I got to meet and listen to Seth Shostak Sr. Astronomer for the SETI Institute last night at Palomar College. His topic title was “When Will We Discover the Extraterrestrials?” I have followed Seth through his career at the Planetary Society and his involvement with SETI. This is a few of the things I can remember that impressed me about his talk and the brief meeting we had after the event.

First was humor. I had half expected to sit through an hour or so of technical information coming to us like a drink from a fire hose but was pleasantly surprised that he is a very entertaining speaker. One of his subject lines was that the definition of intelligence was hard to define and that the size of the human skull was needed to enclose the larger brain of the ‘smarter ape’. He also thought that this was actually a sexual response to get women to go to bed with brainy guys.

He did give a good time line for the first connection with ET. He described the search capabilities of the Arecibo system and the expected power of the ATA now being used at Hat Creek. He defined these two systems in terms of stars examined over time and pointed out that Carl Sagan thought there might be on the order of one million intelligent beings in the Milky Way and that others like Dr. Drake of the Drake Equation guessed the number to be on the order of 10,000. He then put up the next chart that plotted one against the other and arrived at an ETA somewhere the year 2020. So there you have it. Expect the first confirmation between 2015 and 2027.

He also went over the various ideas about what ET would look like and arrived at the ISO ET.

Seth commented on what he thought would the general population would do when the announcement came. He was adamant that what would happen is – nothing. He argued that about 50% of the population of the US believes that ET is already among us and many of them also believe that they are being regularly abducted so confirmation would be received with a ho-hum attitude.

After the meeting I asked him if he ran into other amateur SETI station builders like me and he said that he does not. I asked him if he knew the number of SETI stations in operation, professional and amateur, and he said there were only three; Arecibo, ATA, and the Italian system. I added that in fact there was one more – SETI Net.

It was an interesting night and I recommend his lecture if he ever comes to you part of the world.