Name: Seth Shostak
Age: 71
City: Mountain View
Position: Senior astronomer, director of research, SETI Institute
J.: You serve as senior astronomer and director of research at the SETI Institute (SETI stands for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). What is the function of the institute?
Seth Shostak: The institute is all about the question of life, life beyond Earth and the origins of life on our own planet. We ask whether this is the only place in the cosmos where biology has taken a foothold. People at SETI are interested in finding life in our own [cosmic] backyard. There’s also a small SETI group, which I’m the director of, interested in life that could hold up the other end of a conversation.
In the news recently, we’ve seen stories about possible liquid water on Mars and warm seas on one of Jupiter’s moons. What would it mean if we find primitive life in places like those?
If we find life on another planet — a second Genesis — that would tell you right away that life is not a miracle. It happens all over the place. As long as we’re the only example of life, you can say we’re special. But even if you find pond scum on a moon of Jupiter, you can say biology is a cosmic infection.
What was the closest call you ever had at the SETI Institute?
We had a false alarm in summer of 1997. We saw a strong signal coming over a very limited bandwidth on the radio dial. Because a piece of our equipment wasn’t working that day, it looked like the real deal for most of the day. That was quite exciting. From our point of view it looked pretty promising. It turned out it was the transmitter above a research satellite.
The institute has been around for more than 30 years. How does it get by financially?
We barely have enough money to pay a handful of people. When I joined, it was a NASA project with several dozen involved. It cost 1/1000th of the NASA budget, but that was killed by Congress in 1993, which claimed it was a waste of taxpayer money. Since then we have run entirely on donations. We’re very limited in what we can do. We built our own telescope in the Cascades, the Allen Telescope Array, but to save money we’ve given up half of the [telescope] time to other astronomers.
What would it mean to humankind if you did receive a signal from an alien civilization?
In the short term, it would be a very interesting story. Everyone’s going to want to know where in the sky is this place. In the long term, every telescope would be turned in that direction, so we’d build bigger antennas. If you can decode what is sent, obviously that would be remarkable and could change everything, but it’s more likely we won’t figure it out. Then the effect is philosophical. What happened on this planet is just another instance of what’s happened many times.
You grew up Jewish in Arlington, Virginia. How did that impact your life and work?
My mom was active in the local synagogue and president of Hadassah. My grandfather was Orthodox, but none of his kids were. But I have to say [Judaism] is an aspect of my life I confront every day. Judaism is very open about the processes of science. It doesn’t have dogma attached. Also, a surprisingly high number of the people I deal with on a professional level are Jewish and come from New York. There’s something about Jewish guys from New York that makes them very approachable, easy-going and easy to talk to. It makes me smile a lot.
If you were to receive a message from across interstellar space, and you could respond, what message would you send?
Given that it might take hundreds of years to get there, you might send a lot of stuff. Send them Google servers so they can research the corpus of information. But if I only had enough space to ask two questions, they would be: do you have religion, and do you have music?
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