Would we recognize, would people like you recognize straight away if something, like how do you distinguish between something that we just haven't seen before You know, something that you haven't seen before in your decades on this world with the fact that this universe that we live in is billions of years old and there's probably loads of stuff that we've never seen before versus, wow, okay, this is an organized manipulation of something that could only come from an intelligent being.

I think there are some obvious things that we would know.

Definitely technology has produced this because we know something about physics.

We don't know everything about physics, but we know it's really difficult for nature just to produce a few very narrow band signals that only occupy a few frequency channels.

We don't really know anything in astrophysics that can do that, but we can do that with technology.

I think if we see a signal like that, we'd be we'd be kind of 99% sure that this was another civilization that was generating that kind of signal.

But it's also true, for example, if we were looking for the waste heat that civilizations produce because they use a lot of energy.

And I am kind of curious as to, well, obviously, who knows, but how do we think we would communicate with an extraterrestrial species and what do we think we would want to say to them?

Yeah

... and making the announcement.

Um, but what we hope is, you know, if there was an amateur astronomer, and, you know, let's face it, amateur astronomers have made, continue to make discoveries all the time, so, you know, that wouldn't be sort of, um, surprising in a sense.

We'd hope that, you know, they would realize the magnitude of their discovery, and they'd maybe just sort of do a little Google, or they'd ask, you know, AI or whatever, you know, "What should I do? I'm in this kind of exceptional situation.

Um, what are the things I should be thinking about?" 'Cause they, they'd probably realize that, well, they're gonna become very famous, you know, for starters.

Um, so they, they might see all the positives, but there are also some negatives associated with being in that position.

And we hope the document kind of addresses both of those things, the things that we sh- you know, you should do in that circumstance.

This, this doesn't look right"?

Right, right.

You know, e- even, even, even when we see rocket launches, for example, we see all sorts of incredible phenomena when you have staging, um, when rockets begin to reenter the atmosphere.

You know, all these things can be, you know, um, you know, very interesting for someone looking up at the sky, and they wonder, you know, what, what is it that they're, they're seeing.

And we also know that, you know, not only are we putting a lot of things into space, and so we do see sometimes kinda weird things.

But we also know that there are an awful lot of things flying around, you know, in our environment.

Drones, you know? There are drones everywhere.

Um, there are drones for all sorts of national security reasons, which, you know, um, you know, are not, are not well-known, but they're there.

Go ahead.

In addition to that, the team or person bringing forward has an obligation not only to reveal the possibility of a extraterrestrial signal, but when it is, the possibility is ruled out, they have the responsibility of coming forward and saying, "I was wrong." Did I say all that correctly, Mike?

I th- I mean, I think that little summary, um, it, that covers a lot of ground, I have to say, and I think it, it covers some of the most important, um, areas that the, the protocols tries to address.

Um, the, the protocols are really, I mean, as, as, as you've probably seen, it's a, it's a very short document.

Um, we want it to be short because, um, you know, people, you know, [laughs] just not gonna read it if it's ten pages.

It's only three, three or four pages long.

Um, and I think it, you know, th-those, those points that, that you make that we have to be careful about a discovery, we have to be careful about the verification process 'cause we don't want to make this big claim, you know, that there's life out there without being really, really sure that, you know, there's no other sort of natural explanation to this.

No one wants to sort of go out there and shout, "Oh yeah, we've found aliens," or, "We've found intelligence somewhere else in the universe." Make it into a big thing, and then we find out that, oh, it was actually some artifact in the telescope system, for example.

Um, who do the protocols apply to, and is following them voluntary or mandatory, and is there any enforcement for people or nations to, to follow them?

mind, Michael, what's changed in these new protocols? How different are they from either the 1989 or the 2010 versions?

First of all, we recognize that, as I mentioned before, these techno signatures, we're not just looking for radio signatures, but it's anything out there.

So that's one thing.

The other thing is that we actually talk about researcher safety in the document.

We raise that as an issue in this modern era of social media.

We make some recommendations which are quite common within science today.

You know, for example, that you want to archive your data, you want to protect your data, you want to make your code available, all that kind of thing that's part and parcel of modern sort of doing science.

Are you confident the new protocols will be effective and adhered to?

So, Michael, why did these principles concerning the conduct of the astronomy-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence need to be updated?

Well, the topic, the field has changed.

I think we were then dominated by looking for communication signals from other civilizations, mostly in the radio part of the spectrum, a little bit in the optical part of the spectrum.

And now, really, the whole topic has kind of blossomed.

And we're looking for any kind of anomalies in astronomical data across the whole electromagnetic spectrum.

So the radio, the infrared, the optical, submillimeter, millimeter, you name it, people are looking for stuff.

that's just a little bit different maybe stuff that can't be explained by natural causes and might be the telltale signatures of really advanced civilizations that are using a lot of energy and that energy shows up as a sort of anomaly in astronomical data so the field has changed it's much more international so SETI is happening all over the world these days including Australia which is very active in the field.

Are you confident the new protocols will be effective and adhered to?

So at what point did you guys kinda go, "All right, now we need to actually start getting other companies or manufacturers to help us build these things"?

Well, we, we still assemble in-house here in California, so we'll...

You know, we've, we eventually made our own custom design chiller, and we have the custom acrylic tubs, and we, we still, you know, make those here, assemble them, test them.

So we still do that.

Um, there was kind of an evolution where I think literally for the first whatever, I don't know, how long were we buying just everything that we put on the tub, like, on Amazon? It's like, for a bit, and then we were like, "Well, we- we're- we're getting big.

We should buy in bulk." So we found, I found someone in China who was making, like, an ozonator, and he started to basically kind of become our supply chain in China, so he found the people we were buying from on Amazon and found different versions of it and, you know, they had engineering.

So we started to kind of source things through him over time more and more, and so he would bulk buy and handle a lot of the, the, the supply chain stuff for us for a long time.

It's gonna be a-