Doug Vakoch: “In 1950, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi asked a question that's become
known as the Fermi Paradox: where are they?
If in fact there's intelligent life in the universe, why haven't they contacted us?”
Well, one possibility is the zoo hypothesis.
“Maybe extraterrestrials are out there, perhaps even at the nearest stars, but they're
simply observing us, sort of like how we watch animals at a zoo.
Perhaps the protocol for making first contact requires us to take the initiative.
That's what we're testing at METI.
My name is Douglas Vakoch and I'm the president of METI, an organization dedicated to messaging
extraterrestrial intelligence.
For many years, I worked at the SETI institute as the director of interstellar message composition
and my work is to prepare for the day we detect a signal and we need to decide should we reply?
What should we say?
Well, there are a number of SETI organizations but, all of them have focused their energies
on simply listening.
After a number of years, I decided it's really time for us to move forward.”
A move from listening for signals to beaming intentional ones has been the subject of intense
controversy.
A petition signed by scientists warned that "we know nothing of [an extraterrestrials]
intentions and capabilities, and it is impossible to predict whether [they] will be benign or
hostile."
For METI’s critics, the unknown is a good enough reason to stay quiet.
And they insist on global consensus before any message is sent out.
But that hasn’t stopped METI from forging ahead anyway.
“The key to remember is the signals that we sent off in the 50s and 60s and 70s...are
all travelling outward at the speed of light.
So for anyone who says we should hide from the extraterrestrials, I've got some bad news
for you, it's too late.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve tried to broadcast our existence to the cosmos,
and one of the most famous examples is the Arecibo message.
Back in 1974, Carl Sagan and astronomer Frank Drake sent 1,679 pulses of light into space
from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.
If an alien translated it, they would see the numbers 1-10, the basic chemical elements
for life, a double helix, and a human figure.
“The arecibo message is an ambitious message….it's an encyclopedia written in the language of
science.
And while that's laudable to try and tell the extraterrestrials a lot, I think it's
overly ambitious.”
Another problem with the Arecibo Message for METI was the turnaround time.
“The Arecibo message targeted a globular cluster of stars called M13, 25,000 light
years from Earth.
That means any reply we get back will take 50,000 years.
Surely we can do better than that.
In our next round of transmissions, we're getting three types of messages ready.
One will describe basic chemical principles, we'll send the periodic table of elements.
The second will describe the human body.
The third message will go on to describe something about how we engage with one another, altruism.
As we design a message for extraterrestrials, we need to ask what we and the extraterrestrials
have in common.
Well, we have in common the universe itself.
So when we look around the universe and try to describe it, we start with what it's made
up of.
Hydrogen and helium and carbon and oxygen and phosphorus and all these 200+ chemical
elements.
Well that's something that scientists on another world will know about too.”
So how do you translate this into a message an alien would understand?
“We use a binary notation to show... each chemical element, and then once we have created
a little box, by transmitting at three different frequencies.
One represented by black, one by white, and one by red, the extraterrestrial gets a string
of numbers that they can then put into a 2D array, and then stack that all together to
show the relationships that we see in our periodic table of elements.
As we target Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, it would take just four years
for our message to get there and another four to get back, that means in a little over 8
years we can have a round trip exchange.
METI is currently moving forward with its plan to send interstellar transmissions next
year.
Their efforts to make contact raise questions about whether we should send messages at all,
who should speak for Earth, and ultimately, what this says about us.
“When we send messages, our goal is to learn if there are other intelligent beings out
there, but even more important than discovering other life in the universe is what we learn
about ourselves in the process.
Does our science really map on to the way the universe is structured?
Will an alien really see it?
Then, what can they tell us that we don't already know?
By making contact with an alien civilization, we can hold a mirror up to ourselves, to come
to see ourselves in a new way, and that is the greatest impact of making contact.”