Calling All Aliens

Calling all aliens

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1:19The most ambitious SETI search ever undertaken. Could it lead to the detection of a civilization elsewhere in our galaxy? And if so, what would be the consequences? This is Big Picture Science, and I'm Seth Shostak. I'm Molly Bentley. In this episode, we provide an update on the search for intelligent life in the universe, a conversation with writer Ted Chiang about his speculative visions for how alien contact might unfold, and why some scientists don't only want to listen for messages, but also broadcast them. Is that wise? And if we did it, what would we say? We explore all that in this episode, Calling All Aliens.

1:56I've worked as a SETI astronomer since 1988. That's a long time now. And since the start of SETI, back in 1960, you know, astronomers have used existing radio telescopes, which are really nothing more than giant antennas, to try and eavesdrop on alien radio traffic. That's true for SETI's newest experiment, but this one is far more ambitious than what's come before.

2:32You might be familiar with the image of Jodie Foster wearing headphones as she listens for extraterrestrial signals in the movie Contact. Well, Jodie was listening using the Very Large Array, or VLA, in the New Mexico desert. The array is a collection of 27 radio telescopes, but that type of listening experiment hasn't been done very often or for very long in the past.

The Cosmic SETI project

3:01But now the VLA is being used 24-7 in a project called COSMIC. COSMIC piggybacks on conventional radio astronomy observations made with the array, meaning that the search can be done without tying up one of the world's most popular instruments for doing astronomical research. COSMIC stands for Commensal Open Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster. So COSMIC is a computer system that we are building at the very large array in New Mexico to input signals from the telescope to search for these extraterrestrial intelligence.

3:37COSMIC will survey the sky continuously and will be, by far, the most audacious SETI search ever undertaken. Chenoa Tremblay is a postdoctoral researcher in radio astronomy with the SETI Institute. This is a new data stream where we can specifically look for SETI at all times that the telescope is turned on. All right. Somebody's using the Very Large Array, presumably a radio astronomer from somewhere, right? And so they're pointing at particular places up in the sky. You don't get to control the telescope under this scheme.

4:09No, exactly. So our system is designed to be flexible no matter where they are looking in the sky. And what we do is we pluck out of the field the nearest stars and are able to look for signals just towards those stars in particular. And so it doesn't really matter what anybody else is doing with the telescope at the same time. OK. On the assumption here that we don't know where E.T. is hanging out. So one piece of sky is as good as another piece of sky. Exactly. Exactly. And we know from projects like Gaia that there are hundreds of billions of stars out there.

4:44So we can just pick some number of them and look towards those and see, do we see a signal there? And if multiple people want to point the telescope at the same patch of sky, there's no hurt in looking again. Or we can choose a different star to look at next time. So this is a survey that can extend over basically the entire sky visible from the northern hemisphere. That in itself is a big step forward. Are there any other aspects to cosmic that would sort of make it stand out when it comes to the search for E.T.?

5:18I think also because of our ability to tag along with what the telescope is doing, instead of a dedicated search, we are going to be covering a lot more wavelength space than a lot of the other previous SETI searches. Now, you say you're looking for a signal that would, you know, betray some alien presence there. How is that signal different from the signal you might get from a quasar or some other natural radio emitter?

Searching for narrow frequency signals

5:45So most natural sources in the sky are what we call broadband. And that means that they emit across a very wide range of wavelengths. What we're looking for from a technological standpoint are things that emit over a very narrow number of wavelengths. And so cosmic is designed to split the information into very fine channels of wavelength. And so we can look for these small changes instead of very broad changes.

6:17That sounds like if I'm, you know, in my car driving around and I'm turning the knob on my radio. I have an old car. It has a knob. You're turning the knob on my radio. You know, I'm looking for a station and it's at, you know, one spot on the dial. It's at one frequency and it only extends over a very narrow range of frequency. So maybe it's at 680 kilohertz on the dial or whatever. So this is sort of the same thing. You're looking for a signal that's kind of just one spot on the dial. Even a fraction of a dot on a dial sometimes.

6:49And so, you know, we might go from 98.3 to 98.4. But, you know, cosmic can actually go to a much finer detail than that to look for more specificity of the signal. So this is really a step forward in our search for cosmic company, in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence, aliens, if you will. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, you know, in past searches, we might have covered in a five-year survey, 1,000 to 2,000 stars that we could look to find if another set of beings were trying to communicate somewhere in the universe.

7:25But now with this setup and covering all the sky and a lot more frequencies, we are hoping to search for millions each year. And so that's several orders of magnitude higher. When you say millions, you mean millions of places in the sky? Yeah, millions of stars. And we know now that almost every star has at least one planet. So we're covering entire solar systems with this search. And so we're covering more planets than we even know to exist at the moment.

7:57Our computer system for cosmic is so fast that we're able to do these millions a year. And all the data are processed already. So we just have to go and look at them. Now, of course, it isn't just a matter of pointing antennas at a particular star system. Even if there are some aliens on a planet around that star broadcasting into space, right, you still might not pick up that broadcast. I mean, given the fact that maybe you're looking at the wrong frequencies at the wrong time, or maybe you're just not sensitive enough to pick up a signal that might be coming from 50 light years away.

8:32Yeah, exactly. And I think one of the benefits of using the very large array is it has 27 dishes, radio dishes. And these dishes are extremely sensitive in comparison to most of the search we have done previously, which is using a single powerful radio dish. And so we can reach much higher sensitivity. So this means that maybe we can see a signal that might be coming off from a planet that's, you know, a few hundreds of light years away versus maybe only four light years away previously.

9:05You know, members of the public who obviously aren't doing SETI, they often say, OK, but what are you listening for? And they figure that you're listening for some sort of message on the signal, some sort of modulation, you know, right? Here's the value of pi or here's some, you know, prime numbers or the Fibonacci series or something like that. But that's not what you're looking for, is it? That would be really nice. But I think the chances of that happening are a lot smaller than just kind of a signal that's just being transmitted.

9:38So essentially, we're just looking for a spike in intensity at a specific frequency that we can map. Because essentially, because the Earth is moving and we would expect another planet to be moving, we have something called Doppler. And that means that the signal will change slightly depending on which frequency you look at. And this is called a Doppler signal. And so we're looking for that type of change. OK, so the Doppler change is just the slight shift in frequency because the planet is rotating, like our planet rotates once every 24 hours, right, as seen by the aliens, that kind of thing.

10:15OK, so that's the kind of signature, if you will, that you're looking for. You're not really going to say these are aliens because they're broadcasting their top 40. You're just trying to find out if they're on the air at all. Exactly, exactly. And so maybe it's not just on their planet. Maybe they have an equivalent of a Mars rover or maybe they have a Voyager that's somewhere within their solar system or just outside of their solar system that they can communicate with us. And we would be sensitive to those types of signals as well. I see. OK, so, you know, what motivates you, Shinoah, to, you know, do this kind of an experiment?

10:51I mean, you know, it's a bit of a long shot. Nobody's ever found an alien transmission before. I mean, how exciting is it to try to work on an experiment that's the largest in history to try to answer the question, are we alone in the galaxy? So I know, Seth, you've also published a lot in SETI and you've worked a long time in SETI. What has motivated you to work on the project as it has changed over the years? Well, actually, Shinoah, I don't think it's so different from what's motivating you. I mean, it's just the excitement of being able to find that we have some company out there, that there are other beings out there that have also developed radio.

11:29So so they're technically competent civilizations out there. And just to find them, I mean, it might not have any practical consequences, but it would be really exciting to know that, you know, we're not the only kids on the block. Yeah, I've only been involved in SETI for the last six or seven years. I got involved with it during my Ph.D., but I think you've been involved with it and probably seen more of its growth where I've just kind of read some of its growth. What do you think has really changed a lot about SETI in the last few years?

12:00Yeah, well, that's that's the kind of question I get a lot at, you know, when I'm with other people and they ask what I do for a living. And their question, you know, you can talk to them about radio astronomy if you want, but their question is almost always. But is there anybody else out there? Are we alone in the cosmos? Everybody's interested in that. They're not maybe so interested in the behavior of a pulsar or whatever like that. They want to know if there's somebody out there. And that's that's a very strong motivation. I think that when they ask me about that, they'll also say, well, OK, you haven't heard anything.

12:32Is there anything new? You know what's happening? I mean, you haven't heard anything for a long time. And then you have to point to the fact that the equipment keeps getting better. That's the news in SETI is almost always about, well, we're using this new telescope or we have better receivers. We have different algorithms for sifting the incoming cosmic static or whatever. So there's always progress, even if you haven't found E.T. And you personally, your own motivation, you know, you said, you know, what could be more exciting than finding E.T.?

13:03I mean, that is a pretty exciting prospect. How do you rate the chances that you'll succeed? I think that cosmic brings us significantly closer to that capability. And recently I was talking to somebody and they asked, well, will we find E.T. in our lifetimes? And I think that if we can keep up with cosmic and other processes similar to this in the future, I think we have a very good chance within the next five to 10 years. But don't hold me on that.

13:34Don't hold you to it. Well, you have to have the courage of your convictions here, Shanoa. Well, Shanoa Trembley, thanks so very much for speaking with us. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Shanoa Trembley is a postdoc researcher in radio astronomy for the SETI Institute.

Speculative alien contact with Ted Chiang

13:52The idea of contacting aliens is one that award-winning writer Ted Chiang explores in his engaging short stories. How do his visions compare with those of scientists who are searching for aliens? A conversation between Ted Chiang and our own alien hunter, Seth, next. This episode is calling all aliens on Big Picture Science.

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15:13But what if our contact with aliens was more intimate than eavesdropping on their transmissions? What if we had a conversation? For scientists, the idea is tempered by the reality that the vast distances and timescales make a back-and-forth conversation impossible. But science fiction writers can imagine the scenario, as Ted Chiang did in a short story about first contact, story of your life. It became the basis for the film Arrival. In this scene, a linguist and a mathematician ponder how to have a conversation with visiting aliens.

15:46How did they get here? Are they capable of faster than my travel? Are they... You might have a list of questions starting with a series of just handshake binary sequences. How about we just talk to them before we start throwing math problems at them? While Story of Your Life may be his best-known work, Ted Chiang's prodigious three-decade writing career has earned him many awards and led some to compare him to science fiction giants like Isaac Asimov. In his stories, Mr. Chiang cuts to the core of some of humanity's most profound and complex ideas,

16:20like free will and our moral obligation to non-human sentient beings, including AI, and to the environment. We were pleased to have the rare opportunity to talk to Mr. Chiang about how he came up with the idea for the alien-human conversations in Story of Your Life and the imaginative leaps he makes when envisioning first contact scenarios. I actually have to say that the aliens were not the initial inspiration for that story. The initial inspiration for that story was my desire to tell a story about a character who knew the future

16:55and couldn't change it and I had the problem of how does my character gain this knowledge of the future and the solution that I arrived at was that I would have my character learn a language and I thought it would be much more interesting if it were an alien language. So the fact that it's a first contact story, that was sort of secondary to my initial impulse in writing the story. And you do, I mean, at least judging by the film,

17:26there's a lot of time spent on the writing scheme of the aliens, how they write this language. It's rather complex. They have to sort of draw a circle and then festoon it with squiggles of this sort and the other. How did you come by that? And of course, you know, the writing system used by the aliens in the story is somewhat different than the one shown in the film. But one of the things that occurred to me was that traditionally when, say, linguists or anthropologists first meet an uncontacted population

17:58and they have to try and learn that society's language, you know, they are always dealing with a culture that has no writing system. And I think that could pose some difficulties which might be alleviated if you were trying to, you know, engage in first contact with a culture that had a writing system. I thought that a writing system might make things easier. You know, it turns out in the story that the writing system doesn't actually make things easier,

18:28but I thought that that was a reasonable approach. And it also gave me the opportunity to just sort of speculate about the types of writing system that might conceivably exist. Okay, but I noticed that you didn't resort to the usual tropes of alien languages or writing, for that matter, that are based either on music or mathematics. These seem very popular. And I suppose mathematics appeals to sci-fi writers because it sounds, well, scientific.

18:59But on the other hand, try and describe, I don't know, the concept of government or love using mathematics. I wouldn't know how to do that. I think that your approach is maybe as good as any of the others, maybe better. Well, you know, while there are a lot of different avenues of communication, you know, one of the things that linguists point out is unique to language is just how widely applicable it is, how many things it can refer to. You and I are having this conversation in language.

19:31We could not be having this conversation in music. Yeah, I agree with you. Although it makes for interesting cinema. It doesn't sound like a great way to communicate. So I gather then your interests are not really so much in the technical aspects of this. Could we find a common language even? Or, you know, how do you really conduct a conversation if the aliens, instead of being down the block, are 100 light years away where each exchange takes 200 years? You're more interested in what we would say to one another. For the purposes of my story, it was essential that it be a rapid back and forth type of interaction

20:07because I needed my protagonist to learn this alien language. And that's not going to happen with a 200-year lag. So, yeah, for stir purposes, I, you know, made it basically a face-to-face conversation. Maybe you could just sort of give me a little bit of how a science fiction writer explores the idea of alien contact and contrast that with how scientists think about it because I don't think they, you know, view it in the same way. So I think in science fiction, aliens stand in for a couple different ideas.

20:44One is just foreign cultures. A lot of stories about contact with aliens are just a different way of talking about contact between human cultures. If you want to tell a story about cultural misunderstanding or colonialism or, you know, imperialism, those are stories that you can tell by having humans contact aliens. Another thing that science fiction uses aliens for is to represent the unknowable, to represent something truly foreign, something that we cannot really comprehend.

21:20Almost the diametrically opposite approach of the stories where aliens stand in for, say, just a foreign culture. Yeah, it's kind of a cosmic peace enforced by the distances between objects in the universe. I mean, that's what it is. And the finite speed of light or radio or whatever you're using there. In your story, Ted, The Great Silence, humans use the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. May it rest in peace. They both try to detect and to send messages.

21:53An intelligent self-aware parrot is near the telescope. And, you know, complaining about the fact that, doggone it, these humans are trying to contact, you know, some Klingons 100 light years away when there are, in fact, species right here on or just outside the door that they haven't bothered to try and make contact with.

Animal intelligence and communication

22:11One of the things I talk about in that story are experiments with African gray parrots who, at least one example of which, the parrot named Alex, demonstrated, you know, some really astonishing linguistic capabilities. So, I think there's very strong evidence that there are animals that have, you know, much greater, you know, communicative abilities than what we normally associate with animals. You know, they still don't have the equivalent of human language.

22:45They can't hold a conversation like this, like the one that you and I are having. That seems to be unique to human language because of various properties that human languages possess and animal communication does not. And are you suggesting in your story about the parrot that we should be spending more of our effort trying to communicate with our co-Earthlings as opposed to worrying about the aliens? Well, I don't think it's one or the other.

23:17I don't think that our pursuit of SETI as a project is in any way stopping us from also studying animal intelligence. I do think that there is a kind of implicit social resistance to accepting animal intelligence because that would force us to confront how badly we treat animals. And, you know, so research into animal intelligence, I think, can cause people to feel uncomfortable

23:50about a, you know, a kind of like ongoing, you know, atrocity that is factory farming. So, I think, you know, there is, I think, something sort of fraught about recognizing the intelligence of animals that, you know, makes it a more viscerally difficult question to grapple with. Suppose we were to establish communication, if you will, with some alien entity, as they like to say.

24:22What would you want to know from them, assuming you could ask? Mostly, I would want to know what is their history? You know, what has the history of their civilization been like? What is the current state of their civilization? Do they have a better sense of the prevalence of intelligent life in the universe than we have? Do they have multiple data points? You know, if we encounter them, you know, our data points will have increased from one to two. Do they have a bigger number of data points?

24:54Yes, that's what I would want to know. So, you would ask questions about the prevalence of intelligence. You know of the Fermi paradox, that is, the fact that if the universe is really chock-a-block with intelligent species, you would think that there would be some evidence of that that we could easily find. It's like saying, if there are really, you know, millions of squirrels roaming the suburbs of America, you know, I should be able to walk into my backyard and find a squirrel or two. That sounds kind of reasonable, but the Fermi paradox is a paradox, because even though the assumption sounds reasonable, we haven't found any evidence of anybody trying to communicate.

25:33How do you look at that? Well, actually, I think I'm going to quote your colleague, Jill Tartar, who said, I believe that, you know, based on the amount of, you know, spectrum that we've, you know, listened to, and how much of the sky we have monitored, we have taken a sample of, you know, equivalent to maybe a bathtub out of the Earth's oceans. And so, that is not really a good basis on which to say that we really lack evidence that we should be finding.

26:07You know, it's too early to say.

The Fermi paradox and missing evidence

26:09So, of course, you know, one of the proposed solutions to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent species tend to go extinct, and that's why we haven't heard from any of them. But I guess, you know, I'm going to go with Jill and say that, you know, we actually don't have enough data to draw any kind of conclusion. Yeah, maybe there isn't even a problem. Yeah, there might not be. You know, when people inquire of me, they say, why haven't you heard anything?

26:42You've been doing this for a long time, right? Not a peep. And, you know, there's several possible answers, and one is, well, there just aren't any aliens. But that makes humanity so incredibly special that it's suspect from the get-go, in my opinion. But what's not so suspect is simply that, look, we've had technologies like radio, or for that matter, lasers, you know, communication modes. We've had them for a century or less. Alien species out there could very well have had those kind of technologies for a million years or more, right?

27:14So our experiments are simply not sensitive enough to pick up a cacophony that might be going on among the stars right now. And they might, you know, we might look back on this a hundred years from now and say, oh, yeah, we hadn't found anything yet. It was like the Europeans in 1491. They didn't know too much about the Americas then. Well, I mean, okay, so where are you relative to Jill's position that, you know, like, yeah, we really don't have enough info to, you know, we haven't even, you know, we don't have enough observations to really say that there's a paradox.

27:50Do you disagree? Do you think we have enough observations? Do you think that it is like a real puzzle why we haven't heard anything? I don't think it's so clear cut. I mean, fair enough. I mean, the data set is very, very limited. But on the other hand, the universe is three times as old as the Earth. There are presumably civilizations out there that are literally billions of years more advanced than Homo sapiens is, right? And with an advancement of billions of years, it seems to me not unreasonable to suggest that they maybe have changed the universe or disturbed the universe, as Freeman Dyson says.

28:28You know, that something has changed that is so obvious that any astronomer will have noticed it. And we don't see that. We have never found anything in the skies that doesn't have a natural explanation. And I have to say that that troubles me a little bit. I don't know why, but it does. There's that. And do you have any sense of, like, what that would look like? Like, for instance, is it like, is it an artificial star?

28:59I'm thinking of a science fiction story where they discover a star which has no trace elements in it at all. Like, it is clearly a construct because, you know, it is, yeah, just by, just the spectrogram is not that, not the spectrogram of a natural star. Is that the type of thing you're thinking about? Well, it could be. By the way, you might have such a star that made a story idea. You might have a star like that if it's a really, really old star that formed before, you know, other stars, big stars, had made all those trace elements, as you call them, to put in the atmospheres of new stars.

29:32But anyhow, that's a technical thing. Yeah, I do think that there's something to it. I don't know, I don't, you know, make a point of this in polite conversation, but it does seem to me that we really don't see any evidence of the intelligences, vast and deep, to borrow H.G. Wells, right, you know, in space. We can look, you know, all through the galaxy, a large chunk of the galaxy, we can look at other galaxies, we can look at galaxies that are literally billions of light years away.

30:06And we don't see anything happening that's very clearly non-natural. You sort of wonder why isn't there something that is more peculiar? It's sort of like, you know, asking the Native Americans in 1500, hey, you've seen any of the Europeans lately, right? And they say, yeah, you just look down the street here, and now there's some sort of thing they call a church down there that wasn't there five years ago or something. That there might be something that has been done to the universe that we might detect. And, you know, it's somewhat subjective, but it seems to me that that's a bit puzzling.

30:39Okay, okay. Well, finally, Ted, suppose we were to make contact with aliens. Would that be a good thing for us? I would say that, I think, you know, Carl Sagan said it, that, you know, any civilization that has reached a level of technology that would enable them to contact us, or, you know, certainly if they were able to actually come visit us, if they have achieved that level of technology, and they have not destroyed themselves,

31:11they might have something to tell us. The fact that they lasted that long, and, you know, that they would be engaged in something which, you know, has no conceivable economic value, you know, sending signals out into space or visiting another planet, you know, in what we consider economic value. So, if they are doing things like that, they might be doing something which we ought to emulate. Ted Chiang, thanks so very much for speaking with us.

31:43Thanks for having me.

31:46Ted Chiang is a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer, best known for his collections, Stories of Your Life and Others, and Exhalation. The idea of a real-time conversation with aliens may be firmly in the realm of fiction, but some scientists want to do more than try to detect alien signals they want to transmit.

32:19Up next, the project to message extraterrestrials raises questions. Is it safe? And what should we say? In this episode of Big Picture Science, we are calling all aliens. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

32:55It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

33:25We've been talking about the ongoing effort to detect aliens by eavesdropping on their transmissions, whether those broadcasts are deliberate or simply leakage signals that we could pick up. But some people wonder if we might have better luck if we encourage the aliens to signal us by first sending a signal of our own into space.

Messaging extraterrestrial intelligence

33:48This is known as METI, Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It's challenging because it requires the technology necessary to launch a strong, easily detected radio signal into space. And in addition, it's not entirely obvious in which direction such transmissions should be sent. Consider, there are about 60,000 star systems within 100 light years of Earth, close enough that they might have picked up signals from our planet and thereby know of our existence. But targeting all 60,000 in a METI project is more than a little ambitious.

34:21Still, some people think we should not remain silent. Among them is Doug Vakoch, who heads an organization that he founded, METI International. So I think we should be doing what we hope the aliens are doing, which is sending us messages. Because, you know, maybe as much as we hope they will, maybe they think, come on, you're the new kids on the block. You need to take the initiative. The rationale is that if we make contact at all, we know the aliens are going to be a lot older than we are,

34:52and therefore maybe a lot more patient than we are. And the reason is we have had radio for 100 years. That's how long we've been able to communicate with the stars. But if that's the norm in the galaxy, given that the galaxy is over 13 billion years old, if we get a signal, it means the aliens have been at this a lot longer than we have. But what happens if the aliens are saying, yeah, we have greater capacity. We've done this hundreds, thousands of times.

35:24And here you are, the new kids on the block, and you all of a sudden want to get the Encyclopedia Galactica? Come on. So you send us something, and then maybe we'll think about replying back. So that's what we're trying to do. We're saying we're reaching out. And by reaching out and letting them know that we want to make contact, that may be the critical issue. I like your assurance that with age comes patience, at least among aliens. I hope that is true also with humans. And so these will be patient aliens.

35:55They've been around for a while. And when you say a while, you mean many, many centuries. Millions of years, yeah.

Comparing historical interstellar messages

36:02Mm-hmm.

Comparing historical interstellar messages

36:03Well, some messages have been sent. What I mean by that is some deliberate messages have already been sent. Perhaps the most famous messaging was done 40 years ago and is known as the Golden Record. And this was a pair of records, phonograph records, that contained sounds of Earth and human voices that were launched aboard the twin Voyager space probes. But then you also have the message that was sent out in 1974 from the Arecibo telescope, known as the Arecibo message. And that one was encoded in binary form.

36:35Can you just compare and contrast those two messages? Sure. Well, they're based on the idea that if you want to communicate with an alien, unfortunately, they're probably not going to know English or French or Swahili. So you have to find some sort of a universal language. And on the Voyager recording, as you say, on one side, there were sounds of Earth. There was music. There were greetings in 55 languages. On the flip side, there was a tutorial, a bunch of pictures, and even a description of some basic math, how we count, a description of some chemistry, and over 100 photographs of life on Earth,

37:12the majority of them featuring human beings. So it shows a little something about our narcissism as a species. So that's a picture that used math and science and pictures. And then that was actually the basis of the Arecibo message. As you say, it was sent in a binary code, two different frequencies, very close to one another on the radio dial. And the hope is if the aliens reconstruct it correctly, they'll see that, yes, this is a postcard from Earth.

37:43It's a snapshot of what we're like. And then the most cryptic part to the aliens is right in the middle of it, which is the stick figure of a biped. And, you know, humans look at it and say, oh, that's another human being. The aliens might look quite different. So that may be the hardest part to understand. Well, the question underpinning all of these endeavors is what kind of language could be our common language with the extraterrestrials? As you said, it couldn't be English. French mathematics we're hearing is perhaps a language we could use to communicate with them,

38:17perhaps music. What do scientists think could be a common language? Well, I think all of those common characteristics, because what you have to do is think, what do we and the aliens have in common? So if we get a radio signal from the aliens, that means, oh, they can generate radio signals. So that means they need to know some basic physics. They need to probably know how to do some basic math. I mean, if you can't do something as simple as add two plus two and get four,

38:49you're not going to be a good engineer on Earth or any other planet. So that's where we start. What do you need to make contact with itself? You need a shared technology and you need some shared understanding of the universe around you. You probably know what the universe is made of if you're going to be exploring it. But the tricky thing is, even if the aliens have math and they have a science, are they going to communicate it to us in a way that we'll understand? So all the messages we've talked about so far, the Arecibo message, the Voyager recording,

39:22they use a lot of pictures. They use a lot of sounds. And that reflects human beings being creatures who have a lot of our brain dedicated to interpreting pictures, images. We're very visual creatures. We're very auditory creatures. But what happens if you're an alien that evolved on a world with a really noisy environment? Sound's not going to be very good. It's a very murky cloud-covered planet. Vision's not going to be very good.

39:52Maybe you get around through a sense of touch or a sense of smell. And what if we have to communicate with blind aliens? And so we designed a message that, yes, is based on some math and science, but that could be interpreted without ever drawing a picture. Doug, is the message that you and your METI team designed, that you just referred to, the one that you sent in 2017? Because I believe that your team did send a message a few years ago. That's right. This is part of a project called Sonar Calling.

40:24Unlike the Voyager recording that tried to take a picture of everything and explain everything on Earth, we wanted to explain a few things very well with the hope of really being understood. And so we started with some simple counting, but we pointed to the only thing we and the aliens have in common. So what we pointed to is the radio signal and key characteristics of that radio signal. So we wanted to introduce the notion of time.

40:54And so we sent pulses of different durations, one second, two seconds, three seconds. And then we described those in our mathematical language. We introduced the idea of different radio frequencies. And then we tied those descriptions to the two radio frequencies we were using in our binary code. So very rudimentary math can describe the thing that we're sending to the aliens, the message itself. And so if they can get that, now that's an opening to send something even more sophisticated,

41:26something more unique, something more distinctive about Earth. It's to let them know we want to make contact. Many of the themes that you have brought up over the course of this conversation are captured in Ted Chiang's short story, The Story of Your Life, which was made into a movie, Arrival. And in the movie, Arrival, when the aliens come, they need a mathematician and a linguist present to interpret the messages, the conversation that the aliens are trying to engage in.

41:58You need more than one interpreter. And that's the reality of the complexity. Because, you know, within the SETI community, look, it has been dominated by astronomers and engineers and computer scientists. Folks who think, you know, a binary code may be enough to explain the whole world. But it takes a linguist to say, you know, language is much more sophisticated than that. What I loved is that the aliens actually came to Earth. You know, with SETI and METI, we're stuck with sending or listening for a signal that's traveled trillions of miles between the stars.

42:34And so if you don't understand and you say, I'm sorry, could you repeat that or could you explain this? You may have to wait decades or centuries or even millennia to get that reply back. Here, Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner had the advantage of being face to face or face to tentacle with these aliens who the heptapods would come to Earth. And even then, it took weeks to finally figure out some way of pointing at the same thing, the kind of thing that we tried to do with our radio signals, pointing at radio waves.

43:08And so I think that has implications, too. If we get a signal from aliens, there's not going to be a quick and easy decoding of it. Even if they do use something like math or say they're sending us the periodic table of elements, who's to say they're going to arrange the elements in exactly the same way? So even though I hold out hope that there are universals, really being able to identify them and then building on those to really establish sophisticated communication could take generations.

43:39Is our desire, though, to communicate with aliens, is it simply transactional?

Transactional versus altruistic contact

43:45We want to learn something from them, perhaps something that would benefit us, help us solve climate change, or maybe they would give us the secrets to some kind of energy device. Is that the reason why we want to communicate with them, or is there a bigger question here about understanding our place in the universe? Well, we could reduce sending a message to being something transactional. So we send them something, maybe we'll get something in return. And then the question is, who has to be the first one to initiate?

44:16We hope they're initiating with SETI. With METI, we say, maybe they're not. Maybe we need to take the initiative. But we can also view it in a much more altruistic sense, in the sense of which we're not guaranteed to get anything. But that we think there's something about this experience of being human that's worth remembering, that's worth sharing. And that even though we may have really modest technology or understanding of the universe compared to the aliens, that there is something so distinctive about being human that it matters.

44:54Because what we know is that, yeah, they may be more powerful, they may be wise than we are, but the twists and turns of biological and cultural evolution mean that there's never going to be another species out there that is a twin of human beings. And I think sometimes people are afraid that if we do discover aliens, somehow we won't be as special anymore. I think it's just the opposite. The more we learn about aliens, the more we realize, no matter how powerful or wise anyone is, no species is going to be more human than we are.

45:30Doug Vakhoch, thank you so much for talking to us and best of luck with your project. Thanks very much. Appreciate it, Molly. Take care. Doug Vakhoch is the founder and head of METI International in California. Well, Seth, that brings us to the big picture in this discussion of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. You know something about this. You are a SETI astronomer. Yes, indeed. And frankly, Molly, I'm actually quite excited about this new project, Cosmic, because it will be so much, you know, what we used to say more comprehensive, but nobody knows what that means.

46:05It's just that it will be a bigger search than has ever been done before. Well, we have a sense of how important SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is for the scientists who are undertaking that endeavor. But what does it mean to the public? Well, I think that the public actually would find it very interesting if we could point to some spot on the sky and say, well, you know, 25 light years in that direction, there's a world, there's a planet there with some sort of life forms that are clever enough to broadcast signals into space.

46:39I mean, even if they didn't know any more than that, I think it would be really interesting to know that all those sci-fi shows that they had seen ever since they were kids actually had some basis in fact.

Reacting to a detected signal

46:52Well, let's say we did detect a signal. Let's say that the Cosmic Project did detect a signal. What happens next in the minutes and the days after an interesting signal is detected? Well, the immediate reaction, of course, would be, you know, a huge news story. So, you know, every publication, every TV show, every radio show, they'd all be handling this story. That's interesting. So you would say that the media would react to it before the scientists, they confirmed the signal or just talked about it among themselves?

47:24Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I say that, you know, not to merely provoke our listeners, but because I've seen it happen in the past when there was a hint of a signal that we thought maybe we had found something. It still hadn't been confirmed by the scientists, but the media were all over it. I mean, you know, most of them, the responsible ones, would say something like possible alien detection. But, of course, you know, the public is going to read right over that word possible. They're going to think we're in touch. Mm-hmm. Okay. So the public is having its reaction.

47:55They're getting excited. But the astronomers are having taking a more sober, careful view. What are they doing behind the scenes as those headlines consume us? Well, it's like any other research result, really, Molly. It's just the first thing to do is to check it out, to see if you get the same result that those other people got. In other words, anybody with a big antenna and the capability of pointing it in the direction from which the signal is coming would, in fact, do that. They would just stop whatever else they're doing, you know, to try and confirm that this signal is real.

48:31And those that had even better equipment would try and see if there's any message on that signal. Well, Seth, you know, when we talk about what contact would be like, to what degree have you and other scientists who work in this field imagine what the aliens will look like? Now, in the movie Arrival, we heard about that. They were heptapods. They looked a little bit like squid or something like that. Do we think the aliens could look like squid? Would they look like humans? Would they be biped? Do we have any idea how they would manifest physically?

49:02Well, of course, we don't. On the one hand, you can say, look, you know, they've got their own story of evolution to tell. And, you know, evolution on their planet certainly wouldn't be a duplicate of evolution on Earth. So they wouldn't necessarily look like us. But on the other hand, having said that, it's also the case that, you know, one thing you do know about them is that they're capable of building a radio transmitter. So they've got to have, you know, appendages, hands, arms, whatever, that would allow them to manipulate a pair of pliers or a soldering iron in order for us to hear them.

49:37So they can't just be, you know, like fish in the sea, which really don't build very much in the way of technology. So you would at least know that. Well, finally, Seth, there's been a lot of speculation about what we should say to the aliens. What would you say to the aliens if we did make contact and you could have that conversation in real time, one that was not interrupted by 200 or 2,000 year lag? Yeah. Well, if you could have a real back and forth, indeed, you know, on a reasonable timescale, then I would be asking them questions, of course.

50:07And the kinds of questions that I would ask are certainly the obvious ones, you know, what do you look like and, you know, tell us something about your society and so forth. But I would ask specific questions about things like, well, do you have music or do you have religion or, you know, things like that, that humans are special with regard to those sorts of things. And it would just be interesting to me to know if another intelligent species would develop these kinds of things as well.

50:37Yeah. I'd be interested if they had been watching us or if they understood our society, how they think we're doing and if they had any advice for us. Yeah. Well, it's nice to seek help from the aliens. But on the other hand, I mean, imagine if, you know, the Neanderthals could pipe up today and ask us, hey, look, we've got various problems. Maybe you can help us solve them. You know, to begin with, I'm not sure I'd even want to spend the time solving the problems of the Neanderthals.

51:09But the other thing is, I'm not sure I would be able to do so.

Credits and closing thoughts

51:11This show would not be possible without the extraordinary talents of senior producer Gary Niederhoff and assistant producers Shannon Rose Geary and Brian Edwards. I am the executive producer of Big Picture Science, Molly Bentley. And I'm Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.

51:44We'd like to give a big thanks to our listeners and to our Patreon supporters. The original music in the show is by Dewey DeLay and June Miyake. This episode of Big Picture Science, looking at the latest in the search for intelligent life in the universe, is called Calling All Aliens. You may be listening to our radio show, but you can also listen to BiPiSci by subscribing to the BiPiSci podcast. You'll find links on our website to the platforms that carry us. Looking to get the most out of your money, your time, and generally give your life an upgrade?

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