My guest today Jill Tarder has spent her career on the search for extra terrestrial intelligence,

also known as SETI. She led programs at NASA and co-founded and led the SETI Institute for 35 years.

If you've read the book Contact Written by Carl Sagan or seen the movie,

Jill was the inspiration for the hero, played in the movie by Jody Foster.

It doesn't matter what I believe, the universe is as it is, the galaxy is as it is,

and it contains or doesn't contain a particular number of technological civilizations.

Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Many people are fascinated by the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe

because they have a deep yearning to know we're not alone. My own interest in the topic is

less romantic and more pragmatic. Many of the problems I work on involve detecting weak signals

and noisy data, and nobody faces a harder signal detection problem than Jill Tarder.

You spent most of your professional life searching for intelligent life beyond

Earth. I suspect that's a pretty polarizing endeavor with some people seeing it as

one of the most inspiring questions in science, and others may be wondering what the point of it

even is. I feel that the audience that listens to this podcast may skew a little bit towards that

latter perspective. What arguments do you make to skeptics that might convince them they should

want to listen to our conversation? Well, I think to know whether there is other intelligent life

in the universe is really fundamental to helping us solve our future challenges.

We face on this planet all kinds of challenges that don't respect national boundaries, and thinking

about life beyond Earth, thinking about life that isn't related to us, the idea that somehow

they managed to survive long enough so that we can be close to them both in space and time

in this galaxy that's 10 billion years old. So if we could be co-temporal with another technological

...