- Thank you to Surf Shark with Incogni for supporting PBS.
Hey, smart people, Joe here.
Imagine you're in a dark, dark forest.
It's cold, it's lonely.
You wonder who or what is out there,
but you're afraid to call out or turn on a light
because maybe whatever's out there
might actually want to eat you.
So you sit quietly alone to some, this is what it feels like
to look up at the stars from Earth.
There are hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy.
Scientists now think hundreds of millions
of them have conditions where life could arise.
When you look at it like that,
it would be pretty remarkable if Earth was the only planet
with intelligent life,
and yet we haven't heard a peep from any intelligent
species beyond Earth.
Why? Maybe they are out there just waiting in
that dark forest, uncertain for someone else to call out.
Maybe it's gonna be up to us to say hello first.
But communicating with an alien intelligence
that maybe nothing like us comes with untold challenges.
How could we do that? This is how to send a message
to extra terrestrials.
Yo, we should absolutely not do that. What?
That's like screaming, Hey, here we are.
Come take all our resources and squash us like bugs
and smart people agree with me,
If aliens were to visit us.
I think the outcome would be when Christopher Columbus first
landed in America, which didn't turn out very well
for the Native Americans.
- Okay? But when Hawking first said that we didn't even know
that earth-like planets were common across the galaxy.
I mean, why would ETS go to the trouble
of traveling vast distances to conquer
and pillage when there's probably other options much closer
By, I mean, resource-wise, earth's not that special.
Also, a civilization
that can zoom across the galaxy is probably way
older and wiser than we are.
They probably just wanna study us like a bunch
of intergalactic nerds.
Yeah, well that's just like your opinion, man.
Well, actually we of smart people agree with me.
- I think sometimes we have almost a,
a cosmic inferiority complex.
When we think about reaching out, it's like,
oh, what do we have to offer?
We're so young. We haven't been at this very long,
but I, I think that's actually the point.
So I think we could hold a mirror up to another civilization
and remind them something about their distant past.
- Okay. But if they're so old
and advanced, they definitely have a death star.
They might look at us like we look at ants.
I mean, would you feel bad about squishing an ant?
Furthermore, what gives you
or any one person the right to decide for the whole planet
to paint a giant target on our backs?
A physicist named Mark Buchanan made a really good point.
Without oversight, even one person with access
to powerful transmitting technology could take actions
affecting the future of the entire planet.
Well, sorry to break it to you,
but at this point, the choice isn't between reaching out
or just staying quiet.
It's in between sending smart messages or dumb messages.
We've already been broadcasting radio
and TV signals out into space for over a century.
And during the Cold War,
high-powered military radar leaked out into space,
and it's already passed by thousands of star systems.
Not to mention over the past 50 years,
we've sent out several intentional radio messages
to our nearest star systems.
- So any civilization that has the ability to travel
between the stars already knows we're here.
So it does no good to try to hide.
If they're on their way, it's a much better strategy
to let them know that we make good conversational partners.
- Excuse me. What You don't understand ancient Egyptian,
it means your mind is like an empty room.
Look, my point is,
if you can't understand a message from your own species,
from your own planet just a few thousand years ago,
how can you expect an alien
with totally different biology on a totally different
planet to understand us?
Even if you make contact with aliens,
you're never gonna understand each other.
Well, we actually do have a common language. Think about it.
If they do receive our radio signal,
the one thing we can be sure of is that we both know how
to build radio transmitters and receivers.
So they must know a lot of math and physics.
We have no reason to think that math
and physics operate differently elsewhere in the universe.
So we can use math
and physics principles as a kind
of universal language to communicate.
Well, if you think it's so easy,
did you just send me a voice message from four feet away?
Yeah.
- One - Zero. This is just ones and zeros.
- 0 0 1, 1 0 1.
- I see what you're trying to do.
A lot of really smart people have already thought through
how to decode and encode this exact kind of message.
It reminds me of the very first radio message
that was beamed out into space
that was specifically meant for aliens.
The Arecebo message in 1974, the actual radio signal of
that message was made up of a string of binary digits,
zeros, and ones sent as higher
and lower frequency blips to make sense of the Arecebo message,
aliens would've to figure out that the total number
of binary digits 1,679 is a semi prime number.
That means it's the product of two prime numbers in this
case, 23 and 73.
So just convert the message into a grid of that size
and bingo, you know,
some alien mathematician figure that out.
They'd be rewarded with information about the genetic basis
of our DNA, the chemistry of life, a human figure,
even a diagram of our solar system.
And in 2003, scientists used this same binary grid coating
method to send a basic encyclopedia of human knowledge.
It was 150 times longer than the Arecebo message.
This one contained various mathematical expressions,
geometry, images of our biology, even maps
of our planets and the solar system.
So using that method,
this one shouldn't be too hard to figure out.
- 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 0 0 1 1.
- Well, there's 2,537 total digits in this message.
That's a semi prime number.
And you can only get it by multiplying 59
and 43 prime numbers.
So if I choose the zeros to be white
and the ones to be black
and laid out enough, 43 by 59 grid, we get
very funny.
Got you. But seriously,
those messages you mentioned are all images.
What if aliens can't see?
What if they have all done a hazy planet around a dimm star,
or they're like alien cave octopuses or something.
Well, we could also try sending sound-based messages like
we've already done to Voyager Spacecraft launched in 1977,
carry golden Records with Sounds from our Planet.
- Hello from the Children of Planet Earth.
- In - 2017, Doug Vaco
and others beamed encoded musical messages
to a planet orbiting a nearby red dwarf
for a project called Sonar calling.
- So instead of just sending them a bunch of music
and greetings, as the Voyager recording did,
we sent them a tutorial of how to listen to music, how
to listen to the human voice.
- I mean, we honestly don't know
how aliens might sense the universe.
So maybe the best strategy is to send both visual
and audio messages and hope at least one works.
So if you're watching this video on Glar five,
If there really are intelligent aliens out there,
then why haven't we heard from them yet?
We've been listening for decades
and nothing, obviously we're alone.
Look, this article from physicist Frank Tipler is literally
called a Waste of Time.
You remember how I was talking about the Dark
Forest hypothesis?
Well, maybe they are out there
and maybe they're too scared
to be the first ones to reach out.
But there are other possibilities
that explain why we haven't made contact yet.
Jill Tarter, she's a researcher with the Seti Institute.
She points out that if the universe were all
of the oceans on earth,
we've only searched about a bathtub's worth
of radio signals.
I mean to say that earth is the only intelligent needle in
the haystack of the universe,
but we literally have to examine every single bit of straw.
The search for intelligent life
and space might take a long time.
So I guess I kind of agree with you.
We may never find that proof. Aha.
See, but, but maybe it doesn't really matter.
Maybe there's an even better reason to try.
- I think the big fear that we have
to face is that we're gonna fail.
So what happens? What happens if we listen and listen
and all we get is this cosmic silence?
You know, I, I think our, our natural reaction first is
going to be this was such a waste.
You know, we put so much into this,
but then I think it's gonna hit us differently.
'cause we're gonna realize what we've been trying
to do all this time is to make contact with a stable,
long lived civilization that can teach us something.
But by virtue of the fact that we have done this project,
we have committed generation
after generation, we have taken it on
and we have seen it through to the end that in fact,
we've become the long-lived civilization we've been looking
for out there all along.
I think that will be an accomplishment, just as great
as finding any other life out there.
- Wow. When you put it like that, I mean,
sorry, I Rick rolled you.
It's okay. Bring it in. Come
- Here, come here, come here.
- Yeah, I know
that was pretty emotional there at the end, wasn't it?
Universe is big, big place. Let it out. Let
- It out.
It's okay. It's okay.
- Stay curious, but it's - Okay.
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Thank you so much for sticking
around to the end of the video.
We really appreciate it.
So should we be messaging extra terrestrials
or should we stay quiet?
Or does it not really matter?
Because this YouTube video's gonna go out to Alva Centara
and I don't know how many light years.
Anyway, if you'd like to join our community of supporters,
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See you in the next video. Play it out. Okay. Be theatrical.
- Don't let my performance influence your future
- Performance.
Oh, got it. That is gonna be so dumb. I'm sorry.
That thing we just did.