When I was a kid growing up in the
Midwest I'd go out look in the night sky
and you know I would see all of these
stars and I thought maybe there are
other intelligent beings out there there
are places everywhere that life could
exist but now the big question is life
originated hasn't gone on to become
intelligent and then have those
intelligent beams decided to send us an
intentional signal
My name is Doug Vakoch and I am president
of SETI international. Since the 1960s
astronomers have been using radio
telescopes to look for signals from
other worlds and the assumption has
always been that the benevolent aliens
are out there sending these missives for
our benefit. For over 50 years SETI
scientists have been searching for
extraterrestrials but METI International
was founded to take the next step.
I worked for the SETI Institute for 16
years and I was the director of
interstellar message composition there
but about a year ago I finally made the
shift away from the SETI Institute and
devoted my full attention to our new
organization METI International. Our goal
is by the end of 2018 to craft messages
that could be understandable by another
civilization and begin beaming them out
to nearby stars either using powerful
radio transmitters or it could be
creating a new laser facility that would
send out these brief laser pulses that
would be detectable as something that is
not just our own communication with one
another we assume that the aliens will
pick up our radio and TV signals but
it's something that stands out more
powerful. If we send a radio signal it
would be just a stream of pulses of two
slightly different frequencies. There's a
baseline frequency that each transmitter
uses and then some oscillation around
that. So to have any chance of
communicating to an extraterrestrial we
need to figure out what is it that is
most basic. Each week we get together to
discuss very concretely what kind of
messages will we be sending.
Hey Carl it's Doug I see you there okay okay can
you hear us op sorry yeah yeah okay good
we've made contact. You know a lot of the
past messages have been great but you
have to get that they're this two-dimentional
representation and here's how we picture
objects but in some ways this gets
around it. The question about what would
we say to represent ourselves to another
world is something that can't be decided
just by a handful of astronomers Steven
Hawking has said whatever you do if you
get a signal from the aliens do not
transmit because they may come to Earth
and strip-mine our planet. What could be
a more vivid image of first contact than
Stephen Hawking saying when Columbus
came to the new world they decimated the
indigenous people and that might be what
it will be like for an alien
civilization to come to earth.
In my view there is no reason at this
point in our history to send a message
proactively into space. This is not
science this is diplomacy it's
unauthorized diplomacy. The question
comes up as to why do we need
post-detection protocols for and what
currently exists. The simple answer is
there doesn't exist a lot. There's
something called the first protocol that
SETI scientists normally adhere to our
generally adhere to which basically says
that if there is a detection everything
should be transparent the second major
principle of it is that there should be
thorough confirmation but the third
general principle is that before we
respond to that signal from another star
that there be broad consultations
whatever that means presumably that
means that the United Nations Security
Council might take a boat to determine
whether to respond and what to respond
and so forth there's nothing stopping
anybody from responding to a signal from
ET and there's nothing stopping anybody
from initiating a signal to a star that
they think ET may be on so the very
principle that all of Earth should
decide in unison and some sort of
coherence whether when and what to
communicate back to ET is completely
undecided and it's a wild west open
situation at the moment
What Hawking is ignoring is the fact
that any civilization that really has
the ability to travel between the stars
could already pick up I Love Lucy or
other leakage television or radio
signals that are already screaming out
into space so anyone who's saying that
we should fear an alien invasion because
of our METI signals I think is really
missing the point the point is that we
want to send an intentional message
something that stands out from the
cosmic static and that maybe it's
signaling our intentionality that will
make the critical difference as we look
for targets for our METI transmissions
very enticing to look close to home one
great example that was just recently
discovered the star called
Gliese 411b it's one of the closest stars to
earth it's only eight light-years away
so that means if we sent them a message
we could get a reply back in just 16
years by human timescales a long time I
think it's doing something that won't
pay any benefits for 16 years but on a
cosmic scale it's just a blink of the eye.
Nobody can take it back it's going
at the speed of light it's gone and they
have encumbered generations unborn with
the results of that action to send
intentional messages ultimately gets at
the soul of who we want to be as a
species we want to continue to explore
do we want to continue to say we don't
know what our future is but we have
enough hope that we're going to reach
out we have enough hope that we want to
hear a response.