Earlier in this season, way back in episode six, we learned how Senator Richard

Brian from Nevada added an amendment to the 1994 federal budget that put a stop to NASA's

work on SETI. NASA could keep looking for habitable planets and for microbial life,

but no funding, no work, no personnel, nothing,

could go toward the search for intelligent life.

So imagine my surprise when I came across a paper from 2018

on a NASA website by a NASA scientist entitled New Assumptions to Guide SETI Research.

The author of that paper is Silvano Columbano.

He was a computer scientist at NASA and worked there for 40 years until retiring in 2020.

He's got a background in biophysics and life sciences

and has worked on questions involving the origins

of life, artificial intelligence, and space travel. In the paper, he wrote, the one I just

mentioned, questions some of the assumptions we have when we think about the search for extraterrestrial

life. NASA had no objections, so he published the paper, but I wondered what inspired him to

write it in the first place.

It was basically a request by SETI for feedback.

They were having a conference in which they were trying to evaluate their approach

and see if there were new ideas that people could bring up.

So that was basically that.

And I question the wisdom of SETI's, I question the wisdom of making that the only approach

that they had, which had been to kind of look for signals, some sign of

technology that we might be able to detect from a distance. Right. And SETI looks for radio signals,

...