Back in America

If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast.

Hello and welcome to Back in America, a podcast exploring America's culture, values and identity. This conversation was recorded live on September 17th. You can watch the unedited version on our Facebook page and YouTube channel. After taking a long summer break, during which my intern Josh Wagner took over Back in America, with his excellent series Poetism, I am happy to be back behind the mic. My guest, Thess Shostak, is a doctor in astronomy and an alien hunter working with the SETI Institute, a research organization whose mission is to explore, understand and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe. In fact, SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

He has published more than 400 articles on science, including a regular contribution to NBC News Match, gives many dozens of talks annually, and is the host of SETI's Institute's weekly science radio show, Big Picture Science. Welcome to Back in America, Dr. Thess Shostak. Thank you very much, Stan. It's a pleasure to be here. What do you think makes America so attractive for researchers and scientists? Well, I mean, America actually had very little culture of science for a long time. Science was something that America didn't really do. It was being done in Europe, mostly in Germany, actually. And the US didn't do so much of that. Now, mind you,

there were exceptions. The third president, Thomas Jefferson, was kind of an amateur astronomer, but everybody in the late 18th century was an amateur scientist, I should say. So there was some action. But actually, what changed everything was the Second World War when it became clear, kind of a basis competence in science was necessary just for the defense of the country. So suddenly, the government began to sponsor basic research. The consequence of all that, this is a big country. So there is perhaps more money than you would find in a place like, I don't know, Lichtenstein or something like that. And it's something that is relatively valued compared to other professions. You've been searching for ET or extraterrestrial intelligence under any form

for all your life. And again, as I was looking for information about this interview, I kept saying interviews of you saying that we were getting very, very close to establishing contact. But some of those interviews were 10 years ago. So are we almost there? Well, nobody knows, right? It's like saying, when are we going to find a cure for cancer? You know, many researchers will say, well, we're fairly close to that. We think we are. But on the other hand, they've been saying that for a while, too, and we still don't have a cure. So one can't state because there's no such thing as being close to discovering that there are some aliens out there that are at least as clever as the average person on Nassau Street or something. I mean, we don't know that. You don't

know if you're close. So all we can say is the equipment is getting faster and faster. We're looking at more and more of the universe. And on that basis, I've bet everyone a cup of Starbucks coffee that we will find some evidence that we're not alone by 2035. So I'm preparing to buy a lot of coffee. And I heard you mentioned the technology, which is getting better and better. How are you using AI to help you make sense of the signal you get? Yeah, well, we are. I mean, there is some use of AI. One student at the University of California in Berkeley, which is really only about 80 kilometers from where I'm sitting here, has done some work to apply the techniques of machine learning, which is a specific form of AI, to the signals that we have to process to see if there

anything interesting in them. So there are sort of baby steps towards using AI. But in general, we haven't used it in the past. We've built very specialized hardware and, of course, software to sift through the data and find the kind of signals that only transmitters could make. And so this isn't a matter of recognizing the message. I think most people think that that's what we're doing, that we're looking for some mathematics or French poetry or something like that. We're not. We're just looking for the type of signal. Is it a signal that only transmitters can make and not something natural cooked up by nature? So we're sort of in the beginning phases of using AI technologies. So SETI started in the 60s. And actually, I've got two questions

here. But I heard a talk with Jill Tartar saying that if the ocean would represent the entire universe, we've only searched so far for the value of a hot tub. That seems to be very, very little. And my question is, how long will it take? I mean, it is true that we're looking for a needle in a haystack, which is another metaphor used to describe what we're trying to do. And you might want to know, actually, you've got this haystack and you're looking for a needle in it. When are you going to find it, Bob? When are you going to find this needle? And it only depends on three things. It depends on how big the haystack is. Well, when we're looking for ET, we know how big the haystack is. We're only looking in our own galaxy. The second question is, how fast are you

going through the hay? Are you looking at one piece of hay every 10 years? Are you shoveling it out? Or what? And the third thing is, how many needles are in there? We know the first two things when it comes to SETI. We know how fast we're going through the hay. We know how big the haystack is. What we don't know is how many societies are out there in our own galaxy that are broadcasting signals that we might pick up. We don't know that. But if you just take sort of a range of what you think are reasonable numbers, then that's when I came up with, okay, we're going to do this within 20 years. And that's why I bet everybody that cup of coffee. So I said SETI started in the 60s, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think at the beginning, you didn't have a lot of good press.

A lot of people were looking at you like, who are those weirdos trying to establish contact with the green little man? That image has changed over the years. How would you explain that? Well, I don't think it actually has changed, to be honest. Because to begin with, I wasn't involved with the beginnings of SETI. That was done by a fellow, an astronomer by name of Frank Drake, whose office is actually down the hall here. He's still working. He's 91 years old now. And he did the first experiment in West Virginia in 1960. Did he get a lot of negative commentary where people making fun of it? Not many, actually. Not many. There was tremendous interest in it, and there still is. So there is something called the giggle factor that's often

connected to SETI. That one of the problems we have is that people don't take it seriously. But I think they take it very seriously, actually. I've never run into this giggle factor myself. Now, maybe they're not saying it because I work in the field. But I think that that's something that's kind of a made-up boogeyman, a kind of a fabricated problem. Because, in fact, we now know that there are just more planets out there than there are stars. We have some idea of how many of those planets would be sort of like the Earth. All these things we've learned in the past two dozen years. And they all point in the same direction, that there's just no reason why we couldn't have a lot of cosmic company, if you will. So I don't think that the giggle factor is

actually playing much of a role at all. Okay. Well, good to hear. Maybe to stay on the criticism of SETI, I've also run into the idea of a religious debate where people of

strong faith sort of criticize your work. Why is that? First of all, is it true? And then, if it is, why is it? Yeah, I don't think it's true either, actually. I mean, mind you, you're right in this regard, Stan, that the only time... I give a lot of talks. I give like 60 talks every year. And so, one a week, put it that way. And the number of times that anybody, during the question and answer, would make a critical remark saying that this violates my religious principles. That happened once. It happened in North Carolina, actually. And some fellows stood up during the Q&A and he said, well, there can't be aliens out there because the Bible doesn't say anything about aliens, which is true. It doesn't. But that requires a very

literal interpretation of the Bible. But that was the only time I ever heard a religious objection to aliens being out there. The facts are that all the three atomist religions, so that's Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all have... The theologians have all made statements that, yeah, they're okay with the idea that there might be aliens out there. The Catholic Church has a brother, a brother, Guy Consulmonius, his name, actually. He works for the Vatican Observatory. They have an observatory. And he's very interested in SETI. He's written books about it. And so I don't see any objection there either. So again, I don't know that there's a whole lot of objection. It might be, I have to say this, if we were to find a signal that there are

some factions within the religious community, the fundamentalists who would object and say that it was all fake because it isn't described in the Bible and they might take the Bible literally. That's the idea of the fundamentalists. So there might be in the end some sort of objection, but at this point I've not seen it. Do you think that there is something about the American consciousness that makes its people so fascinated with aliens and UFO? Could the SETI Institute have been created anywhere else than in the US? Well, that's actually a very good question, I think, because what's interesting to me is not so much the UFO phenomenon. That's worldwide. One out of every three Americans, so that's a hundred million Americans, believe that Earth

is being visited, that some of these UFOs are actually alien spacecraft. By the way, I don't believe that, but in any case, so one third of Americans believe that. But on the other hand, if you did a survey in Europe, you would find that one third of the Europeans or one third of the Japanese or one third of the Australians, it's the same around the world. So that isn't very, maybe not so interesting. But when it comes to having a SETI experiment, at the moment, that's only in the United States. And why is that? Yeah, and why is that? That is a good question, for which I have not a good answer. I'll tell you what I think. I mean, it's cultural. It's clearly cultural. It isn't a matter of expertise or equipment or money

Europe in particular, but not only Europe, certainly Australia, Japan, they could all do SETI experiments. They have the radio telescopes. They have the people who know all about the technology and how to do astronomy and so forth and so on. They have all that it takes to do this, but they don't. And as we discussed a little earlier, I lived in Europe for 13 years and I worked with people in France and Germany and Italy and so forth, UK. And I asked them, why is it that none of you do any SETI work? And the answer was usually something like, oh, well, that's not part of our national personality. Whatever that means. I don't know what it means. But I do think that America is different in this sense, that in America,

it's a little easier to do something that's completely out of the ordinary. I would agree with that. And I found that that was a little more difficult in Europe. How are you funded? Poorly, I would say. We're not funded very well. When I joined the SETI Institute quite a while ago now, it was a NASA program. So there was federal money. It wasn't a huge amount of money. It was one thousandth of the NASA budget. So not a whole lot of money by government standards anyhow. But that was ended in 1993 by Congress. So since then, NASA can't do SETI. Well, they

actually could because that was only for one year. But that's a technical point. They're looking for life on Mars and some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and so forth. Microbial life, right? But they don't do SETI. And so all the SETI in this country, which is the only place that's being done at the moment, is funded by private donations. So it's people who think, oh, it's kind of an interesting thing to do. And we finally have the technology to do it. So let's do it. So, you know, I'm in the Silicon Valley here in California and there are within 20 kilometers of where I'm sitting, there are many people who could afford to do SETI for centuries, I think, at the rate it's being done now. So it's all privately funded.

All right. Good. So I'm just looking at the comments here and I would like to welcome our guest from France. We've got someone saying, I'm watching from France. So welcome, France.

And we've got a question here from Dan saying, I'm very curious how those at SETI feels about the buzz surrounding the recently released UAP assessment report to Congress and newly announced pentagone UFO office. So that's definitely a question I had for you. Thank you, Dan, for asking it. Let's dive into it now. The pentagon paper. Yeah, pentagon paper as well. That's a slightly different subject. But indeed, the Defense Department's report on UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, I guess they like that better than UFO, because if you say UFO, people think of alien spacecraft. But the question is, could these UAPs be alien spacecraft? I mean, there are all sorts of possibilities. They could be drones from Russia

or China or somebody else. They could be just artifacts, mislabeled phenomena, or they could be alien spacecraft. And of course, it's that last thing that interests most of the public. I've looked at the three videos over and over again, and it's pretty easy to explain them on the basis of things that have nothing to do with aliens. Looking at aircraft that are more than 150 kilometers away, for example, with infrared cameras, you might just see two blobs that sort of merge together and looks like a peanut. That would explain it. So there are explanations for all three of those videos that don't have to do with aliens. So you have to say, well, what's more likely? Are these things aliens or are these other problems with the interpretation? But my real

argument against them, so you can choose what you like, but if you choose for aliens, you really should know why, because that's a priori a little less likely, it seems to me. But the real point for me is that there isn't any other corroborating evidence except for witness testimony. There are a lot of people who see something in the sky. I hear from such people every day. Every day somebody sends me an email or they call me up or whatever, and they've seen something. A lot of people call me up because they think they're personally in touch with the aliens and that sort of thing.

In the United States, there are roughly 10,000 reports every year of UFOs. These people aren't lying. It's just that they've seen something and they don't know what it is, so that they tend to jump to the conclusion, well, I don't know what that was. Must be an alien spacecraft. And in science, that wouldn't be considered very good evidence. That's just your story. So my question is, well, if the Navy is able to see these things every day, how come we never see them with our satellites that are looking down on the earth? There are like a thousand satellites that are looking down. They're not all American satellites, by the way. The Europeans have them. Many countries do. And nobody else sees these things, right? Amateur astronomers, they don't

see these things. Radars, they're pretty good radar fences in the United States designed to see incoming missiles and so forth. They can see something about the diameter, well, about one centimeter diameter, even several hundred kilometers up, and they don't see these things. So it's surprising to me that they're only seen from F-18 Hornet jets with certain kinds of cameras. I think that's suspicious. Right, right. And I have to say that, again, I spent some time on Reddit, the UFO subreddit and all that stuff. And a lot of people are like, oh, SETI, they don't even believe that aliens are part of, are already here. They're looking for life, but they should look on earth. You know, aliens have already made their way to

earth. What do you say to that? Well, I mean, that's not our job. That's not what we think is the best approach. It's pretty easy to say, well, we should be doing that. But

we have the money for and we're free to do that. But to say that they're here, it's true that there have not been many experiments to try and find these things. Almost everything is after the fact. Somebody thinks they've seen something and then that gets investigated. But there is a fellow who, as in the Harvard astronomy department, his name is Avi Loeb, and he has organized a project to actually do an experiment where he'll build some sort of camera systems, for example, that can look all around the horizon in any given spot in any case. And then, you know, with software trying to determine, okay, what am I seeing there? Is that an airplane? Is it a bird? What is it? That kind of thing. And see if they find anything that's unusual. So they're at least trying to do this

experiment in general. That's one of the big problems with the whole UFO phenomenon is that there are essentially no experiments. It's just reports. And people think, oh, this report is from a fighter pilot or this report is from an astronaut or this report is from some military guy. And consequently, it must be true. But study after study shows that these people are no better recognizing aliens than, you know, the average guy on the street. So I would really like to understand from you, you know, why is it important to spend so much time, energy and money looking for life out there when we've got so much problem on Earth, right? We are near apocalyptic climate change, pandemic and a slew of other existential crises. How can space travel help

ensure survival of our species here on Earth? Should we rather invest into, you know, earthbound technologies? Well, I mean, you could always have made that claim. I think it's a very weak argument, actually. You could have made that claim in the, I don't know, in 1800 and say, you know, these guys in Europe are funding this fellow Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and all he's doing is writing music. And, you know, we've got real problems here on Earth. And, you know, a third of the population doesn't have adequate food and the schools are bad and the public health crisis here, there and elsewhere. We cannot afford to fund music or literature or art or a whole bunch of other things that we do. And one of the most important things that we do is exploration,

right? It was in the exploration in the 16th century that actually transformed Europe so that it was no longer a feudal society. So they had big societal consequences because now, if you didn't like the way you were living, you could get on a ship somehow and escape it, at least in principle. Okay. So it made a big difference, but you could argue, oh, no, we don't, we can't afford to send this guy Columbus. We just can't afford to send him across the ocean in these three ships. We've got better things to do. That argument could always be made. But I think any student of history will note that societies that didn't do exploration in the end were very vulnerable and usually were taken over by somebody else, right? I mean, the Egyptians didn't do a whole lot of exploration and

they were pretty soon under the heel of the Romans and the Greeks. So I think it's just a quintessentially human activity, exploration. You never know what it's going to lead to, but if you don't do it, then your society becomes very static. Hmm. I've heard you say that if ever we manage to make contact with aliens, they will probably be more technologically and intellectually advanced than we. How come? Well, I mean, that's a pretty simple argument. It just is to say that if they have the capability to say, have big transmitters so that we can pick up their signals, obviously they're more technically advanced than we are because our most powerful transmitters are not really good enough

to broadcast to everybody, at least at a strong signal level that we ourselves could pick up. In other words, we're in the situation today where our technology allows us to listen, but not to deliberately broadcast it very strong signals. So what that means is it's a bit like, I don't know, the Aztecs, right? The Aztecs were a sophisticated society, but they didn't have the ship technology that would allow them to go to Europe. The Europeans, on the other hand, did have technology to come to the Americas. And so that's why when they met the Europeans, the Europeans were several hundred years more technologically advanced than the Aztecs were. I've got a question from Gauvio. You can say a few words.

Yeah. The Galileo project was initiated, started by Professor Avi Loeb at Harvard. He came up a little earlier in the conversation. He is convinced that we might be being visited. He thinks that's worth looking at a little harder. He was the one who, well, he wrote a book actually, which he maintains that this object that was seen in 2017, so three or four years ago, called a Muamua, might be an alien or part of an alien spacecraft. Anyhow, so he has set up a project called the Galileo project to build equipment to look for UAPs or UFOs. And actually, he put me on the science advisory board. So every week we have meetings and talk about what they're doing. And I think that this is a good thing to do. But the problem with these kinds of initiatives is

only that if you find something, that's great because that just changes everything. If they were to find that we're really being visited. But if you don't find anything, it doesn't solve any problems. It doesn't settle anything because the people who don't think we're being visited, and I'm one of those, would say, see, I mean, you can try as hard as you want, but you're not going to find something that isn't there. But on the other hand, the people who do think we're being visited will say, see, once again, somebody is keeping something secret or they didn't do the right experiment. So you never actually settle this matter. And hearing you answer this question, am I right in saying that indeed you do share information with the Galileo

Project? Well, I'm on the science advisory board. Yeah, no, there's nothing secret about what they're doing. And about what you're doing? There's absolutely nothing secret about what we're doing either. You drive up to the telescopes and sit in the observing room, if you like. I mean, there's nothing confidential about this. This is another misunderstanding that people have about science, that somehow there's a secret formula on the blackboard here. And only this one guy, Bob, over here, he knows what that formula means and he has to keep it secret. So don't take any pictures with a small camera and send it to somebody else. That isn't the way science works. Science is a very open endeavor. And if you find something interesting, if we were to find a signal

as a trivial example, the first thing that we would do before we call up all the newspapers is call up people at another observatory and say, you look at it, right? And see if you find it too. Because if you don't, and we do, then there's something wrong. And it's probably just a difficulty with our equipment or who knows what. But that's the way science works, right? If you discover something, but you're the only one who can see it, that's always very suspicious. And I heard mention that, but I really wanted to have maybe a fuller answer about transmitting rather than listening, like you do, listening beacons, rather than transmitting and sending signals. Like I think a couple of initiatives have done so far.

What's your take on that? Yeah. Well, I guess your question is why listen rather than transmit? Well, we don't do both. It's almost a financial consideration. The telescopes that we use, the radio telescopes, and they're just, you know, we have 42 antennas here in Northern California, about 500 kilometers north of San Francisco. They don't even have transmitters. In fact, you wouldn't want them to have transmitters because that would mess up the receivers because they would be so strong relative to what the receivers are expecting to find. So, you know, you have to decide, are you going to transmit or are you going to receive? And there is at least one project to transmit, and that's run by a guy who used to work here

at the SETI Institute, Douglas Vakoc, and he's up in San Francisco. He has an organization called METI International, Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Now, he doesn't have any equipment either, so he can rent some, you know, telecommunications antenna that does have a transmitter and send some messages. The only thing that I would say about transmitting is about it once, and of course, a lot of people listen to that. But the point is that let's say that the nearest aliens are 100 light years away. That's pretty close, actually, in astronomical terms, but that means that if you transmit a message, hi, we're the earthlings, it takes a hundred years to get to them. And if there's actually somebody there and they want to answer

you, then it's another hundred years for that answer to get back to you. So it takes, you know, 200 years at minimum for you to learn anything. And as a consequence, you need to play for the long term. Yes, yes, you have to have funding for a very long time. So Dan, again, is asking

what's in store for SETI with regard to the James Webb telescope launch this winter? Will SETI get the data? Yeah, well, I mean, there will be experiments done with the James Webb that are relevant to SETI. You know, it isn't really set up to look for the aliens directly. I mean, we do have experiments that look for flashing laser pulses, right, that aliens might be using for communication. Actually, you can use lasers for communication. Anybody who has anything with fiber optics in it knows that you can do that. But there are experiments to look for those not involving James Webb. James Webb's relevance to SETI is probably going to be the fact that it can look at the light coming from planets around other stars. And it can analyze that light,

that light tells you something about what's in the atmosphere of those planets. And if you were to find oxygen, for example, as a sort of a simple example, but if you were to find oxygen in some planet's atmosphere, you would say, well, that certainly looks like there are plants on that planet, right? There's life there, right? Because most of the oxygen in our atmospheres do entirely to plants these days. And so, you know, it might be able to tell you here are a handful of planets where we know at least that there's life. Doesn't mean that there's intelligent life, but there's at least life. Okay, all right. So I've got my final question, which is about America in general. But before I asked you that, is there anything else you would like to add? Is there any question

I didn't ask that you think I should have asked? No, I think you asked the right questions. People in general seem to me to be very interested in what happens if we were to find a signal. Some people don't even think that they would be told that the government would cover it all up. Those are mostly Americans. Americans love to think that their government is covering up stuff. And, you know, for its part, the government does occasionally cover up stuff. So, but this is a science experiment, as they say, and we've had some false alarms in the past where we thought maybe we had found a signal. And the idea that it would get covered up is completely nutty, because within hours of us finding the signal, you know, the major newspapers in the country

were already calling us up. So there's no secrecy. Yeah, this is just no secrecy possible. But they also wonder, well, will it be dangerous? You know, it's not dangerous to listen. And that's all we do. Right. I mean, if you tune in your favorite radio show, or you tune in this, this show, I mean, there's no danger. It isn't that, you know, Stan's going to jump into your living room and start giving you a hard time because you're listening to him. I mean, he doesn't even know that. So, you know, those are the kind of considerations. We might learn something from the aliens. If they're more advanced than we are, then maybe we actually learn something very important. Right. Well, let's hope so. Thank you so much for your time. Before I let you go,

because this podcast is about exploring what America is, I would really like to hear from you, what is America to you? Well, America, yeah, I've occasionally thought about that. What is America? America is, tends to be chauvinistic, to use a French word, right? And we, many Americans buy into the idea of American exceptionalism, that America is, you know, in many ways, better than the other countries in the world and so forth and so on. Those are aspects of America that are not so attractive. But I will also say that America in the end is just a set of ideas. It's ideas. It's how you organize society. And unlike most countries in the world, America's personal freedom is much more than most other countries. Most other countries, it's, you know, what's better

for society? That causes a lot of trouble, of course. You see it now with, you know, the reaction of people who don't want to get vaccinated or wear masks or whatever. You know, they want their personal freedom and that's more important than the freedom of all these millions of other people that are living in the country, right? That kind of thing. So that's not such a good thing. But on the other hand, I will say, and maybe this is simply because I live here in the Silicon Valley, but that this idea of personal freedom, that you can do what you want, has led to the development of all sorts of interesting things, you know, from the cell phone to Facebook or whatever you want to name. But there's a lot of dynamism in America. And if you fail, right? I mean,

some of my relatives have started several companies and the first three fail, but the fourth one doesn't fail. And in Europe, it was very hard if you failed once to try again. It was hard to get money the second time. That's not true here. So there's a certain dynamism, I think, to America's setup that I think is valuable, just valuable. Well, Dr. César Shostak, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for talking to us about Citi, the place where you've spent all your life looking for extra-terrestrial life. That was definitely fascinating. Thank you to the audience listening in from social media. Thanks very much, Stan. Thank you.