John Gertz: Rethinking the Search for Alien Life

If E.T. exists, they're here, right now, think about this, plan something together, let's organize, let's begin to think this out. Our alien innovator today is John Gertz, a long-time board member of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the leading voice in the global debate about the search for alien life. He has challenged both scientists and governments. Provocative questions such as what happens if we actually do make contact, who gets to decide how Earth responds. In this episode, John shares his insights on the search for alien life, the risks of sending messages into space, his own opinion whether UFOs are real or not, and the mysteries of the creation of the universe. This is Be Alien Innovators and I'm your host, Steve Esposito. Well, great to have you here. Now, you've been a former chairman of the SETI Institute, you've been involved with the SETI Institute for many years, you're now on an advisory board that's related to the SETI program, and the first question that comes to mind is, please tell us, what does SETI do? Some of us may have an idea, but tell us what does SETI actually do in the science field? Well, SETI is an acronym, S-E-T-I, which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So, in general, what we do is we build or adapt big telescopes, aim at the stars, and listen for an artificial signal, either in the radio band or we can look at optical lasers, but we're looking for signals that are coming from very far away, artificial signals. And now, SETI's been around for how long? Well, the very first SETI experiment was run in 1960 by Frank Drake, but it was very low-tech by today's standards. Today, the sophistication has grown enormously, partly because of Moore's Law, that the back-end computing has grown, partly because we're so much better funded than we ever were before, and almost every radio telescope in the world is doing SETI right now. Not only SETI, of course, they do normative astronomy, but are engaged in SETI, and very many optical telescopes as well. So, it's often said nowadays that we do more SETI today, in one day, than we ever used to do in a whole year. So, SETI is advancing. One thing, you talk about funding, one thing that surprised me as I was reading your book is actually how little funding SETI has compared to something like NASA. Right. I know you're very involved and successful with getting funding to the SETI Institute. Please tell us about the time frame and what actually happened. Well, look, first of all, NASA's budget currently is in the neighborhood of $25 billion. The SETI worldwide budget, as best as I can estimate because there are a number of different programs all around the world, but it's in the neighborhood of about $12 to $15 million a year. In other words, it's far less than a penny on the dollar of NASA's budget. And most of it is privately funded. Certainly here in the West, it's almost entirely privately funded. The Chinese, I think, fund it through their government. You mean the Chinese SETI, there's a separate... The Chinese have a robust SETI program right now using the largest telescope, a radio telescope, single dish radio telescope in the world called the FAST telescope. Where is that located? It's in China. Honestly, I don't recall the exact location. Right now, NASA's budget is looking as though it's going to be cut quite dramatically down to approximately $18 billion if Donald Trump's budget passes or his proposed budget passes. Much of those cuts will come at the cost of trying to find life within our own solar system. NASA is deeply engaged in the search for microbial life. No one really seriously believes they're going to find anything more than microbes within our own solar system. So we think that there might be either living or past microbes on Mars or underneath the surface of Mars, maybe fossils. We think that maybe there could be life in the Jovian moon of Europa or other Jovian moons. The moon of Enceladus around Saturn has geysers shooting up from thermal vents. And just maybe if we could fly a spacecraft through those geyser plumes, we might detect microbial life there. Okay, so we're in the hunt for life, maybe in the clouds of Venus, life could be discovered. But a lot of those programs that are supporting that research are likely to get cut. So my plea is actually, look, if we were to find a single microbe within our own solar system that was sui generis, that in other words was an independent origin of life within our own solar system, that would have to mean that if life started twice in just one solar system independently, it must be ubiquitous. It must be everywhere within our galaxy. And consequently, that's going to beg the question of not microbial life, but what we're all much more interested in is intelligent life. And so we could skip that question, we can leapfrog it right now. And instead of spending billions of dollars looking for microbes, and I'm not defending the cuts in that budget, I support NASA's funding. But if I give up the ghost for that second, and say, okay, if there's got to be cuts, let's then take less than a penny on the dollar and devote it to SETI and increase those budgets. Moreover, I would ask the question, should NASA even be the funding agency for SETI? I wonder if the Defense Department might be the more logical funding agency. Certainly it has larger budgets at its disposal. And why the Defense Department? Because SETI at the end of the day is a study of situational awareness. We don't know what's out there. Now, we definitely want to get more into alien life and other things that are happening. But I want to go more into the history of SETI. Carl Sagan, you know, late Carl Sagan, he's a genius. He, you know, he did so much. He really brought, through his book Contact, of course, he had Cosmos, that was his first book that was very successful. But Contact, which was made into a movie, really brought so much awareness, I think, to astronomy, to SETI for that matter, and to this whole idea that there's a message coming from space that's telling us how to build a spaceship or how to connect with a different civilization. What do you think that did to SETI, that whole episode? Do you think that raised enough awareness through that book? Well, certainly and very, especially through the movie. Everybody's seen the movie and the movie is exciting. The Jodie Foster character was based on a real person, Jill Tarter, who, our chief scientist at the SETI Institute for many years, she's retired now from that position. Jill lives in Berkeley, just as I do, and she actually brought me into the SETI Institute. So, for sure, Carl Sagan did an enormously useful thing in popularizing both astronomy at large and SETI in particular. Obviously, we have to give him a lot of homage for that. He really deserves a lot of credit for that. Now, again, you were involved with bringing some much-needed funding. Tell us the story about how you were able to bring this funding to SETI, because in the 80s and 90s, Congress stopped funding SETI. How did you recover this effort? Well, after 12 years on the board of the SETI Institute, I left and founded a new organization, which we entitled FIRST, that sort of first contact, which stood for the Foundation for Investment in Research in SETI Science and Technology. Anyway, it was a non-profit board with the aim of raising $100 million. That was our goal for SETI. We met strictly every six weeks. We had a meeting with lots of homework assignments for all of us. It was a very prestigious board. Frank Drake was my vice president. We had a couple of Nobel laureates on the board, a MacArthur Genius Fellow, and a number of very prestigious astronomers. We met every six weeks to do detailed planning on how we were going to raise $100 million for SETI worldwide. Two years later, the plans were finished. We toasted the success in devising the game plan, and we hit the road. About a month later, one of our board members and a colleague of ours, Jeff Marcy, happened to run into Uri Milner at a social event, and just basically turned to him and said, Hey, Uri, I've got this great idea. If you happen to have an extra $100 million kicking around, here's a cool way to spend it. Words to that effect. I wasn't there. Before you know it, just like that, we had our $100 million. In a way, all that excruciatingly detailed funding was for naught. It just took a simple conversation between two people, and it was done. I see a striking resemblance from the movie Contact. The billionaire, I think his name is Hayden, the billionaire who at the end gets into the spaceship, and he helps Eleanor quite a bit with research and building a second. I see a resemblance between him and Uri Milner. Is there a coincidence, or is it in some way related? I think it's probably coincidental. Yes, that's funny. Now, in the boards you're involved with, with SETI and the other organizations, you're one of the very few laymen who's not an astronomer and not even a scientist in that sense. You have your own company, Zorro Productions. You create movies, you do all this stuff. How did you get involved with the search for intelligence in the universe? Listen, I moved to the Bay Area, to San Francisco, specifically to do a doctorate at UCSF at the medical school. At that time, my field of study was psychophysiology and chronobiology. I'm originally an academic at heart. I was a starving student back then. I had to make a living, and somehow I blundered into the film and television business. Pretty soon that sort of took on a life of its own. I started selling projects in Hollywood and started making money. After a while, it became sort of apparent to me that my fate in life was to be a minor movie mogul instead of the academic I had turned out to be, started out to be. I left academia, I left the university, and I started my career in Hollywood or in production, but I still maintained a lot of academic interest. My interest began to shift from physiology and chronobiology to astrophysics, cosmology, astronomy. I became an amateur astronomer. By the time I ran into Jill Tartar and met her socially, she became impressed, I believe, with how much I actually did understand of their field of study. She was already involved. She was at SETI. Oh, yes. She had been there for many years as the head of the SETI program. As a matter of fact, she had agreed to have dinner with me on the condition that she could ask me for money. At that time, she was designing a new telescope called the Allen, which became known as the Allen Telescope Array when it was actually built, named after Paul Allen, who was the largest donor to that telescope. She wanted to solicit me for money. I'm being honest with you on this. After a dinner that we had together, she realized that I really had a pretty deep layman's understanding of her field. She turned to me and asked me for money. I said, Jill, you're being penny-wise and pound-stupid. Invite me onto your board of directors, and that way, I can help you multiply the dollars because I'm an entrepreneur and I understand your field of SETI. I've served on many non-profit boards. By that time, I had served on probably 10 non-profit boards. One thing led to another. In conversations with other parties involved, I was invited onto the board. Now, talk about your book. It's Reinventing SETI. It just came out last week. People are welcome to read it, to take a look at it. The first question that comes to mind is what some critics would say, that SETI is looking in the wrong place. It's looking very far away. For the ETs, the extraterrestrials, the aliens, people argue that they're here already. Do you address that in any way in the book? Well, those people are me. I've been writing on that subject for some years in academic journals. I've argued, and I believe persuasively, and then it becomes a core subject in my book, that ET's best strategy is not transmitting signals from its home planet and its own star system, but rather to send what I believe would be robotic probes or satellites to our solar system to surveil us and then perhaps to make contact with us. So that, in effect, we haven't heard from ET. We've looked now maybe at a million stars. If you look at foreground and background stars, I'm sure it's at least a million stars. To see if you detect any signal. And we haven't detected anything. And it's my contention that the reason we haven't detected anything is that we're looking in the wrong place. They're not out there. They're not sending signals from there. They're right here in our own solar system. So let's look at some of the problems in that. For one thing, sending signals from its own star system is dangerous. ET may know or have reason to believe that there are some bad actors out there in the galaxy and that their signal might be intercepted by a bad actor. And when you're transmitting from your own home planet, by definition, you're telling everybody where you are. That's the first problem. The second problem is that when they send signals, they get no information back. Unless and until a civilization arises here on Earth that may or may not agree to send something back to them. And they may have been transmitting to us, if they're using that strategy, for the last billion years or two billion years. They don't have no idea when humankind would emerge out of the microbial mist. And this way, if they sent probes, they could have sent a probe at the beginning of our solar system and been sending them maybe once every hundred million years or something, just to check in. And they would discover that Earth had gradually blossomed with life, first microbial life and then multicellular life. And we had an oxygenated atmosphere, which means multicellularity. And then maybe 10,000 years ago, they detect agriculture and then the pyramids and so forth. So they would be able to return actual science, actual surveillance back to their own home planet, instead of getting nothing in return. Also, when they're here as probes, they can learn. And now once we've become technological, they can study our languages from Sesame Street, our maths from Khan Academy. They can pick up the rest from YouTube and from our terrestrial television broadcasts and so forth. So that when they deign to make contact with us or open up a channel of communication, it might be in the Queen's own English or in Mandarin or in Urdu or who knows what. But they will have already know who we are. If they send signals from their own home planet, they have no idea how to send a signal to us and how we're going to understand it. Maybe their form of communication is like a beeswaggle dance or the color oscillations of a cuttlefish or something. Do you think these probes explain what all these sightings might be? There's a lot sightings that people talk about and a lot of these seem very credible. There's a lot of military people. There's a lot of professor scientists who are very convinced that these sightings are real. Do you think this might explain these probes would be these sightings? Well, I have some very bad news and some very good news for you UFO believers out there. The bad news, I'll circle back to it in a second, is I'm a UFO skeptic. By the way, it's a very healthy way to approach this topic because you can actually get to the root of it through scientific means. You'll see in a second. However, I come from an entirely different way of looking at things. I've come from the vantage point of astronomy and UFOs are atmospheric phenomenon and astronomy begins where the atmosphere ends. So really different fields. I honestly don't know much more about UFOs than what I read in the mainstream press. That's getting a little bit of bad news out of the way. The good news is that even though I come from an entirely different perspective, I come to the point of view and come to the conclusion and state so in my book in great detail that ET's best strategy is actually to send probes, what you guys, what somebody else might call a UFO or a UAP, here. Now, why am I skeptical about the reports I've seen? Well, I'll tell you what's lacking for me. If you recall a couple months ago, there was a meteor that went through the skies, I think of southeast United States. Some wild video out of the southeast showing a fireball streaking across the sky yesterday. No one injured. Just about everybody, though, puzzled and maybe a little worried about what they're seeing. Dave Malcolm. And it was caught on numerous dash cams. You don't have that with UFOs. Okay, why not? We all carry around in our pockets. Excellent. There are some videos, but you're right. Individuals. But yeah, that meteor was caught by probably hundreds of dash cams. Why is it always only just one camera with a UFO? Why can't I see a picture taken by 40 strangers to one another all sitting in the window seats of an airplane, all taking out their phones and photographing the same thing? Each individual photograph may be very poor quality, because it may be just a tiny dot or something by that time. But 40 strangers to one another, that I find impressive. Now, the UFOs are purported to have enormous accelerations and reach very high velocities. Where are the sonic booms? Okay, so the spacecraft are presumably made out of matter. When matter crashes through the air, it moves molecules. The molecules of air bumping into each other create the friction that sets up the sonic boom, but we hear none of them. Where are the looked down satellite images? How many satellites are up there looking down on earth all the time? We see every single airplane. Why don't we see the UFOs? So these are questions that leave me unsatisfied, that I've yet seen evidence. Even though I personally believe, and I really think that the logic for this is completely open and shut, is that ET's best strategy is to come here. And if only given that there is an ET, that aliens exist, and that they want to communicate or they want to have contact with the rest of the galaxy, then they're here. They're here now. They're right here somewhere. They may be the size of a basketball. Maybe their probe might be the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. I have no idea. But they're right here in our own solar system right now. We might as well spend some money to look for them. Let me tell you what gets me about all these sightings that happen. It's not just the fact that in many cases there's a lot of them. I think someone like Jacques Vallée or Gary Nolan, these people, they talk about thousands or hundreds of thousands of sightings. It's not just that. It's not also the fact that a lot of these people are military people, very prestigious, very well-known, respected people, scientists again, or university professors. What really gets me is that by them talking about this, it gives them a bad reputation. They get ridiculed. They're made fun of. It definitely doesn't elevate them in any way. So the question is, why would they do it? In some way, there's something that makes them to be convinced that this is actually true. That's actually happening. So to me, that's the part that it's hard to understand. If this wasn't true, how would it be so prevalent in these people? Well, I'm not a psychiatrist. I mean that sincerely. This may be a psychological phenomenon and not an atmospheric phenomenon. I'm open to it. Just show me evidence that I can find believable. And individual reports by single individuals are already suspect. I want to see groups of individuals. And there's something else too. I hate to say this, but I'm kind of a mainstream press kind of guy. You know, I read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and so forth, and I don't see the front pages. Now, I know that the mainstream press can let us down. Believe me, when I understand a topic in some depth, I can be pretty disappointed by the way that it's covered in the New York Times or the Washington Post or wherever. But nonetheless, there's thousands of journalists out there that serve as a kind of filter. It's got to sort of rise above a certain smell test for it to get into the press. And speaking about tests, the test I'm mostly interested in when it comes to UFOs and UAPs is the interoculatory test. What's the interoculatory test? It smacks you right between the eyes. In other words, I believe that when ET, when one of these probes wants to make itself known, it will be so obvious to all of us. If it's not landing on the White House lawn, it'll be a laser beam that all of us can look up in the sky and see that it's a star that wasn't there yesterday. And then it's monochromatic, and so it can't be a star at all. It has to be artificial. And it's sending a message and so forth. You know, it'll be obvious. If there's one thing that everyone can agree on, it's that if there are aliens, if there are extraterrestrials even monitoring us, they definitely don't want to make themselves known, at least on a large scale, because obviously we don't know of them on a large scale. Right. And I would tell you why I think that may be true. And I do believe that if the evidence indicates and we can deduce logically that the aliens are here in our own solar system, the question poses itself, so where are they? Why don't they speak up? And there are several possibilities here. One is that they have no intentions of speaking up. They're just sort of, as it's been called, they're workers. They're just uploading information from us without any intention of ever giving us anything back in return. I don't believe that's the case, and I'll explain in a second why. The next possibility is that they don't have the onboard computing capacity to truly deeply understand us. That, you know, it's difficult to understand all of human society and nature and languages and so forth. They're collecting data but uploading it to their home planet for deeper analysis. In that case, if the home planet is, let's say, a thousand light years away, and they started a stream of data, let's say, from the first television broadcast in 1950ish thereabouts, that's going to take a thousand years to get back to their home planet, another thousand years for the home planet to send back instructions to the local probe as to what to do. And so that may be an explanation. Or alternatively, that they're not authorized to make contact with us. That again, they're uploading the information and that the home planet is making a judgment whether to, you know, they've looked at our nightly news and destroy us forthwith because we're a wretched species, or they've looked at I Love Lucy and gotten a good laugh and saying, okay, let's, you know, open up lines of communication, or whatever. Now, I promised you I would tell you why I do believe that they will make contact with us. That they will. That they will. And they will because they need us. They don't need we have nothing to offer them scientifically. You know, if we tell them that E equals mc squared, they're going to, yeah, we've heard that one a million times before, okay? They don't care about that. But the resources. They don't, no, they've got plenty of resources in their own solar system. They're still not coming here to eat us. Big Mac can't be that expensive in their home planetary system. No, but they really need us for one thing, and one thing very importantly, they need us to help maintain the internet, the galactic internet, the communication system. That must be because I told you that the probe here is sending signals back. Well, it's not that easy to send signals back. You think we're part of a link. You need a huge infrastructure of probes and relay nodes and communication nodes to send information back through the galaxy. The physics of it are daunting. You need a lot of equipment, and no one society, no one civilization can produce so many billions and even trillions of communication satellites and nodes and probes, and they need us to help them maintain that galactic infrastructure. No one civilization could possibly do it by themselves. Well, I definitely appreciate your much down-to-earth conversation on this topic. Now, in your book, you talk about what would first contact look like with the extraterrestrials and how that could go wrong. Can you tell us about it? Okay, well, it can go very wrong in many different ways. First of all, let me give you a full lecture right this second on all that we know about ET's intentions towards us. Did you like the lecture? We don't know anything. We don't know whether ET is coming to aggress against us, to save us, to trade with us, to proselytize. We have no idea what they want. We have no idea what their intentions are. And no matter how benign they may seem, they could be playing three-dimensional chess to our checkers. We just don't know. We have to be very cautious in our dealings with ET, no matter how benign they may sound. You remember the great Twilight Zone episode? Yes, I actually remember those episodes, yes. Where the aliens come with a manual on how to serve man, and it's a treatise on altruism. Their great textbook, How to Serve Man, we've translated just the title, How to Serve Man, but it turns out it was a cookbook, okay? And it's the same principle. We have to be very careful. We have to not take their communication and put it on the internet. It could contain who knows what type of malicious viruses. We have to be very careful that they don't open up channels of communication with our scientists. Here, great biological scientists, we know your research. Just between you and us, take our DNA code, we'll download it to you, put it into these kinds of cells and replicate it and so forth. Don't tell anybody about it and we'll give you lots and lots of bitcoins or something. We have to be very careful. And then, of course, they reproduce themselves in our laboratory or something. Your science fiction is as good as mine, but we do have to be extremely wary. That's actually probably a closer to reality point that you've made right now. It's very significant, but go ahead. We have done absolutely no planning and no international planning, so we must do international planning. And for that purpose, in my book... You have a treaty. Right. I wrote a first draft treaty. Maybe it's a last draft treaty, but it's a treaty that the international community has to take seriously. Let me give you a couple of contingencies that really need to be thought out now in advance of contact and dealt with. So, I'll give you two hypotheticals. Let's say that I am correct and that there are probes right now in our own solar system surveilling us and finally they decide to make contact with us. And they transmit a message down to us in Chinese or in English or both. And the message is, we've been looking at you and we think that we're now ready to welcome you into the galactic club. We're going to start by giving you a cornucopia of high tech knowledge and science that is really going to advance your civilization by leap years, by light years. And they say, listen, it's here on our version of a hard drive or a thumb drive, and it's right here in my cargo bay. Come up and get it. Who would get it? Who will get it? Exactly. Who will get it? Okay. So, the Chinese and the Americans both send up spacecraft as fast as possible. Elon Musk, maybe on his own dime, sends up another one. Let's say the Americans get there first and get the hard drive and they bring it back. Are the Chinese incentivized to shoot that down? You know, lest America get all this wealth of technology to China's disadvantage or vice versa. All right, let me give you another hypothetical. Let's say I'm wrong and that ET does send messages from its own home planet and we do receive a message. And the message is words to the effect of, hi, we're here. Are you there? Is anybody home over there on planet Earth? We don't know if anybody's there, but if you're there, we're interested in a conversation. Okay? We want to friend you. Okay? What do we do? Do we respond? This is not a trivial question. Okay? This is not a trivial question. It could be like a bat echolocating its prey. Or, so we could really put ourselves at mortal risk if we respond. Alternatively, if we don't respond, we lose a wealth of wisdom and knowledge. What do we do? And who gets to decide? Okay. Well, it seems to me that the only way to decide is to study the question, bring our greatest experts together, study the issue, bring together experts in law and diplomacy and military affairs and cryptology and linguistics and behavioral biology and evolutionary biology and economics and on and on and on. And to study it and the issue for five years, ten years, it takes a long time, and then issue a report and get to the UN Security Council. And then does the, is it the UN Security Council which gets to decide whether to respond? Is it the General Assembly? Is it three quarters of the General Assembly? Is it two thirds? Who knows? It's never been thought of. In the meantime, years have passed. Okay? Not to mention the fact that in the meantime, Kim Jong-un or whoever wants to could be sending off messages. Okay. Now, the problem is that we here on Earth look at each star, our standard setting protocol is to look for at each star for ten minutes. But what if their standard protocol is also to send to each planet ten minutes? So they send to Earth for ten minutes, hey, hi guys, we want to meet you. They send to a different planet for ten minutes, and the next planet, and the next planet, and the next planet. And then they circle back to Earth. Now if they're 500 light years away, a thousand years later, they circle back to Earth to check in. Did they get a response? Are they going to wait for ten minutes? Ten days? Ten years? Ten centuries? Who knows? Okay. Our only reasonable thing to do is to decide today, now, before it happens, whether we're going to respond to those, that message and what we're going to be saying. And if the answer is yes, we are going to respond, and we have prepared a message, then the instant we get some message, we hit the send button. Okay? So it's basically instantaneous because the decision's already been made. Yeah, the space of the universe, with the current speeds we can achieve, is daunting. Communication is simply unrealistic. Now is there any doubt in your mind that at this moment in time, this contact that you're talking about has happened already, but it's not being revealed to the public? Do you think that's a possibility? No. Okay. I know that's not a popular answer among conspiracy theorists, but I'll tell you why. Look, the first UFO was supposed to have crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Since then, there have been 14 presidential administrations. Each and every president would have had to have decided to keep it a secret. Not only that, but it's not just the president, but it's hundreds of thousands of people would have to have been in the know. Not one of them made a deathbed confession. Not one of them leaked something to the New York Times. Bill Clinton ran breathlessly in front of cameras when he thought he had discovered a single microbe in a Martian rock. Donald Trump. I don't care if you love Donald Trump or you hate Donald Trump. Who among us believes that Donald Trump would keep that a secret? It just doesn't smell right to me that there is this kind of conspiracy. And it's not just in the United States. It would be all over the world, because the United States has no privileged position as far as UFOs are concerned. UFOs could have been crashed anywhere. And everybody would have had to have kept the secret. Why? Let's change gears and talk about a different topic. We're talking about these potential signals that SETI is looking at. And I want to quote a little bit, pretty much the last page of Carl Sagan's Contact book. And pretty much at the end of the book, he has this, again, he's a genius in fiction, right? So he creates this scenario where there's a computer program that is looking at the many digits of pi. Since then, probably now computers can develop a lot, billions of digits of pi. But he's looking at the digits of pi at that moment in time, and he sees a pattern. The person in the book, Eleanor Arway, which is Jill Totters, right? She sees a pattern how at a very large number of digits, if you put the digits in base 11 arithmetic or something, they show zeros and ones. And then if you put them on a square format, the digits would actually show a circle. There would be zeros and then a one, and then, they would actually represent a circle. And through that, it's almost like science is playing games with us. How can you have a circle in the number pi, which is derived from a circle, right? So with that question in mind, and looking at all the constants of the universe, which in so many ways, it's even more amazing how they exist. Because if any one of those constants is a little bit off, the universe would not be here, in so many ways. Is this, you think, an intelligent design, the way this whole universe is created? Does it have any kind of creation intelligence, rather than a randomness? Well, obviously, I don't know the answer to that. But I can tell you what I suspect. The first thing is, I'm going to swing it back to ET for one quick second. And that is that these kinds of questions, and questions of theology, and of the possible divine nature of the universe, or intelligent design, are on most people's short list of questions to ask to ET, if we ever come in contact with ET. Since any alien civilization that we come in contact with will be aeons more advanced than we are, maybe they figured out something that we don't know yet. And certainly everybody I know who's thought about the subject wants to ask the aliens, well, do you have religion? What do you believe? And why? And is it strictly faith-based, or is it evidence-based? And so on. And then after that, we would ask them, do you have math? Because today, we don't actually know whether math is embedded in the universe, or if it's just embedded in our brain. Whether the universe operates in a mathematical fashion, or whether we just imagine it does. And this is still an open question. Most people believe that math, or most scientists and mathematicians, believe that they're discovering math. It's out there to be found, rather than they're inventing it. Now, whether the universe is designed intelligently, I think it may be possible that this is the case, because the alternative is some very spooky things are going on here. For one thing, I believe that we're all eternal, because science teaches us that in some respects that we're all eternal. Meta doesn't disappear, doesn't get destroyed. And we specifically don't disappear and get destroyed. You know, Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't show how time flows. We still don't understand why time flows. His equations show a block of space-time that simply is. It just is and is eternal. It's as much of a block as a brick. It just is. Why we experience it as flowing is another matter. But in that respect, we're all eternal. We're just in this block of time. The universe, as far as we know, is flat. As far as we've been able to determine, it's flat, which means to say the topography is flat and therefore it goes on forever. There are galaxies that continue on forever and ever and ever. Just galaxies, galaxies, galaxies, and so forth. And we know this from a number of lines of evidence, partly mathematical by having to do with the first phase of the expansion of the universe in the Big Bang that expanded exponentially in a period of what's called inflation that demands that the universe be in effect infinite. And we also know by observations, because we look out to the very, very edge of our telescope's ability to look out, which is towards the very beginning of the universe, just after the very beginning of the universe, and we see galaxies everywhere. There's no thinning out. There's no brick wall that we run into or anything like this. In that case, it can be shown mathematically that there are infinite numbers of you, Steve, and me, John, out there that were repeated because even though the universe is infinite, the ways that matter can organize itself is not infinite. And therefore, sooner or later, you're going, and it's very far distance away, there's another identical Steve and an identical John sitting in these chairs talking. Okay, so in that respect, we're also returning. But we have to judge, and we have to look seriously at what the fine tuning of the constants means, which means that, as you said earlier, Steve, that it's a problem that physicists and cosmologists are very keenly aware of, that if anything in the universe was just ever so slightly different, like the mass of a proton, the constant of gravity, the speed of light, these are things that just don't come from any formulas, they just are. So the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers a second. Well, why is it not 200,000 kilometers a second or 400,000 or whatever? It just is. The only way we know that it's 300,000, we measure it. And well, there are quite a few of these constants in nature. And it turns out, if you look at these constants, if they're tweaked ever so slightly, we couldn't exist. Tweak one constant this way, and atoms wouldn't form. Twist, tweak another constant another way, and… Or stars wouldn't form. And stars wouldn't form. Or carbon wouldn't form. Exactly. Exactly. Or there would just be hydrogen in the universe, and that would be a boring universe. Or the universe itself wouldn't form, it would collapse in on itself right away. So it turns out, when you look at it, that the chances of our universe bearing life and human life are one in trillions upon trillions upon trillions upon trillions. Well, the only possible two ways that you can answer this conundrum is to say, yes, it could be trillions upon trillions, but there are even more trillions upon trillions upon trillions of other universes, and somebody's got to win the lottery. You know, when you buy a lottery ticket, the chances of you winning are close to zero, but it's not zero, okay? Somebody wins, okay? It's not exactly zero. So that's the way that most physicists would tend to think of it. The other alternative is that it's somehow intelligently designed, not necessarily by a deity, but possibly by us. Why by us? You know, John Wheeler, the great Nobel laureate physicist, came up with the idea that the whole universe is a quantum field that is adjustable by observation. That we proactively, not retroactively, proactively, you know, configured the universe for our own selves, which is mind-boggling, but in a universe that Einstein created, where there's no actual forward and beginning, and when you look at quantum particles that can be entangled in such a way that they're not subject to causation, that maybe backward and forward causation can be equal in some respect. Fascinating, yeah. Those are age-old questions, something we may or may not know. If you ask me about theology, I will probably never live long enough to get the final answers, but I think that the final answers will come through either asking E.T., but the way E.T. may have figured it out is the same way we might, is through science, effectively. Not through blind faith, but from following evidence. I want to go back to your book in a minute, but before I do that, I want to talk about the Chinese SETI. They have their own SETI program now. Please tell us how that's working out, and from what I understand, our SETI is very transparent. Everyone can see what we are seeing. If they have a program and they make contact first, will we know, and what's being done about that? Okay, what disturbs me is I don't know the answer to your question. That's already a problem. That's my problem. The problem is that we don't really know what they're doing. We know that our SETI data is 100% transparent to the Chinese, and we've even taught their SETI scientists how to do SETI. Their data is not at all transparent to us. We don't see their data, so we don't know what they're doing, is the honest bottom line. I don't doubt that their scientists are sincere. I've spoken with our SETI scientists who have trained them, and they say they're good guys, they're doing good SETI, they're doing good work, and so forth. But I also don't doubt that they're responsible and responding first and foremost to their own government, and that if they were to make a detection, they would very swiftly stamp it top secret, and you and I would never know about it. So we're in a SETI race with the Chinese, and I think it would be wise for the Defense Department to recognize that we're in much of a SETI race as we are in a technology race, and an arms race, and an economic race, and so forth. We're in a race with the Chinese. It'd be nice if we woke up and realized it. As well for SETI, in addition to all these other things. Yes, yes, yes. Now we probably have time just for a few. I wanted to talk about your book again, and some statements you made, like the Drake's equation, you know, it's not valid anymore, or it's not what we based our knowledge on before. Can you dive into that and give us some thoughts on what you feel is not working out right now? Maybe explain further the Drake's equation. Absolutely, okay. The Drake equation was formulated by Frank Drake. Frank Drake was the very first person to run a SETI experiment in 1960. In 1961, he and Carl Sagan and a few other people put together a symposium for the very first symposium to discuss SETI. In order to prepare for the symposium, Frank Drake sort of wrote an equation on the back of the proverbial envelope that said N, now N is the number of advanced civilizations out there in our galaxy, equals, and then he had a number of factors there, and you multiply them together, and you get the number of civilizations that are currently transmitting to planet Earth. Now, Frank Drake was a dear friend of mine, and I worked very closely with him for a long time. But I have to say that the Drake equation is ready for the ash heap of history. And I wrote about this before Frank passed away, because I didn't want to do it sort of behind his back, if you will. And I think he would have embraced the sentiment of what I was doing, because he too sort of chuckled. He was a very modest man, a very lovely man, very, very lovely person. But he was also very modest and quiet. And I think he was absolutely kind of flummoxed by his own fame. Because the Drake equation is often called the second most famous equation in all of science, next only to E equals MC squared. Everybody, you know, the Drake equation, if you Google it, you'll find, you know, thousands of pages of the great Drake equation. And it's a, and it's a crock of nonsense. Okay, it is, it completely has no bearing on SETI today. And I spend a fairly lengthy chapter of my, of my book. And there's no nice way of saying this, but I devastate it factor by factor by factor. So I don't know, let's take one of the factors as a point of view. But one of the factors is the number of the percentage of stars that have planets. Yes. Well, we know what the percentage of stars have planets today is now for now, in Frank's defense, he didn't know it back then, but we know it today. It's planets are ubiquitous. Every star system or virtually every star system not just has a planet, but it has a planetary system. So that our star is quite ordinary. In that respect, we've, you know, we've got a lot, eight planets, and most star systems have, you know, planetary systems, I can't tell you how many planets per, we don't know exactly how many, but it's multiple planets per star system. So anything that's one, the percentage is 100% can come out of the equation, because one times every anything else is the same thing. So out with that, okay. And then the next one is the number of Earth-like planets in a solar system, because after all, we live on the most wonderful place in the world to live. You know, it's the Frank was interested in, in, in where life could get going. And he made this very poor assumption that it would have to be an Earth-like planet. But that assumption is now known to be or felt to be completely wrong. Okay, his idea was, and was common in the time that there was something called the habitable zone, the Goldilocks zone, not too warm, not too cold, not too close to the sun, not too far away from the sun, just right so that there could be liquid Earth water on the on the surface. So we're, since we live in the best of all possible worlds just happened to be right smack dab in our own in the habitable zone. Okay? Yeah, but so is the moon. And it's dead as a doorknob. Okay. And so that, and moreover, when the when the life started 3.7 plus billion years ago, we don't know the exact date, but it was at least 3.7 billion years ago, and maybe 4.2 billion years ago, life got going when the sun was 70% the brightness of it that it is now. Earth should have been frozen solid. It was well outside the habitable zone. Yes. So what, obviously it wasn't. So what's, what's up with that? Well, the qualifier here is that the atmosphere was much different back then. It was a, it was filled with greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane and so forth, ammonia and others. Mars was even further out. And we know that Mars had water flowing all over it. And it was even further from the sun that was only 70% as, as bright as it is today. That's fascinating. So we're talking about an equation that's like you said, it's probably the second most important one, something that's been accepted by scientists for all this time. And now we're looking at it and seeing that it doesn't make any sense. So that's, that's amazing, right? In so many ways, because it is, we have to reset our mind. In my book, I go factor by factor and frankly devastate the entire equation. It becomes basically completely worthless. And it's obvious, and it's because it's worthless that it gives us no answer. It doesn't tell us how many, n cannot be calculated. That's right. It's precisely because that we can't use that equation to tell us anything that we have to turn to experimentation. And if experimentation is SETI and SETI is that experiment, then that is all the more reason I'm a big fan of SETI, if not a big fan of the Drake equation, because we have to stop all the crazy making with the Drake equation and get to the experiment. Why do you think scientists accepted this equation when when it was, you know, not that it's a bad thing, but why would someone accept something? I don't know. I think go along to get along, you know, and Frank was such a lovely person. It was very hard to, to, you know, you don't have a better one, you know, to diss him, you know, he was sort of the hero of SETI. But, but they, but, you know, he wrote, he wrote himself, it took no great intellectual power on my part to devise the, the Drake equation. I totally agree with him. It didn't. He just wrote it on the back of the envelope to organize a symposium one day. And, and, and, and, you know, it's just, nobody's afraid. Everybody's sort of afraid to be the first one to stand up and say, Hey, the emperor's got no clothes. This thing is, is, is, is worthless. John, thank you so much for your time. I have one more question in conclusion, and I want to ask about what's your motivation, what drives you in your everyday work, especially with SETI, the work you do. And just to mention, I recently talked to someone on the show who was talking about curiosity and how kids nowadays, they seem, many of them, they seem to lost, they have lost that interest, that curiosity. They, they don't seem to be interested in anything. It's like, okay, you know, that's a TV, that's a computer, that's a phone. They, they, they lost that sense of like, how does this work? Or why, why is there this, why is the sky blue? You know, they lost the sense. So what is it that drives you or drove you when you got involved in this? And how do you convey that to others? Well, I'm going to give you the, the, the, the meta answer and then the, and then the more practical answer. The meta answer is I've always been driven by questions of, of, of deep knowledge. I mean, my first field of, of, of study was comparative mythology and comparative religion viewed from a psychoanalytical point of view, from a Jungian perspective. My interest then segued to cosmology and astrophysics and so on. I've always been, and finally to SETI, you know, I've always been interested in the very, very deep and broad questions. I'm deeply interested in evolutionary biology as you know, what drives life. You know, these are big questions drive me, but what drove me to write this book is something a little bit different. What drove me was, was public policy. It is my favorite reader. The, the person I wrote this book for is a 30 something year old congressional staffer. I'm trying to influence public policy to get people to just open their eyes, wake up. It's real. If ET exists, they're here right now. And we kind of, kind of think about this, plan something together. Let's organize. Let's, let's begin to think this out. And I dare anybody to read my book and not, and not come to the conclusion that logic is, is, is undeniable. If ET exists, they're here. I don't know where they could be on the far side of the moon. It could be on an asteroid. It could be in, in, in orbit around the sun and a close orbit around the sun. We don't know where ET is, but they're here. Best we should open our eyes and begin to think about it. John, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Steve. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.