One of the biggest questions regarding the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in
the universe is what do we do if we find evidence of it?
On the one hand, there is the argument that we should do everything in our power to keep
quiet and simply watch the activities of the alien civilization from a safe distance and
never tip them off that we’re here.
This may be the smart move for two reasons, the first is safety, we live on what we so
far see as a very rare kind of habitable planet, basically a garden world.
Those could be rare, and very desirable for several reasons.
But maybe not for the ones you might think.
A common trope in science fiction is the idea of an alien invasion with the aim of stealing
earth’s resources.
This falls flat however in that earth doesn’t have anything that’s rare enough to bother
crossing light-years of space and expending enormous amounts of energy doing so to get.
Some common resources cited in this trope include water, but in reality water is not
rare.
The universe is full of ice.
Another is gold, but that’s not rare either, a few years back we saw a kilnova spew out
entire planets worth of precious metals that’s now just sitting out there for the taking.
And if you can't find a remnant of a kilonova close by, the low hanging fruit for mining
in space isn’t planets, you only do that if you live on one, but asteroids.
The reason is simple, asteroids have very little gravity to work against and their size
makes for easy access to the metals.
This is a far more sensible proposition than launching heavy metals out of a planetary
gravitational well, which requires more energy.
But what earth does have is a biosphere, and that may be among the most valuable things
in the universe.
Firstly, it’s an occurrence of life, which could be very rare and interesting to alien
scientists, and might be worth preserving at all costs.
This dovetails with the zoo hypothesis as a solution to the Fermi Paradox, the alien
civilization just sits and watches you and never interacts or reveals its presence until
you do something that threatens your existence.
Then the caretaker wildlife management aliens intervene.
Even if that’s a good thing, it may not be such a good idea to get the attention of
such an alien civilization if you don’t have to.
The second is biodiversity.
Organic chemistry is unbelievably diverse allowing for astonishingly complicated molecules
like DNA.
Comparatively small genetic differences mean the difference between a horse and a dog.
Just what biodiversity can do could also be of great interest to alien scientists and
pursuing such studies could lead to insights they wouldn’t have otherwise had, and expand
their knowledge and use of biotechnology.
In other words, the reason to come to earth is its life.
Studying the civilization that’s living here may be secondary, or even worth wiping
out to ensure that the rest of the planet survives us.
The other major reason to stay silent is our own world and how geopolitics works.
Telling an alien civilization that we’re here may not be popular among all of earth’s
countries.
So some sort of international consensus on the matter would be called for.
And it may not be so easy to get everyone on board for concerns about security and the
fact that once you send out a contact signal, you can’t take it back.
But then there are the proponents of METI, or Messaging ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.
The argument here is that aliens would simply be too distant to pose a threat, and the potential
benefits of a slow dialogue over light-years with an alien civilization could be of enormous
benefit to us ranging in everything from cultural exchange, scientific exchange, and technological
exchange if the aliens are more advanced than we are, which it seems likely they would be
if we detected them through SETI.
And here’s the problem.
We’ve already sent intentional messages into the cosmos, and we did it without international
consensus.
The reason for that though is that they were shots in the dark and are highly unlikely
to ever be intercepted by an alien civilization.
Chief among these were things like the Voyager record, which is a tiny object traveling the
vastness of space that isn’t very likely to ever be found.
It was more for fun and to get the people of earth to wonder than it was a serious attempt
at one way communication.
At the same time however the cover of the record does give a roadmap to earth if the
aliens can work out its meaning.
Maps could be bad.
But a much better chance, though still a huge long shot, was the Arecibo message.
This signal was sent in 1974 to mark the remodeling of the Arecibo telescope, now sadly destroyed,
though there are preliminary plans to build a replacement for it known as the next generation
Arecibo telescope.
Stay tuned for developments on that as they come in.
Arecibo had the ability not to just receive radio waves, but also transmit them at very
great power.
Enough that any alien civilization in the galaxy that happened to be looking and was
at a vantage point to receive it, would know unquestionably that it was an artificial signal.
But that’s where the problems with that signal start.
That’s all the aliens would know.
The message really was just a demonstration to ourselves that we could produce such a
signal, and it was done in celebration of a special event.
It was never seriously thought that anyone would ever see it, and since it didn’t repeat
and only lasted three minutes, they’d never be able to verify it anyway.
It’s frankly a wow signal, making it a little strange that we sent out someone else’s
wow signal three years before the big ear picked up our own at a completely different
frequency.
The arecibo message was interesting however in that it was an attempt to convey information
to a civilization entirely alien with no commonalities with us.
The authors of the message, Frank Drake, Carl Sagan and others tried to think of ways to
communicate universally using this message.
That’s the key to any of this, whether SETI picks up a signal and we have to try to decode
it, or we send out a signal of our own hoping someone out there can decode it.
It has to be understandable to an alien.
Here on earth, we communicate using language.
But even if we don’t speak someone’s language, you can still communicate to a degree successfully
using hand gestures and other methods.
We don’t have any of that with an alien signal.
So the idea is that physical representation, such as rudimentary pictures and mathematics
and numbers would be universal.
Or at least try to be universal, it’s hard to show a picture to an alien that doesn’t
have a sense of sight.
But a major problem here is that it’s been noted that the resolution of the signal’s
message was so low, that it’s unlikely any alien civilization would be able to interpret
the stick figure imagery which shows a human and the arecibo radio telescope, though the
numerical parts of the message might be more easily decipherable.
These include the numbers 1 to 10, the atomic numbers of the elements that make up DNA,
other life related chemical information that we presumably would have in common with them,
or they would at least be aware of from their own studies of chemistry.
But, in the end, It’s impossible to say if they could decipher that.
But perhaps an even bigger problem is where the signal was sent.
The transmitter was aimed at the globular cluster M13.
The idea was that a dense cluster of stars would give more chances for the signal to
be intercepted, and at 25,000 light years away, it’s distant enough to not worry too
much about a response.
But it has since been pointed out that globular clusters are very high radiation environments
and see supernovas so often that life within them is highly disfavored, so they, along
with the dense galactic core, do not seem good candidates for indigenous alien civilizations.
So there may simply be no one there to pick up the signal.
Yet another problem is the frequency at which the signal was sent.
The transmitter Arecibo had at the time was a planetary radar, it was designed to bounce
radio waves off of asteroids and solar system objects.
It broadcasted at 2380 megahertz, and that’s the base frequency of the message.
It was good for the instrument’s intended use, but not for METI because it’s otherwise
just one arbitrary frequency among countless others, so any civilization that picks the
signal up would have to either be monitoring all frequencies, at least in the area, which
is how we do modern SETI searches incidentally, or they simply wouldn’t know where to look
on the dial, nor would they know when to look.
Unlike things like the 1420 megahertz watering hole of SETI fame, the arecibo message lacks
any natural counterpart that might tip off aliens about where on the dial to look for
other civilization’s transmissions.
The flaws of the Arecibo message aside, the core idea was sound and variations of it have
been used in other, smaller transmissions that various groups have beamed out over the
years.
You can in principle transmit data to an alien civilization that they could decipher and
understand if the right things aligned.
This has led to further thinking to build on Frank Drake's idea and come up with at
least a plan for a new signal of this type should we wish to send one out.
In a paper by Jonathan Jiang and colleagues, link in the description below, they detail
a revised message that could be sent out similar to the Arecibo message.
While that radio telescope was destroyed, it’s possible for the Allen Telescope Array
or China’s FAST radio telescope to do a similar transmission, though neither has transmission
capability right now, but could in the future.
But this transmission benefits from the cumulative thinking of the last 4 decades on the matter
of getting an alien civilization’s attention and sending them information.
The new message is known as BITG, or Beacon in the Galaxy.
Much like the Arecibo message, it contains scientific information that any alien civilization
practicing science enough to build a radio telescope may be able to decipher and understand.
The idea starts with binary code, a bit map, ones and zeros.
Aliens should understand this basic concept.
But then they have to figure out that it’s a bitmap, and then they have to decipher it.
This was a problem for the Arecibo message.
Frank Drake sent out a prototype of what would be the Arecibo message to a number of colleagues.
And they were an impressive bunch, some with Nobel prizes in their hands.
Not a single one was able to decipher the message, and only one figured out that it
was supposed to be a bitmap.
That does not bode well for these kinds of messages.
But this new one is different in several ways.
The message goes like this.
It begins with a prime number, with the hopes that it would be recognized as artificial.
Then it introduces our base ten mathematics, which is a problem in that aliens might not
use base ten, but they’d probably recognize it and wonder why we chose it.
It then gives basic mathematics in hopes that aliens would recognize it.
With that established, it does something different from any other message.
It uses the spin-flip transition of a hydrogen atom, the most common element in the universe
that scientific aliens would recognize to establish a measure of time, and then give
exactly when the message left earth to give the aliens a distance reference.
It then goes on, much like the Arecibo message to explain our biochemistry and DNA, which
aliens probably to some degree share unless they’re really different from us.
Then the message gets to the good stuff, but it’s the hardest part of the message to
understand.
It then moves to images, showing male and female humans, naked as is every other depiction
of a human we’ve ever intentionally sent out, not sure how the aliens will react to
that, and the usual diagram of the solar system, but also a radio frequency to send a response
back.
In other words, they will have our phone number so to speak, should we choose to monitor it
24/7 after the signal starts reaching some stars and passage of time needed to expect
any response.
It also includes a map of the earth’s surface so they can draw their plans against us, and
the coordinates of the solar system in relation to the prominent globular star clusters in
the Milky Way that most in the galaxy should be able to see.
As far as transmitting, the team identified an optimal time for transmission to minimize
interference from the sun, and a targeted area nearer to the center of the galaxy where
stars are more dense maximizing the amount that could potentially see the signal.
But again, if it’s sent, it’s done so under the assumption that aliens would be
able to decode it, and if they did, that they would understand it, especially the pictures.
But that brings up another sort of odd thing.
It’s also possible that alien life may have things in common with us that they would absolutely
recognize.
It may be a situation where not everything about first contact would be incomprehensible.
One aspect of that is of course shared mathematics and science, but there are others.
Within human history there have been inventions that were arrived at by groups of people that
were absolutely isolated from each other.
A good example of this is pottery.
Pottery was independently invented in at least two very isolated places, China and the Americas,
though it seems like there were even more independent inventions of pottery based on
recent finds in Africa.
The reason for this may be simple, if you build a fire on clay ground, you can end up
seeing the effect of the heat on the clay.
Heat and clay aren’t unique to earth, so it may well be that most alien civilizations
also discover and use it early in their history, given its usefulness at least to carry water
which presumably would be as useful to them as it is to us.
But this can also happen on a far more complex level.
Another in human history was the invention of money.
Depending on how you define money, primitive money has existed for a long time in many
different cultures on earth as a medium of exchange.
But in one particular instance, it got very similar very much independently.
It was the Spanish and the Aztecs.
When the Spanish arrived in Mexico metallic coins had been used as money in Europe, the
middle east and central asia for over 1500 years, and in China for about as long.
Though this in itself might have represented an independent invention because while there
was contact between Europe and Asia, the way coins were minted and traded varied dramatically
between Europe’s gold, silver and copper coinage and China’s almost exclusively copper
cash coinage system.
Whether the two influenced each other is unknown, but even the early coins look dramatically
different with China focusing on script and never putting an image or a portrait of an
emperor on their coinage.
Just the emperor’s reign titles usually.
So who knows, But with the Aztecs it was very different.
Here there had been no contact that we know of, yet the Aztecs had a functioning monetary
system based on polished copper sheets known as hoe money.
A Franciscan friar in Mexico at the time in the 16th century even recorded that there
was an exchange rate between the hoe money and the Spanish silver real which was then
in circulation.
So not only did the concept of trading by using money develop independently, it managed
to gravitate towards the same metal.
If two independent groups of intelligences can do that, then it may be applicable to
envisioning an alien civilization.
After all, if they’re technological, they’re going to be familiar with metals and mining.
It might be that they have a monetary system and they might question our decision to turn
ours into paper.
This brings up the concept of common utility in writing science fiction.
There are certain things that you can look at and say only a human would invent that,
such as a five fingered glove or a statue of Frank Drake.
But an alien might have something like a glove, or not.
But some inventions such as a radio telescope might be very similar because of a common
utility, in this case studying the cosmos, and there’s only a limited number of ways
to make a radio telescope work.
Nature defines it’s design, so alien radio telescopes make look very similar to ours
and even be built out of the same materials.
Steel is good, and we all would have access to the elements needed to make it.
We may not recognize the aliens, but they would very likely recognize our materials.
But as technological advancement comes, this effect may get increasingly likely and more
widespread across technologies.
Advanced aliens probably have 3d printers, communications systems, and all manner of
things that may be mutually recognizable.
If they are space faring, it then gets very recognizable in the form of a spacecraft,
and they aren’t even a trope in sci-fi, alien starships are so common as to be ubiquitous.
We assume they have them very often, and that’s actually an interspecies communications problem
in and of itself.
Commonality is king with METI, so while we bet on mathematics, binary code, DNA and somewhat
ambiguous or complicated pictures of ourselves, it may not go that way.
Instead, if we ever pick up an alien signal and decipher it, it could be a picture of
a water pot due to the commonality of it.
Or a series of pictures starting with a stone tool and then progressing until we get a picture
of a microwave oven, and finally a picture of an all powerful superintelligent artificially
intelligent alien supercomputer and then the whole transmission going abruptly dead.
Forever.
That aside, the common denominator is that while we may someday pick up a signal of obvious
technological origin, that may be as far as it ever gets.
And the reality of the universe may eventually be that while all civilizations eventually
discover that they aren’t alone, no one ever understands the messages they send to
each other or only rarely so and the most commonly uttered phrase in the universe is
something akin to wait, what?
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently worried about blowing
our cover and sending messages to aliens.
As it stands right now, anyone can do it if they have a big enough transmitter.
We might want to slow that down and just listen, after all when in the forest one does not
poke at the sleeping bear while wearing a steak as a helmet and be sure to check out
my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular,
in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing
universe in which we live.