsewhere didn’t jump on this bandwagon – the exception being the Japanese, of course.
Well the one that made the biggest impression – I mean, these films would make me sick all night after seeing them. My mother was really against my going to see these films because I’d be up vomiting all night because I was so sick, because they really scared me. But the one I liked the most at that time was the original War of the Worlds.
JF: And now you consult on films depicting space, aliens or interstellar travel.
SS: Yes, well, they usually ignore basic physics or light speeds if interstellar travel is required in the storyline. Like in Star Trek, Captain Kirk will call up Scotty in the engine room and say, “Put the pedal to the metal. We got to get over to that sector of the galaxy,” whatever. I mean, we don’t have any way to do that. And it’s faster than light travel at warp speed. So physics says that you can’t do it no matter what technology you have, but they do it anyway because otherwise the show goes on for a really long time, billions of years.
I was confused by Interstellar, but I'm easily confused. I thought there were some interesting things there. I mean, the thing about science fiction is that the hero is not an actor or an actress. The hero is the idea of the story, right? That’s what drives the story forward, and maybe I just like that because it’s easy enough to be caught up by the personalities in the film, but the idea is something that’s much more durable – the ideas or the worlds mentioned in it.
What’s the idea? Well, aliens are looking for water. They’re Martians, right? Because up until the 1970s, most aliens in the movies were Martians. Now we know that Mars is not such a great place for aliens. But the story is they come to Earth, they want the water, and the humans are in the way. So they take care of the humans. Simple, really simple. You got a bad guy and he’s gonna do really terrible things unless you stop him. What could be simpler than that? Like a cowboy film? Well, what have we ended up on Mars? Well, we’re going to go to Mars. I mean, we have a lot of hardware sitting on Mars.
We have an idea of life on Mars now but that wasn’t true when I was a kid. Nobody knew what Mars was going to be like. And there were many people who still thought there were canals on Mars. In fact, there’s a story, it may only be apocryphal, but there was a story that when Mariner 6, I think it was, produced the first detailed images of Mars by the creators, and things like these photos were shown to President Lyndon Johnson by NASA, and his reaction was, “So where are the canals?” So he was still expecting canals. This was the president. He wasn’t a scientist.
So now we know what Mars is like. It’s very dry. It’s very cold. Even on a warm summer day, it’s still pretty cold. And you can’t breathe the air, such as it is. It’s very little air, but you can’t breathe it anyhow, not no oxygen. So it would be a tough environment, but it’s better than most planets. So your future may be on Mars.
JF: Well, as long as Elon Musk doesn’t nuke it. What are your thoughts on terraforming?
SS: The problem is you can melt the ice, but then you need to beef up the atmosphere. You need to put greenhouse gases into Mars’s atmosphere, because otherwise you’ve nuked it and ice melts for a while, but then three years later it’s all ice again. In order to fundamentally change Mars, you have to change the composition of the atmosphere, not just heat up a small patch of Mars.
I mean, you could do it. A lot of people are writing a lot of stuff about it, but it would take an enormous effort and the usual thought is okay, you can do all that, but what if it doesn’t work out so well and wouldn’t it just be cheaper to do it all in the South of England, for example. Just build more houses there, right? I don’t know, build apartment blocks in Cornwall.
Image: #17 ATA by Seth Shostak