ET Signals from the Milky Way –“We’ve Missed Signals We Were Totally Unaware Of” (VIEW Today’s “Galaxy” Stream)




"Do you think that we've missed signals along the way?" SyFyWire's Don Kaye asked SETI Institute's chief astronomer, Seth Shostak during a recent interview. "That we're totally unaware of. That there are possibly signals that are being transmitted in such a way that we're too primitive to pick them up?

"Well, I don't know if we're too primitive," Shostak answered, "but I agree with you. I'm sure we've missed signals. I'm sure there's signals coming from somebody that we're totally unaware of because we're not aiming the big antenna in the right direction, tuned to the right frequency, and all that sort of stuff. I mean we can easily miss that. The universe is 13 billion years old, right? There's been plenty of time for intelligence to pop up on lots and lots of worlds out there, and there's lot of them that are older than the Earth, so they may have a tremendous head start. So yeah, I'm sure we've missed a lot of clues."


Shostak was then asked if he thinks it's feasible at all that we could be alone, or are the odds are just against it. "I think the odds are against it. I gave a talk at the Griffith Observatory less than a week ago and I started off by asking how many people thought aliens were really out there, and essentially all the hands went up, but not all. Then I asked how many people thought they were probably not out there, and there were a couple of hands that went up. But the reason I don't agree with them is because, if we've learned anything over the last 20 years, it's that essentially every star has planets.

"We didn't know that 20 years ago. We know it now. So that means the number of planets that are kind of like the Earth, the kind where you might want to make a real estate investment, where you might have an ocean or an atmosphere — the kind of things that would be useful for biology — that number in our galaxy is maybe 50 billion or 100 billion.

"It's tens of billions, and I don't want to bore you with big numbers but that's a lot of planets. And that's just our galaxy. You can photograph a hundred billion other galaxies, and each of them might have a hundred billion planets like Earth.

"And so what that means is that if Earth is the only place where anything interesting is happening, you're living in a miracle! And you may think you're living in a miracle, but if you think that in science — if you think you're really, really special — it's usually not true."

We're finding planets every day that are either in that habitable zone or that have Earth-like conditions, Shostak concluded

The Daily Galaxy via SyFyWire and SETI Institute



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