Talking to Aliens
Should we try and contact extra-terrestrials? If so, what should we be saying to them? Dr Jill Stuart looks at the attempts so far
Dr Jill Stuart is an academic based at the London School of Economics. Since March 2013 she has been Editor in Chief of the journal Space Policy, the pre-eminent academic journal on the topic published since 1985. She was recipient of the prestigious 2015 British Science Association Margaret Mead Award Lecture, in recognition of her cutting edge research. She came to Second Home to talk about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence as well as humanity’s attempts to communicate with the unknown.
What is extra-terrestrial life? At the most basic level you have cellular or microbial, for example, a planet that has bacteria. The next level up is sentient — something that’s able to perceive or feel things. The next level up is intelligent. Then it’s potentially robotic or cyborg. The big question is whether or not we should just be listening in, or whether we should be sending messages out to extra-terrestrials.
In the ’70s, so there was an astronomer named Francis Drake who came up with an equation which tried to answer the big philosophical question: does extra-terrestrial intelligence exist, and if so, or if not, should we be bothering trying to make contact with them? The Drake equation just took into account the number of stars there are, the likelihood that they will have created intelligence and so on, and what he came out with was that there is a very high probability that there are other life-forms in the universe. So are we alone? The Drake equation is a scientific suggestion that we are.
For me, more emotionally I guess, is what people within the field call anthropocentricism. This is the idea that we think we are unique and quite special. I actually think that’s quite arrogant. Why do we think that within this vast universe we are the only ones to have evolved life and also to have evolved intelligence?
“Why do we think that within this vast universe we are the only ones to have evolved life and also to have evolved intelligence?”
We originally thought the earth was the centre of the universe, we then realised that the sun was the centre of the universe. This [gestures to photo] looks like nothing, those of you who are familiar with Carl Sagan will know that this is a photograph taken from the Voyager probes four billion miles away, and that dot is earth. Carl Sagan had a beautiful saying, he said, ‘We are a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’.
Of course we live our lives, we think we’re significant, but we are so insignificant in the geographical context of the entire universe. So for us to assume that we’re the only ones that have evolved in terms of life, I just think it’s arrogant.
I think that extra-terrestrial life has existed in the past, or does exist now, or will exist in the future, but I don’t think that we will encounter them because as humans we only live 60 or 70 years with a 365-day year, our perspective is restricted. So [Carl Sagan] took a year and put the whole of what we understand of the universe’s history into that year. And so January we have The Big Bang, May the Milky Way forms, September the Solar System forms, and then in terms of Earth, on the 31st of December, humans come around. On the 30th, dinosaurs get wiped out by an asteroid, on the 31st humans evolve. And it’s only within this massive context, in the last 60 seconds of an entire year that we as humans are here on earth. So in this last 60 seconds, you have at about 47 seconds the last glacial periods, humans migrate to the Americas, agriculture and so on.
“Do I think we will ever encounter extra-terrestrial life? No. We have this framework of who we are and what our life timeline is but it’s just a blip — we are a cosmic blip.”
Do I think we will ever encounter extra-terrestrial life? No. We have this framework of who we are and what our life timeline is but it’s just a blip — we are a cosmic blip. So if we got to the point where we had the technology to contact extra-terrestrial intelligence, or if they got to the point where they had the technology to contact us, we would have to have this weird overlapping timeline. I would love to think that it would happen but frankly, I don’t think it will. However, I believe we should still be making this effort, because by searching the universe we learn more about ourselves.
On the 15th of August 1977 we had what has been called the Wow! signal. There was a telescope in Puerto Rico focused out into the stars and it recorded a signal. It wasn’t until later that a scientist was looking at it and they saw what had happened and he actually wrote ‘Wow!’ out in the margin because he was so surprised by this. So as the telescope was looking, it only had 72 seconds that it was focused on that particular star and for all of those 72 seconds, it picked up that signal. But we have looked and looked and looked and looked and looked at that star again and nothing has come out of it.
What messages have we been sending out?
We have been sending out signals for a long time already both unintentionally and intentionally. One of the strongest signals that first we sent out was in 1936 when Hitler announced the 1936 Olympic Games and he sent it by television broadcast. I think it’s highly unlikely, but if somebody happened to be eavesdropping on us, one of the first things they might actually get is an image of Hitler. Of course they wouldn’t know what it meant, but these are the sorts of things that we send out, and we mean it for ourselves but it could potentially be picked up.
The Pioneer Plaque
The one that people might be familiar with is in 1972 and then 1973 Earth sent out two probes — the Pioneer probes — and they were meant to go out and look in. But they were meant to just go, they left them to go, and they’ve recently left our solar system. We don’t know what’s happened to them, we’ve lost contact with them, but at the last minute they included a plaque on them that said something about who we are. It was very much explicitly intended to say who we were and how to find us.
The Pioneer probes were meant to be going out and it was kind of a last-minute decision to put a message to potential extra-terrestrial intelligence who might encounter them onto it, and then it was probably the first discussion about how we represent ourselves, what do we say about ourselves?
Carl Sagan himself, who designed the plaque, was really uncomfortable with the fact that these figures looked Caucasian, he wanted them to look more pan-human — his original design had more of a curly, African-type hair — but because it was a short timeline they had to rush it through. The other thing that was really controversial was showing the humans as naked. The female form is anatomically not quite correct [laughs], and that was done actually in order to get the approval of Nasa to send this plaque out.
The Arecibo message
In 1974 we had the Arecibo message, which was sent from a very powerful telescope out into Earth and it targeted a particular planetary array, and it focused on saying who we are and where we are.
Cosmic Call, 1 and 2
The first one was in 1999 and the second one was in 2003. What I think is interesting about these is that they were a start-up company, so they were a private company, and they decided that they wanted to send messages into outer space and they managed to send out two and then they went out of business. It’s kind of interesting because up until now you had NASA, and now you have a private company that’s potentially sending messages out.
The Teen Age Message
This was based out of Russia. The reason it’s called Teen Age is because they asked teenagers to contribute the suggestions of what should be sent out, but it was done through a Russian institution.
Across the Universe, 2008
This was a NASA project and they sent The Beatles’ song Across the Universe out into space. Who says NASA doesn’t have a sense of humour? I don’t know what the purpose was but they did that.
A Message from Earth, 2008
was just a radio signal into space. Hello from Earth I think is interesting because it was sent from a Nasa telescope, but what was contained within it? 26,000 emails from people who had written in to a website to support the message that was going out. It was stuff like, ‘Hi Mom, I love you’ type stuff, I mean, what would humans say? That was the first sort of democratised sense of sending everything out.
Lone Signal, 2013
What’s interesting about it is that they attempted to be crowd-funded. So they tried to set up a crowd-sourcing thing whereby if you contributed money then you could have a message sent out. They did manage to transmit — o all of these big global arrays in Puerto Rico, in Mexico, in Costa Rica and so on, you can rent time on them, so they had managed to rent some time on them and they had sent out a bid, but then they ran out of money. So they have since shut down, but I think it’s interesting that again [there’s] this philosophical question of who’s sending out messages, who has a right to, and what should we be saying?
Some people say that not only should we stop sending messages out, either by radio or the probes that we send out into outer space, but the phrase actually is [we should] ‘hide under a rock’, so all of the leakage that we do, we should try to contain that — so we should try to stop leaking any information about ourselves in order to hide. There are a lot of people who are very serious about this.
For me, we’re not going to make contact, but I think it’s worth it because it forces us to think about ourselves and it’s an interesting philosophical issue.
Having said that, if they did make contact with us, it kind of says something about where you think evolution is going and it’s an existential question. To me, I think that, if they are a billion years ahead of us, then I hope that they will have evolved out of the state that we’re in where we’re warring with ourselves. I would hope that they’re morally evolved as well as technologically and physically evolved. So I actually think that they would be benign — I can’t see why they would want to come and crush us. That goes against so many science-fiction stories [laughs], but that’s how I feel.
Where people on the ‘no’ side say that they would hurt us, I actually think that they might help us. So if they’re in a situation where they’re technologically [at] a state where they can make contact with us, they will be far more evolved than us, then I think they will have gotten through climate change, through so many of the challenges that we face today. So if they make contact with us, I don’t know, maybe I’m a die-hard optimist, but I think that they could help us.
With things like particular climate change, how do we get through this industrial stage? But also they could make us an interplanetary species, so if they did make contact with us, there’s a lot of talk about the lifeboat scenario — we’re stuck on earth, we need to be onto other planets — so if we did make contact with them then that could be really positive.
Again, for me, I don’t think we’ll make contact, I think that the biggest value is that we’ll learn about ourselves. But if we did, I think it could have really positive effects.
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