What is the main purpose of SETI operations today? Thats a 2 part question.

The SETI Institute is a nonprofit scientific and educational research organization. We have about 150 people working here, and out of those, roughly 75 are scientists that are doing individual research projects around the whole question of understanding life here on earth and searching for life beyond earth. So thats the purpose of the organization. The purpose of doing SETI research, Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, thats a particular kind of science that we do here, and that type of search is designed so that we can seek out evidence of alien technology. By that I mean that if some living organism on a planet far, far away from here turned their radio telescopes or even their optical telescopes or certain kinds of equipment towards the Earth, they could detect that the population of the Earth emits, that are not normal in nature. They could pick up radar, that we bounce off of asteroids, and then the part that misses the asteroid can go zinging out through space, would look very different than something that would normally just be emitted by an astronomical body. So we look for artificial signals as evidence of technology, and therefore we can infer that theres intelligence that built the technology. So thats kind of the main thing that SETI research itself does, its listening, essentially, for things that are not natural that we might pick up from out there in the universe, and we do that from radio frequencies, because in the universe theres all kinds of electromagnetic radiation, some of its at radio frequencies, that gets through our atmosphere, so we can pick it up with ground telescopes, and we do it at optical frequencies looking for short very high energy pulsed laser that might be used as beaming signals that basically are saying hi, Im here, are you there? So far, none of those searches here or other places that are searching has succeeded. Thats the purpose of SETI research. Our organization was founded to conduct that kind of research, initially as a project for NASA and is now funded by private individuals. Do you think that the SETI Institute was a turning point in answering the question are we alone? Well I think that the SETI Institute could be a turning point in answering that question, because we still dont have an answer. Theres a lot of stuff in science and in space exploration and space research that is still unknown. In fact, the only place we know of that has life in the universe is right here on our own little rocky world, the Earth. We dont know if life ever existed on Mars, we dont know if life ever existed down under the ice on the surface of Europa, we dont know the answers to those questions yet. And we havent picked up a signal from a different civilization or from a planet going around some other star. So we feel like were still on the cutting edge of trying to answer that question. One of the things that we have gotten very involved with is a NASA mission called Kepler. The Kepler Mission was launched 3 years

ago, and its busy find out how common planets are around other stars. You know, are solar systems common or are they rare? And what its finding out is that theyre extremely common. There are lots of planets in the galaxy. That gave us a target to point our radio telescopes to because every one of those is something that might possible be a planet, and we can go and listen there and see if theres technology emitting any signals from that planet. We are in the process of doing that; weve looked at 10% of those stars so far. Bottom line: yeah, we think were an important organization that could be a real turning point in answering the question are we alone in the universe but we havent answered it yet. Were still doing the research. Did the alien craze in the 1970s and 1980s in any way help kick off the organization? The alien craze of the 70s and the 80s well the alien craze goes back a whole lot further than that to, you know, radio transmissions of Invasions of Mars in the 1930s. The whole notion that aliens are invading the Earth go back quite a while, 80, 90 years. No, that wasnt the reason that the SETI Institute was founded. We dont get into taking reports of people thinking theyve seen unidentified flying objects, which they attribute to distant planets. Were not doing that kind of thing at all. The reason that the organization was founded was because NASA was supporting a radio astronomical search, for the technological signals mentioned earlier. That was being run in collaboration with Stanford University and other places like that. The people doing that project realized that if they set up a nonprofit research company, they would be able to apply more of their funding to the science of technology, and less of the funding would go to administrative overhead. So that was one of the original motives for SETI Institute, was to be able to do as much science as possible on the funds that were available. Since that time, we have expanded to do all different kinds of astronomy, planetary science, planetary geology, and life sciences. People explore extreme environments, like diving under the ice in the Antarctic, looking in volcanos and so on to understand how life can exist on our own planet, and also trying to see how life would exist elsewhere. So really, our organization was founded to be a scientific research company, and had nothing to do with the alien craze and movies like ET and other more scary ones. Do you think that the SETI Organization changed peoples opinions of extraterrestrial intelligence or technology? Thats a pretty interesting question to me, because the SETI Institute has been around for almost 28 years. What I think that our organization and other organizations that are interested in finding life beyond Earth have done, is changed from something thats kooky and affiliated with weird tales and alien abductions and that kind of thing and have turned it into something where people understand you can do real investigations, make real observations and impose real science to the question that you might be able to answer. And that has changed the search for life from something that is driven by myths and Hollywood into something that is a genuine

scientific endeavor. We have got right now, sitting on Mars, the Mars science lab, that we, the SETI Institute, and the human race has that Mars science lab up there. Its doing all kinds of analysis on all different kinds of soils and rocks, and over time looking to see if Mars ever had water on its surface, because wi think waters really important for life. Every place we find water on this planet we find life, and I think we were a very early organization that took the risk to say, hey were very interested in life beyond Earth. And about15 years after we were founded, NASA said that we need to found astrobiology as a science of biology. Its a big question of, whats the origin of life, how did it evolve, whats it like on Earth versus what it would be like elsewhere and whats the future of life. Its all about life, not just on our planet but on other planets too. And the SETI Institutes been doing