Scientists listen, look for life forms in universe

SETI astronomer and researcher Seth Shostak is like a rock star to some scientists, says Mary Katherine Creel at the Catawba Science Center.

Shostak hopes there will be groupies when he speaks there Saturday.

He may have to settle for Catawba County Astronomy Club members such as Joe Heafner, who says Shostak is a celebrity in the scientific community for his search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Heafner emphasizes the word "evidence."

"You can ask somebody, 'Do you think there's life out there. They will usually say yes or no with no thought to the evidence. Science is about finding evidence," he said.

His point is, don't expect Shostak to be talking about little green men when he speaks to a Hickory audience Saturday. Don't expect him to be boring, either.

"People ask me what he's like and I tell them he's like Robin Williams with a PhD," Heafner says.

Q & A with Seth Shostak

Your lecture will be about the search for extraterrestrial life?

I will talk about why we think they're out there and what it would mean if we found them.

I will briefly touch on the topic of whether we're being visited since somewhere between one-third and one-half of the population believes that. I don't believe it, but … There's no assumption in my talk about whether they're little or green, but I will talk about what it might be.

What do you believe is out there?

I think that there's probably a great deal of life. What we have been finding is a lot of cosmic real estate. So unless life is very hard to create, unless it's a miracle of some sort, there are lots of places where life could be. There are other planets, lots of other planets. We don't know now how many of them are like Earth, but we will soon.

"X-Files," good or bad?

Some of my colleagues would say that it's bad because it encourages the sort of pseudo-science notion. I think it's actually not a bad thing. When I think of what got me involved with astronomy and with SETI, it was all the cheesy science fiction films I watched as a kid.

We need that. We need kids to be interested in science and this particular arm of science is exciting. It's romantic. Science should be exciting. It's exploration. You're Captain Cook, only you're doing it with a microscope or a telescope.

What's the question you hear most often?

The question people usually ask is, 'have we found anything yet,' which is an unusual question because they already know the answer. One other thing they ask is, 'What would happen if we found a signal? Would there be rioting in the street? Would we know it?'

The facts are, it would be a big news story and that's about what it would be.

Is there a question you wish you never had to hear again?

No. Carl Sagan used to have a fairly short temper with people who would insist he was ignoring evidence of alien visits but I don't mind so much.

A major SETI Institute project is the Allen Telescope array. Explain how it works.

It's a radio telescope consisting of lots of radio antennae. It does not look at the light coming to us from the heavens, but for the radio waves. You point the things toward star systems. The hope is that a nearby star could be like the sun. At least half of all stars have planets. If one of the planets is like Earth, then we could catch some sound being broadcast either because they're trying to contact us or because they are broadcasting sound and there is some leakage.

How much time do you spend at the telescope?

Very little, really. We're trying to automate it. You don't want to do it like Jody Foster did it in "Contact," with headphones. Even she looked bored in that.

What do you want people to know about what you do?

I think that finding other life forms is something that will happen soon, sometime in the foreseeable future. The instruments are getting so much faster. It's like Captain Cook again. You give him a rowboat and then you give him a steamship.