Seth Shostak

We've chewed on it.

We had, uh, uh, Seth Shostak come on, and, uh, he had all, everything refocused on that star.

I listened for a week, didn't hear anything, and now the press is treating it as though, "Oh, well, um, can't be much.

Uh, we didn't hear anything." Uh, would you like to comment on the whole thing?

We're chugging cans, we're blasting tunes out of a Bluetooth speaker, we're shining our torch to the heavens, and we're sending our messages to anyone who might help us find our way.

As Seth Shostak of SETI puts it, we've never given the slightest thought to turning off all the radars because it might be dangerous.

It's just not going to happen.

Yeah, I think the guy earlier saying like, why do these people get to skip all this peer review and scientific consensus and stuff and just blast signals out into space? And it's like, dude, whether you like it or not, that shit is happening.

They're very like we would do, and that initially made me very suspicious that it was us.

But when we say us, this is not what Seth Shostak thinks, a bunch of college kids with nothing better to do than drink a, you know, half a bottle of beer and go out and have fun in the field.

Yeah.

This is someone with extraordinarily sophisticated knowledge, with an extraordinarily interesting agenda, and apparently with equal technology to match, that at this time in 2001 wants us to think in a certain direction because it's time, and that's part of the detailed story, which is in our article on Enterprise that we're gonna get into later on in this, in, in this coming hour.

David Grinspoon, three times.

Seth Shostak.

Bing Garthright.

Duncan Forgan, twice.

That doesn't discourage true believers.

Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute, writes that SETI's failure is tempered by the fact that the number of star systems sampled is still quite small.

In 2010, astronomer Jill Tarter, one of the leading figures in the field for decades, calculated that so little of the universe had been searched that it was like dipping a single glass into the ocean to determine whether it contains fish.

If extraterrestrial signals are out there, and it's just a matter of looking in the right place, it's entirely possible that SETI could find one tomorrow.

Good Lord.

Even talking to Seth Shostak, he said likely they're not going to hear anything.

It's too far away.

14.8 light years away, right? Almost 15 light years away.

Many proponents argue that the potential benefits of contact with an advanced civilization, access to knowledge, technology, and perhaps solutions to existential problems like climate change or asteroid impacts, outweigh the speculative risks.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, has publicly described fears about alien hostility as irrational, arguing that any civilization capable of interstellar action would have no conceivable motivation to harm a species as technologically primitive as humanity.

Douglas Vakoch has argued that passive SETI itself is an implicit endorsement of active messaging.

since detecting an alien signal would inevitably provoke a chaotic burst of responses from Earth, making any attempt to control our electromagnetic profile ultimately futile.

The microbial life in the Atacama is very unique, and life has existed where it really shouldn't be.

Seth Shostak is a senior

astronomer at SETI Institute.

Anybody who's been to the Atacama desert of Chile knows that it's pretty unusual.

A fringe thought.

Seth Shostak at SETI has said it for years.

Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royale.

Same argument.