-The search for extraterrestrial intelligence using radio signals
is almost as old as radio technology itself.
More than 100 years ago, Nikola Tesla thought
he might be receiving radio signals from Mars.
Today, SETI work is carried out by scientists
around the world who tirelessly search the skies
for all kinds of possible messages from alien planets.
Michael Garrett is a professor at the University of Manchester
and also co-vice chair of the SETI Permanent Committee
at the International Academy of Astronautics.
Part of his work is creating a set of instructions
for how Earth should react
if we were to detect an alien signal.
♪♪
-What are some of the protocols
that you and your colleagues have been working on
that you think are really important for that moment,
should it happen?
-So, one of the things that the SETI PC
has worked on for many decades, in fact,
is to try and make sure
that if people do sort of detect a signal,
that they follow certain rules
so that we can be sure that it really is a signal,
that this really is sort of definitive evidence
of extraterrestrials before that would go public.
Obviously, you only want to go public
with something which is really big news.
You only really want to do that when you're absolutely sure
that this really is a detection and that it isn't some,
you know, interference,
you know, just over the hill,
as it were, from your radio telescope.
So there's a set of protocols that have been sort of agreed
by most of the organizations
that are sort of involved in SETI
that, you know, we should try and follow the rules
to make sure that when we do come out
with an announcement that we've made a detection
that we are sort of 99.999% sure that it really is something.
-I kind of wanted to just share a story
from when I logged in to Twitter today,
which normally I would not subject a person to.
But I thought it was
an interesting example of these issues
because someone had asked on Twitter if aliens attacked us,
what newscaster would you be watching for the updates?
And a bunch of pundits were trending because of this.
I'm not sure it's the greatest idea to be sat
in front of a TV if aliens attack us.
But in any case, I thought it was an interesting example
of the kind of challenges of a fractured news environment,
especially on a topic like this,
because, you know, how are you going to control
the dissemination of good information
when you have it sort of being all siloed away
into different news sources?
So how does your committee kind of approach
the problem of making sure that, like,
if there was an unambiguous detection of intelligent life,
it wouldn't sort of just spread misinformation
across all of these different news sources?
-I mean, I think that's a really good example
of a problem that I think that we have.
So if you look at the SETI protocols, for example,
and you look at the documents that have been written,
they've been written a long time ago
and they've been written long before
sort of social media was as prevalent.
I personally believe that there's a good chance
that a signal, a very interesting signal
might be discovered just by sort of any astronomer
who just might be going about their business
and doing any kind of routine observation.
They probably have never heard of the SETI protocol,
for example.
And so I think it will actually be --
it's possible that it could be really difficult
to manage the whole sort of, you know,
how the news of such a sort of really important discovery,
how that would propagate.
If you look at a lot of recent activity in SETI
or even in, for example,
the discovery of gravitational waves
and you see that these things typically leak.
And the more people that are involved,
for example, in the follow-up
and the confirmation of a SETI signal,
the more likely it is to leak.
So I think trying to control sort of
how this sort of comes out on social media
and in the news in general will be very difficult.
But the important thing is that
you write a good scientific paper
that a large group of people, not just one group,
but several groups, can stand behind.
-I think most people's conception of
what a first contact moment would be like is very informed
by the many science-fiction ideas about this,
and there's so many different visions of that.
So what about the kind of perhaps more unlikely scenario
where an alien ship kind of just pops up in our orbit, you know,
or we have the "Independence Day" giant saucers
going over cities and things like that?
♪♪
Is there a different protocol than just getting information
from a very distant civilization
in the case of actually having the species be right there?
-Yeah, I think if everyone could see them
and they're CNN or the BBC or something like that,
then, yeah, the protocols go out the window.
You know, I mean, it sounds crazy,
but, you know, we absolutely have no idea what's out there.
We have no idea how we're going to discover
the first SETI signal.
I would say that, you know, if you look at science,
science is always surprising.
It's always surprising us in some way.
And discoveries typically happen in ways
that we really didn't predict, you know?
And I would be really surprised if SETI was discovered,
you know, just, you know, by SETI scientists
going out on their radio telescope
and getting that signal.
I think it'll be something completely unexpected,
something that will surprise us in many different ways
and something that we are probably not prepared for.
You know, we don't know everything.
You know, we hardly know anything
about physics and astronomy
if you consider the fact that we don't know what dark matter is,
although we've known it's been around for,
you know, almost 100 years now.
We don't know anything about dark energy,
which has been around for 20 years.
That encompasses most of the energy budget of the universe.
There's a hell of a lot of things
that we don't understand about our own galaxy
and all the other galaxies that are out there.
And probably extraterrestrial intelligence falls
into the same sort of area.
We've been looking for it for a long time.
We think we know what we -- you know,
we know what we look like,
but we actually don't know what they look like
in terms of the signature of extraterrestrial intelligence.
So we need to be prepared for completely the unexpected.
And the thing I like about this
is that everyone can have a valid opinion
about what to expect.
Everyone, you know, because we absolutely have no idea
what it is that we should be looking for.
We have some ideas what we think we should be looking for,
but the reality might be something different.
And so that's one of the great things about SETI
is that I think to detect extraterrestrial intelligence,
you need to think as broadly as possible.
And so everyone's opinion counts.
There's no right answer to this question at the moment.
Everyone can make a contribution.
-Yeah, that's really wonderful.
And when you even think about the different ways
that animals on Earth communicate
or life forms on Earth communicate,
there are definitely some examples of very alien-ish,
alien-adjacent communication techniques
just here on our own planet.
So I cannot -- yeah,
you literally cannot imagine what is out there.
-So to think that there's only one type of intelligence
and it's biological and it looks like us
and it thinks like us,
and not to think that there might also be
other possibilities out there I think is wrong.
And I think that's why you just need to be
as sort of broad-thinking as possible.
I'm not going to say that
I think all my colleagues in SETI think this way,
but I personally feel that you need
to think of all sort of possible possibilities.
And, you know, something landing on the lawn
of the White House might be quite extreme,
but no one can rule it out.
-So in the popular science version that you see
in "Contact" or "Arrival" is another one...
♪♪
...you get a contact with an alien species
and it immediately gets locked down by the military
and there's no information coming out.
Is that something that you could ever see happening?
-I don't really think so. I don't.
I think that, you know,
sort of outside of the science community,
other communities are only going to get interested in this
when it's clear that this is the real signal, you know?
And by that time, there will be so many people
that know in so many different countries
that I think it's unrealistic to somehow
lock down a facility or lock down information.
-Say we get a fairly unambiguous signal.
Maybe we don't know how to decode it
because it's very alien,
but we can tell that it's not natural.
What are your thoughts on communicating back?
Because there's been some debate on this.
Stephen Hawking had said that at some point
that he thought that was a bad idea to be messaging aliens,
because what if they're hostile?
Do you think that there are those kinds of ethical concerns
that should go into planning to send a signal back
to a species that has sent a signal to us?
-I think it's fair to say that the sort of community
is quite polarized on this,
so there's a lot of people
who are dead against sending out those messages.
And Stephen Hawking was probably the most famous scientist
who was really against the idea.
But then on the other side, you have many people who think,
you know, if we don't communicate,
if we don't send those signals out there,
then why should we ever expect
to sort of find signals ourselves
from when we're doing SETI?
I kind of sit, actually,
on the fence a little bit on this one.
I kind of see both sides of the story.
And it would be really difficult to stop individuals
from sending such signals.
You know, there's a lot of groups
that are in control of big antennas
that could transmit a signal if they wanted to.
So, again, it's a bit like the Internet and social media.
It's actually quite hard to control a response from Earth
because, you know, some people have the capability
to send whatever they want to to a particular star.
It might take a long while to get there.
Maybe it takes 100 years.
So it might not affect us at the moment,
but it might have consequences for our grandchildren
and great-grandchildren.
So potentially a species could be getting a lot
of scattered answers from different organizations
if they contacted us.
Probably. Probably would do, yeah.
I'm almost sure that would be the case.
-That's a very human response.
And I sometimes worry if I took a bad tone in an e-mail I sent.
I can't imagine how bad it would be
if you're not sure you took the right --
if you're miscommunicating somehow in the content
of a message to an alien species.
-I mean, to be honest, it would be really quite interesting
because it would be a sort of competition.
You know, as soon as one country starts transmitting,
then surely another country is going to transmit
and they will be trying to present the best --
their best sort of sides, as it were.
So, yeah, I think it might become
a bit of a free-for-all eventually.
-It's so funny because often the alien trope in movies
is that the world comes together to face the aliens.
And I know that's usually a hostile alien thing,
but it is very funny to think of us all competing
against each other being like,
"No, talk to me! Talk to our country."