Search for extraterrestrial intelligence

In fact, there's a crop circle years ago in like the seventies that showed a human face.

It was a response to a call that SETI, the SETI program sent out in, I don't know, a decade prior or whatever it was.

And then, so they sent back the same blueprint thing that was sent out, but it was altered.

And then the other one next to it was a human face.

Now you could argue, well, couldn't they be here at the same time? Well, now you got the problem is if we're talking about some intelligent civilization, say 2000 light years away, that's 2000 years ago.

so the farther away you go the farther back in time you are so in terms of having actual communication is we're the first on the scene that has to be able to do that so that's been used as an argument against SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life given that it takes light time to travel and if we're the first then there's a very low probability that we're going to actually have another intelligent civilization with the capability of interstellar.

And of course, to get all that you're going to need a fine-tuned location.

Where do we see that fine-tuned location? I mean, God could have created intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but it would have to be and a spot of the universe where everything is fine-tuned to make that existence possible, and we've yet to find another location in the universe where we see that possibility.

Now, people have argued, well, maybe you go 10 billion light years away.

Well, now we're 10 billion years into the past.

So again, that doesn't favor SETI at all.

So you're talking about this in terms of designing a location for habitability, but what about designing another location for discoverability?

And that's what we're doing.

We're doing that with SETI, sending out radio signals at random out there in the hope that somebody may pick them up.

So the WOW Signal, anyone listening, go and do this.

Go and Google WOW Signal, W-O-W. It's a really good read.

In November of 1974...

A small group from SETI, S-E-T-I, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, used the radio dishes at Arecibo to send out a message to whoever might be listening.

They sent about a quarter of a kilobyte, including structure of human DNA, map of our solar system, population of the Earth.

Helpful facts like that.

And I definitely think that they're here, especially human looking ETs.

In fact, there's a crop circle years ago in like the 70s that showed a human face and It was a response to a call that SETI, the SETI program sent out in, I don't know, a decade prior or whatever it was.

And then, so they sent back the same like blueprint thing that was sent out, but it was altered.

And then the other one next to it was a human face.

Everyone agrees that that's a cool and interesting thing that we should be doing.

And I think even for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, you know, not looking for microbes on Mars or chemicals in the atmosphere of a distant planet, but actual But signals from a potential civilization far away, you know, that used to have a large stigma attached to it, which SETI scientists used to call a giggle factor that I think has decreased as we've learned more about the universe and how big it is and how many planets there are.

You know, the UFO alien combo side of things is kind of the last vestige maybe of that stigma that exists.

And so I don't know that I know what will happen, but we have seen this kind of mainstreaming of the rest of it.

The newest Pentagon files are being read in sharply different ways.

The head of the SETI Institute sees old witness reports from an era of space fever.

Podcast hosts on CBN News are weighing alien visitors, secret human technology, and other dimensions.

The Pentagon's own investigators see a pattern of unknown craft over sensitive sites in the western U.S.

The first dates to August of 1952, when three Boy Scouts camping on Catalina Island reported a silver object moving faster than a typical jet at an unknown altitude.

The second came in November of 1953 from a man who watched a round, purplish-white object hang motionless over the island before it drifted off towards Los Angeles.

CBS brought both reports to Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the SETI Institute, which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence group that listens for signals from other worlds.

Diamond believes life exists beyond our solar system, but he has a hard time accepting that visitors would travel that far only to circle for a couple of hours, get spotted by a group of scouts, and then leave.

But beyond UAPs, there's also scientists actively searching for intelligent life beyond our planet.

The SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, for example, hopes to find particles of extraterrestrial societies that may have wafted onto our moon.

That's from a headline in the New York Times.

Humans are curious and we want to believe, but why? This is exactly the question our guest explores in his book, We Want to Believe, How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters.

So one of the things that's interesting to think about is why haven't we and where might we actually find those minds if we went looking for them?

And I want to come back to what I talked about in the intro.

What is SETI?

So SETI is an acronym, S-E-T-I.