The movie Contact famously depicted an alien radio signal that when decoded provided plans
for the construction of a faster than light device so that a human representative could
travel and meet the aliens.
This was a rather benign way of making first Contact, though it doesn’t seem have done
Jodie Foster’s character much good.
Outside of fiction, we don’t seem have a network of wormholes that we can use to go
and interact with exocivilizations unfortunately.
And, if intelligent life is somewhat rare in the galaxy, not an unreasonable notion,
traveling the great distances of space to actually physically meet them seems out of
reach, at least until the far future.
But, there may be another way it could happen.
And it’s a method that has somewhat scary implications.
The idea was first proposed by physicist Vahe Gurzadyan.
It traces back to something called Kolmogorov Complexity, essentially the length of a computer
program that can enable the complete recovery of compressed data.
Think of it like this, if you write a program that describes a string of information, say
a randomly generated string of letters and numbers, it would be so complex that the program
designed to describe the string is nearly as big as the information string itself.
But if you have something that’s not complex, say a string of 200,000 alternating 1’s
and 0’s, all you need is a program that says “Print 200 thousand alternating ones
and zeros”.
No need to send all 200,000 digits.
He looked at the human genome and found that it’s actually not that complex in this sense.
So you could send a program that reconstructs the human genome without too much difficulty
with an Arecibo style transmitter.
This would allow an alien civilization to send us its genetic code, and from that we
could reconstruct a member of the alien species and interact with it without ever leaving
earth.
But there’s more, he also found that since life on earth shares much of its genetics,
without too much more effort, we could send the entirety of the genomes of all life on
earth.
This would allow for the reconstruction of virtually all of an alien planet’s ecosystem
all in a SETI signal.
We can send us to them, and they can reconstruct, essentially, earth.
Likewise, we could reconstruct, essentially, their planet by terraforming, say, Mars and
getting their life going on it.
If this turns out truly possible, then it has broad implications.
It may mean that the galaxy is full of alien civilizations transmitting their genomes to
each other leading, ultimately, to colonies of aliens from across the galaxy.
These transplants would have no direct connection to the world they evolved on, yet be living
next to other aliens native to a star system that sent their data to the transplant’s
original world.
But could this also be malicious in a Borg Collective kind of way?
Well, it’s probably not very likely unless a civilization is stupid enough to reconstruct
species from another world that could be dangerous.
Or worse, slatewiper viruses or archpredators looking to feed and reproduce using radio
astronomy.
After all, this would be a roundabout way to reproduce just as much as any other method.
But a civilization with a command of genetics solid enough to reconstruct these genomes
very likely would be able to determine what they’re going to get before reconstructing
the creatures themselves.
And, there is a variant in all of this.
If a civilization wanted to simply say hello, and say that they once visited our world long
ago, something of which there is no indication of but is possible, they might send genomes
of past creatures that were clearly native to earth.
Think the SETI signal contains the genetic information to bring back trilobites or tyrannosaurs.
This might be considered a gift of sorts, give a species back lost genetic information
so they can study DNA that disappeared long ago when those species went extinct.
Think a snapshot of all earth life in, say, the late cretaceous.
Another variant would be for civilizations to send out Von Neumann or Bracewell probes
that can receive the data from the original civilization, print out an ecosystem on a
world, and colonize.
Perhaps federations of aliens might find worlds suitable for one member species’ ecosystem
and print it out there, but then print out an entirely different, more cold tolerant
species ecosystem on the next world out in a system with multiple habitable worlds.
In the end, if we ever did detect such information in a signal, it may end up not decodable.
But it’s an interesting idea nonetheless.
And it does suggest that perhaps maybe we should be looking at the noise of space for
bits of strings.
And, at least in principle, it is possible that such a von Neumann probe once visited
this world very early in earth’s history and printed and deposited life on earth in
a kind of interstellar panspermia.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently giving a heads up
for Star Trek fans that watch this channel.
In a special edition on Event Horizon next Tuesday, I did a show with the hosts of the
Well Podcast, award winning filmmaker Branan Edgens and actor, writer and producer Anson
Mount, who also just happened to portray Captain Christopher Pike in Star Trek: Discovery.
Link to their podcast in the description below and be sure to check out my books at your
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into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.