Ep. 223: Reinventing SETI: New Directions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

And I just turned around and I call ass out of there. I was done. I wasn't dealing with them. The hypocrisy of the cult is one of the things that turned me. Away the quickest. When I turned my head lights on, it turned and looked at us. And one of the things I remember the most where the eyes were going red. I see an orb of light. It is just circling these steps like it is waiting for me. And he begins to tell them that he saw UFO. They're basically like, what are you talking about. That's seven foot up on a tree, peeking around it, and that's where I saw. The top of the muzzle, noose and the eyes. As soon as I made eye contact with this thing, I don't like death. Welcome back to Stan Foyle tells. I'm your host, Brandon and I were joined by my guest John, John. Thanks for coming on here talking with me. I want the pleasure to have to be here. Would you like to let the audience know a little bit about yourself before we get into it. Well, sure, I mean, if you want to go free form, I'll tell you that I am a businessman and I have a production company where I make motion pictures television, stage productions, and other things mostly related to the old character of Zoral. However, I began my business as a as a producer as a way to originally work my way through school. I wanted to be an academic. I was working on a doctorate, and it took me some while to realize that. I'm said, you know that essentially I'm going to end up being a minor movie mogul instead of the professor I thought I was going to set out to be. In the meantime, my interests changed over the years, and I've always been an amateur astronomer. But then I became involved with the field of SETI, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence, when I joined the SETI Institute Board of Directors in the year two thousand and eventually served three terms as a chairman of that board. So from there I went on to had a group dedicated to the proposition of raising one hundred million dollars for SETI research worldwide. My vice chairman was Frank Drake, who founded SETI, and we had a couple of Nobel Laureates on the board, the Carvergenius Fellow and anyway. But we eventually when Uri Milner stepped forward with a hundred million dollar grant as administered through Breakthrough Listen his and his Breakthrough Foundation. We folded our efforts into his, and most of our board members either became principal investigators for Breakthrough Listen, which was and it still is, the largest setting program in the world, and others like myself became members of the advisory board and advising on how best to spend that one hundred million dollars. So that brings you a little bit up to date. But about some years ago I decided to segue from the business side of setting into the theoretical side by writing a number of theoretical papers which were peer reviewed and published, and that eventually led to the writing of a book entitled Reinventing SETI, which I'm sure we'll talk about. And that book has just been released by Oxford University Press. And even though it's been released by a prestigious academic press, it's actually written for lay people. And my idealized reader is something like a thirty year old congressional staffer, let's say, because I'm really, at the end of the day, trying to influence public policy visa the aliens. So that gives you a little bit of background on me. You've been a man of many hats. It sounds like, yes, I think so. So the stuff was SETI. That is one of the things that really gets me interested. But you were the chairman of the board for that for three terms. How did you even get involved with SETI from the get go, Like, was this something you're interested in, like with extraterrestrials prior to this, or it just something that you kind of got involved with. Well, as I said, I was an amateur astronomer, and I was very interested in the field of SETI had read, you know, a number of books in the in the field, and and I and I happen to live in Berkeley, California. Berkeley was then and still is a major major locus of SETI research in the world. And I met through social contacts Jill Tarter, who was the head of the SETI program at the SETI Institute, who lives here in Berkeley, and she she and I had dinner together with her late husband, Jack wellsh was the head of the radio astronomy program at UC Berkeley. And they wanted to frankly, to be honest with you, what they wanted to do is they wanted to solicit me for money to help build what was then on just on the drawing boards, their new vision for a SETI telescope, which eventually was built and is called the ATA or the Allen Telescope Array, named after the largest benefactor, Paul Allen, of pro founder of Microsoft. And after the dinner that we had, I think Jill and her husband Jack realized that I actually had a very good layman's understanding of their field and they've so when they came to ask me for money, I said, listen, Chill, you're being penny wise but pound stupid. Actually invite me onto your board. That way I can help multiply the dollars. You know, I'm an entrepreneur and you need entrepreneurial talent on your board. I've worked with any nonprofits before. I had served on ten nonprofit boards, and I understood nonprofits and I have a good understanding of SETI, so invite me on to your board. I led to a lot of conversations, and maybe a year later actually was invited to the board. Everybody else on the board was either an astronomer or a high techie. So I think with SETI like the my first ever knowledge of it, and this is I think it's back in like ninety five or ninety six, But whenever that Independence Day movie came out, I think like at the beginning of that movie, they had like the big satellite dishes or whatever where they picked up a signal or something. I think that was the first time I'd ever heard of SETI And is that something that obviously was a movie? But is that something that they were looking into, like what they still do now? Because I know like they had the dishes and like they're they're searching for signals for like extraterrestrials or anything that they can find. But with the dishes and everything, is that something they still do today? Yes, most assuredly. Pretty much every I can't even actually at the moment of an exception, but pretty much every radio telescope in the world is involved in doing SETI at the moment. So even the Chinese, who have recently built the largest single dish radio telescope in the world, are dedicating that telescope to a lot of study research as well. So the hunt is on. In my book Reinventing SETI, I'm arguing that the hunt is being done inefficient and backwards way, and consequently we don't discover anything because, let's face it, I mean, we've been doing SETI since nineteen sixty. Although the cadence, the speed, the energy that's being put into a now, the money that's being put into it now is dwarfs anything that we ever did in the past. A bit more SETI is done today every single day than was ever used to be done in a whole year. So we're doing a lot of SETI, but we're not necessarily doing it in the right way because we've already looked, oh, certainly in a million stars if you count background and foreground stars, and what we do the standard protocol is to look at a star for ten minutes and then if you don't see anything or hear anything, or record anything, you move on to the next star, and the next star, and the next star and the next star in the next star. So that's that's what's going on. But the presumption is, and this is where where my book really really dives deeply into, is that ET is sitting on its home planet in a faraway star system, signaling to us from there. And I point out in my book that that's a dreadful strategy. That's you know, it's a it's a stupid way to do business. ET would not be doing that. The much more efficient thing that ET would be doing is sending spacecraft robotic probes from their solar system to our solar system to surveil us, to learn our languages from Sesame Street, to learn our maths from con Academy, to learn all the rest from YouTube, and then if if they after having surveilled us, then maybe they might communicate with us. But from here within our own solar system. So ET is not out there. They're here now. Uh. This you know, sounds like UFOs and or UAPs as they're called today, like you said, the Independence Day spacecraft. But I'm coming from a different perspective altogether, right, Yeah, you know, I happened to be come from the perspective of astronomy, and astronomy begins where the atmosphere ends. And so I personally don't know very much about UFOs or UAPs. I mean, just what I read in the newspapers. Maybe a little more than that, but but that's not my field. And honestly, to be honest, absolutely honest with you, I'm skeptical of the reports that I've heard. I think I think a lot of the ones that are reported, I think they're actually just obviously man made. I don't I'm not thinking there's ets lying around here like I would like to think that way. But for a lot of them, I think it's just misidentification. I'm I think everybody agrees that most of it's misidentification. But here's the here's the key thing. Although I'm not a student of UFOs, I'm not a friend of UFOs in the sense that I don't believe in them necessarily. I mean, I'm open to any evidence that that passes the smell test. But my own theorizing leads to the complete conclusion, or the strong conclusion, that ET's best strategy is to send probes here, and that therefore they are here only if ET exists an ET that actually wants to communicate with us, or learn about us, or know about us, or welcome us into the galactic club, or whatever they want to do with us, proselytize to us, frankly, destroy us, whatever is on their mind. They're here right now in our own solar system. And I come to that conclusion from a different from an entirely different point of view than the UFO people too, and yet I bolster them. So instead of hopefully instead of sending you know, hate mail and say, oh, Girtz, how can you be such an idiot not believing in UFOs, take comfort by the fact that even though I'm not one of you, I'm supporting my research supports you. And we can get into the reasons why ET would send probes instead of instead of transmitting from their own solar system. Yeah, we can go into that, but before we do, I was going to ask you, have you seen the news recently where they've released saying there's something enter in our solar system, that the thing was from outside our solar system, and the media has turned it into something claiming it could be like an alien spaceship coming in our way, And I was like, why did they have to spin it that way? It just seemed well. It wasn't the media. It was a guy named Abby Low. Yeah, Avi, I know very well. He's a professor of astronomy at Harvard, and he was the guy who insisted that was an alien spacecraft. He was wrong about that, and he's completely wrong about this. It's a it's a comment yeah, this is what it is now. You know, we've got, as near as we can tell, something like a trillion comments orbiting our son. But the way past Pluto in what's something called the Orc cloud, and that ort cloud stretches like twenty five percent of the way to the nearest star. It's a huge, huge cloud of comets. The stars as they rotate around the Milky Way switch positions and jostles and so forth. Just because the gravity of everything affects the gravity of everything else. If another star or rogue planet, and we could talk about rogue planets happens to get near to a to our comet field as an example, or any other Solar system's comet field, it can disturb it gravitationally and send them and kick comets out of the orbit and send them flying into interstellar space. Inevitably those those comets or asteroids, because it can happen asteroids as well make their way to our Solar System. It just happen to go through it. There. We've been astronomers have predicted that we would see interstellar asteroids and comments for some time, and this one called three I slash Atlas, its completely fits the model for what a comet would look like. And in fact, the Hubble spacecraft is now looking at it and we're determining it is a comet. It's going very fast. It's going about sixty kilometers a second, which is much faster than anything else in our Solar system relative to our Sun. That is the speed. But that's predictable too, because the this comet, as it goes through the interstellar space inevitably meets with some stars or planets and gets some kick, a gravitational sling, slow shot, and does it enough times, because this comment could be billions of years old, does it enough time, and it gradually builds up speed as it makes its way through the through the through interest space. So it's a common but you know, so you know, and we're going to start seeing a lot more of these as new telescopes come online, the Vera Rubin telescope, which is just now getting started, we'll almost certainly find a lot of these, and we'll see them in a routine fashion. These are not spaceships, but space ships aren't here, okay. For one thing, these are pretty large objects. These could be sixty miles from one side, or a dozen miles or ten miles wide, these are very big. An alien spacecraft could be the size of a of a basketball, It could be the size of a school bus. I mean, we don't know, obviously, but there's no reason why I should be as large. As that, right unless they're I guess bigger like giants or whatever. But I can't see anything like that. But this is this is another problem. Would they be squishy beings like us little green men, if you will, or would they be robotic AI beings. It's my contention, and I write about this quite a bit my book Reinventing SETI that interstellars travel by squishy beings like us is so difficult and so onerous that for all intents and purposes, they don't do it. It's so much easier and better and more efficient to send robots. And there are lots of reasons for this. So for example, I mean, if the voyager, which is leaving our Solar System into interstellar space now, would take one hundred and five thousand years to get to Barnard Star, their second years star, that would be like four thousand generations of people, okay, and that's every single one of them would except for the very first generation of this very last generation would be born, live their entire lives, and die on board the ship. Okay, uh, the can you imagine the uh that every single atom would have to be efficiently recycled because there's no possibility of resupply. Mhm, we can. And and how vast that that that ship would have to be look at gosh walking too. You know, somebody's quarters there on the on the ship, and you'll see that in the bathroom there's a toothbrush, and there's a and a and a cup, and some far some pharmaceuticals in the closet, and and there's sheets and pillow cases and so on. Right, So you've got to have a toothbrush factory, a toothpaste factory. Uh, hey, you know, a glass factory. You've got to have a whole plantation for cotton, and and uh and and and I heard of a flock of geese for the for the for the pillows, and on and on and on and on, and it's just for a bedroom and and so it's the the technicalities of doing this are so awesome and so formidable, and the failure points so many, and it only takes one single failure point for the whole mission to go into it into disaster. Uh So, take for example, the starting ah the starting bacterial load, and the and the starting viruses. They would have to be so perfectly balanced so that one or another species, if you will, of bacteria or virus doesn't explode or more likely, uh mutate in a in a way that just destroys the entire mission. Uh So it's and again, I write a whole chapter on the book about the impossibility of space travel by squishy things. I've always thought it would be more like even what we do here, Like we send out machines, we send out probes, we do investigating me especially in areas that we can't get to. Obviously we can't travel through space. Whatever we do, we launch satellites. We launched these right probes out there. So if we're doing it, I've always assumed that if there's other intelligent beings out there somewhere, that they would probably be doing the same thing we are. So totally true. I mean, we have sent interstellar spacecraft to the stars with nineteen seventies technology. It's pioneering voyagers. They're on their way to the stars, okay, and they're not aimed at any particular star but they could they could have been, or they could be and there, and they're often running and they will go basically forever. They'll just be out there. And that's with nineteen seventies technology. Any aliens that we need, make no mistake about it, will be eons, eons more advanced than we are. And we can say that with an absolute certainty. We don't know very much about et. We don't know what their intentions are towards us, but we do know this about them, that they are AONs more advanced than we are. And we can say this on very strong statistical grounds. The very first alien civilization might have arisen in our galaxy about eight or nine billion years ago. That would have the first rocky planets were formed approximately twelve billion to thirteen billion years ago. And if it took four or five billion years for a civilization to a rock on those rocky planets, that brings you to eight nine billion years ago. That's twice the age of our own solar system. These aliens would be so vastly superior to us, it's quite a head start. They've got billions of years of head start, and the chances of us meeting statistical chances of us meeting it's another civilization that is also like us in our first hundred years or so. If the technology to send and receive signals or send spacecraft and so forth in the first hundred years is essentially statistically for all intensive purposes zero, Okay, they're way way in advance of us. Do you think if we were sending out signals like we have been and they were actually picked up by something, because the chances of a different, like different type of civilization out there was to come across what we had here, do you think they would be they'd come and look at us, and they'd investigate what we are, or do you think they'd be more so inclined to not really care because of the distance and how long it would take, Like how long do you think it would take for them to even receive something from us before they'd even know where we're even at. Well, that's one that's you're giving us very good reasons, Brandon, for giving et very good reason to send probes here instead of instead of trying to transmit, because you know, they could have been sending their first probes to us, like four and a half million years ago to check out our brand new Solar System. They could be sending these probes at the speed of voyage, or it could take fifty hundred thousand years, a million years, it doesn't matter. In deep time. A million years is like nothing to get here. But once it gets here, it can do actual science. It can study our Solar system. It can study and realize that the third planet out is looking kind of promising, and then the fourth planet out in Mars, maybe as a biosphere. Okay, But then they send a one hundred billion years later, they send another spacecraft and they see that Mars went dead, but this other planet Earth is now blossoming with some microbial life that's worth checking out and keeping an eye on. And so they send probes once every hundred million years. That's all it takes until they see that there's oxasgenation, which indicates multi cellularity, which now gets really interesting. Okay. And now for the last two billion plus years, they've been sending probes let's say every fifty million years, and they've realized that that multicellularity has grown into larger animals, and now they send them even more frequently, and now they actually let the stay in orbit around us basically on a permanent basis to constantly surveil us and lo and behold, we light up. And they may have detected that we were technological, not just with the first television broadcast in nineteen fifty ish, but rather they could have realized that we were growing towards technological competence ten thousand years ago. They would have been able to detect agriculture. They certainly would have seen the pyramids go up. So they're on to us, you know, And since you know, in my book, I talk about the galactic Internet, and I specifically draw out what the schematics of a communication internet or network of probes would look like. But what I'm talking about is the probability there are probes around every star system, and they were in communication with each other. As soon as the agriculture is detected on Earth, it the information is shot out to the probes around Office Inari, our nearest neighbor, and Barnard's Star, our second and nearest neighbor, and those probes then send it out in other directions. Before you know what the information about is diffuse all over the galaxy. Do you think it would be wiser for us to do the same thing rather than just broadcasting ourselves out to everything out there, listening that, hey, we're out here. We should be investigating like what we're doing now, but not letting everything out there know that where we're at, because we don't know what type of civilizations are out there. Absolutely, absolutely, Brandon, I think it is would be gross, grossly malfeasant to send signals out to the out galaxy at this point. We don't have any idea what we're doing there. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, that I given my book for why it is that ET is not transmitting signals from its own planet. The reason, one of the probably the first and most important reason, is that it's dangerous. Okay. I mean, ET may have good reason to know that there are bad actors in the galaxy, and when they transmit signals from their own planet, by definition, they tell everybody where they are. Okay, when they send a probe, and even if that probe is studying our languages right now and eventually opens up a line of communication with us in the queen's own English or a Mandarin or Urdu or something else, you know, they don't have to reveal the coordinates of their of their progenitor civilization, the the probes, and you know Memory Bank, because it's a it's basically a robot. May not even have that information. Okay, it's dangerous. So that's one of the main reasons why why they're not transmitting signals to us. They're sending probes instead. As a kid, I always thought it'd be great if we if their aliens were like friendly and they're here to help and all sorts of stuff like that. But as I've gotten older, I'm in my forties now, I'm like, I don't trust them. If they're out there, I wouldn't want someone knowing where I live, Like even in today's standard with other people like, I don't want people knowing where I live. So why would I want a completely different civilization of non humans to know where I live? Well, we may have no choice about it, but because if they're if they're in our solar system right now as I think they are, and then they gigs up, they know we're here, but we need to deal with them with both hands in our pockets. Okay we have. We can't assume that they're benign. It'd be nice to assume that they're nine. But when you when you look at the evidence for ET's intentions, you've quickly discovered that there is no evidence. Okay, we have the slightest idea whether ET is here to aggress against us, to save us, to proselytize, to simply trade with us, information being presumably the coin of the realm, Whether they're or they're here to lay down the law of the galactic law. And I can tell you what. I think they've got galactic laws. But you know, or you know or whatever they're here for, we really don't know, but what, But we do need to treat them very very very cautiously. So they may be paying playing three dimensional chess to our checkers, so to speak. So for that reason, I've I've balled in my book. And this is I started by saying I wanted to affect public p We need to get our act together on Earth. We need to figure out today, well we're going to be dealing with aliens if and when we meet them. We certainly were looking for near Earth objects right now, asteroids and so on the make crash into Earth, even though the probability of that is very very low. It's you know, it's been sixty five million years since there was an extinction level asteroid impact that knocked out the dinosaurs sixty six million years ago. But you know, so the chances of that happen they're small, but it's worth studying and it's worth caring about it. Equally true, it's whatever you regard the chances of waking up tomorrow morning and finding that that et is transmitting to us from the distance of the moon or something. Whatever you think the chances are, you can't honestly say that the chances are zero. There is a chance that this is going to happen. The way we need to deal with it is now, we need to form committees of experts to study this at great length. And a committee should be well financed and report to the UN Security Council. And I lay this out in my book that a committee shouldn't be comprised just of astronomers, let's perish that thought right away, but should be comprised of security experts, military people, diplomat's economists, behavioral biologists, evolutionary biologists, linguists, cryptologists, and on and on, game theorists. They should have a prominent place at the table, I think, and on and on, And why do we need to study this urgently today, because first of all, in the in the in the moment after our first detection of ET, especially if it's within our own soular system, we're going to be in a state of shock and fuddlement. And and if we'd leave it to our world leaders to deal with it with in the in a vacuum and without no knowledge, no understanding, and nobody having ever thought about the subject, we're going to be in a world of trouble. I let me give you a couple of hyperthedicals. Okay, just to give you an example. Let's let's say that I'm correct and that ET is here. They're right here in our own solar system that may be at the distance of the moon. And we get a transmission and in English it takes over you know, the tinfoil tails uh podcast or whatever. I mean. It passes what I call the interoculatory test, which means it smacks you right between the eyes. There's no doubt about it. It's ET, you know, for it's apparent everybody. There's no equivocation, and and ET says here, i am, I'm up here, I've got I'm in my I've got this nice probe and I've come to give you all the technology and wisdom and science and of our advanced civilization. It's here for the taking. It's all recorded on my on our version of a hard drive or a thumb drive or something. It's in my cargo bay. Come up and get it. WHOA, well, what are the Chinese going to do? What are the Americans going to do? They're going to have a race to get there first, Okay, Elon and Musk may maybe they race as a private party. And let's say that the Americans get there first and we grab the hard drive and bring it back to Earth. What are the Chinese going to do? Aren't they incentivized to shoot that down? Lest the Americans receive a corn accut hope of technology that disadvantages them. And will that not then start a war? I mean this is we've got to think this off, oolks and really act according to a treaty that needs to be written and devised. In my book Reinventing SETI I actually write a treaty. It's there. I adopt and adapt some of the current outer space treaties, and it's just meant to be a first draft to get the conversation going. So we need to this kind of international thinking and this kind of international coordination. Let's say that let's if you would let me give you another hypothetical. Sure, let's say that I'm wrong that et is not here, or rather, one day we get a signal from a star and it's et DT says basically the same thing. Hi, guys, is anybody over there? We're over here. If there's anybody there, write us back, send us a signal so that we can send you all the great science and technology and for dyna mitia. Okay, great? Do we respond? Fair question? You would think The easy answer is, but I think Brandon, you're onto it is. The easy answer is, sure, of course we respond. We want all that wisdom. We want to get into conversation. Now, they may be, you know there, they may be a malignant civilization. It's echo locating. It's like a bad echo locating. It's next prey. It could be really dangerous to respond. Who gets to decide and it could be really wonderful to respond? So who gets to make that decision? Is it the United Nations a Security Council? And if so by two thirds vote, by three quarters vote, is it the General Assembly? Is it by nations, is it by populations? Is it two thirds three cord? Who knows? This stuff has never been talked about, never been decided, But it's urgent that we do that right away because if the answer is, if the collective decision is and we're going to roll the dice and we're going to respond to ET, we need to make that response. We made them make that decision today, not after we receive a signal, because after we receive a signal, it's too late. You know, As I said at the earlier, we look at each star for just about ten minutes each and then we move on to the next star. What if ET does the same thing, They transmit to a star to a star US wait ten minutes. Now you have to adjust for the speed of light. So if there are one hundred light years away two hundred years later we're talking about and what are they going to wait two hundred years plus plus ten minutes plus ten hours, ten days, ten weeks to ten years. Who knows? Our own only possible correct strategy is to if we decide we're going to send back a signal to write the message today and the second we get an actual you know, signal, from et from another star system. If that's the decision, we hit the send button immediately upon the receipt of that signal. I just feel like if just based off humanity the way we are, I don't know if a civilization far more advanced than us would go the same route that we do, but I know just how people are around here, and if they need resources, they need something. If they look down upon us as not as advanced as they are, are they going to consider us an equal or are they just going to come and take us, take the resources that we have here and then go on to the next one. Well, my own view on that is that they're not here to even if they're malicious, they are not here for our resources. Water, you know, it's ubiquitous, it's all over the place. We don't have anything here in our solar system that they don't have in their solar system. They're not coming here to eat us. I mean, Big Max can't be that expensive in their home system. You know, they're you know, we're probably incompatible as they couldn't digest us. They're not here, they're they're not here in that respect, but they may be here to destroy us, just flat out to destroy us, and they could have for two reasons. One is they don't want the competition. Well, let's just say that's the real reason they don't want the competition. So they basically will strangle every civilization that arises. And it's bradal lest we become technological, technologically savvy and destroy them first. So it's there's you know, it's a real possible threat. I mean, one of one of the and it's one of the main reasons why potentially we're not hearing anything because everybody else is keep thos is smart enough to keep their heads down, or they've already been destroyed. So AT may also be here simply to lay down the law. And the law may be just as simple as saying, there's two words. You know, don't come, stay still, you move, you die, something like that, you know, like the universal law would be, you cannot leave your own star system. There is no colonization that would make you a threat, or colonization by what it's called von Neumann replicators, they may be also forbidden. However, I want to add a positive note on this et and I lay out this case in my book Reinventing SETI ET needs us and we've got tremendous bargeting power with ET, and we shouldn't use it frivolously. Should be very careful about this. What do they need us for? I posit a great sea of robes that are acting not just as to do fundamental research on planet Earth, for example, but to act as communication relay stations or communication nodes, and they're constantly in touch with one another with narrow beam lasers, which would be efficient carriers of information from star to star. We don't, So we're embedded in a cacophony of signals and we don't, and we're completely oblivious to it because they're narrow beams that miss us. They don't hit a planet Earth. There's sort of like garage openers or the security system in a museum or something, where we don't go through the lasers and so were unaware of it. But that system of nodes and communication nodes and probes is so vast that no one civilization could possibly build it and maintain it. Ultimately, ET needs us to help maintain the intercalactic communication system, to build out probes and nodes communication nodes in our factories and launch them. Do you think that would be something that would happen within our lifetime, because I know I've talked with other people and they think it's going to be not within our generation, but within the next hundred or something. Ever, they might receive a signal. But do you think it's going to be sooner than what a lot of people are thinking? If there's one out there. I haven't the slightest idea, and anybody else, All I can say is any thing. I'm going to add just one positive, one note to this conversation, but before saying, in effect, we don't know, and your personal guess is as good as the next person's personal guests. However, there is something that concerns me, and I'm going to lay out here on the table. If ET exists, an ET wants to learn a curious ET, they wants to learn about the galaxy, and wants to communicate with other civilizations, then they are here, and they are here right now. They've had billions of years to get here. They're here. I don't know where they are. They could be sitting on an asteroid somewhere. They could be on the moon, they could be in orbit around the Sun. Here, so they're decoding us. So there are two possibilities unless they're just here to lurk to to you know, eavedrop on us and have no intention they're uploading all the information from our Internet and have no intention of giving anything back in return, which is possible, but as I said, it's not probable because I think that they want to they want our assistance in building out the network, and they want to lay down the galactic law. But if they are here, the question is when will they make contact with us? Well, there are two possibilities. One is after they decoded US, and they're in the process of decoding US right down. We think that they're super intelligence or that they're on board computing capacities. They are so immense. But but but still, it takes time. I mean, you know, I know that EO. Wilson, the great etymologists from Harvard, who's spent a career studying ants, at the end of his great career, you know, he finally understood something about the chemical communication systems of ants. You know, we're more complicated than ants. Okay, it's tough to decode US now, but that's that's so it may just take time, and when they're finished decoding US, they'll open up a line of communications that will meet, as I said, the interoculatory tests, they'll smack us between the eyes. We'll all know it's there and and we're off to the races. Alternatively, they may either not have the onboard capability to fully decode us, and or they need permission to make contact from their home base, and so they may be funneling fast streams of data UH back to their home star system for deeper analysis and or for permission to open up a channel of communication with us. Well, if they if they're if their home community home civilization is two thousand light years away, that's going to be four thousand years before we hear from them, two thousand because it takes ET two thousand years to send a signal to them, and the and the home civilization two thousand more years to send it back. So we're not going to hear from them for four thousand years from now. It's very prostrating, but that's this, you know. But they're dealing in deep time. They're dealing in you know where millions of years or are like nothing, So they couldn't care less than we have to wait for another four thousand years. That may be the solution. To why we're not getting anything. I've kind of wondered if it's just basically exactly what you said, is like a distance thing, because the universe is so vast that sending signals and receiving signals from star systems is going to take even at the speed of light, unless they're like right at one of the closest stars, which I think is still like, isn't it. I mean light years away. Is the closest star to Earth four point two So just say if they were from that star system, it's still going to take four point two years just to even get a signal to there to back to us. That's eight years. But if you think about all the other distances out there from other star systems, then it's can take thousands to millions of years before we receive anything. Well not millions, but thousands, yes, because the galaxy is one hundred thousand light years from one side to the other, so they'll be much closer than the furthest furtherest reach of the galaxy, So it's not gonna be millions of years, but it could definitely be thousands, certainly hundreds, and it's frustrating, but it's unfortunately the. Reality that is, I've talked with someone else before and they said that, and again, this is just someone's opinion, but they had did research. But they think the ETS aren't even as advanced as what we're considering that they're only like maybe twenty to fifty years more advanced than us. And I don't know where they come up with that determination, but he was. Well, they're right, they're right, and they're wrong. They're not more advanced than us. If you if you if the team metric is basketball, okay, So in other words, sure there are things that we're going to do better than ET. Okay, playing basketball or whatever, because you know, even a dumb shark swims a lot better than I do, you know, so we're gonna be where we will excel over ET in some fashion or another. However, when it comes to alience and technology, they're not just a little bit more advance in us. They're way more advancing us. Is there anything I'm looking through some like this Drake equation I'm not familiar with that even? Is is that because down here it said something to where you believe it's holding us back. That in the firm paradox. Right, So let's take the Drake equation first. The Drake equation is often considered to be the second most famous equation in science, next only to E equals MC squared. It tells it was devised by Frank Drake. Frank Drake ran the very first SETI experiment in nineteen sixty and was active in the field and to his death just a few years ago in his nineties. Frank was a very dear friend of mine, a lovely, lovely human being. But he wrote an equation. He ran the first setting experiment in nineteen sixty and then in nineteen sixty one he and Carl Sagan and a few other people organized their first conference or symposium to discuss issues of setting. So Frank, I think really on the back of an envelope or something, wrote down an equation that would say, which would give you the result of n N being the number of civilizations in the galaxy, and if you could fill in all the factors on the other side of that and equals. And then he had a number of factors and I can listen up with you, but I don't think time allows. If you multiply all these factors together, it gives you the N. So, for example, the end of planets is the number of planets, which is one of the factors, is very very large. However, the number of communicating civilizations, which is another factor, is very very small. Just you know, a very small fraction of those plants. You multiply that together with a number of other things, and you end up with your end. In my book, Reinventing Study, or on my website John Gertz dot com, which is my author's website, it's just my name, John Gertz dot com, I go through lengthy arguments. I take the factors one by one by one by one and basically say they're ready for the ash sheep of history. The whole thing needs to be scrapped and reconsidered. And I say this even though Frank was a very very close friend of mine. Nonetheless, it's time for us to move on from the Drake equation. Unfortunately, I think it's a programmer a Celtics exactly why that is so, I would encourage people to go to my website or to pick up a copy of my book, and it's laid out in great detail, and again it should be accessible by layman. It's even though it is an equation, you just middle school math is more than adequate for the job on sixth grade math is fine. It's just it's just a multiplying a few things together. The one last thing that I had to ask is, and it's a hypothetical question, but obviously, whether it's being you can see the graphics or whatever, what do you think when people are reporting that they've seen extraterrestrials or they've experienced do you think that's actually something that's a possibility or do you think there's something else? Do you think there's actually beans that have been coming here. I haven't seen evidence that persuades me. I'll tell you why. Okay, first of all, it's not my field, and therefore I'm waiting to just open up the New York Times of the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or USA Today and seeing on the front page, you know, aliens have been discovered. In other words, you know, listen, when I know a subject deeply, I'm often disappointed with the mainstream press. But you know, I understand democracy deeply, and I'm disappointed with democracy too, but it's the best thing we've got. Same thing with the main stream press. So that's one sort of safeguard for me let the reporters, the thousands of reporters out there, see if they can dig up something that is real enough to put on the front page. But I've got some other specific problems with what I'm looking at. One is with the photographic evidence. You know, if we all carry around great cameras in our pockets, we're the great photos of these things. Now you could say, okay, well, an iPhone is going to take a great photo of a UFO that's ten thousand feet above or something. Okay, fair point, fair point. But you know, I would be impressed if forty strangers to one another all took the same picture of the same thing, or forty strangers for one another. We're all sitting on window seats and an airplane and all shot a picture of the same thing out the window. Even if the quality of each picture is not great, the fact that they all did it would impress me a lot. I don't know why, you know, our satellites aren't seeing these UFOs. I mean, they're looking down on Earth all the time, they see every single airplane. Why aren't they seeing the UFOs? With all the great accelerations that these UFOs are purportedly achieved, where are the sonic booms. Matter flowing through the air moves air molecules, they bump together, create fixed friction, and there's your sonic boom. We don't hear them, so, you know, And I don't buy conspiracy theories. You know. The oldest one, of course, is the nineteen forty seven crash landing in Roswell, which has been kept a secret in all that in area fifty one. But you know what, there have been fourteen presidential administrations since then. Thousands of people in each of these administrations would have to have been in on the secret. Not one of them leaked anything to the New York Times, not one of them made a deathbed confession. And as far as the president are concerned, you know, Jimmy Carter ran to the microphone breathlessly when they thought he'd discovered a Martian microbe. And Donald Trump, come on, you love Donald Trump or you hate Donald Trump. I think we can all agree that Donald Trump wouldn't hide that from us. No, so I think you know. So I'm not buying the conspiracy theories either anyway, So that's my problem. But so your listeners can al right hate, oh help girts be so damn stupid. You know, it's fine, fair enough, but take heart in the fact that even though I'm not a UFO person, I'm coming to the same conclusion that they're here, they're in our solar system. It's just I haven't seen the evidence for them yet. That hits me between spacks me between my eyes. Anyway, Now, I respect that opinion. I don't. I've never seen an alien myself. I've seen weird things in the sky, but that doesn't mean it's not man made there. It's from here. So until I try and remain skeptical of a lot of things, so until I have my own personal experience or eyewitness something myself, it's just kind of I don't know what to think. But yeah, fair enough. Well, John, it's been a pleasure talking to you. But before we wrap this up, I would like for you to let everyone know where they can get your book. Well, I mean, you can get it at Amazon or if you go to my website, John Gertz dot com. They're linked to either Amazon or from Oxford University Press. We can get it directly. I presume you can get it bookstores and and it's available on Kindle as well, and has just been released, so it is written for layman. It's frankly, it's if I have to say so. It's written with a lot of good sense of humor and a little bit of snarkiness and so on. And you know, I've tested it with my layman friends who all seem to love it. So it's uh and while at the same time it says it's serious, it's fact base and and I know Oxford University Press, which is a leading academic press, sent it out to be reviewed by by four astronomy professors, and all of them that they would use it in their classrooms. So it's on the one hand it's serious, but on the other hand it's completely readable by any layman. I'm definitely looking forward to checking it out. I had a copy that was sent to me by the press lady, so I haven't had a chance to sit down and read it yet, but it is on my agenda to get done, so I'm definitely looking forward to it. Okay, thanks so much. I appreciate it. And Brandon, it's really been a pleasure talking with you. It's been a pleasure too. I'm happy to have you on here, and maybe sometime again the future will have you back on Okay, all the besty, Bye bye bye. If you'd like to be a guest on Tenfoil Tells, remember to send an email to Tenfoil Tales podcast at gmail dot com or go to tenfoil tales dot com and go to the contact section. Make sure to follow me around on all the social medias, and just remember truth comes at a cost. Are you willing to pay the price? I've heard a story late last night about something alert along a woodline. You foot prints, strange lights in the sky. They claim it's nothing, but I know they lie. It's easier last lapping my face. But something about this makes me say, what if it's real? What if they knew? What if the answers are coming from you, spending stores, wasting mind time? Hearing boy says, is it all in their minds? They can call me crazy, but I just want some throom. What if it's true? What if it's really? What if it's true? What if the worlds not what we knew? Jim for tell, blend me a story that starts where the line is gets what if it's real? What if it's true? The answers are waiting, They're waiting for you. They see if the dog man walking, or maybe a offman flies. I love the very giants hidding beneath the lies. They say, it's just stories. It's all they believe, the fairy tale sport of things we can't perceive. That won't keep us blindly. They won't break our wheel. But I'm not buying it. I'm not swowing another pill, forest fed poison. The lines were made to thee What if the truth could set us free? The alien signals traveling through time, secret space programs are racing their minds. They call them crazy, but I just need some proof. What if it's true? What if it's real? What if it's true? What if the. Worlds not what we do till oil tells Fullieve. Me in a story that starts where the logic is. What if it's real? What if it's true? The answers are waiting. They're waiting for you. They they lie. We all been die. The signs are there if you. Open your eyes. The aliens cricked its demon's ghost, the devil them too. What if it's me or what if it's real? What if it's raal? What if it's true? What if the world's not? What way to do? Ten Foil tells fully me a story that starts wear. The lodger can What. If it's rain, What if that's true. The answers are waiting, they're waiting for you. It's all in our heads, it's all in our binders. These voices can be silenced. The truth must rise. Ten for tell, it's pulling me through. 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