Reality Check: ‘Probability that we are alone in the universe is zero’

NewsNation contributor Ross Coulthart digs into stories the media is supposedly not meant to tell, taking a fact-based approach to tackle unidentified aerial phenomena and other mysteries often missing from the headlines. Watch Reality Check with Ross Coulthart.

( NewsNation ) —  On this episode of “Reality Check,” Ross Coulthart talks to Bill Diamond, CEO of the nonprofit group SETI Institute, which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Founded in 1985, SETI scientists started listening for signs of life elsewhere in the universe. Dozens of others have joined the hunt over the decades, but so far, no luck. So why keep at it?

“The more we learn, the more it is statistically inevitable that there is life, and even intelligent life, beyond earth,” Diamond said. “The statistical probability that we are alone in the universe is zero.” He said it’s simple math once scientists learned that all the stars in the sky are more than just other suns.

The numbers don’t lie

“Only in the last 15 years do we have irrefutable proof that planets are ubiquitous. We didn’t know that. We hadn’t discovered planets outside of our own solar system until the mid-1990s. Now we know that every star in the sky is, in fact, not a star. It’s a solar system.”

Among all those solar systems, Diamond says, maybe a third have planets that are rocky like Earth, are positioned within the “habitable zone” (receiving not too much and not too little energy from their host star) and might support liquid water.

“Within our home galaxy …  there (are) tens of billions of other potentially inhabitable worlds. That’s a game-changing bit of new knowledge.”

The long hunt

What SETI has been doing before and after that discovery is training its radio telescopes to the sky, hunting for radiation that might contain data, similar to the energy emissions from all of the Earth’s radio and TV stations and everything else that generates radio waves.

Diamond says that, slowly but surely, our detection technology has improved and become more sensitive. That, he says, is vital to detecting anything beyond our own corner of the universe.

“The planet that we’re on, Earth, has been emitting electromagnetic signals in the form of radio, and then television and other types of communication. Were we looking for another planet like Earth that’s simply leaking radiation … we’d only be able to find a similar kind of planet doing similar kinds of things within 10 or 20 light years, which isn’t very far.”

When success comes

And when SETI scientists do pick up a signal, what happens? First, he says: verification.

“Get another radio observatory elsewhere on the planet to point their instruments at the same place and see if they see or hear the same phenomena.” If that second station detects the same signal, he said, it could mean the source was far out in space. But if the second station detects nothing, that would suggest the signal was something originating on earth.

Step two: Announcement. And that, Diamond admits, is where governments might interfere. But SETI is not government funded, and does not answer to any government.

“The announcement … in the traditions of science, would be as fact-based and informationally accurate as possible with … minimum speculation.” Diamond says governments would learn of SETI’s discovery at the same time as the rest of us.

“We’re not under any obligation to make any advance notification to any government agency,” he said.

Diamond goes into far deeper detail about the work that SETI has done for nearly 40 years in the full episode of “Reality Check.”

Watch “Reality Check” examine the SETI Institute with CEO Bill Diamond in the video above.

You can find “Reality Check with Ross Coulthart” on NewsNation’s YouTube channel each week. Click here to watch the latest episode.

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