The Contact Paradox: Where Are All The Aliens? - Keith Cooper - #130

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the final Modern Wisdom of 2019 Massive thank you to everyone who's tuned in over the last 12 months. And we're finishing up with an episode I actually recorded a couple of months ago, but took quite a bit of editing due to some technical problems, but finally got it ready. And it's definitely a unique one. Keith Cooper has written his most recent book called The Contact Paradox, challenging our assumptions in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So essentially we're learning all about aliens. How would we know if we've received a signal from an alien civilization? What sort of language would they be using or how could we decode it? Should we respond? What are the dangers associated with that? Should we tell the general public if we've received it? What are the implications for religion across the globe? I have to say that I'm in full nerd mode on this episode with Keith. And if space and aliens and astrobiology and physics isn't your thing, then go back and listen to another episode because we're going in deep today. But for those of you who enjoy this sort of stuff, it's absolutely amazing. That's it. The year is over. We have next week, potentially one of my favorite ever episodes that we've released. Myself, Jonny and Youssef sitting down to say what we would tell our 18 year old selves if we were able to give them a 30 second phone call. And then analyzing why we would do it. So yeah, as we enter the new year 2020, hopefully that will give you some really good ideas for new year's resolutions and lessons that we've learned. But for now, that is it. 2019, we're saying goodbye. Please welcome the wise and wonderful Keith Cooper.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Keith Cooper. We're currently on Planet Earth, but I'm not sure for how much longer. Keith, welcome to the show.

**Keith Cooper** (2:07)
Thank you, it's a pleasure to be on, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (2:08)
So we're talking about The Contact Paradox today, which is your new book. And it's all about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and messages from the sky, right?

**Keith Cooper** (2:21)
Yes, and our attempts to send messages into space as well, for extraterrestrial life to hear, that's a major part of it as well.

**Chris Williamson** (2:30)
I see, yes, so it's a conversation, not just us listening. So why does this book need to be written at the moment?

**Keith Cooper** (2:39)
SETI has had, well SETI, the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence, for anybody not familiar with the acronym, it's had a big resurgence recently. For many years, it was kind of the pariah of the sciences. It didn't get much funding at all. Mainstream science didn't really pay much attention. NASA weren't interested in it. And then a couple of years ago, Yuri Milner and the Breakthrough Foundation, he's a billionaire philanthropist. He donated $100 million to a 10-year SETI project using all the big radio telescopes in the world to listen for extraterrestrial signals and that's given it a real boost. Now NASA is starting to get a little bit more interested and other parties as well. So it's really starting to come into its own and mature as a science.
And everybody likes space and aliens.

**Chris Williamson** (3:29)
Why was it so lambasted in the first place or why was it sort of looked down on?

**Keith Cooper** (3:35)
I think there was a stigma attached with flying saucers, UFOs. It was around 1960 when Frank Drake did the first SETI radio search. And I think at the time it was too small a project for anybody really to notice. But as time went by, I think people did associate it with flying saucers, little green men.
And I don't know, I mean, NASA, they talk about astrobiology and searching for microbes on Mars and things like that, but they never seem to take it to the next level and look for more complex life. So it's a strange kind of thing, especially when you consider how popular science fiction and aliens and things like that are, the scientific community hasn't really reacted to it in the way that you would expect.

**Chris Williamson** (4:27)
It didn't get embraced as a real science then, it doesn't sound like. And perhaps Hollywood caused that issue in part, because there's not many Hollywood blockbusters about microbes in space. But there's a lot about that and it might just make people feel like, well, this is us just trying to replicate film in reality. It's a waste of money.

**Keith Cooper** (4:51)
Yeah, when people think of aliens on movies, on TV, they think of xenomorphs from aliens or Independence Day War of the Worlds. Aliens coming here to steal our water and our women, which seemed to be a common theme in 1950s.