Interview with the alien hunter

Seth Shostak, author of "Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," is senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, a very down-to-Earth organization of scientists attempting to "explore, understand, and explain the origin, nature, and prevalence of life in the universe." Last weekend was the SETI's Institute's SETIcon and KALW radio spoke to Shostak before the event. From KALW (Shostak photo from Star Trek: Of Gods and Men"):

What makes you so sure there is extraterrestrial life - that might be a very basic question, but what evidence, to you, is most compelling?

SHOSTAK: Well, there isn't any evidence of extraterrestrial life, compelling evidence, yet; in fact, the bottom line is, there isn't - we haven't found ET and frankly, we haven't found pond scum. We haven't found dead pond scum. But, I think that situation is going to change in the next couple of decades and the reason is that the searches are getting so much better. We're sending space craft, of course, to Mars. There may be life on Mars. What you have to do, probably, to find it, is drill a hole a couple of hundred feet deep and pull up the muck at the bottom of that hole and look at it under a microscope and you might see martian pond scum. You might say, I don't know, do I care about that? Do I want to spend my tax dollars looking for Martian pond scum? Because you know, I've got earthly pond scum in the bathtub at home.

But if you found life on Mars then you would know that life is just some sort of cosmic infection, it's not something miraculous because look, two worlds have it, so there must be many more. All these things are possible but we haven't found them yet and I think that the reason that I remain optimistic that we will, are just developments in mostly astronomy, and the fact that we're learning that planets are just as common as fire hydrants - they're all over place. The best estimates for the number of worlds in our own galaxy, the number of planets - a trillion. A trillion! That's a big number.

"Senior astronomer Seth Shostak on the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (KALW News, via Daily Grail)

Confessions of an Alien Hunter by Seth Shostak (Amazon)

• [Nadreck]

  In Warren Ellis’s great comic book mini-series Global Frequency issue #3 is about an alien civilisation’s battle memes invading us via some poor shmuck’s PC running seti@home.

• [awfl]

  A decade ago, after a radio interview (NPR?) with Shostak where he was discussing SETI, I emailed him asking about some minor detail regarding the hardware/software. He was very gracious and replied with a solid answer and helpful information.

  PS Even if the television waves have been traveling all those light years and have reached far star systems, their *amplitude* has fallen well, and probably irretrievable, into the noise.

• [nanuq]

  As if a real nerd would ever wear a red shirt. We all know what that means.

• [Mongrove_Moone]

  “two worlds have it, so there must be many more”

  Isn’t this a scientific fallacy of some kind? I mean, two occurrences of anything could still be essentially random coincidences rather than “proof” of “many more.” Is “correlation =/= causality” what I’m thinking of?

  And, since both worlds are in the same system, I think you’d be looking at cross-contamination more than independent origin, right?

  Skeptics ~ isn’t this the SETI-version of the bigfoot/ESP/ghosts argument?

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Oh hey: the inverse-square law probably has a greater effect than just the attenuation of the signal.See:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

  But the effects work together: and both decrease signal strength. For attenuation, see:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuation

  I think I was confounding the two.

• [Brainspore]

  I agree with everything this guy is saying but I think he could use some help in the PR department. If you’re trying to get more people on board with the “science” thing you probably don’t want to summarize your position as “life isn’t miraculous, it’s just a cosmic infection.”

  • [saehn]

    Yeah, but realistic typically perspectives don’t sell people on things :-P

• [alllie]

  A red shirt! He shows himself as a RED SHIRT!!

  I thought blue was for science. Still red is engineering and Scotty never died despite being a red shirt. So is Shostak saying he’s basically an engineer rather than a hard scientist?

  • [Brainspore]

    I thought blue was for science.

    You forget: Lt. Uhura was the one who actually got the aliens on the phone, and she wore red (in most episodes, anyway- they weren’t entirely consistent about that). Seems appropriate to me.

• [JDavid]

  Nice shirt. Put him on the away team list. Like, now.

• [Anonymous]

  SETI: money pit.

• [Jason Rizos]

  Fast forward twenty years, this man is standing before a crowd, announcing First Contact with an extraterrestrial species. Just after his Earth-shattering announcement, in the crowd, a group of BoingBoingers are overheard, speaking in Comic Book Guy voice. “I believe the red shirt is the proper nomenclature of the Engineering Officer, whereas the blue of Science would be more appropriate.”

• [shmageggy]

  His claim that ‘”I love Lucy”, every day, washes over a new star system’ is pretty much wrong. Stars are a helluva lot farther away from each other than one light-day. Our radio signals would hit a new star every couple of years perhaps, and have only reached a handful so far. Space is big.

  • [Brainspore]

    “I Love Lucy” has been on the air since 1951. There are well over 1000 star systems within 59 light years of earth. Not quite a new one every day, but more than “a handful” and certainly more than one every couple of years. (The number grows faster as time goes on).

    • [Ugly Canuck]

      That’s right: the waves propagate outward more or less spherically from earth, do they not?

      • [Brainspore]

        Yes indeedy! I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in high school calculus but I’m almost sure that sphere is expanding at such a rate that our earliest TV & Radio transmissions are probably up to the “new star system every day” distance now.

        • [Ugly Canuck]

          That sphere expands in all directions at the speed of light: but as awfl #19 reminds us, above, attenuation of that signal also proceeds apace.
          Weaker and weaker: those signals are not gaining energy as time goes by, and as they travel farther and wider into space.

  • [jmcgarry]

    Space is… dark?

    • [Halloween Jack]

      It’s hard to find

      A place to park

      Burma Shave

• [Anonymous]

  SETI is a joke. The first thing they do when they find a signal is turn it over to the government. A government that may or may not be ran by aliens.

  • [David Pescovitz]

    Nope.

    “Once an extraterrestrial transmission is detected, there’s an established, though informal, protocol for whom to inform, says Welch with a grin. It’s no longer the President of the United States or even the Secretary General of the United Nations who gets the first call. It is investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, cofounder of Microsoft. A major underwriter of the SETI project, he will be the first to know when the aptly named Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, has breaking news to report.”

    From:
    “Sharing the sky: An engineer’s quiet search for extraterrestrial intelligent life” by David Pescovitz

    • [Brainspore]

      Pfft. Same difference, they’re all Reptilians.