Astronomer Seth Shostak discusses ET hypothesis
2/1/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
Out of the ashes of a 1993 NASA-related budget cut, the SETI Institute.s Project Phoenix program took wing in 1995, embarking on SETI.s most ambitious attempt to locate the presence of alien life yet. In the spring and fall of each year, astronomers from Project Phoenix for three weeks inhabit the 1,000-foot (305-meter, or 18-acre) radio telescope that.s based on the cliffs of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. To date, not one search effort has yielded the discovery of radio signals coming from another star.
On the www.seti.org site, Public Programs Scientist Seth Shostak says Project Phoenix's autumn visit to Arecibo was .like a boat ride down a placid river. With hardly a ripple in the system, we've watched the celestial scenery pass by slowly, all the while scouring the river banks for tell-tale signs of intelligent life..
The mission of Project Phoenix is to search the microwave radio spectrum (ranging between 1,000 and 3,000 megahertz) of 1,000 older stars, which are located nearer than 200 light years from Earth. (A light year is 5.88 trillion miles, so the outer limit of the search range is 117.8 trillion miles.) Project Phoenix has already searched 500 of these stars . roughly half of the number on its target list. Since 28 million channels are scanned simultaneously, computers do most of the listening.
The guiding principle for the search revolves around the notion that, since Earth.s earliest TV and high-frequency radio signals have unintentionally leaked into 1,000 of the nearest stars, alien civilizations. programming could be traveling into Earth.s atmosphere. Not everyone agrees that radio telescopes are the best vehicles for searching for alien life, of course. What if ET civilizations communicated telepathically?
But don.t expect Project Phoenix to conduct in-depth conversations with alien civilizations anytime soon. Consider this: If it were to detect signals from a civilization that exists 100 light-years away, the group would have to wait 200 years for a reply to a deliberate broadcast. Consider, also, that a manned space mission would require 60,000 years to reach the nearest solar system, Alpha Centauri, which is located 4.2 light-years away; that.s almost 25 trillion miles from where you.re sitting.
Shostak, who holds a degree in physics from Princeton Univ. and a Ph.D. in astronomy from California Institute of Technology, is also author of 1998 Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life. In his book, he contends that UFOs and aliens are wished into existence, and believes that the work of ufologist-skeptic Philip Klass .best withstands the hard light of scientific inquiry.. Shostak writes (see page 136) rhetorically, .After a half-century of UFO sightings, where.s the payoff? What new science do we know that we didn.t find out on our own? Where.s the technological spin-off, the advanced materials, the super hi-tech products that we otherwise wouldn.t have? If the Air Force really has alien spacecraft under wraps at the celebrated secret test site known as Area 51 in the Nevada desert, why does our military continue to build planes following the same designs it always has? Why don.t we have a craft that.s a hundred times better than anyone else.s?.
Of course, a dyed-in-the-wool ufologist would retort that Shostak is a disinformant. And so the battle for mindshare rages.
AlienZoo: Seth, SETI is gearing up for another three-week session at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, home of the world.s largest immobile radio telescope? Is this the correct way of describing the telescope?
Seth Shostak: Well, I don.t think I would insult a telescope by calling it immobile. (Laughs.) But you.re quite right. It sits at the bottom of a natural bowl there in Puerto Rico. It can only point straight up, but that.s a little bit misleading. You can.t tilt that antenna, but the receiver.s suspended above it by a cable . a whole bunch of cables, actually . so that receiver can move around a little track. So, in fact, that telescope can see quite a bit of the sky.
AlienZoo: When, exactly, will you be occupying the facility there?
Shostak: We get to observe . that is, use . the telescope in Puerto Rico twice a year, normally the spring and the fall. Our fall session is coming up soon. I think November 22 is the first day that we actually get telescope time. As you can imagine, a big telescope like this is in great demand. It isn.t like what you see in the movies, where an astronomer kind of wanders up to a mountain, unlocks the door, goes inside, puts his eyeball to the telescope eyepiece, and checks to see if the moon is still there. These are very expensive instruments. All of the telescope time is booked months in advance. It.s all competitively allocated, which is to say that if you have an experiment, other astronomers have to agree that it.s a good use of telescope time. We get this telescope time for three weeks in the fall, three weeks in the spring.
AlienZoo: Exactly where are the stars that you.ll be scanning this time?
Shostak: Well, we look at nearby sun-like stars. We figure that those are the kinds of stars that are most likely to have Earth-like planets, where we think not only life could cook up, but intelligent life . life that.s smart enough to build a radio transmitter so that we could hear them. . . . They.re all within about 150 light years, so they.re kind of our neighbors in space. And they.re all over the sky, of course . wherever you aim a pair of binoculars, you undoubtedly are looking a couple of the stars that we.ll be looking at with this telescope.
AlienZoo: Are they at any position in the sky?
Shostak: Well, no preferential position. Of course, there are more stars in the plain of the Milky Way. In other words, on a clear night . which most people don.t have any more, if they live in cities . if you go out to the countryside, you can see this feint band of light across the sky. If you look in that direction, that feint band is caused by all of the stars that are piled up in that direction. . . . For us, that doesn.t matter to us, because we.re looking for stars that are nearby. They.re really all over the sky.
AlienZoo: Seth, can you give us an idea of what life is like at Arecibo? You.ve described it in the past as monastic . a bit like living in a monastery. Is that correct?
Shostak: Well, it is . unfortunately! Actually, you get to like it after awhile. For three weeks, you can handle anything, right? (Laughs.) It.s a bit like going to college, but maybe without the classes and too many classmates. You live at the telescope. There are these cabins and dorms there, that they throw the astronomers into. Anybody who has seen the movie Contact may remember Jodi Foster got to share her cabin with Matthew McConaughey. We don.t usually have romantic trysts like that. (Laughs.) I.ve not known any of those. The cabin that is portrayed there is actually one of the cabins that are used there. We observe at night. So I usually don.t go to bed until very, very late. You wake up late in the morning; usually the heat wakes you up. You get something to eat . there.s a cafeteria on the site. And you walk into the control room, and deal with any problems that have accumulated. And ultimately, you observe for six hours or so, sitting in front of computers, and do it all over again. There are no weekends. There.s no time off. You just do this for the entire time you.re there.
AlienZoo: I imagine that you maintain a pretty full schedule of interviews and speaking engagements, explaining and promoting SETI. What are some of the strangest questions you.ve been asked?
Shostak: Actually, not too many of the questions are very strange. Occasionally, people will ask questions that deal with the fact that aliens are interfering with their personal lives, and sometimes those are strange. There are some questions that come up over and over again. For example, a lot of think that we.re broadcasting, in other words sending a message into space and waiting for a reply. We.re not doing that, and we.re just listening. We.re already hoping that they.ve sent some messages that are reaching us now. The other question is, What happens if you find something? What happens if you pick up something? And then what? Of course, we don.t know. We haven.t picked up on a signal yet. To begin with, it will be a very big news story . I mean really big. Some people think that the government would cover this up, but of course there is no way they could cover this up. (Laughs.) The evidence is in the sky. Anybody can find it. But beyond that, what would happen is you.d build a bigger instrument and go back and look for the message.
AlienZoo: As far as sightings of space ships are concerned, though, SETI.s official position reads, .The lack of credible physical evidence has made it difficult for serious scientists to believe that UFOs have anything to do with extraterrestrial visitors.. There are a couple of words there that catch my attention. What does SETI mean by credible? And, secondly, there are many hardcore ufologists out there who would call themselves serious scientists. Are you at particular odds with ufology?
Shostak: I hope not. You said this was an official position, but of course it.s not an official position. There.s no company line. This is like a university, really. Anybody can say anything they want. But I don.t mean to understate the fact that I believe you would find that essentially every scientist working here . in fact, every scientist working here . would agree that UFO evidence is simply not compelling. That is to say, look, if the aliens are already here, that would be a heck of a lot more interesting than finding them hundreds of light years away. We would be very interested. I would personally be extraordinarily interested. And we would be spending all of our time looking at that evidence. Not just us, but you.d have tens of thousands of university researchers, who.d be beavering away day and night on that stuff if they though it was real. No doubt about it, there couldn.t be a more important scientific story than the thought that aliens might be visiting the Earth, or have been visiting the Earth in the past. It.s the position of the world.s academics, not just us, ... that this evidence just does not stand up. People send it to me all the time, and it usually consists of photos. And the photos look like, well, there.s some sort of object floating through the air . you know, it might be a UFO and it might be hubcap. Either one would make the same sort of photo. But that.s not good enough. It.s not good enough. The fact that you could make it so easy . fake it so easily . means that I.m not going to believe it. If you come in and say, .I.ve got the cure for cancer, but I.m not going to give it to you, I.m just going to show you photos of somebody before and after.. Are you going to take that very seriously? No. You.re going to say, .Look, I.ve got to run some experiments myself.. That.s the problem. . . . It.s like that saying: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
AlienZoo: And what about OSETI, or Optical SETI: Is it gaining support?
Shostak: Yeah. Actually, it.s not such a new idea, but people are certainly paying more attention to it these days. The idea is, okay, we look for radio waves that are broadcast into space. . . . But what about flashing lights? In the past, we thought, well, maybe that isn.t such a good idea, because if we were to send a light signal from Earth . big search lights into the heavens . and flash them on and off, and get somebody.s attention, the trouble is that the light would be drowned out by competing light from our own sun, if you were looking from a couple of light years away. So we figured that the aliens wouldn.t use that too much. It turns out that you can build very powerful lasers . . . that operate in ordinary wavelengths of light . or in infrared, because that.s even better. You can make very short pulses, maybe a trillionth of a second long, but pulses that are really, really bright . so bright that for a trillionth of a second they outshine your own sun. The aliens could have a very big laser that for five minutes a day sends pulses in our direction, and for the next five minutes sends pulses into some other star system.
AlienZoo: Geologist and paleobotanist Dr. Bruce Cornet has discussed the formation of a group forming called SETV, the Search for Extraterrestrial Visitation. The idea is to invite people to scan the skies from their backyards, so that a control group could exist, against which reports of UFOs would be measured. In concept, it.s a lot like SETI@Home, the SERENDIP computing project, because anybody can do it at home. Would this help SETI.s efforts?
Shostak: No. I don.t know. I need to know more about it. It doesn.t like it.s terribly helpful. There is already a group, based in New Jersey, called the SETI League. It.s trying to get radio amateurs to use backyard satellite dishes to scan big chunks of the sky, building a simple receiver that allows them to do that. They want to get 5,000 people to do that. That way, they can look at the entire sky. This is a good thing to do, because if a very strong signal is coming from some constellation or another, but it.s only on for a week, and then it goes off, we.ll never see it . the professional SETI experiments will never see it, because we won.t be looking in the right direction at the right time. But I do have to say that simply using a backyard satellite dish without using the right kind of receivers, and so forth, probably isn.t useful, because the sensitivity is so small.
AlienZoo: Let me throw a cockeyed conspiracy your way, just for laughs. It goes like this. SETI@Home, where you can sign up your computer to crunch Project Phoenix data during its unused cycles, is a project of DARPA.s (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which handles high-risk technology projects. One of DARPA.s specialties is parallel computing. Could it be the case that SETI@Home is a way of trying to get civilians used to the idea of volunteering to crunch an outside organization.s data, so that they would be willing to participate in a Department of Defense effort in a time of emergency?
Shostak: I think fundamentally what you.re saying there is the American public loves the idea of conspiracies. It.s just great to think that your government has got these very sophisticated plans to take advantage of your unused CPU cycles. (Laughs) If the government is indeed involved in this project . and it stopped its involvement in this project, by the way, in 1993; this was a NASA program, but in 1993 Congress said, .We.ve got to reduce the budget deficit. We.re killing this.. And they did. We.re running on private money now.
There.s nothing secret about this office. You can just walk right in and walk around. What you.ll see are a bunch of desks with computers on it, and people sitting around, and presumably doing something. But I would think that if there were any DARPA money involved with this project, I.d have a much better desk. (Laughs) And a better income, I might say. I just don.t think that.s the case. To think that SETI@Home is somehow an advanced plan for the government . . . I think the two guys at Berkeley who are doing this, would love to have some government money, too. And I can tell you they don.t.
The total number of people in this country, in the entire country, working on SETI is fewer than the people who are working on the In-and-Out Burger across the street here.
AlienZoo: Lastly, Seth, what do you think of Richard Hoagland's theory of Cydonia, the face on Mars?
Shostak: Well, I think that there.s something that looks like a face in the 1970s photographs made by the Viking orbiter. But I just went to Safeway last night and bought a 10-pound bag of potatoes. If I.d go through those potatoes, who knows, I might find the face of Nixon, or at least something that looks like a face. But it never occurred to me to claim to the world that this was an attempt by the spuds to get in touch. I think that if you look at enough mountains, you.re going to find enough that look like faces. Our eyes are pretty good at that. . . . When that particular feature in Cydonia was looked at with the Mars Global Surveyor . the high-resolution cameras that have 10 times the resolution of the photos made in the 1970s, it looks like what it is: a geological feature, a pile of rock. If the photo had shown bulldozers parked around it, I.d have a different opinion. (Laughs) It.s a rock. And it.s certainly been good to Richard Hoagland. He.s earned a decent living for 20 years, by telling people that this is some sort of signal by the aliens. But I certainly don.t believe it, and I don.t know a single expert on Mars -- and there are a lot of them around here, because we.re next to NASA Ames Research Center . who takes it the slightest bit seriously. Think of the motivation. If you were an alien civilization trying to get in touch with us, would you come to a nearby planet - forget the Earth - and put up a big structure that looked like the inhabitants of the planet that you.re trying to contact? Does that make sense? Why didn.t they put a dinosaur there? Why didn.t they put their own face there?