Professor Michael Garrett
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 21 Jul
Professor Michael Garrett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
It's an astronomy-based activity where we're looking at astronomical data for the sort of signature of other technologies, extraterrestrial technologies from other advanced technical civilizations.
Well, yeah, I mean, we know over the last couple of decades that just about every star has some kind of planetary system.
We never knew that until sort of the mid 1990s.
So that means that there are something like 100 billion, maybe even more, planets in our own galaxy.
And a good fraction of those will have been very similar to where the Earth was four billion years ago when life first started to arrive.
So basically, you know, if it happened here, why shouldn't it happen elsewhere?
It seems reasonable to think that it might.
Well, it's a document that has a long heritage, a long history, so this is not the first time it's been done.
It's the first time it's been updated in 15 years, so the last incantation was in 2010 and before that there was one in 1989.
It's really a kind of set of guidelines for, as you mentioned earlier, that astronomer, maybe without a background in SETI, who suddenly stumbles towards this fantastic discovery.
And then begins to think about, well, you know, what next?
They probably have a feel for the fact that this has interest that goes beyond the scientific community, that sort of the general public is very interested in this question of, you know, life elsewhere in our own galaxy and the universe.
So we hope that the document will be a sort of guideline for someone who maybe doesn't quite have the background that maybe SETI scientists have, so that they can do the right thing, make the right decisions, and sort of think a little bit about the impact that their discovery might have beyond the scientific community.
Well, the first thing is sort of verification.
So I think that this isn't just like any other kind of astronomical discovery, which may be very interesting.
The public is also interested in astronomy, but I don't think it has sort of a huge impact on a large number of people.
A few interested people will find it something that's important.
um but when you're thinking about you know this possible discovery of life elsewhere in the universe and in particular not just life but intelligent conscious technically advanced civilization probably similar in some respects to our own then that has a much larger impact than just your standard sort of astronomical discovery and i think
you know back in the day when these guidelines were first drawn up people realized they were working in the field they realized that they had a larger responsibility than just a normal astronomer has and so one of the important things really is verification because we don't want to go out there and say look how we've found you know intelligent life
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