Astronomer tells Athens audience: E.T. liable to phone any day
BY ANDREW TILLOTSON
Athens NEWS Campus Reporter

Intelligent life is likely abundant in the cosmos, and we will find
evidence of it soon, according to one of the world's top experts on the
ongoing search for extraterrestrial life.

Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain
View, Calif., gave a pair of talks in Athens last week about what his
organization does to search for alien life, why he believes it is out
there, and what might happen when we find it.

SETI is a general acronym for "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence"
that can apply to any group that does such work, and does not
exclusively refer to Shostak's institute.
"The bottom line is we will find E.T. in the next two dozen years,"
Shostak said. "I'll bet you all a cup of Starbucks on that." "E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial," of course, was the name of Steven Spielberg's
popular 1982 film about a lovable alien.

His prediction of such a specific timeframe relies on statistical
projections of how many intelligent civilizations lie within our Milky
Way Galaxy, as well as how his institute's searching capacity will
continue to grow exponentially in the coming years.
In fact, he said each SETI experiment usually gathers more data than all
the previous ones combined.

Shostak compared our generation to the generation of Australian
aborigines whose 40,000-year "watchglass of isolation" was shattered
when Europeans arrived in the 18th century. He predicted that ours will
be the generation to have our planet's 4 -billion year watchglass
shattered in similar fashion.
Shostak asked those who doubt the existence of life elsewhere in the
universe to consider just what that would mean statistically.
He said the currently accepted estimate of 100 billion galaxies in the
universe, each containing 100 billion stars, means there are more stars
in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches in North America.

"[Those] who think that we're the only grain of sand where anything
interesting is happening, you have to admit that that's a very audacious
point of view," Shostak said. "And if there's one thing that astronomy's
taught us in the last 500 years, it's that every time we thought we were
special, we were wrong."
He said that Earth was bombarded with meteors up until 3.8 billion years
ago, and that the earliest known evidence of microbial life has been
dated not long after, around 3.5 billion years ago.

"Life got started on earth essentially as fast as it could, and that
suggests to me, if not to you, that life must be very probable...very
easy to get started," Shostak said.
And if life is very easy to get started, then it stands to reason that
it may also be very common, he said.
A theological argument he offered, which he said is not made anymore, is
sort of a "real-estate developer theory of God."
"Why would God have made that galaxy with all its stars, all its
interstellar mediums, black holes, all that stuff, if there's nobody
there to enjoy it?"

Shostak said that while his organization's desires are often hampered by
a lack of funding, and while NASA seems content to focus on searching
nearby planets for microbes -- "pond scum," as he put it -- there are
several sound strategies that no one is employing to search for
intelligent life.
He said that a common practice now is to "look at random stars for a few
minutes, once, and that's it." If nothing is found, that star is
deserted for the next, and never returned to.
He suggested it might be better to focus on the same area for longer
periods of time and look for very short signals that are repeated every
few hours or days.

Another tactic he said has never been tried is focusing on two-star
solar systems.
Of all the possible intelligent civilizations in the universe, he said,
it's probable that some exist in two-star systems. Shostak reasoned that
such civilizations would have inevitably explored and perhaps begun to
colonize the other side of their system. At the very least, they would
have established outposts on other planets as we have in places like
Antarctica.
Such a setup would mean, of course, that the two ends of the system
would be constantly engaged in some sort of communication.

Therefore, if we knew to be looking in that direction when the two stars
were lined up from our vantage point, we could reasonably expect to
detect their communication.
But even if we do detect some transmission in the near future, Shostak
said that asking us to understand whatever communication we receive will
be comparable to us giving Neanderthals the end of our modem cord and
asking them to understand it.
UFO abduction theories and similar conspiracies are mere fantasy, he
said, as there is no way an alien civilization could even know about us
yet, let alone have already arrived.

As he explained, the human race has only been transmitting signals
powerful enough to escape our atmosphere for the last 60 years. For a
civilization to have picked up our signals and reacted to them at this
point, it obviously would have had to have been no more than 60 light
years away, and probably no more than 30, to allow time for a response.

He said it is far more likely that intelligent civilizations are
hundreds, thousands, or millions of light years away from us.
And as for what the aliens might look like, he said the best guess is
what we might look like in our near future -- machines.

Regardless of what happens in outer space, he implied, the prospect of
having machines that can out-think us here on earth by as early as 2020
is far more ominous:

"You may be the last generation to run the planet, ergo I suggest a
hedonistic lifestyle."