Dr. Seth Shostak, an astronomer, questions what if ET is out there at TEDxSanJoseCA. Here is the full transcript.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here: What if ET is out there by Seth Shostak at TEDxSanJoseCA
TRANSCRIPT:
Is E.T. out there? Well, I work at the SETI Institute. That’s almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face. I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate.
Now, a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic, ridiculous, maybe even hopeless, but I just want to talk to you a little bit about why I think that the job I have is actually a privilege, okay, and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into this line of work, if that’s what you call it. This thing — whoops, can we go back? Hello, come in, Earth. There we go. All right.
This is the Owens Valley Radio Observatory behind the Sierra Nevadas, and in 1968, I was working there collecting data for my thesis. Now, it’s kind of lonely, it’s kind of tedious, just collecting data, so I would amuse myself by taking photos at night of the telescopes or even of myself, because, at night, I would be the only hominid within about 30 miles. So here are pictures of myself.
The observatory had just acquired a new book, written by a Russian cosmologist by the name of Joseph Shklovsky, and then expanded and translated and edited by a little-known Cornell astronomer by the name of Carl Sagan.
And I remember reading that book, and at 3 in the morning I was reading this book and it was explaining how the antennas I was using to measure the spins of galaxies could also be used to communicate, to send bits of information from one star system to another. Now, at 3 o’clock in the morning when you’re all alone, haven’t had much sleep, that was a very romantic idea, but it was that idea — the fact that you could in fact prove that there’s somebody out there just using this same technology — that appealed to me so much that 20 years later I took a job at the SETI Institute.
Now, I have to say that my memory is notoriously porous, and I’ve often wondered whether there was any truth in this story, or I was just, misremembering something, but I recently just blew up this old negative of mine, and sure enough, there you can see the Shklovsky and Sagan book underneath that analog calculating device. So it was true.
All right. Now, the idea for doing this, it wasn’t very old at the time that I made that photo. The idea dates from 1960, when a young astronomer by the name of Frank Drake used this antenna in West Virginia, pointed it at a couple of nearby stars in the hopes of eavesdropping on E.T. Now, Frank didn’t hear anything. Actually he did, but it turned out to be the U.S. Air Force, which doesn’t count as extraterrestrial intelligence. But Drake’s idea here became very popular because it was very appealing — and I’ll get back to that — and on the basis of this experiment, which didn’t succeed, we have been doing SETI ever since, not continuously, but ever since.
We still haven’t heard anything. We still haven’t heard anything. In fact, we don’t know about any life beyond Earth, but I’m going to suggest to you that that’s going to change rather soon, and part of the reason, in fact, the majority of the reason why I think that’s going to change is that the equipment’s getting better. This is the Allen Telescope Array, about 350 miles from whatever seat you’re in right now. This is something that we’re using today to search for E.T., and the electronics have gotten very much better too. This is Frank Drake’s electronics in 1960. This is the Allen Telescope Array electronics today. Some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately 100 trillion times better than they were in 1960, 100 trillion times better. That’s a degree of an improvement that would look good on your report card, okay?