S3E08 - SETI (Searching for Aliens)

#SETI #Aliens #Astronomy #BoardGames #Science

Summary

Today we're talking aliens! Or at least potential aliens, with SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, by Czech Games Edition. We are joined by Dr. Seth Shostack, the director of the real-life SETI Institute, which tries to scientifically answer the question: Are we alone? We talk about why and how we search for aliens, what makes SETI actually scientific, number crunching, screen savers, the Drake Equation, and how the most unrealistic thing in the game is that you actually find aliens. So grab some Reece's Pieces and your favorite blanket and settle in for this out-of-this-world episode of Gaming with Science

Timestamps

00:00 Introductions
01:22 A universal universe and far-flung probes
03:05 SETI game overview
15:42 Science at the SETI Institute
21:50 The Drake Equation
27:46 Active and signal crunching
37:42 How do you verify a signal?
42:31 WOW!
46:29 Nitpick corner
48:36 Final grades
52:11 Signoffs

Full Transcript

(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )

Brian 0:06
Hello and welcome to the Gaming with Science podcast, where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Jason Wallace 0:12
Today we'll be talking about SETI by Czech Games Edition. All right, welcome back, everyone. This is Jason.

Brian 0:19
This is Brian.

Jason Wallace 0:20
And today we're joined by Dr. Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, and probably the best qualified person on Earth to talk about this game today, given what his job is. Seth, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is you do?

Seth 0:35
Yeah, I'm sorry that you limited, by the way, the expertise to only this planet, because might find people on other planets that might be better.

Jason Wallace 0:44
Well, that's your job.

Seth 0:45
Well, yes, but you can't talk to them very easily. Even if we find them, they're going to be far away. You don't want to hear about that right now. And let me just give you sort of a short summary of my background. This shouldn't take more than I don't know 45 minutes. My academic background is in physics and astronomy. I used to study galaxies for a long time, and then I moved here. Here being Northern California, where by a series of happenstance, I guess it was, I ended up at the SETI Institute, whose brief is to try and find some cosmic company. So that's sort of what I've been doing for many years now.

Jason Wallace 1:17
And we are going to be talking a lot more about that today. I'm actually really looking forward to this episode. But before we get into that, we have our fun science fact area. So, Seth, as our guest, we give you first opportunity. Do you have something fun about astronomy or about SETI that you'd like to share with our audience?

Seth 1:34
I mean, there are a lot of things in astronomy that I'm not sure I'd say that they were fun, but they're certainly a little bit interesting. Whenever I talk to the general public about astronomy, I usually tell them something that many of them may not know. One of the greatest accomplishments of astronomy in the past two centuries or thereabouts is to learn that the entire universe is made out of the same building blocks, the same junk. It wouldn't have to be like that, right? It could be that you know you go into another galaxy or something. It's made out of different stuff, but it's not. So the benefit to the listeners is that if you study, I don't know, chemistry in school, you won't have to study it again if you move to another galaxy. So you know that's a benefit.

Jason Wallace 2:15
That is good to know. I'll make sure to cross that off my moving list. All right, Brian, your turn. What do you got to top that?

Brian 2:22
I got two things. I don't. We don't really need to talk about two, but I did just hear that I think it was Voyager One has just reached one light day away from Earth in terms of distance. The Voyager probes were some of the fastest objects ever produced by humans. I don't know if they still have that record. I think the New Horizons might have them beat, but all that time and it's just now reached one light day away is kind of insane. There was also a thing about Europa Clipper, which just made a flyby of Mars and had a chance to test its impressive radar device that it's going to be able to use in 2030 to look under the ice of Europa, which is also very cool.

Jason Wallace 2:57
Also appropriate, I'm pretty sure Europa Clipper is actually a card in the game.

Brian 3:01
I'm sure it is. I'm sure SETI Institute is as well.

Jason Wallace 3:04
Oh, it is. I've got it right here, actually. Well, let's jump into this game then. So this is SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by Czech Games Edition, who's probably best known for the game Code Names. It was designed by , who I have never met, but after researching this game, I really want to. And we'll talk about a bunch of this stuff later. But he seems like he really cared about the core of this game. He listened to the old Cosmos TV show while preparing it, which was done by Carl Sagan, who's apparently one of his childhood heroes. There's just all sorts of stuff in this where he cared about making the game accurate and right, and he sounds like a cool guy to hang out with.

Brian 3:43
He's kind of like a method actor for game designs. He's like playing background music and stuff while he's designing his game. Yeah,

Jason Wallace 3:50
yeah. He wanted to make a gamer's game, and he wanted to make it about SETI, and I think he dramatically succeeded. So, basic stats about this game: it's for one to four players, so obligatory single player mode. The game estimates about 40 minutes per player, so you're looking about one to three hours to play, and ages 14 up, which is definitely true. This is a very complex game. There are a lot of moving parts. It took Brian and I at least an hour to mostly figure out what was going on, so it is definitely complex. But probably because of that, it is also highly rated on board game geek, it is number 16, and so very popular. Probably because there are a whole bunch of different things that you can do. It's never really clear which one is the best thing to do, and so there's a bunch of different strategies, and there's a lot of strategic depth to knowing what is the right thing to do given my current situation. It's also a very expensive game with an MSRP of $80, which is probably due to the very large number of high-quality components. So they've got a bunch of either cast or 3d printed meeples that represent different things. So there's these generic little discs that are your markers you put around. There's special ones that are shaped like satellites that are your probes. There's one that's a microphone that tracks your publicity. Another one that tracks your victory points that. Like some sort of trophy, they didn't have to be different. They could have all been the generic markers, but they made them different. Or the player boards, which could have just been a flat sheet of cardboard that you put things on top of, but instead it's chipboard that you punch things out of and then fold in half. So you have all these little depressions that you then slot later things into

Brian 5:18
little insets where you can put your little upgrades, right?

Jason Wallace 5:21
Yes, like so. The quality of the game, the workmanship is very high, and probably as a consequence, it is quite expensive. The game itself, when you lay it out, is massive. It does not pass the "bowl of chips" test that we oftentimes do. It actually has three main components just to the board. The first is a central area that basically shows the solar system, and this has probably the most fun thing in the game, which is that the solar system actually rotates over the course of the game. And the way it's set up is that it's a set of stacked disks, so that you can rotate the inner solar system or the middle solar system, which will also rotate the inner, or the outer, which will rotate the other two. And so the inner solar system with Earth and Mars and Venus actually rotates faster than stuff like Jupiter and Saturn and the outer planets.

Brian 6:03
Yeah, it's like three times as fast, right? Because it's like every time you move one, it's literally got to be moving three times faster than the outer.

Jason Wallace 6:10
Yeah, so that's the main central areas where you're tracking the movement of the solar system, and you launch your space probes, and they are traveling from one place to another to another. Another area is a sort of zoom in on all the places you can send those probes, so the various planets and moons and such, and that you can explore in order to get various benefits. This is also when you finally do discover aliens, which in this game is basically inevitable. They're attached to this part of the board upside down, and then they get flipped over when you discover them because it's random which of them you get so that's the second part, and then the third part tracks technology, and so it has all the various technological advancements that you can research. It also tracks your publicity score, which is what you use to pay for research advancements. Presumably, you are cashing in public goodwill or with a local government or funding agency, and so these three pieces slot together, and it takes up a lot of space. We normally play at my desk at work, and we had to move to one of the conference rooms in order to have enough space to actually lay this entire game board out. What other stuff you have aside from the main game board? You have all the components that go into it. So I already mentioned the little foldable player board that you track in front of you that keeps track of some of your various actions you can do and your various discounts and upgrades over the course of the game. It has all the various meeples that go out in various places. There are data tokens, data meeples that are tiny little clear things. They have actually little ones and zeros as part of their molding.

Brian 7:32
That's where $5 of that MSRP came from. Is just those little transparent 01 meeples. I'm sure.

Jason Wallace 7:39
Yep, and they're the signals that you are crunching, and you put them on part of your player board, and then you run them through your computer at a certain point to get results, and so on and so forth. There's a whole bunch of different cards, and I'll talk more about those in a moment because they're my favorite part of the game. But there's a whole bunch of cards that represent different projects you can do and goals that you can have. There's chits that represent your energy and your technology and such. There's a lot of stuff to this game. There's a lot, and the objective, well, the main objective, the game objective, is to get as many points as possible. And there are many, many ways you can do this. You can do it by exploring planets, by you launch probes out and you explore planets. You can complete missions, which are the various cards you can do. You can scan stars and get signals off of them. Eventually, the aliens show up, and then you can complete additional missions with them in order to get more victory points, and so on. And so there's a lot of different ways to get points, which again is where the strategic depth comes from, and probably why so many people like this so much. I will say, in all this, my favorite part, like I said, are the cards, the project cards, because almost all of them represent real things. So we have cards for the SETI Institute. We have cards for the International Space Station and the Kepler Space Telescope. We have cards for scanning very specific stars, which I forgot to mention. There's another part of the game board, which is the actual stars you can scan for signal, and so there are cards that correspond to those, and they are all real stars. And apparently, one of the cards actually depicts Carl Sagan. I'm not sure which one. I assume it's some sort of science communication card, and I think that the creator's love of Cosmos and Carl Sagan is why Cornell University is the only university that is actually represented here. That's where Carl Sagan was faculty, and that has a near and dear place for both me and Brian. We both did some of our education there. Brian did his PhD there. I did a postdoc, so near and dear to our hearts.

Brian 9:26
Did you go check out Carl Sagan's house ever?

Jason Wallace 9:28
I think I drove by. I checked out his grave.

Brian 9:30
Oh, okay. Well, that's cool too. What?

Jason Wallace 9:34
What? It's like I have a picture of me next to Carl Sagan's grave. People leave little mementos. There's like so. There's a good science center there, and there's like little marbles of earth, and there are like half a dozen of those like on the grave as like little tributes to Doctor Sagan.

Brian 9:47
The house is a little bit of a weird thing. You drive by, and it's like that was Carl Sagan's house. It's beautiful, but you're like someone else lives there, so it's not like you can go knock on the door.

Jason Wallace 9:55
Yeah. Okay. So anyway, so you have all these different ways of getting points. By playing projects and by searching for aliens, finding aliens, exploring planets and moons and such, so lots of different things you can do. How does the game play? Well, like a lot of things that is complicated, it's a little hard to get into because there's a lot of things to figure out. I was very grateful for the player aids because I swear there's like 30 different little icons that have meanings on this, and they are not always intuitive, so there's a lot of things you can do there. And I've got to say, what I consistently felt is that I felt I was strapped for cash and for energy. So I felt I didn't have enough money and I didn't have enough energy most of the time because you only get a little bit of it every turn. And part of the gameplay is boosting that up, but I only ever found ways I can boost like one or two to add to it. I never really found a way of getting like an engine going to generate me a lot of money or a lot of energy.

Brian 10:47
Yeah, I'm sure it's in there. Maybe you just need to get the right cards or some strategy or something. Jason, I'm sure you'll figure it out.

Jason Wallace 10:53
Someone has probably figured this out at some point. It definitely feels like a Euro game where there's like 20 different things that you want to do, but you really can only do three or four, and mastering the game comes from learning which of three or four things are the things you should be focusing on right now. This is also a game that, because of its complexity, for many people would be easier to play online than with a physical copy. I don't know that it's actually online. You said it's not on Board Game Arena.

Brian 11:19
It's not on Board Game Arena, which would be great. I never checked Tabletopia, but I can check later. If it's on either of those, we'll drop it in the show notes, folks.

Jason Wallace 11:26
Oh, but I just did a search. It's on Steam on Tabletop Simulator.

Brian 11:30
Okay, all right. Well, we haven't messed with that yet. Maybe we should try. before we move on. Can I ask about the aliens? Because I don't really know if we'll have another chance. So, because you get two random aliens out of what six possible options each game?

Jason Wallace 11:30
Yeah, well, since the aliens are the science fiction part, yeah, we won't be talking about them very much probably.

Brian 11:47
Well, like there was one little thing that I definitely wanted to talk about. Didn't wasn't one of the aliens that weird splinter shaped meteor like extra solar object that came racing through the solar system a couple years ago?

Jason Wallace 11:58
Yeah, so there are five aliens in the base game. Apparently, there's an expansion that has another three, and one of them is I'm going to slaughter this pronunciation. Omaoma, Omaa. Yeah.

Brian 12:07
Hey, it's not as bad as that volcano that exploded in Iceland. So,

Jason Wallace 12:12
hey everyone, this is editor Jason here. We wanted to make sure we got the correct pronunciation actually on the air. So, courtesy of Wikipedia, it is

Wikipedia 12:18
Oumuamua.

Jason Wallace 12:20
And if you're curious about the volcano Brian mentioned, which I'm not even going to attempt myself, it is

Wikipedia 12:25
Eyjafjallajökull

Jason Wallace 12:26
And now back to the show. Anyway, it's a long, thin asteroid that was based on its speed, came from outside the solar system, and in the designer diary, the designer mentioned how he knows that yeah, this came through and it slingshotted out of our solar system, and we did not have a chance to study it. in the game. If you flip this over, there's actually a little tile that you attach to the solar system, and it now becomes something you can send probes to to study. And apparently, you find like fossils of aliens on it, so not actual aliens, but fossil traces. And that is the thing: the five alien species all seem to be things that reward different strategies. So the rewards sending probes there to go find fossil traces. There's another one that you can only communicate with via radio waves, so it rewards investing in your transmitters and signal detection. There's like these little bug things that are all on the outer planet moons, and so getting probes there is important. I'm not quite sure what the other two ones do. There's one that's is the anomaly that is the one we got where you just do more research on it and it gives you powerful cards.

Brian 13:27
I think the anomaly rewards scanning. I think it was mostly scanning, but I'm not sure.

Jason Wallace 13:32
Yeah, but basically each of the aliens rewards a different strategy, and I believe that's part of the game design. Is that since you don't know which two aliens you'll have until you flip them. You can't just go all out into scanning because if you flip over the outer moons aliens, then and you have no ability to launch things well, then you're probably going to lose out in the second half of the game. I'm not sure it's a balancing mechanic, but it's one of those strategy of how do I invest well in what I'm doing now while also keeping lanes open for the future.

Brian 14:00
Have we played other games like this before, where the game kind of like hits a certain tilting point and sort of the mechanics fundamentally shift? This is the only one I can think of that kind of has this sort of like tipping point where new mechanics get added.

Jason Wallace 14:13
Let me check our list just a moment.

Brian 14:16
Okay.

Jason Wallace 14:16
No, I don't think any of the other games we've played change like that. Not for this podcast. One of my other favorite games, which will never make it on this podcast because it has zero scientific content, is Betrayal at House on the Hill, which is very much one of these things that something happens and it changes the game-not completely, but very, very much. But again, no science in that one, so it's not going to make it on. So no, none of the games we've done before this have that real tipping point where suddenly the game changes a lot. And I mean, truth be told, it doesn't completely change the game when the aliens show up. Like you and I kept doing kind of what we were doing. It's just now we had another target we could aim for.

Brian 14:53
That's true. Maybe just the feel of the game changes a little bit.

Jason Wallace 14:57
It does change a little bit of the feel of the game because. It makes that transition from science fact to science fiction. We're suddenly now investigating the aliens is actually one of the best ways of gaining points, and so people tend to start doing that a lot. Which, to be fair, if we ever actually do discover aliens, there will be a lot of effort put into studying them. Society will totally make that shift. That's all anybody's going to want to study. Like for yes, it's kind of like what's going on with AI right now, except probably more so. It's like you could make the argument that studying AI is us studying a little bit of an alien intelligence because we don't actually understand how it works. But that's a different episode. We won't go there. With that, I think it's time that we segue off and let's start talking about the science behind this game. And Seth, this is where we really need your expertise. So this whole game is about SETI. It's about searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Can you explain to us a little bit of the history of us trying to do that, of what SETI actually is, and of the SETI Institute? I didn't know there was an institute devoted to it.

Seth 15:57
Well, the institute hasn't been here forever, but then again, neither have I. The SETI Institute was actually founded in 1984, and so that's a fairly long time ago now. And its project, its only project, was to try and find ET by eavesdropping on signals that ET might be broadcasting. Since then, we've added a whole bunch of different science experiments, mostly in astrobiology. But you know the flagship thing that we do is to try and find ET. That's still true.

Jason Wallace 16:24
So the SETI Institute is actually a card in this game, and it's a fun one. What you do when you play it, you get publicity, which is a resource in the game, and then whenever you scan for signals, you're able to get additional resources. You're able to either get data, or draw another card, or just get victory points, which I think is perfectly on point with this, and actually that is a good part about this game. So I have never met the designer but I would love to because he started with the flavor text. He wrote the flavor text for his cards first, and then he actually wrote the cards behind it. So he wrote the description of the SETI Institute before actually figuring out what it would do mechanically. And I think a lot of the cards reflect.

Brian 17:02
so opposite to like every other game, right?

Jason Wallace 17:05
Yeah.

Seth 17:06
Well, certainly Chinese Checkers

Jason Wallace 17:07
Now, Seth, looking for aliens is generally not like high tier science. It's usually considered more pseudo scientific, and you get a lot of fringe stuff there. But the SETI Institute is very definitely a solid scientific institute using very rigorous scientific methods. What really sets you apart? Like, what is the way that the SETI Institute does its work that makes it firmly within science, hopeful science, and not pseudoscience?

Seth 17:32
Well, I think that's fairly straightforward. The SETI Institute uses what we know about astronomy. We don't know anything about aliens yet, but that's what we're trying to find. So we use astronomy, known astronomy, and we also use very high-tech equipment. So it's an experiment. It's like trying to find quarks or dark matter particles or WIMPs, whatever. It's an experiment, and it's really it's an exploratory experiment. So that's it. It's just another piece of science, I guess.

Jason Wallace 18:00
And I guess a key part there is that you're willing to have your hypothesis be wrong. It's probably really hard to prove that, but it is a possibility.

Seth 18:08
That's a fundamental problem, just as you say, Jason. We can hypothesize that the aliens are out there, and that seems perfectly reasonable, given the fact that if not, then we're very special. And although my brothers think they're special, you know, real world experience has shown it's not true, and it might be this case that thinking that we're the only thinking beings in the cosmos and therefore extremely special might not be true either.

Jason Wallace 18:31
And so, with SETI, I imagine you have to manage PR a lot, and that's actually also part of the game. You have to manage your publicity. It's something you use to fund research projects to get better technology. I assume you're basically cashing in public goodwill or with lawmaking agencies or funding agencies or something. What does the SETI Institute do as far as outreach and publicity?

Seth 18:51
Well, we do a lot of both, actually. Although I'm not sure that it has resulted in much in the way of fundraising success. Although I have to hold myself back a little bit on saying that because the principal funder of the SETI projects these days is a guy by the name of Franklin Antonio. Perhaps I should say was a guy by the name of Franklin Antonio because Mr. Antonio has passed away in the past couple of years. But anyhow, he set up a fund to keep financing this search. And why did he do that? Well, because he heard a little bit about the SETI project on a radio program, so in a sense, you're completely right.

Brian 19:24
And of course, there's the Big Picture Science podcast, which comes out of SETI Institute, which I've been listening to forever.

Seth 19:29
Yeah, and he'd listen to that too. It was on a radio station in San Diego, which is close to where he lived. It's on, you know, a lot of radio stations actually.

Brian 19:36
It's a really good show, listeners. If you're looking for a great science communication podcast, big picture size, solid.

Seth 19:42
People complain about the puns.

Brian 19:44
Oh, what? No, impossible. It's the highest tier puns in the game.

Seth 19:49
I'm not sure that says much, but okay.

Jason Wallace 19:52
Does like the U.S. federal government provide any funding? I know I was a member of the Planetary Society for several years, and they at least seemed out. With the SETI Institute, although I don't know if they fund it

Seth 20:02
it.No, it was originally well, not originally. Originally, SETI was done by a fellow by the name of Frank Drake. That was back in 1960. He did the first experiment, and he simply did it as a really a science experiment. He happened to be working at a radio observatory, so he did the first experiment. But after that, it became the you know the purview of the SETI Institute, which is as I say founded in 1984, but even before that, there were people at the University of California at Berkeley and elsewhere, Harvard, where individual researchers did their own SETI experiments. I think the reason they did that is very straightforward. I mean, you could say, look, the chances that you're going to hear anything might be small. You might have reasons for saying that, but even if they are small, the payoff would be enormous. So that is sort of an incentive to at least try

Jason Wallace 20:48
Sort of a high risk, high reward sort of research.

Seth 20:51
Exactly.

Jason Wallace 20:52
So what would those payoffs be like? If we were to discover a signal from an alien intelligence tomorrow, obviously that'd be big news and everything. But what would the benefits of that be to society?

Seth 21:03
There are, if you will, practical benefits, and there are some that are, if you will, more philosophical. I mean, the practical benefits could be since this society that you hear is undoubtedly more advanced than we are technically. Otherwise, you're not going to hear them. You know, you could ask them questions like, you know, I don't know, how do you cure death, or how do you get a whole bunch of really inexpensive energy, or whatever, right? So there may be some practical benefits that could really change everything. But it's like if you gave the Romans automobiles or something, that would change the course of human history. To me, the more profound change would be simply in knowing that there's somebody out there, knowing that humans, for all their good points, and I'm I'm told they have them for all their good points are not the only game in town. And since this is a game here, I guess I can say that

Brian 21:47
absolutely. You said that the originator of the first SETI experiment was done by Frank Drake from the Drake Equation fame. Yes.

Seth 21:54
Yes.

Brian 21:55
Jason, have we talked about the Drake Equation before?

Jason Wallace 21:57
I don't think so, and I've gathered it can be a sore spot for some people, just because there's a lot of unknowns. So, Seth, could you? What is the Drake equation? I assume that Dr. Drake is the one that came up with it, but what is it, and what is the status on our being able to fill it in?

Seth 22:12
Well, the Drake Equation was actually the consequence of something that Frank Drake himself did in 1960. He was organizing a meeting at the Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. The subject of the meeting was going to be, you know, looking for evidence that there's an intelligence out there, right? That there may be not just life in space, but clever life in space. So he was just thinking about how to structure the meeting. You know, he was just trying to make an agenda for a meeting, and he came up with this very simple equation that incorporated all the you know the important unknowns that you would need to know to estimate how many aliens are out there. That subsequently became known as the Drake Equation. I might add very briefly, Frank Drake never called it the Drake Equation. Frank Drake was you know not just a modest guy and a very clever guy, but he was a very nice guy, actually.

Jason Wallace 23:02
Well, I've gathered it's gauche to name something in science after yourself. You just put it out there and you let other people name it after you.

Brian 23:08
I'm thinking of Hawking radiation, maybe being the contrary to that.

Jason Wallace 23:14
So, for our listeners who may not be familiar with this, I just looked it up. This is what the official Drake equation is. It's so the number of civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy that we might be able to communicate with is equal to, in theory, the average rate of star formation in the galaxy multiplied by how many of those stars have planets multiplied by how many, or what fraction? These are all fractions. What fraction of those planets can actually support life? Which fraction actually develop life? Which fraction develop intelligent life, and then the fraction of that intelligent life that actually develops a technology that could release some sort of signal that we could detect, and then all that multiplied by how long that civilization lasts. Because you can imagine, if we get a very highly advanced technological civilization that manages to last for like five years, very unlikely to detect it. Whereas if they stick around for a few 1000 years, then we have a better chance of being able to talk with them.

Seth 24:04
Absolutely correct.

Brian 24:05
And some of those numbers, we're getting closer to filling in some reasonable estimates for some of those values. Most of the ones at the beginning of the equation, obviously.

Seth 24:14
That's right, Brian. I mean, the start of the Drake equation it consists of seven terms that are just multiplied together, and then you get the estimated number of societies that are out there in the Milky Way galaxy, our galaxy, that are advanced enough and that are busy enough for us to detect them today. That's what the equation does. And and Frank was using it to sort of justify his experiment there, where he was turning a big antenna, radio telescope, in the direction of some nearby stars, hoping to eavesdrop on the aliens, but you know the people affronting him the money. In this case, the federal government really, you know, they want to know: well, is there any chance of success? And that's what the Drake Equation can give you-an estimate of whether you're going to succeed.

Jason Wallace 24:53
And I think, in reality, we don't know many of those terms. We don't know what the odds are of getting life. We still have. N of 1 of planets with life. We have Earth, so we don't know how common that is. We certainly don't know how common it is for life to show up or for intelligent life to come from that technology. But in the game, I think we can definitely say that the Drake Equation solves to two, because the game has it so that not only is it possible to discover aliens, it is inevitable unless you're intentionally trying to not discover aliens, you will eventually get to them, and you will find two civilizations that you can communicate to. So I think the game is probably significantly more optimistic than real life, given that SETI's been looking for what 65-ish years now, and we don't have much to show. Like we don't know how long a turn in the game is, but given that you're actually spinning the solar system around. We can make a guess that it's a 5 ,10, 20 years for a game, and they apparently are much more successful than we are in real life.

Seth 25:49
You're certainly certainly right in saying that. You know, as far as we know, n still equals one, right? Us, we don't know about any other societies, and there are people, serious people, by the way, who you know argue that that is actually a pretty good estimate of the true number. Not because there aren't a lot of planets out there. There are a lot of planets, and not because all those planets are lousy planets, because they're not. But you know, you need more than just a nice planet. You need to start life, and even that might not be so far-fetched. But then you need that life to develop intelligence and technology, and nobody knows whether that's rare or otherwise.

Jason Wallace 26:25
My personal opinion is that life is probably common, given that seems to have started on Earth as soon as it could have started. We have evidence of life, pretty much. But it took us four and a half billion years to be able to send a radio signal,

Brian 26:36
and the percentage of the time that there's been life on Earth versus the percentage of time that we could send radio signals, it's a rounding error.

Seth 26:43
Well, it's small, but we're not talking about us sending signals. If you're talking about the aliens, you know, I think it would be presumptuous to maintain that the aliens have only been around for four and a half billion years, which is to say, as long as we have. I mean, the universe is three times that age, so there have been plenty of planets out there, many of them with life, presumably, that have been around for literally many billions of years longer than we have. So sending signals into space, maybe something like inventing the wheel, something that's very common.

Brian 27:14
Jason and I's training is also both in microbiology, so we'd also be very excited to find microbial life. Of course, that would have to be in the solar system because microbes aren't sending radio signals.

Seth 27:25
But they might be traveling. People have suggested that it's an idea called panspermia, in which rather than trying to colonize distant worlds, you just send a rocket out into space with a bunch of microbes and bottles in the rocket and let it crash into some other planet, and you know, with luck, it'll multiply, and you'll you'll get aliens that look like you.

Jason Wallace 27:46
All right, so you talk about sending stuff out. So aliens sending signals out, or the panspermia sending bottles of bacteria and stuff out. But we've actually sent messages out ourselves, haven't we? So Brian was talking about the Voyager probes earlier. I know they've got like the little golden record, which the game designer actually listened to as mood music when he was designing this game to try to get himself in the right headspace. I want to meet this person too. They sound really interesting. Yeah. So we've done that, but I seem to remember we've sent radio signals out into space. Like basically, we've sent the signal to someone else to pick up, haven't we?

Seth 28:19
We have. It's called active SETI, and that may sound like you know whoever did it finally got off the couch. But that's not what the meaning is. The meaning is simply that you don't just sit and wait with your earphones on, hoping to pick up a signal. You actually send a signal out there, either to inspire some aliens to try and converse with you, or you know just to let them know where we are, so they can send their interstellar spacecraft back to Earth and just wipe us out. So either way, you're doing somebody a service by broadcasting. But the difficulty is you don't know where to aim that signal, right? And even more critically, you don't know at what power level, or what frequency, or how often, all that kind of stuff. So it may be very difficult for us to communicate to the aliens. But presumably, there's societies out there that are so advanced that they could target, you know, the entire Milky Way galaxy with a powerful signal all the time. And if anybody is doing that, well, we might hear them.

Brian 29:11
But do you think it would make more sense to target your signal at the core, where presumably there's more stars, or out towards the arms, like more where we are? I mean, is there any reason to make one choice over the other, I guess we don't know.

Seth 29:22
Well, I mean, in a sense, we do. I've done many SETI experiments, but you know, in the beginning, I was always listening in the direction of the galactic center, the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And if you go there, I don't know if your travel plans are firmed up for the weekend, but if you go to the center of the galaxy, you'll find that the density of stars is about a million times what it is where we are.

Brian 29:42
Oh wow!

Seth 29:43
So there are a lot more stars per cubic inch there, and presumably a lot more you know societies per cubic inch as well.

Jason Wallace 29:49
So that's like where to aim stuff. What about the signal? It's been years since I've read this, so I don't remember. But I seem to remember reading that there are some bands of radio frequencies that we tend to look at, because we make some assumption about these will be the ones that other civilizations would use because they tend to go through space very well they don't get intercepted by dust or something like that. Are there certain parts of the radio spectrum that we favor when looking for signals or is it a broad swath?

Seth 30:14
Well, it is a broad swath.

Brian 30:16
I've also heard about gathering at the watering hole. Although I'll be honest, I don't remember what that means. But

Seth 30:21
well, this was an idea observation that societies will gather at the waterhole. That was said originally by a guy by the name of Barney Oliver, and he was an important guy in the SETI endeavor for many, many years. A very clever guy, one of the smartest guys I ever met. He was the head of R&D for Hewlett Packard, which is up the street here in Palo Alto, California. He's gone now, which is a real loss. But he referred to this range of frequencies between about 1400 megahertz and 1600 megahertz. Those are rough numbers. Where you know that's the water hole. That range of frequencies there, because at 1400 megahertz you have a naturally produced emission line of hydrogen. The universe glows at that frequency, and at the 1600, there's a natural line of what's known as the hydroxyl radical. So that's H O. So if you have hydrogen, then H O, you have H2O, which is water. So you know maybe the aliens will be clever enough to realize we're going to think this and transmit their messages or their you know top 40 or whatever it is that they broadcast in that frequency range,

Jason Wallace 31:09
and so a big part of the game is actually crunching signals. You're gathering data by scanning nearby stars or by various cards that get you data, and crunching it to try to find evidence of alien civilizations. Where do you get your data from? Like, where does SETI actually gather its signal data from in order to look for these signals.

Seth 31:44
Well, there are several approaches. One is you can say we don't know anything about where the aliens might be, and so we're just going to look at every star, assuming that some of them have planets, and some of those planets might be salubrious, might be able to support life. But there are a lot of stars out there, and you know that's throwing away things we know about stars and planets. To begin with, we know that a very large fraction of stars, more than 90% actually, are either too hot or too faint, if you will, too bright or too faint to support life on a planet that might encircle them. So we might as well use that fact and only look in the direction of stars, star systems. Really, you're looking for anything around the star that are somewhat like the sun-not too bright, not too dim, that kind of thing. So you try and put as much astronomy into the search as you can, because otherwise you're sort of compelled to look everywhere, and that can take you a long time and will never be complete.

Jason Wallace 32:35
That actually ties nicely to the game because in the game there are eight stars that you can scan specifically to look for signals, I tried to figure out why these ones specifically. They seem to just be a little bit of a greatest hits of like nearby stars, mostly nearby stars. Not all of them are actually that close. We've got a few close ones like Proxima Centauri and Barnard's Star, which are the two closest to us. They've got Vega, which one person speculated is because that's the star the signal comes from in the movie Contact

Jason Wallace 33:01
with the vegans, right? Where the vegans come from?

Jason Wallace 33:03
Yes, where the vegans come from.

Seth 33:05
The local diner, I think.

Jason Wallace 33:07
Beta Pictorious, which has a large dusty planetary disk because it's a very young star, and apparently we have made a direct image of planets around it somehow. I don't know how, but apparently we have.

Seth 33:18
We have, and by the way, that's not a very good choice, right? Beta Pictoris, because it's young. Just as you said, now when you say young, it means maybe a couple of 100 million years, something like that. That's very short period of time in astronomy, and there may not have been enough time for any planets around there to not only produce life but to produce intelligent life, which takes billions of years apparently. So you can excise that from the game.

Brian 33:42
Hey, later in the podcast we do our nitpick corner. You just added the perfect nitpick.

Seth 33:48
I'll pick some more nits here.

Jason Wallace 33:50
Back on the idea of crunching signal. So way back in high school, I actually downloaded and was running the SETI at Home screensaver, which I think was one of the first scientific crowdsourcing that was done is that correct?

Seth 34:02
Well, I'm not totally familiar with all crowdsourcing efforts, but it was certainly one of the most popular. I mean, I think something like 7 million people ultimately downloaded SETI at Home, which is the screensaver you're talking about, and ran it. I mean, millions of people actually crunched data for SETI at home, it was an initiative from guys across the bay here at the University of California at Berkeley. A very clever idea.

Jason Wallace 34:27
So the idea, listeners, was that so this was way back in the Pleistocene when Brian and I were in high school, and we didn't have much computer power at the time. And so the idea was rather than having to get enormous amounts of time on these massive supercomputers, what if we could make use of idle time on people's personal computers? And so SETI at home was packaged up as a screensaver, which is something we don't really use anymore. It was meant to prevent damage to your screen, but it would actually crunch data and crunch numbers while you were not using your computer, and then every now and then it would like send that data packet off and down. A new one, and so it was essentially distributed computing on a massive scale. And I know it led to a whole ecosystem of this. I've heard of them for things like doing protein folding, and I think other astronomy stuff. Crowdsourcing science has become a big thing now. It's it's still niche. It's not something that everyone knows about, but if you look out there, there's all sorts of ways where you can go out and you can participate in some sort of science project where someone just needs a lot of people to look at a lot of stuff, either your computer or your own eyeballs.

Seth 35:29
Right, exactly right. I have to say this, Jason. I'm talking to you from the Silicon Valley. Right, that's where I am. And the guys down the street, and lamentably they are mostly guys. The guys down the street are you know developing the next generation of computers to sell you one, and you know even home computers they double in capacity, double in speed roughly every two years. So the thing is that you know the if you will the computers that are not part of a home network are getting faster all the time, and maybe so fast that it doesn't pay to do it via crowdsourced scheme anymore. However, and maybe more to the point, to run something like SETI at home, where you have literally millions of users, many of those users are going to run into problems or think they found ET or whatever, and they're going to want to write somebody and tell them,

Jason Wallace 36:15
"Oh, you need tech support.

Seth 36:17
You need tech support. And remember, this was done by one or two guys, so that was a problem.

Jason Wallace 36:22
I can imagine. I'd say I would not want to be those guys, but they probably hired some poor undergrad to be the one who actually answered the emails.

Seth 36:28
It wasn't emails that was the problem. It was people, you know.

Jason Wallace 36:32
Oh right, right.

Seth 36:34
Well, maybe it was emails. I mean, if they were just crunching data, that was automated pretty much. But when the program wiped out all their email files or their the novel they were writing on their computer. Then they needed somebody to complain to.

Jason Wallace 36:46
Okay, so here's another question I've got based on the gameplay. So one part of the game is that you actually have a little spinning disk of the solar system that moves around, and it limits which parts of the sky you're able to observe. Or better said, you get a free observation of whatever Earth happens to be pointed at. How much is your signal gathering limited by which side of the sun we happen to be on at the time?

Seth 37:07
I would say none of it. The Earth is pointing at all the sky all the time. Really, it's just that you know half that time it's daylight. But that doesn't matter if you're listening for radio signals. So you don't really need that. But even if you did say, well, we're only going to look at night because we just like it at night, and we want to keep this from the neighbors or whatever. It's also true that, by the way, there's a little less interference at night. But in any case, even if you're only going to do it at night, six months of the year it's going to be okay, and the other six months of the year it's going to be daylight during those hours. So you know you're all set anyhow.

Brian 37:38
Okay, so that's just a nod to game mechanics-that doesn't mean anything.

Jason Wallace 37:42
Probably, yeah. Along the lines of all this signal crunching, how would you know if you actually found a signal from another technological civilization? I mean, how do we determine what it looks like? It's not like there's going to have standard like handshake procedures with computers. Like, how do we know that something is artificial and not just some random natural phenomenon?

Seth 38:04
That's actually a good question, and there are some answers which are fairly straightforward. I don't know if they're totally good, but I think they are actually. You look for a signal that's narrow band. Now that's you know a radio technology term. That means that the signal is confined on the radio dial to a very small range of frequencies because that's the kind of signal a transmitter makes, but it's not the kind of signal that a quasar, pulsar, whatever make. So if you find a narrow band signal, you're just about you know assured or reasonably assured that that's being made by a transmitter. So you know it, but you wouldn't be certain of it. You might not publish a signal that you found even if it were narrow band because there are some natural phenomena that can make a narrowband signal. You know what you would do is you would say, okay, I'm pointing my antenna this way, and I picked up a signal. Now I'm going to move the antenna over here five degrees or whatever, and see if I still pick up this signal. And if I do, then I know this is not ET because ET can't be in two places at once. Can't be in that part of the sky and also in that part of the sky. So you know there are some very simple tests you can make to kind of convince yourself that whatever signal you pick up is really the kind you're looking for.

Brian 38:54
So narrow band, specific source, those are the kind of markers that indicate that you might be on the right track.

Seth 39:15
Narrow band and in a particular direction. Yeah.

Jason Wallace 39:18
Now I always remember the movie Contact where Jodie Foster is there, like listening to the signal, and then gets this whole whoop, whoop, whoop coming through. It's probably not going to be anything that clear, is it?

Seth 39:28
Well, I don't know if it'll be that clear. It probably won't be that, though. I mean, it sounded like you know, I don't know, a sledgehammer hitting a pod of whales. That sound effect, right? That that's the sound designer for the movie. You're not going to hear anything like that. I mean, just think of if you listen to a teletype, if you know what a teletype is, doesn't sound very science fictiony, but it is the kind of signal or the kind of sound, if you will, that anything that's trying to communicate some information might make. So, yeah, the movie isn't accurate in that respect, but so what?

Jason Wallace 39:58
I just suddenly have this. Image of these aliens off in another galaxy. All right, we're going to beam this signal to cover this entire galaxy. We need to get the aesthetics of this right. I mean, we want our first impression to be good, so we got to get a bunch of designers together, get some good sound design, some good mathematics there.

Brian 40:14
I mean, that's what we did with the record, right? With the probes that were sent out on Voyager, it was exactly that, right? There was an effort to make a good impression.

Seth 40:21
Well, I don't know if it was a good impression, but at least an informative impression. You know, to be completely honest, the Voyager records and the Pioneer plaques, and you know these limited efforts to try and get in touch with the aliens. Those communications have all been really to us, to show what could we do.

Jason Wallace 40:37
So another part of the game, very big part, is developing new technologies to be able to scan signals better, or launch probes better, or other things like that. And I know that astronomy and space exploration in general has been behind a lot of technological advances. The one that I'm most familiar with is like the CCD cameras that we all now use in cell phones. I believe were pioneered for use as telescopes in order to capture photons. My question is: Has SETI been involved in any of these? Like, are there challenges that we have had to overcome in order to carry out this search for extraterrestrial intelligence that has resulted in knock-on technologies that our listeners might recognize?

Seth 41:15
Well, technological spinoff is indeed something you you think about, but the whole SETI effort is so small and so specialized. You know what we're looking for, where we're looking for it, and all that. You know there aren't terribly many technological spin-offs. You could say that the receivers that have been designed and built for SETI, which are narrowband receivers. In other words, they're looking at one spot on the radio dial very intensely. And of course, you know we look at different spots, but at any given time, it's one very narrow range of frequencies. Well, we've developed very good receivers for that. But if you ask me, well, surely there must be practical applications of that. The answer is I don't know of any.

Brian 41:51
Fair enough. I see no problem with basic research. I truly don't. But I'm also a scientist, so yeah.

Jason Wallace 41:59
I think it's in our DNA to explore and to try to find things out. But I'll also say, like, you never know where the next big thing is going to come from. And so I think basic research is important just because it's there, but also because we don't know what the outcome could be. And this is again high risk, high reward. If it turns out that one of those narrowband receivers happens to pick up a signal that we can verify is from extraterrestrial intelligence. I think it will have been worth it.

Seth 42:23
Oh, for sure,

Brian 42:24
absolutely.

Seth 42:25
I'm going to ask them as I say. I'm going to ask them for the cure for death. Start there, and then ask them other questions.

Brian 42:31
Okay, so that goes through most of my questions. Brian, do you have any questions that you want to ask Seth now? Yes, there was one card in the game that I actually would like to talk about because I noticed that but didn't get to play it, and that is the Wow! signal. Can we talk about the Wow! signal?

Seth 42:34
Well, it's totally classified, Brian. I don't think I don't think we can talk about it. But send me a stamped self-addressed envelope, and I'll no. The Wow! signal was picked up at Ohio State University. When was it? I think it was 1977. I may be wrong about that, but that's what I remember because they were doing a SETI experiment. One of the early ones had this big antenna in the open fields near Columbus, Ohio, and they didn't know what to use it for because it had been, if you will, eclipsed by other radio telescopes in terms of astronomy research. So they thought they'd look for ET, and they did pick up this signal. In those days, the output of the receivers was not, you know, written on a magnetic disc or anything like that or a tape. It came out on a what was called a pen recorder, a chart recorder. It was just pen and paper. And one day they came in to the shack where all the equipment was, and they looked at the previous night's recordings and they saw a big signal. And the astronomer in charge just wrote "Wow!" next to it because he thought it was pretty impressive. That's how it became known as the Wow! signal. By the way, the Wow! signal has been looked for many times since that time, including by the guys at Ohio State themselves. But it's never been found a second.

Brian 43:53
Really? Oh, so the Wow! signal is still of an unknown source or origin, or I thought it had been tied to a particular astronomical phenomenon. I guess not.

Seth 44:01
No, and the chances are it wasn't astronomical at all.

Seth 44:05
Most likely, it was terrestrial interference. But of course, we don't know because it wasn't found a second time. And if you can only find it once, you can't do very much science with it.

Brian 44:13
True, true. All right, thank you.

Jason Wallace 44:15
Well, I think we're getting near the end of this, but I guess to wrap up this part, Seth, do you have any misconceptions about SETI or the SETI Institute you want to clear up?

Seth 44:23
I'm sure I have many, but since they're misconceptions, obviously I'm not aware of them. If I had to make a kind of a philosophical question to come up with one answer to that, the equipment that's being used for SETI keeps getting better because mostly of what's happening here in the Silicon Valley. The electronics keeps getting faster and cheaper, so the search keeps getting you know wider and wider. It's as if you know you're in Cadiz, Spain, in 1492, and you've only got budget for a couple of ships to cross the ocean, see what's there. Not that that's what the Spaniards, the Spanish guys are doing, but anyhow. But you know, suppose you could send not two ships or three ships. But you could send 10 ships, and then two years later you could send you know 20 ships, and so you know let this go on for a few decades, and you can send you know hundreds, 1000s of ships. So that's what's happening in SETI. The listening experiment keeps getting better and faster and very quickly. So that's why I bet anybody who's interested a cup of Starbucks that will find ET within the next 20 years. Now, mind you, I've been saying that for two dozen years now, but nonetheless, I still believe it.

Brian 45:25
Well, that would be consistent with the timeline of the game. Seth, I got a question for you. Do you have a favorite game?

Seth 45:31
Well, when I was younger, I used to play board games, obviously, with my friends in the neighborhood, and we played all the usual ones, right? Monopoly and Clue and things like that. These days, alas, alas, none of my friends is terribly interested in games. I probably shouldn't say that here, but because I do like games, but there aren't many people I know who play games. My mother, for example, was in a bridge club, and you know, I never learned bridge because they didn't seem to serve sufficiently adequate snacks during bridge club meetings, I'm not going to get into that. But now regret it. I'm sorry that I don't play bridge. I always enjoyed games.

Brian 46:07
Snacks are a crucial part of the board game experience. Jason and I have repeated conversations about how you need to have room for a bowl of chips on the table if you're going to play a game. If you don't, that is not a well-designed game.

Seth 46:19
Or you know, have a board that's edible.

Jason Wallace 46:22
We already determined that SETI does not pass the chip test. This is a massive spread that when you put the whole game out. So yeah,

Brian 46:28
we need the charcuterie edition.

Jason Wallace 46:30
Well, Brian, you earlier mentioned nitpicks. So nitpick corner places where we think the game could be potentially improved. And I'm going to put out one immediately. And I'm going to say this is probably not really deserved to be a nitpick. The fact that you can actually find aliens and it's really easy

Seth 46:45
in the game.

Brian 46:46
Yeah, in the game.

Jason Wallace 46:46
In the game, it's not just easy to find aliens. It's basically inevitable. But apparently, the early versions of the game did not have that. They actually didn't have any aliens show up in the early version of the game. You were just looking for aliens and never found them, exactly like real life SETI, and early play testers complained a lot. So the reason why we have aliens in the game is because much as that may be true to the real world science, apparently it's not nearly as fun to play.

Seth 47:12
Same in games as for for you know science fiction movies, right? If they never encounter any hostile aliens, well, why are you watching it?

Jason Wallace 47:19
Part of me takes that as a nitpick, but at the end of the day, it's probably one of those. It's not a bug; it's a feature. We talk about the compromises you have to make in order to turn a scientific concept into an actual fun game. This seems to be one of the things that had to be compromised: is that you know, in order for a game about finding aliens to be fun, you have to actually kind of find the aliens.

Brian 47:38
We already talked about this just a little bit, kind of off mic, but I want to talk about it again. It's only science fiction until it happens. There was a time when we didn't know how to fly. We didn't have powered flight until you do, and then it's just part of everyday life. And you know, eventually we may find aliens, and then it's just going to be part of everyday life. There's even a card after you find aliens that's just called part of everyday life, and it does some special thing. I don't remember.

Seth 48:01
Got to have one more card when somebody decides to broadcast back to the aliens that we've heard them, and 50 years after that, Earth is wiped out. Just a suggestion.

Brian 48:12
There are multiple different aliens. They're not all friendly in the game.

Seth 48:16
Well, I'm sure that's true for the real aliens too.

Seth 48:19
I would not be surprised to find out that one of the cards is actually us sending a signal out there. Most of the cards, a surprising number of them, are real scientific missions that either have happened or are planned and are going to happen. I would not be surprised to find that out there somewhere. All right, well, it's time to wrap up. The last thing we do on this set is we give letter grades, which you are welcome to recuse yourself from if you want. But the idea is we want to grade it on the science and on the fun. So, Brian, I'll toss this at you first. Where would you put your grades for SETI?

Brian 48:50
So, for science, I think that there was all the intent in the world, and that every intent was there to be accurate. I didn't get a chance to read their diary. I'm sure that there were compromises made, like being able to detect the signals. I don't see any reasons to knock it. I mean, I'm okay with an A, Jason. Are you going to fight with me on an A for science, or do you think I'm on the right track?

Jason Wallace 49:09
I was going to give a solid A. Like, yes, there's aliens. That was a specific design choice. But looking through the cards, especially the project cards, there was so much care and effort put there, and that's where he started. He started by designing flavor text around all these projects around the world, and then he figured out the mechanics. He was really devoted to being accurate to these things, and so I say my litmus test is: What are you aiming at? Did you hit it? And I think he nailed it solidly. I think this game, especially in those cards, is highly scientifically accurate. The data in there is not much, but the things that are there are definitely there, and even the mechanics make sense if you know what they're talking about.

Brian 49:51
The system for rotating the planets is actually really clever. The inner planets will rotate more frequently than the middle, than the outer. In terms of fun,

Jason Wallace 49:59
before we. So on the fun, because Seth hasn't played the game, so I don't think he can speak on fun. But do you want to give an opinion on the science based off of what you've heard? And you're welcome to contradict us.

Seth 50:08
No, no, no, no. I mean, it sounds okay to me. I haven't heard you say anything that would be rejected by the Nobel Committee or anything like that.

Brian 50:17
Okay, for fun, it's a complicated game. It is a difficult teach and when we were talking about Jason and I have been getting together to play board games literally for years and we're getting together soon to do so we were like what should we play it's like oh we could play SETI jokingly because there's no way we think we'll be able to get the people we play with to actually sit down and learn the game

Seth 50:36
sounds like the old Avalon Hill games

Brian 50:37
yeah for sure

Seth 50:39
where you could reprise the Civil War, but it would take you longer than the Civil War lasted just to play the game.

Jason Wallace 50:47
This is definitely a gamer's game, and we already talked about it's like number 13 on Board Game Geek, so it's very highly rated. But the games that get up that high tend to be the one with lots of fiddly bits, lots of deep strategy, and they do tend to take a while to play. So, what are you going to?

Brian 51:02
I'm only going to give it a B because the thing is, is that like for me, my fun metric is: Are we going to get it out and play it? Am I going to throw it in the car with the idea that we're going to get it out and play it? I don't think that's going to happen. Like, I would like to. I just don't think it's going to.

Jason Wallace 51:15
I'm probably going to put it more in the A minus B plus range. I would want to try it out more because it seems like it could be fun. But we spent our play session. We spent like a full two-hour play session, which is what we normally do for these games, getting most of the way through a single game, and a lot of that time was spent learning it. There are so many little symbols we had to figure out what they meant. I'm glad there's a little quick reference guide. Once we started getting it down, it went smoother, and I think it could go really well, and there is, as always, a single-player mode. So I may give that a try at some point to see how it is. I think this feels like it would be really fun, but yeah, you need the right group of people to play it with. This is definitely not for everyone.

Brian 51:54
Well, because you got to play it twice. You got to play it once just to learn how to play. Then you play a second time to actually play.

Seth 52:00
Yeah, but that's true of any game, right? Unless it's checkers.

Brian 52:03
Yeah, no, you're right right. You're right. But in this case, it takes two hours to play.

Jason Wallace 52:07
That's true. Like you have to do that for Uno too, but it's not really a half day or an all day commitment.

Brian 52:11
Point taken. Point taken. Seth, I really want to. I we really appreciate you finding the time to come and talk to us. This is a real brass ring for us to be able to get you to come on and talk about this game, it's a match made in in the heavens. Where could people find more about what you do? Obviously, there's big picture science.

Seth 52:27
There's also the SETI Institute's website, just SETI.org. They can always go there. But if you just type SETI into your search engine, presumably Google, but I say that because Google's you know down the street here, and they might hear me. If you just type that into your search engine, you're going to find lots about SETI. Okay, and there are books.

Jason Wallace 52:45
All right, sounds great. Again, thank you so much for coming on. This has been a great conversation. And like I said, if we could get anyone on the planet to talk about this, you're probably one of the best qualified people to talk about this particular game. So thank you for making the time and talking with us about this wonderful little bit of science edutainment,

Seth 53:04
Jason Brian. It's been my pleasure.

Jason Wallace 53:07
So, listeners, take care. Hope you enjoyed this discussion about searching for extraterrestrial intelligences. If you happen to find any, please let Seth know. In the meantime, have a great month and happy gaming,

Brian 53:17
and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.

Jason Wallace 53:22
This has been the Gaming with Science podcast, copyright 2026. Listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non-commercial purpose as long as credit is given to Game with Science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you, and have fun playing Dice with the Universe.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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S3E08 - SETI (Searching for Aliens)

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