Regular Episode
#145 – FERMI TO KNOW AND UFO TO FIND OUT
The episode opens with Blake’s commentary on a then-breaking news story: the New York Times had just revealed a secret Pentagon program — the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program — that had spent over $20 million examining UFO reports, greenlit by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and with much of the funding directed toward Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace — a man whose involvement with the allegedly paranormal Skinwalker Ranch does not inspire Blake’s confidence. Blake draws a pointed parallel to the Project Stargate psychic spy program: secret budget, small results, and former participants heading to the private sector with breathless claims of imminent disclosure. Where’s the beef, indeed.
📡 What SETI Actually Is (and How Few People Are Doing It)
Seth clarifies a common misconception: SETI is not a sprawling global network of listening stations. The total number of people actively conducting SETI searches worldwide is, by his estimate, around 10 to 15. The main players are the SETI Institute itself (using the Allen Telescope Array in the Cascade Mountains of Northern California) and SETI@home at the University of California, Berkeley. Harvard runs a smaller optical SETI experiment looking for laser pulses rather than radio signals. The Allen Telescope Array’s individual dishes are modest — about 20 feet across — but 42 of them work together, a cost-effective modern approach compared to building one enormous dish like the Arecibo Observatory (which Blake had been incorrectly imagining sat in a volcanic caldera; it’s actually in a karst sinkhole).
🍿 Contact vs. Reality: What Finding a Signal Would Actually Look Like
A listener question asks whether discovery would play out like the film 🎬 Contact 💵 — Jodie Foster dramatically scribbling on a notepad at the Very Large Array while everyone spills coffee. Seth’s verdict: not quite. The ATA monitors around 70 million frequency channels simultaneously, which would require Jodie to wear approximately 35 million pairs of earphones. More practically, any candidate signal would take days of verification — instructing the antennas to shift slightly off-target to see if the signal disappears (terrestrial interference stays put; a genuine point source goes away), then calling a colleague at another observatory to confirm. The whole process might take a week, not a breathless afternoon. Crucially, Seth emphasizes there is no secrecy policy: past false alarms have seen media calling within hours because researchers tweet freely. The public will know.
🤔 The Fermi Paradox and the Wow Signal
Blake asks Seth about the Fermi paradox — physicist Enrico Fermi‘s 1950 lunchtime observation that if the universe is teeming with intelligent life, some civilizations would have had tens of millions of years to colonize the entire galaxy — so where is everybody? Seth lays out the math without pretending to resolve it.
The conversation turns to the Wow! signal, detected at Ohio State University in 1977 when astronomer Jerry Ehman came in one morning, found a striking anomaly in the printout, and wrote “WOW” in the margin. The signal was never detected again — not even by the same instrument moments later. Seth notes that multiple teams, including the SETI Institute, have searched for a recurrence without success. Could it have been ET? Yes. Can anyone say that it was? No.
🌏 Rare Earth and the Numbers Game
A listener question raises the Rare Earth hypothesis, articulated in the book 📚 Rare Earth 💵 by Peter Ward and Don Brownlee of the University of Washington. Their argument: Earth’s large stabilizing moon, Jupiter’s role as a comet shield, our position in the galactic habitable zone, and other factors make complex life vanishingly rare. Seth is unconvinced by most of the list, though he credits the book with generating productive debate. His preferred framing is the numbers game: we now know most stars have planets, the Milky Way likely contains roughly a trillion planets, and the observable universe holds around two trillion galaxies. Claiming Earth is the sole cradle of life, he observes, requires an impressive degree of cosmic self-regard.
💸 Funding: Government Out, Private Donors In
Seth confirms what Blake suspected: U.S. government support for SETI didn’t just decrease — it evaporated entirely when Congress cancelled NASA’s SETI program roughly two decades before this recording (the program had been costing taxpayers about three cents per person per year). The SETI Institute now runs entirely on private donations. The Berkeley group received a substantial boost from Russian tech investor Yuri Milner through the Breakthrough Listen initiative — $100 million over ten years — though Seth notes that even that sum is modest compared to the cost of a single Mars rover mission. The SETI Institute accepts donations at seti.org.
📻 SETI vs. METI, and the Public’s UFO Calls
Seth distinguishes between SETI (passive listening) and METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence — actively transmitting). A recent METI effort sent a short signal, including some music, from an antenna near Tromsø, Norway. Whether anyone is listening is, as ever, the question.
On the subject of UFO phone calls: Seth says he receives several per week from members of the public who’ve seen something in the night sky. In all his years at the institute, he cannot recall a single case he suspected was a hoax. The callers are sincere — they’ve seen something they don’t understand and, thanks to decades of television, immediately reach for an extraterrestrial explanation. He and Blake agree that this says more about the power of cultural framing than about the skies.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 💵 by Seth Shostak
– 📚 Cosmic Company: The Search for Life in the Universe 💵 by Seth Shostak and Alex Barnett
– 📚 Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe 💵 by Peter Ward and Don Brownlee
– 🎬 Contact 💵 (1997), dir. Robert Zemeckis — based on 📚 Contact 💵 by Carl Sagan
– 🎬 The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms 💵 (1953) — Seth’s personal favorite monster film, featuring stop-motion effects by Ray Harryhausen
🔗 Related Links
– SETI Institute — seti.org (donations and Big Picture Science podcast)
– Allen Telescope Array
– Wow! signal
– Fermi Paradox
– Drake Equation
– Rare Earth Hypothesis
– METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
– Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)
– Skinwalker Ranch
– Project Stargate (psychic spy program)
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
MonsterTalk interviews Seth Shostak, chief astronomer for the SETI Institute, and host of their podcast and radio show, Big Picture Science. Our interview questions come from Facebook listeners, and we also comment on recent news regarding secret US government UFO research.
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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