Today's transcript
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0406/02/acd.00.html
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0406/02/acd.00.html
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's great. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Aren't you too promising a scientist to be wasting your gifts on this nonsense?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Look, I don't consider what could potentially be the most important discovery of the human race nonsense, OK. There's 400 (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are two probabilities, one there is intelligent life out there but it's so far away you'll never contact it in your lifetime and, two...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You're making a decision.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two, there's nothing out there but noble gases and carbon compounds and you're wasting your time.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Well, that's the 1997 sci-fi movie "Contact" starring Jodi Foster. A little nugget of trivia for you, the inspiration for her character is Jill Tarter a real life astronomer who for more than 25 years has been trying to answer the question many of us ask as we look to the stars. Is anyone out there? In a moment I'll talk with Jill Tarter about her search for extraterrestrial life.
But first a behind-the-scenes look at her research institute and the fascination with seeking the truth, part of our special series "Paranormal Mysteries, do you believe?"
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER (voice-over): You can't miss this planet's fascination with aliens, unidentified flying objects and things that glow in the night. A Gallup poll two years ago found that 33 percent of Americans believe extraterrestrial beings had visited earth sometime in the past. Scientists dismiss this as pure fiction but that doesn't stop some of them from looking to the stars and listening.
JILL TARTER, DIRECTOR, SETI INSTITUTE: It's seen a detection here.
COOPER: The privately funded SETI Institute, begun in 1984, uses radio telescopes like this one in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the world's largest, to eavesdrop on the heavens.
TARTER: Where are they? Well that's the question we're trying to answer, is someone out there?
COOPER: SETI stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the signal they're listening for is some kind of evidence of other worldly technology and so far not a peep.
TARTER: This cosmic haystack in which there might be this needle of a signal hidden is -- is nine dimensional at least and we've barely to search. COOPER: On the horizon is SETI's Allen (ph) telescope array part funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen. When completed, it will include 350 radio telescopes in northern California all working in concert.
NASA meanwhile is planning the Kepler (ph) and Terrestrial Planet Finder missions to look for other earth-like planets.
TARTER: It's quite possible that there is -- there are many places where life could exist in the universe.
COOPER: Skeptics say we shouldn't get our hopes up. The living conditions of cosmic real estate are so extreme we may not get a call from ET anytime soon.
PETER WARD, PROF. OF EARTH & SPACE SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON: While there could be other intelligences, I suspect the majority of life out there would be no more complex than a bacterium, so lots of microbes and not a lot of Vulcans.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Well, Jill Tarter ignores some of those skeptical thoughts. As director of SETI Institute she's published numerous scientific articles, earned a lot of rewards. In fact, back in April she was selected by the editors of "Time" magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential and powerful people. Tonight, Tarter joins me from San Francisco, California. Jill, thanks for being on the program.
TARTER: Oh, you're very welcome.
COOPER: How certain are you that there is life somewhere out there?
TARTER: I'm not certain at all. I think it's a marvelous question humans have been asking themselves forever and we now have some tools, some telescopes to try and do an experiment to see if we can answer that old question.
COOPER: How deep can you look? I mean how far away can you look?
TARTER: Right now we're searching stars that are nearer the sun, so our local neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy. But the Allen telescope array will expand that search by factors of many hundreds as we can search farther and faster.
COOPER: What do you think are some of the myths about extraterrestrial life that you hear a lot that you can just bust here right now?
TARTER: Well, that they are -- that they are here, that they're abducting Aunt Alice for salacious medical experiments on their spaceships. I think that that's nothing but myth and money making and there is no (unintelligible). COOPER: And the idea of UFO's you don't buy at all?
TARTER: I think there are unexplained phenomena. I don't think they have anything to do with spacecraft visiting the earth or, at least, I've seen no data, no evidence.
COOPER: Because the likelihood of extraterrestrials actually making contact in that way, I mean why?
TARTER: It takes a lot of energy to move mass across that distances between the stars. Photons, light waves, radio waves that have no mass are much more economical and energetically feasible.
COOPER: Do you think people sort of anthropomorphize the idea of life on other planets? I mean often you see those pictures of sort of a big headed creature.
TARTER: Right. They're -- we used to fantasize about angels and ghosts and now they're grey aliens. Yes, in fact, we can't get out of our human skins and we put a human face on those things.
COOPER: Now, what you are searching for though is some sort of technology of someone trying to make an effort to contact the United States. I mean things like microbes, bacteria, which would be life is not something the SETI can see.
TARTER: No, in fact, and finding microbes somewhere else, finding a second genesis, an independent evolution of life somewhere else would be fantastic, a really important scientific discovery. We happen to be looking for that kind of life that can build some sort of a transmitter to attract our attention.
COOPER: Why do you think it is important to keep trying to do this? I mean because you really -- you haven't -- there haven't been any close calls. There haven't been any signals that really got you excited, have there?
TARTER: Well, we've had a couple of false positives that kept us going for a few hours but nothing that we weren't able in the end to show was our own technology.
COOPER: So, why keep going? I mean you started SETI in 1984 I think.
TARTER: Oh, well SETI got started in 1960. But in fact there's a huge universe out there. It's an old question. Humans really want to know where we fit into this large cosmos and this is just the first steps. We may not succeed in my lifetime or we may succeed as soon as we turn the Allen telescope array on. There's no way to know except to do the experiment.
COOPER: Do you ever get discouraged?
TARTER: No. Actually, I've got the best job in the entire world. We get to develop new technology. We get to learn things about life and stars and planets that we didn't know a decade ago. It's a fascinating job.
COOPER: Jill Tarter, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much for being on the program.
TARTER: You're very welcome.
