Guest: Dr. Seth Shostak; Topics: SETI, radio astronomy, searching for ET, star systems and planets, radio astronomy off Earth, the WOW signal and much more.
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We welcomed Dr. Seth Shostak of the SETI Organization back to the show for this 65-minute discussion. As I have done with other programs, I suggest you follow the tags which I have repeated below as they do a good job of providing a short summary of topics discussed for this program.
Tags: Dr. Seth Shostak, searching for extra-terrestrial life, SETI Organization, where SETI looks, radio astronomy, trillion planets, VLA in Socorro, NM, WOW signal, Ohio State radio telescopes, Arecibo, China's 500 meter radio telescope, 5 million mph star, Voyager 1 detection, SETI at home, consumer radio astronomy dishes, modification to satellite dishes, optical SETI, Mars and radio astronomy, Martian moons, parallax, Enceladus ice covered, 80% of stars with planets, lots of speculation, Jupiter for radio astronomy, radio telescope sensitivity, the COSMIC Project.
Highlights for me were the extended conversations and discussions we had regarding radio astronomy both on Earth and the possibility of doing it off Earth. For example, when asked about Enceladus, he suggested it would not be a good location plus he explained why. Seth then said some Jupiter moons would be much better. Don't miss this part of the radio telescope discussion which came later toward the end of the program.
Another highlight for me was his discussion of the COSMIC Project. Cosmic stands for Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster. SETI is joined on this project by the both the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative. Having been to Socorro, NM to see the Very Large Array, I was interested in how he told us about combining the VLA with other radio telescopes to create a massive data processing system. You can read more about their new COSMIC project at www.seti.org/press-release/massive-radio-array-search-extraterrestrial-signals-other-civilizations. If you want more information on COSMIC, do a Google search for the project as there have been lots of news reports and other stories on this new program.
Listeners brought up searching for ET by means other than radio signals. Our guest even talked about ET possibly wanting to hide or camouflage a radio signal. Seth also suggested that in the near future our radio transmissions off Earth might significantly diminish due to new ways of communicating and sending information back and forth to users and people all over Earth other than with radio. I found this to be a most interesting but short commentary. Other search methods and short topic discussions were part of this interview.
Please post your comments/questions for Dr. Shostak on our blog for this show. You can reach our guest through me or through SETI.org.
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