INTERVIEW: DOUGLAS VAKOCH PRESIDENT OF METI

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Ray Tarara: If you could just start by introducing yourself and what is your name and role.

Douglas Vakoch: My name is Doug Vakoch. I'm the president of METI, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to messaging extraterrestrial intelligence.

Ray: Can you talk a little bit more about METI itself and how the organization came about?

Douglas: METI was founded in 2015 and it arose from a long-standing discussion within the community of scientists trying to make contact with intelligence beyond Earth, folks involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI. One of the big questions has been: should we only be listening or should we also be transmitting? I was involved in discussions that we really should be transmitting, but it became clear to a number of us that none of the existing SETI organizations were going to take the lead on this so we needed a new organization that would have as it's mandate from the outset to send powerful intentional signals to the stars in the hope of getting a response.

Ray: What is METI's relationship to SETI, the other organization that listens for extraterrestrials? What's our relationship with them and do you guys collaborate?

Douglas: Well, the first observations that we did of a SETI nature were in collaboration with the SETI Institute. When people think of SETI, they think of either an organization. There are a number of organizations doing SETI. For many years, I was at the SETI Institute, one of the premier organizations based in Silicon Valley. When METI did its first SETI project using optical telescopes to look for very brief laser pulses, this was in collaboration with an observatory in Panama, we did it in collaboration with the SETI Institute. The SETI Institute has a wonderful radio telescope. We were looking at this weird star that was discovered a few years ago that had an erratic dimming. There was a question might this in fact be evidence of some alien structure around that star. As one way of testing that, we simultaneously listened for signals at radio frequencies, at optical frequencies using the METI's observatory in Panama. Unfortunately, we didn't see anything. There are times we do a collaboration, but for the most part, we're independent organizations, each championing our own approach to making contact.

Ray: Why would you think of reaching out to ETs instead of just waiting for a signal? Where do you think the benefit's coming from that approach?

Douglas: Well, it is possible, of course, that the signals are coming in, so that's why we continue to do that. What happens if the other civilizations out there are doing exactly what we're doing, which is simply listening and not transmitting? It could really be a quiet universe. What we're doing is reaching out to those civilizations that may be interested in the conversation, but they're looking for someone else to take the initiative. We often talk about wanting to enter this exchange, but we've always put the burden on the other civilization. It may be that they're waiting for us, so that's why we transmit.

Ray: What technology are you using to transmit?

Douglas: Well, in our first transmission, we used a wonderful radar facility located in Tromsø, Norway. This is a location north of the Arctic Circle in Norway that let us transmit radio signals. Typically, this facility is used to understand the northern lights, the aurora borealis. In fact, most people know about Tromsø, Norway. It's a great tourist location if you want to see the northern lights. It's also a great location to do scientific research to try to understand the structure, the composition of these northern lights. They do it by sending radio signals and some small fraction of those radio signals bounce back to Earth, but you can use the same transmitter to send signals to other stars. That's what we used in the first project we did. In the future, we'll add to that a laser transmitter where we can in the same way that we're listening for, looking for brief laser pulses from Panama, we'll be able to send laser signals. One of the beautiful things about transmitting at optical frequencies is you can get a lot of information in each second. You can't get as much information in radio frequencies.

Ray: One of the issues I've heard with maybe that we haven't heard from extraterrestrials is that we're maybe not listening for the right signals, maybe civilizations would advance to a certain point no longer use radio signals as often as we do. Are you accounting for this possibility that maybe we're not sending the right signals to get a response in your work?

Douglas: Well, that's one of the reasons that we would transmit because I think that's very reasonable. You only need to look at our own half-century of developing SETI searches to look at some of our blind spots that we've had. In the earliest days of SETI, when the first SETI project was launched in 1960 by the astronomer Frank Drake, a project called Ozma, where he looked at to nearby Sun-like stars for about 150 hours at radio frequencies, there was, at the same time, this was ramping up in the early '60s, Charles Townes, who got the novel prize for inventing a laser said, "Well, why not look for laser pulses?" Virtually, all of his colleagues laughed him off and said, "Charlie, that's ridiculous. No civilization has the capacity to send such powerful signals." As the decades passed, we slowly began to realize that, "Wait a second. Even humanity, a civilization who's really new to this game, we have the ability to send those signals ourselves." We need to keep open to new possibilities, but we're also constrained by the technologies we have. It's very easy to think of how to look for laser pulses that are a billionth of a second long because there's off the shelf technology that will detect nanosecond pulses. A lot of it is a constraint of our imagination, but if, in fact, there are civilizations out there that have been doing this not for 50 years, but for 500 or 5 million years, then they may well have methods of signaling us that we would never think of. That's one of the virtues of transmitting. Presumably, if they're a very advanced civilization, they made contact with a lot of other civilizations, they may be familiar with something even as rudimentary as something that we would use like a radio or optical signals. It may be that the aliens are sending us things that they think are wonderful, but we haven't detected them. If we let them know how we can conceive of communicating, that may be the essential ingredient to getting a response back.

Ray: I've heard that our radio signals don't actually reach very far out from Earth. What are some of the constraints with radio signals that we face when trying to message extraterrestrials?

Douglas: Our radio signals, of course, they dissipate. The further they go out, the weaker and weaker they get. Using our current SETI searches, we wouldn't be able to detect our own level of leakage radiation. The TV, the radio signals that are going out from our broadcast, we wouldn't be able to detect them even at the distance of the nearest star for light-years away. Those signals on a cosmic scale are pretty weak. On the other hand, if we look at how our radio technology has developed since we first launched it and have seen the kind of progress and extrapolate that only 200 or 300 centuries from now, we will have the ability in just 200, 300 years to detect our level of leakage radiation out to a distance of 500 light-years. We are incredibly constrained in what we can detect right now, but in just a little time, just a small moment in the cosmic time scale, we'll have a capacity to detect a civilization even as rudimentary as we are now and we don't have to wait very long. What that means is that it's very likely that a civilization just a tiny bit more advanced than we are looking at Earth already knows that there's intelligent life here. If they've been looking at us for a long time, they've had about two billion years to detect microbial life because of changes to our atmosphere. I think it won't be a surprise for the extraterrestrials to know that we're here. What we're hoping to surprise them with though is a clear indication that not only are we here, but we want to make contact. Right now, it's like if you go to a big cosmic party and you look around, there are a lot of people, but no one has reached out to say hello. That's what we're trying to do.

Ray: The focus of this episode is on Fermi's Paradox. Could you talk a little bit about Fermi's Paradox and how that's informed your work?

Douglas: Sure, well, the Fermi Paradox began in 1950 when Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist was looking at the scope of the universe and the 13 billion years it's been around and pondering the whole question of, "If there's life out there, why haven't we made contact?" He summarized it by saying, "Where are they?" It's really kind of puzzling because in SETI, we look for radio signals. Radio signals can travel at the speed of light. We've been doing it on and off for over 50 years. We haven't detected anything. Does that mean they're not out there? Even though there are some people who think the aliens have come to Earth, there's no concrete scientific evidence of that, but even if spacecraft travel at a fraction of the speed of light, they should be able to get here if they've been out there trying to travel for millions of years. The Fermi Paradox is this puzzle about if in fact there is intelligent life in the cosmos, why haven't we yet made contact? I think the critical thing is to imagine possible explanations that let you do something different to try to find contact. Again, in the earliest days of SETI, the emphasis was looking for radio signals and that continues till today. Maybe we just haven't looked at enough stars, but in the late 1990s, we also started looking for laser signals, so that's another possibility. Now, I see a third shift with the advent of METI, of saying maybe it's not enough simply to listen, but maybe we need to make ourselves known the fact that we are being intentional and we explicitly want a reply. Maybe that's the key to getting a response. That's a way of testing a particular answer to the Fermi Paradox called the zoo hypothesis. Maybe there are other beings out there watching us much like we watch animals in the zoo. Imagine even I go to the zoo and we see a bunch of zebras. What if one of those zebras turns right towards us, looks us in the eye, and starts counting out a series of prime numbers? That would really give us a radically different relationship. I don't know, Ray. You might go down and check out the wildebeest, but I'm going to stick around with that zebra and I want to see if I can get a conversation going. That's what we're hoping to do with METI of the galactic zebra in a way that can elicit a response from the extraterrestrials.

Ray: That's great. What will you do if you get a response? Do you have any procedures in place?

Douglas: Yes, there have been long-standing protocol developed by the International Academy of Astronautics, International Institute of Space Law, a number of other space organizations. There are a lot of "therefores" and "thou shalts" but really, it boils down to two things. The first thing is if you get a signal that looks good, double-check. Make sure it's really there. Make sure it's not some smart grad student's hacked your system and is feeding you some false data. You want someone from another observatory independent of yours to be able to observe it. Then once you do, the second step is tell the whole world that this doesn't belong to METI or the SETI Institute or anyone else who happens to get the first signal. This is a signal for humanity so it should be publicized widely and openly.

Ray: I've heard that there's been some controversy around actually sending signals into space. I think it was Stephen Hawking who was pretty vocal about saying that that's maybe not the best idea because what if we don't want to be found by this alien life? Is this something you've felt in your work? Have you heard this opinion and how do you address them?

Douglas: When anyone as brilliant as Stephen Hawking says, "Watch out. Beware of transmitting," you have to take it seriously. When he first raised that issue in 2010, he did it in the contest of saying, "Well, maybe the aliens will come to Earth and strip mine our planet." Hawking is brilliant, but he can't see the future any better than any of the rest of us. When he said that in 2010, astronomers had not yet discovered Earth-like planets, rocky planets, big, gaseous planets like ours, Saturn and Jupiter around other stars, but now in the years that have followed, we know that there are other rocky planets everywhere, so it really doesn't make economic sense, but maybe that's not the motive. Maybe it isn't just economic as Hawking originally suggested. Maybe they're just having a bad millennium and they want to come here and destroy us. The thing that Hawking ignored is that it's too late to hide. Now, it's true that if there is exact duplicate of Earth's current technology out at the distance of another star, that civilization will not yet know we're here, so sending a powerful signal could alert them to our existence, but that civilization that's a duplicate of our level of technology is not a threat to us, so it's fine to let them know. They can't come here and do us any harm. The civilizations we're worried about, that Hawking was worried about, the ones who had come to Earth and annihilate us in their spacecraft, those civilizations are already advanced enough to know that we're here. Frankly, if they're on their way, I think a much better strategy is to let them know we make better conversational partners than slaves. Our proteins are not going to be compatible, so we're not going to be very tasty. The key that Hawking and others who've raised concerns about the safety of transmissions is that the civilizations who do pose a danger, already know we're here, so as much as we might like to hide, it's too late.

Ray: I'm curious to hear how common of a concern do you think that is among the scientific community? Do you still hear that concern in your work?

Douglas: I hear a lot of concern of public perception about it. When I talk with individual SETI scientists, I hear them agreeing with this kind of analysis of saying, "Well, sure we're already detectable," but I also hear a considerable concern that the public is going to think it's dangerous. In a field like SETI that is non-traditional in enough other ways, we're looking for something that we don't know is out there. I think there's a natural tendency to want to avoid controversy and so I appreciate that. That was a reason that we founded a new organization because we knew some people would oppose it. Other people would think it was great, but it was something that we could do as a new organization that's difficult for a more established organization to do.

Ray: That's great. Can you speak to how the Drake Equation has influenced METI and also the search for extraterrestrials as a whole?

Douglas: The Drake Equation actually came out of a conference that Frank Drake did. He held it the year after he did this first search. It was held in Green Bank, West Virginia, the location of the telescope that he used for his first SETI search. As he was getting ready for the conference, he said, "How do I organize these talks? What is it we're really trying to get at?" He realized that they were trying to get at this question: how many civilizations are out there right now trying to transmit? He said, "What do we have to know in order to estimate that number?" and so he wrote out a series of seven terms and if you multiply them together, you get what's now called the Drake Equation. The seven terms start with the astronomical and they move up to the more societal. So the astronomical terms, first thing you have to know is how many stars are there in our galaxy. The first term is the rate of star formation. Then for those stars, you need to know what fraction of those stars have planetary systems. That's called f sub p. Then of the star systems out there, how many earth-like planets are there? Potentially habitable planets per star system? That's called n sub e, the number of earth-like planets. Then once you have a planet that's potentially habitable, what fraction of those go on to develop life? That's called f sub l. Then once you have life, maybe microbial life, how likely is it that that's going to lead to the evolution of intelligence? The next question is, what fraction of these life-bearing planets has intelligent life f sub i? Then of those planets with intelligent beings on them, what fraction go on to develop the technology that lets them communicate at interstellar distances like radio and laser? That's called f sub c. Then the seventh and final term, perhaps the greatest unknown is the longevity, L, the lifetime. By lifetime, we don't mean how many years since their species first arose, but how long have they been sending out signals? What's their lifetime in terms of a lifetime that we can detect? You multiply all of those terms together and you get some approximation of how many civilizations are out there right now. It's an important formula because it gives us a ballpark sense that this is a plausible search. Over the decades since it was first formulated, we've gone from having a really pretty good estimate of one of those terms, the rate of star formation. Now over the last 20 years especially, we've come to a much better appreciation of how many planets are around each star. We go outside on a dark night, look up at the stars. Virtually all of those stars have planets. That second term of the Drake Equation, the fraction of stars that have planetary systems is a fraction very close to one, which is good if you're multiplying things together. It keeps the number high if the goal is to find there are a lot of civilizations transmitting. We know that third term of the Drake Equation, if you have a planetary system, how many earth-like planets are they. We know there are about one in five-star systems that will have a potentially habitable planet. When Frank did his first search, he had no direct evidence there is a single planet out in our milky way beyond our solar system. Now we know there are billions of them. There are a lot of places to look, a lot of real estate. The big question is, in those later terms of the Drake equation that are harder to quantify, does life appear, and does it take the form that we can communicate with often enough to make contact, and do they keep at it long enough?

Ray: That's interesting. It's almost like the Drake Equation is an ongoing work in progress and the further we go, the more we're able to fill in some of those variables and get a better snapshot of how many civilizations might be out there.

Douglas: We can fill in the blanks and some of this humanity has nothing that we can do. We can only observe, we can only try and understand. For example, we have no control over how many stars are out there or how many planets are out there. As we moved toward the later part of the Drake Equation, we actually have an ability to control this. That last term how long is our lifetime, well, we have been sending out these accidental TV and radio signals for decades, but as we move into the future, our own telecommunications here on earth are going to become more efficient. We use fiber-optic cable, we use very targeted telecommunications, so there's not as much leakage. We can become effectively quiet or we can decide to intentionally transmit. Again, as we look at those individual terms, we have opportunities to think of ways to expand the range of contact scenarios by tweaking them a little bit and adding alternatives that would be neglected under the status quo.

Ray: We have so many different modes of communication just here on earth that it seems impossible to really even comprehend what could potentially be out there in the universe. How does METI Institute factor this in when listening for signals, and how would you communicate with a species if we did establish contact?

Douglas: This is a wonderful point you're making because we see the universe. In fact, the word that I naturally use is to say we see the universe and that reflects the primacy of vision for us as a species. In the early days of SETI, in fact, a lot of SETI scientists would say, "Look, we can expect that extraterrestrials we make contact are also going to see because vision has evolved 40 times independently here on earth." It's obviously a huge evolutionary advantage, but what we need to look at is that, yes, that was true here on earth and it's true for us, but what if that life evolved on a planet with a very murky atmosphere where vision isn't very helpful? We might be encountering creatures who use a sense of hearing or a sense of touch or a sense of smell. To a limited extent, we can expand our ways of imagining extraterrestrials by understanding other forms of life here on our own planet who encounter the world and communicate differently than we do. That's one of the emphases of our organization. Is to really, really look at the nature of animal communication language itself, but now from an extraterrestrial perspective.

Ray: I've read about the work that you've done trying to develop this concept of a common language. Could you talk about that?

Douglas: Sure. Not knowing what sensory modality an extraterrestrial uses, we have to think of what we have in common simply by virtue of being able to make contact. If we do make contact, it will be because they've picked up our radio signals or laser pulses or we've detected the same coming to earth. The thing we know is that these other beings have a shared technology. What that implies is you've got to know some basic math and science in order to create a radio transmitter. That's what we focus on in our earliest messages. Going back to the transmission from Tromsø, Norway, this was part of a project that was initiated by a Barcelona musical festival called Sonar. They wanted to celebrate their 25th anniversary as a music festival by sending music into space. They asked us to create a mathematical and scientific tutorial that would let the extraterrestrials understand math if they would understand the physics of sound. We went to that challenge by creating a message that should be meaningful to any intelligent being regardless of what their senses are. A number of the past messages that have been sent out have included a lot of pictures. What if the aliens are blind? When we sent that message out, our focus was on what an astronomer and an engineer at another world would need to know to send a radio signal. We communicated basic concepts like time by sending remedial pulses of different durations, one second, two seconds, three seconds. We explained the concept of radio frequency by sending pulses of different radio frequencies. We limited the number of ideas that we communicated, but we focused on the only thing that the extraterrestrials are going to have in direct possession, which is the radio signal itself. Our general approach of how do we communicate with an alien we've never had an opportunity to establish a protocol for communication with, we don't know what they're like, is to send something that is as closely tied to the nature of the signal that they are receiving from us. Then beyond that, we can elaborate moving forward. 2019 is 150th anniversary of the discovery of the periodic table of elements by Mendeleev. We're developing a message that communicates our notion of the periodic table. That's something that should be familiar with scientists in other worlds. Using the most basic mathematics simply describing the numbers that are associated with different chemical elements, we're going to communicate what the universe is made of.

Ray: In October 2017, I believe you sent one of these lessons out to a red dwarf star, Luyten. I believe is the pronunciation.

Douglas: That's right.

Ray: Could you talk about why you sent to that star, why that one was chosen?

Douglas: Yes. We chose Luyten star because it is the closest star that we could target from this location north of the Arctic Circle that at that time was known to have a potentially habitable planet around it. Luyten star is just a little over 12 light-years from Earth. That means it takes a little over 12 years for a radio signal to get there, and if we get an immediate response, another 12 years to get a reply back, so a little over 24 years. On a galactic scale, that's an incredibly tiny distance. Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years in diameter, so it's a tiny fraction. This is one of the closest stars to Earth. More than that, it is a star that is orbited by a planet a bit bigger than Earth. It's called a super-Earth, but it's a dense rocky planet. Not only is that planet orbiting the Luyten star, but it's orbiting at just the right distance from the Sun that it could support liquid water. It's what we call the Goldilocks zone. It's not too hot. It's not too cold. It's just right to support liquid water. That combination of a star that is nearby, and we want it nearby both because the closer the star is, the stronger our signal is going to be. Then also, since we're aiming for a round trip reply, we want to get as close as possible to minimize the time for a round trip exchange. That was the perfect target for this transmission in 2017.

Ray: Could you speak to the implications and the possibilities that we are alone in the universe? Then maybe why you think it is that we haven't detected another civilization yet.

Douglas: One of the things about this search is that if we find intelligence out there, if we're able to make contact, if we're able to understand something about them, the implications are astounding. We have a completely new way of understanding life and ourselves in the universe. If we keep on searching for decades and centuries and thousands of years and don't find anything, we also slowly have this new way of viewing ourselves a life being really rare, at least the kind of life that's willing to reach out, to attempt contact, to search over the course of long timescales. In fact, I would say that the biggest impact of searching, especially as we continue on is what we're trying to do is find a civilization that is more advanced, someone to learn from. The reason I say they would be more advanced is we have had the technology to communicate, radio technology a little less than 100 years. If that's the norm in the galaxy, if a civilization pops up, they're there for 100 years, they disappear. They either destroy themselves in a nuclear war or they turn inward and become contemplative. They stop exploring. If that's the norm, if they're as old as we are, then it's incredibly unlikely that their 100 years and our 100 years are going to coincide given that the galaxy is 13 billion years old. It's as unlikely as if two fireflies each flick on for a single moment over the course of a dark night, what's the chance it's going to be exactly at the same time? Virtually zero? The only way we make contact is if the other civilization has been out there doing this either listening or transmitting much longer than we have. In essence, we're trying to look into our future, we're trying to find a civilization that has a stability of its own civilization, of its own capacity to search far beyond anything we can imagine. Imagine we look for that civilization, decade after decade, century after century and we find absolutely nothing. Again, I think slowly it's going to dawn on us that because we've committed to this search, something more ambitious than anything humanity has ever taken on before, that we have, in fact, become that long-lived stable civilization we've been looking for out there all along. It's a profound search whether we find something or whether we find nothing out there as long as we're able and willing to do the search.

Ray: What are some of the technological limitations we face at the moment and maybe also some of the societal limitations? I know talking about extraterrestrials carries law taboo around it in the scientific community. Can you talk about some of those hurdles you have to face in this research?

Douglas: Sure. One of the challenges is finding the really powerful radio transmitters like the one at Tromsø or like the one at Arecibo Observatory, the world's largest radar facility, both because of how heavily subscribed these facilities are for other traditional scientific research, but also because of concerns when Stephen Hawking says, "Maybe not such a good idea." What observatory director wants to attract negative publicity for their facility? I think that's one of the limitations that we have is gaining access to some of these prime radio transmitters. The possibilities on the flip side are incredible, which is that for modest amounts of money, $100,000, $200,000, we could build a basic laser transmitter that would let us communicate with nearby star systems. There are technological constraints. One of the constraints of transmitting at light frequencies is that the universe absorbs energy at light frequencies if you try to go out too far. Beyond about 1,000 light-years, they're not going to travel very good. That's why you look up at the sky and you see these patches in the Milky Way. That's interstellar dust that's absorbing the light. We're not going to be able to transmit all the way across our galaxy with laser. The good news is, that's not what we're starting with. We can get millions of stars right within our own galactic backyard. We've got a lot of places we can target in the coming decades. I think that the technological challenges, as significant as they are, are not nearly as great as the societal challenges. You mentioned one of them. The giggle factor of you're looking for something but you don't even know that it's there. That's not the way science traditionally operates. Or the notion that "Oh, they're searching for ET." When SETI was first funded through NASA, it got targeted by a senator from Nebraska who said after a year of the search, "Come on, guys. You still haven't bagged any little green man." That kind of giggle factor is enough for an agency like NASA to say, "We've got a lot of priorities and we're willing to sacrifice this one so that we can go ahead with the Hubble Space Telescope and the shuttle," and all the other things that were going on back in the '80s, early '90s. I think the biggest challenge as I talk with people in the SETI communities, these are astronomers have devoted their lives to searching for extraterrestrials. They're willing to take that risk that maybe what they're looking for isn't out there at all, but then when I ask them to start thinking even longer-term and imagine transmitting and waiting for a reply, I think the most difficult thing to imagine is that we as a species are going to be able to commit to the project that realistically could take centuries or millennia. It's possible we're going to get a reply back from Luyten star in 24 years, but that only works if virtually all of the stars are populated. This zoo hypothesis is out there. That's why the extraterrestrials aren't replying and all it takes is for us to take the initiative and then they'll all say hello in return. I think that's not likely. The more realistic scenario is we may have to repeat this transmission to hundreds, thousands, even a million or more stars and that takes a perspective that humanity isn't very good at, a long term perspective. I think that is the greatest societal challenge, but as I was saying before, as we look at the Drake Equation, some of these trends we can't control. We can't control how many planets are out there. We do have control over what we decide to do. Whether we decide to transmit. What we want to commit to. I think the very fact that we need to think in the long term is indirectly providing an antidote to one of the greatest hindrances that we humans face right now, which is that we're not good at thinking or committing to the long term. That's what a lot of our environmental problems are due to. The fact that we're looking for immediate gratification and not willing to think on multigenerational timescales.

Ray: You've talked a little bit about the zoo hypothesis? What steps can we take that we might be able to prove or disprove this theory? It seems it would be a pretty hard one to get solid proof of.

Douglas: Yes, it's possible, let's say in the zoo hypothesis in its strongest form is true that the extraterrestrials out there, they're watching us. They are very disciplined zookeepers no matter what you say, they're going to think almost like in Star Trek terms, the Prime Directive. Sorry, we can't interfere. We're not going to let you know we're here. We're just going to watch you. If that is what's happening in the strongest form, then there's no way to distinguish between that response and there being no extraterrestrials out there at all. The only thing we can do is to find some variations of that strong zoo hypothesis. A weeker zoo hypothesis in which maybe, in fact, some responses, some attempts to make contact will yield a response. Again, if you want to think of The Star Trek analogy. Sure, according to the federation, you're not supposed to mess around with another civilization, but when those civilizations themselves reach out and start attempting contact, then all bets are off, and It's okay to welcome them into the cosmic conversation. What we need to do is think of systematically, what might the reasons be for a civilization to be out there but not making contact? Maybe it's that they're waiting for us to indicate we're ready. Maybe it's that in fact, civilizations don't continually progress. I outlined a scenario in which in two or 300 years, we humans will have an ability to detect very weak levels of radiation out to hundreds of light-years. When we think about civilizations who are much older than we are, we naturally think about them being vastly technologically superior, but maybe that's not always how it works. It could be that the sustainable civilizations are the ones who learned to work within their means. That, in fact, maybe the civilizations that keep a SETI program going for thousands or millions of years, are the ones that are more modest in the signals they're looking for. Those civilizations, though they don't have the technology that would be threatening to us, they haven't been able to come to earth, but maybe they've been looking for a signal. Those civilizations, we could make a difference by sending an intentional signal. Again, it's always a matter of looking at all of these possible explanations for the silence. Is there something that we could modify that might let us imagine a way of making contact that we haven't pursued before. We've seen it over the decades as we've shifted from exclusively radio SETI to optical SETI. Now we're thinking about it is we imagine us taking the initiative to transmit and then also thinking about the nature of the signals that we might get and the languages they might be written in.

Ray: What future projects are in store for METI? What do you guys have on the horizon?

Douglas: Well, the big shift that we need is to go from targeting an individual nearby star, to targeting many stars, and not just to target them once, but repeatedly over the course of years and months. Our next project will be targeting 25 stars, and we will go back to those stars a few months later and send them a follow-up message. One of the things that is intimidating about starting a cosmic conversation is a sense that you've got to get it all right and complete and perfect that first time, but that's never how communication works here on earth. It's almost as if we're seeking out cosmic pen-pals, but you don't have to wait to get a response to the first letter before you send a second and a third and a fourth. Those are the two key features of projects that we're developing right now of get progressively more stars, and then target them multiple times.

Ray: Have we detected any signals so far in our history of looking and sending signals that you think could potentially be extraterrestrial in origin?

Douglas: The most famous signal people talk about was one detected in the 1970s from the Ohio State University telescope called the Big Ear. It's called the Wow signal. It's called Wow because these are the days when you would get computer printouts. The morning following the observations the observer who was in charge that morning looked at the printout and there was this apparently incredibly strong signal and he wrote "Wow" in the margins. That's the prototypical signal that leaps out saying, "We don't have a natural explanation for this, maybe that was ET calling." In the decades that have followed SETI scientists have gotten much better at detecting interesting signals, but then doing an immediate follow-up. The downside of getting an interesting signal that happened once is you don't know whether it's from ET, whether it's a satellite that was flying over, whether it's another transmitter somewhere here on Earth. We get those false alarms like the Wow signal in SETI observations all the time now, they're always interesting signals. What we can do now that we couldn't do back in the '70s is to immediately go back and see whether that signal is still persistent. When we do that second step, there's nothing that looks good. So far, we see things that are intriguing for a moment, but with a more in-depth follow-up and no indication that it was extraterrestrial.

Ray: If any of our listeners want to get involved in the search for extraterrestrial life, are there any contributions they can make?

Douglas: Sure, well, one easy way for anyone who uses Amazon is to sign up for AmazonSmile. It's the same way you order anything else on the Amazon, but if you go through amazon smile, a fraction of your payment will be made as a nonprofit contribution to METI International, you just need to enter METI International. The other thing is to keep informed about what's going on in the search for life beyond earth in astronomy. I encourage people to follow METI International organization on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn so you'll find out what else we're doing.

Ray: Something I meant to ask earlier that I'd missed was how are the members of METI selected and who comprises the board?

Douglas: METI is fortunate in having an esteemed Board of Directors and Advisory Council. These are people who have had some involvement with space scientists, they're leaders in their disciplines. One of the critiques sometimes of METI projects is that these decisions about transmitting and what to say shouldn't be made by a handful of astronomers, and we agree completely. We do have a number of prominent astronomers as our advisors, but we also have people from the arts, the humanities, the social sciences. Our Board of Directors and Advisory Council includes over 90 people from over 20 countries around the world, so these are selected. Anyone who's on our Advisory Council is unanimously selected by our Board of Directors. Many of these people have been involved in space. We also want some perspectives from people who haven't been directly involved in space so that we can continue to examine our assumptions.

Ray: Do you have any last thoughts or comments? That's everything we had for you.

Douglas: Sure. Well, as I reflect back on the last 50 years of METI, it strikes me that we have been approaching this like an adolescent, which makes sense. We're just starting this whole process of trying to make contact. We've been thinking like someone who focuses on me and now. What better way to describe an adolescent than me and now. What I would encourage us to do as we move into the next half-century is to think about growing up so that we shift the emphasis not on me and now, which is what we're trying to get through SETI. We could observe a signal tonight and it could benefit us directly. As we move into the next half-century of our research, I'd encourage us to think about ways that we can contribute to others both future generations of humans and extraterrestrials by transmitting messages. One of the strangest things I see sometimes is that the whole question of who should take the initiative. Sometimes people talk about SETI as an attempt to join the Galactic Club. What I find so odd is that no one ever talks about paying our dues or even submitting an application. METI does both, and it may just be the approach that leads us to the first contact.

Ray: Thank you so much, Doug. I've really appreciated this. It's been really, really amazing hearing from you.

Douglas: Sure. Thank you so much. How well these things go depends on how much preparation the interviewer has put into it. I really appreciate all that you put into it. It was a very coherent outline and you were really well prepared. Thanks so much.