Now let me ask you this, I know that you're listening for signals, or you're also sending, you're trying to attract the attention of extraterrestrial civilizations, where you're just receiving at this point. We just receive, we leave the transmitting to the networks, for example, or the radars down at the local airport because those put pretty strong signals out into space. We don't broadcast, part of it is just money, right? There's hardly any money even to receive, or try and find a signal that's already arrived in the air. The other thing is you would have to have a lot of patience. If you want a broadcast, right, suppose you broadcast in the nearest society is 500 light years away. It takes 500 years for your inquiry to get there. And if the aliens dain't reply, that's another 500 years before you get the response. Well, after a thousand years, your personal interest in the project will be somewhat less. So we don't do that. Now what if you actually found a signal that indicated it came from intelligent life? What would you do then? Well, what happens first? We know what happens because we've had some false alarms. I think we know fairly accurately what would happen if we got a signal to begin with. You don't know right away. It isn't that you're just sitting there looking bored. And then the next moment, oh, look, a signal, right? It takes days for you to be sure that any given signal is really what you're looking for, really ET and not just more interference. So during all that time, the half a week or a week it would take to verify it, you can be sure the media are, you know, bombarding you with questions because there's no secret to see in this project. So as soon as the signal is found, you know, everybody knows about it. The media will be calling up. We know this happens and they'll be saying, what about that signal? So that's what would happen right away. There would just be a lot of media coverage and people would want to know more. But let's say you determined that it looked like it came from an intelligent source. I mean, could you decode it and figure out what the signal was saying? Well, probably, in fact, overwhelmingly likely is the fact that you would have to build a much larger antenna to go back, look at that same signal source again, a different kind of antenna that would allow you to get the message because the message might be, you know, very intensive in terms of the bandwidth. I mean, they're not going to send a very slow speed signal like a, you know, more code from a ham with a very slow fist. They're going to send something like a TV signal. Well, a TV signal varies about 5 million times a second, right? So you need a different kind of instrument to find out. But if you did, and you got all these bits, what would you do with them? Sure, I think you just put them out there and let people try and figure out what they're saying. Now, let's say you never find what you're looking for is the project a complete waste or does it produce other benefits, even if you don't find DTI? Well, I mean, that's a very good question. I'm not sure I know the answer. I don't think it's a complete waste because it has led to a lot of very clever people to think about how to do this. And in the course of doing that, they've also thought about other problems that are germane. For example, habitable planets. Now, we talked a little bit about that. I mean, this whole Kepler project, what is that really motivated by? Is it just to find more balls of rocks in space? You know, it's an astronomical question. How many stars have planets, sort of like the Earth? Why do we want to know that? We want to know that for one overriding reason. We want to know if we have any cosmic company. So even if said he doesn't succeed, it has, in fact, stimulated an awful lot of very interesting research. Now, one of the early motivations for the whole space program was to find out if there was other life in the solar system intelligent or not. Now, if searched all the planets and we haven't found any, not even a microbe, do you think that affects the odds of finding it in other solar systems or is that completely irrelevant? Yeah. No, I think you've called this game too early, actually. We haven't observed or we haven't explored all the places where there might be life in our solar system. And we've sent landers in the mid-1970s, the Viking landers to Mars, and they scraped up some of the dirt and looked at it. And even those results are slightly contentious. Most of the scientists involved concluded that, well, it was dead gym, that there was no life in the dirt of Mars. But just a couple of weeks ago, there was the discovery of what looks like water right below the surface of Mars, liquid water. Okay, salty water just below the surface. And when I say just below the surface, you know, maybe only that far. So there are missions being planned to go to Mars and you can just dig down. It doesn't take much of a drill to go a few inches under the surface. Pull up that muck and look at it under a microscope. We may yet find life in Mars. But there are six other worlds in our solar system that might have liquid water and where there might be life and we haven't explored any of them. Now, this gets a little bit into the field of astrobiology, which I think the SETI Institute is also involved in trying to define the minimum conditions under which life can survive and be created. This one thing for an environment to be capable of sustaining life is different for an environment to generate life. Have you been able to find out anything about what are the conditions to get life started just because conditions to sustain it are present? Yeah, well, that's quite right. I mean, if you took, maybe Mars is dead. But if you took all the biode on Earth and just threw it at Mars. It took Noah's Ark, including the microbes, by the way, not just the giraffes and the hippos. Yeah, that's right. Maybe you need one of each of the microbes that they can split. But you just throw that all at Mars. Right, and you come back a year later. Would any of it still be alive? In the answer to that is, well, apparently yes, some of the microbes would survive. But that doesn't, just because you might be able to survive on Mars doesn't prove that life could get started on Mars. That's your question. And how can we be sure that just because you have a million worlds which have the conditions that would sustain life, that any of them will produce life? That's a big question for which, unfortunately, there's no definitive answer yet. One thing that's always pointed out, however, is that life got started very quickly on Earth, and that sort of suggests that maybe it isn't hard to get started. But there are people who would even argue with that. Now do we want to meet people from extraterrestrial civilizations, assuming there are people? Would that be good for us? Would we benefit from coming into contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, or would that maybe harm us a lot? Well, we're not talking here about coming into contact because if we pick up the signal, of course, they don't know that we picked up their signal. So they're not about to jump into their spaceships and say, well, we've got some people that have found us over there, we better come down there and either buy their used cars or just destroy the plant or whatever it is they have in mind. I don't know. What you're asking is, if in the case of actual physical contact, close encounters of the third kind, they visit us. They visit us for whatever reason. I don't know why they would come here because they don't know about us. It's a nice place. It's a nice place. Well, maybe on an international tourist location. Well, maybe they're attracted by the forests of Estonia or something. So they decide to come here. They do that. Would they be friendly? I don't know. What you're asking is, what is the behavior of the aliens? That's alien sociology and I've got to tell you straight out, Marty, we don't have much date on that. Well, right now, all we can do is project ourselves onto them, which is probably isn't that encouraging. Well, it might not. It might not be. It is true that explorers tend to be fairly aggressive compared with the general populace. If you look at the Spaniards that the Mesoamericans met, the South Americans, the North Americans met for that matter. I mean, it wasn't always the Spaniards, but they didn't meet your average Spaniard guy who sells zippottas on the streets of Madrid. What they met were the very aggressive guys who were trying to make a name for themselves and so forth. Well, if you think that that is a good analog for how the aliens from other star systems would behave, then maybe it would be dangerous. But the bottom line is we actually have no idea. But the idea of searching for life is that we're really hoping to find it. We're not searching in the hope of not finding it, right? Yes. Yes. This is a very asymmetric experiment. It isn't like the science you learned about in junior high school. You set up a nipothesis. Remember the scientific method, which as far as I know, no scientists actually follow. But anyway, you set up a hypothesis and then you decide an experiment that could prove that hypothesis or falsify that hypothesis. In other words, prove it's not true. You run the experiment. You might falsify the hypothesis. Oh, well, that idea just doesn't work and we can throw it out. That would be a valuable experiment. In the case of looking for life in space, you cannot prove that it's not there. There's just no way to do that. You can't prove that. All you can do is hope to prove that it is there.