Well, I work at the SETI Institute.

That's almost my name, SETI.

"Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence."

In other words, I look for aliens,

and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually

look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face.

I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate.

Now, a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic,

ridiculous, maybe even hopeless,

but I just want to talk to you a little bit about why I think

that the job I have is actually a privilege, okay,

and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into

this line of work, if that's what you call it.

This thing—whoops, can we go back?

Hello, come in Earth. (Laughter)

There we go. All right.

This is Owens Valley Radio Observatory

behind the Sierra Nevadas, and in 1968,

I was working there collecting data for my thesis.

Now, it's kinda lonely, it's kinda tedious, just collecting data,

so I would amuse myself by taking photos at night

at the telescopes or even of myself,

because, you know, it, at night, I would be the only hominid

within about 30 miles.

So here are pictures of myself.

The observatory had just acquired at new book,

written by a Russian cosmologist

by the name of Joseph Shklovsky, and then expanded

and translated and edited by a little-known

Cornell astronomer by the name of Carl Sagan.

And I remember reading that book,

and at three in the morning I was reading this book

and it was explaining how the antennas I was using

to measure the spins of galaxies could also be used

to communicate, to send bits of information

from one star system to another.

Now, at three o'clock in the morning when you're all alone,

haven't had much sleep, that was a very romantic idea,

but it was that idea, the fact that you could in fact

prove that there's somebody out there

just using this same technology

that appealed to me so much that 20 years later I took a job

at the SETI Institute. Now, I have to say

that my memory is notoriously porous, and I've often

wondered whether there was any truth in this story,

or just, you know, misremembering something,

but I recently just blew up this old negative of mine,

and sure enough, there you can see

the Shklovsky and Sagan book underneath that

analog calculating device.

So it was true.

All right. Now, the idea for doing this, it wasn't very old

at the time that I made that photo.

The idea dates from 1960, when a young astronomer

by the name of Frank Drake used this antenna

in West Virginia, pointed it at a couple of nearby stars

in the hopes of eavesdropping on E.T.

Now, Frank didn't hear anything.

Actually it did, but it turned out to be the U.S. Air Force,

which doesn't count as extraterrestrial intelligence. (Laughter)

But Drake's idea here became very popular because it

was very appealing — and I'll get back to that —

and on the basis of this experiment, which didn't succeed,

we have been doing SETI ever since,

not continuously, but ever since.

We still haven't heard anything.

We still haven't heard anything.

In fact, we don't know about any life beyond Earth,

but I'm going to suggest to you that that's going to change

rather soon, and part of the reason, in fact,

the majority of the reason why I think that's going to change

is that the equipment's getting better.

This is the Allen Telescope Array, about 350 miles

from whatever seat you're in right now.

This is something that we're using today

to search for E.T., and the electronics have gotten

very much better too.

This is Frank Drake's electronics in 1960.

This is the Allen Telescope Array electronics today.

Some pundit with too much time on his hands

has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately

a hundred trillion times better than they were in 1960,

100 trillion times better.

That's a degree of an improvement that would look good

on your report card, okay? (Laughter)

But something that's not appreciated by the public is,

in fact, that the experiment continues to get better,

and, consequently, tends to get faster.

This is a little plot, and every time you show a plot,

you lose 10 percent of the audience. (Laughter)

I have 12 of these. (Laughter)

But what I plotted here is just some metric

that shows how fast we're searching.

In other words, we're looking for a needle in a haystack.

We know how big the haystack is. It's the galaxy.

But we're going through the haystack no longer

with a teaspoon but with a skip loader,

because of this increase in speed.

In fact, those of you who are still conscious

and mathematically, you know, competent,

will note that this is a semi-log plot.

In other words, the rate of increase is exponential.

It's exponentially improving. Now, exponential is an

overworked word. You hear it on the media all the time.

They don't really know what exponential means,

but this is exponential. (Laughter)

In fact, it's doubling every 18 months, and, of course,

every card-carrying member of the digerati knows

that that's Moore's Law.

So this means that over the course of the next

two dozen years, we'll be able to look at a million star systems,

a million star systems, looking for signals

that would prove somebody's out there.

Well, a million star systems, is that interesting?

I mean, how many of those star systems have planets?

And the facts are, we didn't know the answer to that

even as recently as 15 years ago, and in fact, we really

didn't even know it even as recently as six months ago.

But now we do. Recent results suggest

that virtually every star has planets, and more than one.

They're like, you know, kittens. You get a litter.

You don't get one kitten. You get a bunch, okay. (Laughter)

So in fact, this is a pretty accurate estimate

of the number of planets in our galaxy,

just in our galaxy, by the way,

and I remind the non-astronomy majors among you

that our galaxy is only one of a hundred billion

that we can see with our telescopes.

That's a lot of real estate, but of course,

most of these planets are going to be kind of worthless,

like, you know, Mercury, or Neptune.

Neptune's probably not very big in your life. Okay.

So the question is, what fraction of these planets

are actually suitable for life?

We don't know the answer to that either,

but we will learn that answer this year, thanks to

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope,

and in fact, the smart money, which is to say the people who work on this project,

the smart money is suggesting that the fraction of planets

that might be suitable for life is maybe one in a thousand,

one in a hundred, something like that.

Well, even taking the pessimistic estimate, that it's

one in a thousand, that means that there are

at least a billion cousins of the earth

just in our own galaxy.

Okay, now I've given you a lot of numbers here,

but they're mostly big numbers, okay, so, you know,

keep that in mind. There's plenty of real estate,

plenty of real estate in the universe,

and if we're the only bit of real estate in which there's

some interesting occupants, that makes you a miracle,

and I know you like to think you're a miracle,

but if you do science, you learn rather quickly that

every time you think you're a miracle, you're wrong,

so probably not the case.

All right, so the bottom line is this.

Because of the increase in speed, and because of the

vast amount of habitable real estate in the cosmos, I figure

we're going to pick up a signal within two dozen years, and

I feel strongly enough about that to make a bet with you:

either we're going to find E.T. in the next two dozen years,

or I'll buy you a cup of coffee. (Laughter) Okay.

So that's not so bad. I mean, even with two dozen years,

you open up your browser and there's news of a signal,

or you get a cup of coffee.

Now, let me tell you about some aspect of this that

people don't think about, and that is,

what happens? Suppose that what I say is true.

I mean, who knows, but suppose it happens.

Suppose sometime in the next two dozen years

we pick up a faint line that tells us

we have some cosmic company.

What is the effect? What's the consequence?

Now, I might be at ground zero for this.

I happen to know what the consequence for me would be,

because we've had false alarms. This is 1997,

and this is a photo I made at about 3 o'clock in the morning

in Mountain View here, when we were watching

the computer monitors because we had picked up a signal

that we thought, "This is the real deal." All right?

And I kept waiting for the Men In Black to show up. Right?

I kept waiting for, I kept waiting for my mom to call,

somebody to call, the government to call. Nobody called.

Nobody called. I was so nervous

that I couldn't sit down. I just wandered around

taking photos like this one, just for something to do.

Well, at 9:30 in the morning, with my head down

on my desk because I obviously hadn't slept all night,

the phone rings and it's the New York Times.

And I think there's a lesson in that, and that lesson is

that if we pick up a signal, the media, the media will be on it

faster than a weasel on ball bearings. It's going to be fast.

Okay, you can be sure of that. No secrecy. Okay?

That's what happens to me. It kind of ruins my whole week,

because whatever I've got planned that week is kind of out the window.

But what about you? What's it going to do to you?

And the answer is that we don't know the answer.

We don't know what that's going to do to you, not

in the long term, and not even very much in the short term.

I mean, that would be a bit like

asking Chris Columbus in 1491, "Hey Chris,

you know, what happens if it turns out that there's a

continent between here and Japan, where you're sailing to,

what will be the consequences for humanity

if that turns out to be the case?"

And I think Chris would probably offer you some answer

that you might not have understood, but it probably

wouldn't have been right, and I think that to predict

what finding E.T.'s going to mean,

we can't predict that either.

But here are a couple things I can say.

To begin with, it's going to be a society that's way in advance of our own.

You're not going to hear from alien Neanderthals.

They're not building transmitters.

They're going to be ahead of us, maybe by a few thousand

years, maybe by a few millions years, but substantially

ahead of us, and that means, if you can understand

anything that they're going to say, then you might be able

to short-circuit history by getting information from a society

that's way beyond our own.

Now, you might find that a bit hyperbolic, and maybe it is,

but nonetheless, it's conceivable that this will happen,

and, you know, you could consider this like, I don't know,

giving Julius Caesar English lessons and the key

to the library of Congress.

It would change his day, all right? (Laughter)

That's one thing. Another thing that's for sure

going to happen is that it will calibrate us.

We will know that we're not that miracle, right,

that we're just another duck in a row,

we're not the only kids on the block, and I think that that's