November 26, 2014 • 50 mins
If we found intelligent alien life, how would we communicate with it? We explore the challenges of chatting with someone out of this world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says I talk talk,
I talked to you. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Vocal
(00:21):
Bomb Hi, and I'm Joe. How y'all doing today? Not
too bad? I'm sorry, But before we started rolling a
little look behind the scenes here y'all, Jonathan apologized in
advance for his lyric today. And so that was just
my reaction to that one. Um, I feel I feel
good about it, uh, and I feel good in general. Joe, Yes,
(00:41):
But Joe, I think that you had something more serious
and not nineties pop music related to ask us. No,
I have something very fifty sci fi related. So the
other day I was watching a great old classic called
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Thank God. I thought
you were going to say some other thing, attack the
crab monster jam No, no, no, that wasn't from the fifties.
(01:05):
I know, but he didn't start with okay, no, the
Day the Earth Stood Still. So aliens arrived, Clatto comes
out of the flying saucer addresses the ambassador from Earth.
I think he gets shot almost immediately in peace. Yeah,
but here's how it almost always is in the old
(01:26):
movies especially, Aliens are very easy to communicate with because
they come down, they arrive at Earth, and they are
bipedal primates who speak English with varying degrees of sliminess
or tentacles on their heads. Occasionally they are not able
to speak in English. However, they are able to use
(01:49):
another human as a conduit through which it can speak English,
for example, Independence Day. Sure, yeah, let us speak not
of Dr Oakin. Uh, that's the same guy who played Data,
wouldn't it. Well? Anyway, In reality, if there are aliens
(02:09):
out there, we've got a few problems. They're not coming
to Earth, or at least not yet, not that we
know of, And so that means if we want to
talk to them, we need to receive and transmit messages
over long distances. And also in the real world, there's
no reason to assume aliens already speak perfect American English
or have any kind of universal translator. Yeah, let's let's
(02:31):
first point out that there are a lot of Americans
who cannot speak anything close to perfect American, like all
three of us. Yeah, sure, all the time. There are
even more basic assumptions than that we probably shouldn't make.
So after that, you may be thinking, huh, well, if
we can't assume that aliens can speak you know, English,
(02:52):
or Chinese or any other Earth based language, why on
Earth could we ever expect to have a converse station
with them? How could we possibly set up communication between
different solar systems? And I do want to impress upon
you guys exactly how huge of a problem that is,
because we humans have a really hard time understanding each
other's languages a lot. I mean, I mean modern languages
(03:15):
all right, right, and that's not even taking into account
ancient languages. Yeah, yeah, I'm one of the things I
wanted to point out. I had a quick aside in
the notes. I love having my asides before we're even
able to really dive into the topic. Is just the
the proof that we would have some significant challenges being
able to decipher any sort of alien language or be
(03:36):
able to communicate meaningfully to aliens. Uh. In a way
that I feel confident about that is, we just look
at how we've treated ancient languages that we had lost
practically all context around, so that we were unable to
understand them for the longest time. So say, for example,
you have a bunch of examples of ancient Egyptian script,
got some some hieroglyphics, but there's no translation for them, right,
(04:01):
You don't know you don't know that this symbol in
ancient Egyptian means this symbol or this s phonetic unit
in another language. So on earth can you make sense
of it? The way we made sense of it in
the sense of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs was because we were
lucky enough to come across the Rosetta Stone. Now, the
Rosetta Stone is a stone that has UH generally the
(04:23):
same passage with minor differences, written three times in three
different languages. So there's uh. Egyptian hieroglyphs are one of
the languages, Ancient Greek is another, and Demotic script, which
was a later Egyptian language. Those are the three that
are written. And by using those three texts and being
able to make comparisons, linguists were able to say, oh, well,
(04:46):
this tells us what these different hieroglyphics symbols mean, what
they represent, and that was how we began to understand
the language of the hieroglyphic images. That we would find
everywhere that you know, we're we're artifacts from the ancient Egyptians,
but that all depends on a particular archaeological discovery. If
we had never discovered the Rosetta Stone or I don't know,
(05:08):
there may have been other archaeological discoveries since then that
could have played the same role. I'm not sure, But
if we didn't have those things at our disposal, what
would we do? Basically, we would be completely unable to
truly understand this language that that beings that were biologically
identical to us more humans. Yeah yeah, wrote in what
(05:32):
was that three to five thousand years ago? Yeah? Yeah,
So we're talking about our own species and not being
able except through on our own planets, right, except through
fortuitous circumstance, being able to understand. And on top of that,
you get to the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian. We aren't
entirely certain exactly what it sounded like. So if someone
(05:55):
were to speak ancient Egyptian like in a film like Stargate,
it might be exactly what it actually sounded like way
back when, because I mean, we still have scholars disagreeing
on what the pronunciations were like. So, uh, you know
when we point that out. The reason I point that
out is to say, any message that we send that
(06:17):
would be purely language based to an alien life form
could be completely indecipherable. I mean, if we're having that
much trouble with languages from our own species in our
own history, imagine how much challenging, how much more challenging
it would be when either an alien race receives something
(06:37):
we send or we received something from an alien race.
And understanding what that means, and that sort of brings
us to the main thing we want to talk about today.
So this month, on Monday and Tuesday, November tenth and eleven,
the Seti Institute held a conference about communication with alien civilizations.
And they brought together experts from a vast array of
(06:59):
different dis to sort of combine their knowledge, put their
heads together and and and see what they're different intuitions
based on their different subject areas would come up with
with reference to insights about and recommendations for communicating with
alien civilizations. So it's called communicating across the Cosmos, And
the central question was how can we make ourselves understood
(07:21):
by other civilizations in the galaxy. So the conference had
seventeen presentations over a couple of days, and we don't
have time to talk about all of them here, but
we wanted to discuss some of the ideas that were
brought up at this conference and also just talk in general,
have a discussion about what it means to try to
communicate with aliens, how we could do it, what should
(07:44):
we say, how should we say it, and is it
a is it something that's possible to achieve? This is
something that we've been thinking about for a while, We
as a species have been thinking about for a while,
not just steady but you know, pre steady days. And
so I wanted to talk a little bit about some
of the earlier ideas people have suggested and some of
the actual things that we have done that could at
(08:06):
least you know, in in theory be a communication with
an alien presence um and and so it's it's interesting
to kind of look at what we've done before. Also,
before I forget, I should mention this reminds me a
lot about the episode of how do you warn the
people of the future about something like a nuclear waste
(08:27):
disposal area? We talked about that, and I think in
our second episode about dealing with nuclear waste for the future,
the problem of communicating the fact that a very certain
location has been made highly toxic for thousands of years. Right,
how do you how do you create symbols that will
last the test of time, knowing that things, even things
that you would first ascribed to being dangerous, like skull
(08:49):
and crossbones, today our fashion statements on like clothing and
even kids toys. So it's you know, it's a legitimate issue. Well,
the same sort of thing, except kind of magnified when
you're talking about aliens. That doesn't mean that we haven't tried.
So some of the some of the earlier attempts before
we get into the actual conference details. Uh, there were
(09:10):
some folks in the in the nineteenth century who thought, well,
there might be life on the Moon or on Mars.
We don't know, especially way back in the very early Yeah,
they had no idea, So spell it out on a
corn field, right, Actually one person did say, yes, one
person suggested. One person suggested going into uh, something like
(09:32):
a corn field, cutting pathways through it and planning wheat instead,
so that through the contrast, you could create geometric patterns
that could be seen from the moon, therefore being an
indication of an intelligence that had put something there, because
the thought process went no natural occurrence would create such
perfect shapes. Okay, alright, that's cool, But but what about
(09:55):
something further away from than the Moon. I mean, what
if there are aliens on Mars Martians where That was
a big one, right, because for a long time, even
the patterns that could be seen with the telescopes, we
had suggested things like possible canals. You guys have probably
heard about canals on Mars Um. So this was an
idea that was thrown around for a long time. And
there are various people who are coming up with ideas
(10:15):
of how we might be able to indicate to any
source civilizations that might be on Mars that we are
also here. And there was one guy, Joseph von Littrow,
who said, why don't we just create these enormous channels
of water and then pour kerosene on top of the water.
It'll float on the top of the water. Then we
set fire to the kerosene and so these flaming channels
(10:40):
will create the same sort of shape. So I was
talking about before, but on a massive scale. I'm talking
like huge, so that they would be visible from the
surface of Mars, especially if we're lighting it at night. Yeah, totally. Yeah,
so well you have to do it at night. That
that ridiculous, right foresight to plan it when Mars would
(11:00):
be in a position to see Earth on that side
of Earth at night. I don't think they ever got
to a point where any actual work was done. This
was purely on the theoretical. It's probably good because that
also sounds really quite dangerous where going to come from?
You know, yeah, who needs light scale kerosene burning? I
(11:21):
like it moving into the actual space age when we
could do things more meaningful than setting stuff on fire. Uh,
you know, in this case, we could set things on
fire and make it fly up into space. But the
Pioneer ten and Pioneer eleven spacecraft each had plaques on
them that detailed the origin point for those spacecraft as
well as when they were launched. So the plaques measure
(11:42):
six by nine inches, which is fifteen by twenty three
centimeters um. The plaques were bolted to the frames of
the spacecraft and they show a naked man and a
naked woman. The man is waving as if to say, hello,
we have no clothes and we are probably good to eat.
The plaque also has a symbolical layout of our solar
system as well as our son's position relative to nearby pulsars,
(12:04):
so that an alien craft, if it were to encounter
one of these, would be able to triangulate the position
of our solar system based upon the information um And
so that's kind of interesting. Yeah, but that's essentially just
like a like a giant postcard. Yeah, yeah, it was
really a I mean it was more than just literally
it was symbolic for a couple of different reasons. Sure, now,
(12:26):
it was a lovely idea. And in nineteen seventy four
we had another one, which was to beam up a
message using a radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory and uh,
it was to the globular cluster M thirteen, Lovely Neighborhood,
um gated community. This is a cluster of stars that's
actually pretty dense. So it was thought, well, there are
(12:47):
a lot of stars in this cluster, so if you know,
it's just as good as any other potential target for
possible intelligent life. And since there are more stars there
than they're potential, Yeah, there's probably more planets in that
general area, but it's about twenty five light years away,
so that message would take years to get there. I mean,
(13:08):
they're that message travels at the speed of light. So uh.
The digital message was a twenty three pixel by seventy
three pixel bit map image. Have you seen the pictures
of this? It looks like it's a level from an
Atari game. I'm wrong, I have seen it. It looks
very interesting, yeah, very So what's what's in the image?
(13:30):
There's a stick figure or a block figure if you prefer, uh,
some chemical formulas, some numbers. There's also a very simplistic
depiction of the radio telescope and the beam that was
sent out. But here's the sad trombone moment of this message,
which is that the way they aimed the message, they
aimed at where the globular cluster in thirteen was at
(13:52):
that moment, not where it will be in Now. You've
always gotta lead it. Now they didn't lead it, so
have taught me. Yeah, so in twenty five, in two years,
that message will be where in thirteen was, not where
in thirteen is. So even if there were some sort
(14:13):
of intelligent life there, it's not going to be in
line with the message by the time it actually gets
to where it used to be. So the official response
to that particular little stickling fact is that the message
was really a technological demonstration rather than a sincere effort
to make contact with alien life. Uh. And again, if
you think, well, it would take fifty thou years for
(14:34):
a message to go out and get back to us,
assuming that there isn't some sort of trans hyper communication
thing that we don't believe exists, and assuming that they're
really prompt with answering their man right, they might they
might be like, just let that's in the inbox for
you know, a couple of millennia. We're talking about fifty
thousand years before we would hear back. So I'm inclined
(14:55):
to believe that, yes, this is really more of a
symbolic show of look at what we're able to do.
Um and fun side facts, since that radio telescope has
gathered data for the City at Home project, which we've
talked about, and distributed computing. What about those golden records
we put on the Voyager spacecraft. They're pretty cool. Uh.
First of all, they are actually copper discs that are
(15:16):
gold plated, so they're not pure gold. So if you
were thinking about leaving the solar system so that you
could scavenge the gold records aboard the voyage of space. No,
you you people salvage copper for scrap. Yeah, but but
gold by weight is far more valuable than copper. Yes, really,
you wanted me to pull up the buy ounce. Always
(15:39):
go with gold at any rate. Uh. Actually, boys, both
of your metal is precious. This whole conversation is precious.
So the message was about our history as a species,
leaving out some of the more grim details. The records themselves.
They were twelve inches in diameter, which is a little
more in thirties and meters. They had to be played
(16:01):
I think at sixteen and two thirds repetition revolutions per minute,
so not the same as what are typical records here
on Earth, you know, the thirty threes. And this was
but there. But there were instructions for how to play them,
kind of symbolic instructions, yeah, yeah, kind of a pictionary
type thing. They also included a needle and a cartridge
inside the aluminum plated UHL that held the the discs
(16:26):
and uh they had a committee that decided what went
on this particular these pair of disks, and it was
chaired by Carl Sagan, so there were billions and billions
of submissions for that he went through. No, but I
had to say billions and billions because so uh, it
(16:47):
did include music from different cultures and different eras and
greetings spoken in fifty five languages. And here are some
of the music that you could find on the those disks.
I'm going to take issue with one of these, but
you can go ahead and read them. You're gonna take
issue what that that it was included or that I
put it? All right? So there's a box, Brandenburg Concerto
number two, Mozart's Queen of the Night, Aria from the
(17:09):
Magic Flute, Stravinsky's Sacrificial Dance from the Right of Spring,
and Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Good. Is that the one
you want to take issue with, No, it's the Right
of Spring. We so we're deciding to set up a
channel of communication via physical record with some future alien species,
and what we give them is, I'm sure a very
influential and great piece of music, but it's about human sacrifice.
(17:34):
It's a ballet about a girl who dances herself to death.
And also it's something that pretty much started a riot
the first time it was performed. What's okay because none
of that context is included with the records, so the
aliens will have no way of knowing unless they you
have a riot as soon as they hear it, in
which case we realize that Stravinsky's effect is truly universal.
There's also music from Japan, China, Bulgaria, from Native American tribes,
(17:57):
from Aborigines, and more in fluded on those discs. There's
also this is one of my favorite stories of all time.
There's there's a soundtrack of the heartbeat and brain waves
of andrew Ien that was taken over the course of
an hour in ninety seven. And Drew In was Carl
Sagan's wife until the time of his death. The two
of them had fallen in love a couple of days
(18:18):
before she went in to do this recording. They had
been colleagues for years and years and years and uh
or months and months at the very least, and and
had been working very closely together, and over the course
of a telephone conversation just a couple of days before
these readings were taken, she and and Sagan had this
revolutionary like like I love you, let's get married kind
of moment and so so she she says that that
(18:41):
while she was in this e G. Machine, Um, she
was meditating on falling in love. Yeah, so there's so
that is going out into the universe. And I mean
and there were also there were also images that were
converted into analog uh well a hug waves essentially and
(19:02):
recorded onto these discs. So, um, it wasn't just sound,
it was also pictures that you could get again you
would have to follow the instructions on the plaque. Um.
So these are all examples of previous symbolic attempts at
least to send messages out to the universe that essentially
say we are here and we are curious about out there.
(19:25):
So this is some of the stuff we do that
leads into the conference that about well, what if we
took this the next step Instead of it being essentially,
you know, we're just hurling a rock out into space
that happens to have information about us on it, what
if we wanted to take a more uh you know,
a more serious and more concentrated effort to say we're here.
(19:47):
What can that step be? Yeah, And so at this
conference recently, there were I would say we could sort
of group different discussions from the conference into sort of
different categories. So one of the first ones I wanted
to talk about, because I think it's kind of fundamental
to all the other approaches, is what kind of assumptions
can we make about the nature of alien minds? Like
(20:09):
what kinds of alien minds should we aspire to talk
to and what kinds of organisms will be able to
receive and understand messages that we send in principle. And
it's interesting because there's a law of discussion on this
right about all the different types of assumptions that we
may or may not be able to make, uh, you know.
And I'll withhold my own opinion about assumptions until we
(20:31):
discussed the other ones, because obviously, you know, I don't
want to. I don't want to end up adding my
bias to all the conversation that follows. Well, so, so
some a few of the people spoke very specifically about
this kind of thing, right right Well there, So the
idea is, Okay, if you assume there is a technologically
intelligent species, maybe there are some assumptions we can necessarily
(20:56):
make about their psychology that you could not be a
technological civilization without certain things about your brain being a
certain way or maybe not physically brain in the way
we think of brain. Whatever your intelligence organ is. Uh,
you know, perhaps like an understanding of mathematics are you
talking about or No, mathematics will be fundamental to when
(21:16):
we talk about language, but I'm talking about even more
fundamental psychological conditions. So for example, uh, David Dounair from
Lundon University gave a presentation that was related to well,
he wanted to say that, yes, we can probably expect
to be able to communicate with an alien species, provided
that a feature of that alien species is intersubjectivity, which
(21:40):
he defines as quote, the sharing of experiences about objects
and events. So it's sort of like the basis of
all social behavior and and civilization. I would I would
say it's just the basis of communication, which is almost
a circular argument, saying we will almost certainly be able
to communicate with an alien species is capable of communicating
(22:02):
well well, but without the ability to communicate, we would
not be able to communicate with that alien species, which well, no, no,
I'm just saying that's completely a valid point to make,
because there is absolutely the chance that that a complex
alien life doesn't have any any methods of communicating with
anything outside of itself. Right, Well, he argues, actually that
(22:23):
any alien species that has the technology to receive our
radio messages will possess intersubjectivity. He says, quote intersubjectivity is
a basic requisite for the emergence of intelligence, sociability, communication,
and technology. And I can see the idea there. I mean,
you can't imagine, I really think that he really might
(22:44):
be onto something that you can't come up with a
scenario in which a species that can't communicate ideas or
or experiences works together to create technology. Oh right, absolutely
not so at least not one that has any form
of individual is um right. So he argues that we
should sort of expect some attributes that are likely present
(23:06):
based on this. We we should assume intersubjectivity in alien minds,
and we can expect quote a sustainable complex social system
with a regulated system for collaborations such as ethics. So
sort of social complexity and then complex communication for collaboration
and abstract conceptualization makes sense to me. And then also
(23:29):
a high degree of distributed cognition. And then there is
another presentation that I thought was interesting about what we
could assume about alien minds. And this was from Thomas
love Yanovic, and this idea was the role of empathy. Okay,
so people like us, we can try to empathize with
(23:51):
and subsequently understand the intention of other minds. We can.
We have a theory of mind. We can get inside
other people's heads, and and we do that all the time,
even with non human creatures like we as we assign
feelings and thoughts and emotions to dogs and beetles and airplanes. Right. So, yeah,
imagine you put yourself in a room, in a locked
(24:12):
room with somebody who doesn't speak the same language as you,
and you're working on a task together. You may very
well be able to work together on a relatively simple
task even without sharing any words in common whatsoever, because
there are ways that humans can sort of derive intentionality.
I can sort of figure out what you're trying to
(24:34):
get me to feel, even without understanding what any of
your words mean. So uh Yanovich proposes that empathy might
be a psychological universal. In other words, it's a feature
of almost any intelligent species that could evolve. From that,
we get the following guideline quote. If our communicants are
incapable of understanding the informative intention behind our message. They
(24:58):
still might be able to understand our communicative intention, the
intention to reveal our presence as intentional beings, for it's
much more likely that they will be able to empathetically
recognize such an intention than to interpret a signal embodying
an explicit representational content, right right, that at the very
least they would be able to go, hey, this was
(25:20):
created by beings who want to say Hi, yes. So
in both cases here, it's sort of saying that we
can assume any technologically intelligent species will have these basic
features of psychology, and what can we derive from that
that will help us craft a message, or at least
know that there's something worth crafting, even if they don't
understand it. And I think that's really interesting. But I know, Jonathan,
(25:44):
you're you're probably you don't like assumptions, and yeah, though
I don't think these are just stupid assumptions. Think these
are very logical and well, and I don't think they're stupid,
and I don't think that they're illogical necessarily. However, I
get a little antsy simply because you know, we have
to draw our conclusions, we have to base our assumptions
on on the most minuscule of sample sizes for intelligent
(26:08):
a planet that houses intelligent life, Now there's no way
to get around that. Oh sure, Sure, and Joe, you
actually had a point about that, right right, Well, the
point you make is something that the people at this
conference were highly aware of and talked about it in
uh in their reflections on it. But I wanted to
offer up, for example, one way that I was just
trying to imagine, how could it be that these assumptions
(26:31):
might be violated, because I think maybe the two assumptions
we just talked about do make a lot of sense.
For example, if you try to imagine any species evolving
intelligence through natural selection. But I was wondering, well, maybe
we could assume there's a different kind of species out
there in the galaxy, and that species could be one
(26:52):
that's based on design. Now, I'm not going to that
kind of controversial thing here. I'm talking about. Imagine a
planet populated by intelligent robots created by another alien species,
and now the species that created them is extinct or
or has gone away to another planet. Sure, Or imagine
(27:13):
even genuine chemistry based organic life forms, except instead of
bearing minds shaped by the way intelligence naturally grows out
of self replication and natural selection. You've got minds designed
to be one way or another by the hyper intelligent
species that engineered them, or we encounter aliens that have
re engineered themselves to depart from their natural psychologists. So
(27:36):
like a singularity on an alien platform. Right when you
introduce crazy scenarios like this, which who knows, might not
be crazy given different assumptions about alien technology, whatever we
can assume about psychology based on natural selection and biochemistry
that we see here on Earth kind of go out
(27:57):
the window. Who knows what the purpose of engineered minds
might be created for? Anyway, My point is, well, I
think the points they make are really interesting and good.
We can't be sure that the only life we encounter
will have arisen by the same forces we did. Absolutely,
um I I do think that at a certain point
(28:17):
the question is for for our intents and purposes, and
not this podcast intents and purposes, but for humanities intents
and purposes. Um. It's it's almost moot because that level
of difference in society is going to be I think
that that's going to push it into the impossibility of contact. Um.
(28:37):
That's a good point. Like, like, unless they show up
um and fail to notice us, but we notice them,
Like we're never going to talk to them because they
don't understand talking. They would. Yeah, unless it's well, if
it's a like you said, some sort of of artificial
whether synthetic, robot, chemical, whatever. If it's some sort of
artificial intelligence created by aliens, that it is was designed
(29:01):
for a specific purpose by the aliens, but is not
a reflection upon the actual thought processes however you wanted
to find it of the aliens. Uh. But they have
access to a radio tower, they could theoretically they could
theoretically receive whatever message we send out, but we but
they wouldn't care. Yeah, I guess maybe. I mean, it's
(29:23):
it's kind of hard to say what they would or
wouldn't do, right, sure, Sure, I just I think that
it's pretty solid to to go forward. I like that
they laid out the fact that what we need to
communicate with aliens is essentially uh, empathy and communic ability
or communicativeness. That's communic ability is what colds are. Yeah right,
(29:44):
I don't know, Yeah, Okay, communic anyway. Uh So, so
if we start with the assumption, because I think we
basically have to in order to proceed with the discussion.
If we start with the assumption that that aliens can
understand what intermined communication is and understand intentionality, they can
perceive that there are other minds with intentions. What do
(30:07):
we do from there? And how can we use language?
What kind of tools would we use to get a
message in those alien minds? Yeah, One of the messages
that was included, or one of the ideas that was
included within this this conference, was one that was proposed
by Dr kim Binstead that any message sent must be
by necessity self contained because it will take many thousands
(30:29):
of years for it to get to wherever that intelligent
life might be. Right, So it can't be like, hey,
what's up. It needs to be the whole message at once. Right.
It can't be a text message because whoever owns the
phone now is not going to be owning the phone
by the time the message gets responded to. Right, So
it would just be like humans fifty thousand years from now,
like who is this that's contacted us? And what what
(30:52):
do they want? Did one of you guys ask if
you left your keys somewhere what's what is this about?
So it needs not the start of a conversation actical way. No,
it's essentially saying we are here, this is us, we
are here, and like that. Very similar to the the
attempts we talked about in the previous uh UM section.
(31:13):
But another was that if we want the aliens to
understand what we're trying to say, it beholds us to
make as few assumptions about that alien's knowledge, cognitive abilities,
and even physiology as possible. So, in other words, we
can't we can't put all of our eggs into a
basket of based on lots of different assumptions on the aliens.
We should try and make it as open as possible,
(31:35):
with as many different UM avenues as possible, in order
to make UH at least some attempt of understandability to
an alien intelligence. And also stated that was unlikely that
an alien intelligence would be able to decode natural language text,
no matter how large the sample size. So we talked
about this in artificial intelligence quite a few times, that
(31:57):
by feeding enough data into a machine, the machine can
eventually learn if it's designed a specific way and the
software supports it. She argues that that might not be
the best way to UM to send a message to
alien life. That may not matter that we send. For example,
if we were to send UH a library of books
(32:18):
in in every language on Earth to an alien species,
they might not be able to you know, that might
not be able to do anything like the volume might
not help them. Well, here here's the analogy. I think
if you were to give more and more and more
ancient Egyptian writing samples to the pre Rosetta Stone archaeologists,
they still wouldn't have anything to go on. It wouldn't
(32:39):
be it wouldn't necessarily be helpful. Then you have a
doctor Carl de Vito, who held to talk about whether
or not mathematics can really be considered a universal language.
And that's really interesting question because I think this idea
is one of the best things we have going in
terms of finding a universal constant to communicate. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
The presupposition is that anyone who's intelligent enough to look
(33:01):
at a message and say this came from people who
want to communicate UM is going to have the basis
in mathematics that's similar that to to to what we
have that that mathematics is the universal Yeah, that's it's
a scene in the Day the Earth Stood Still actually
where the clattoo goes into the professor's office and writes
a mathematical equation on the chalkboard that helps the professor
(33:23):
solve his problem, and in the idea is well, math
underlies all of the science of the universe and the ideas.
You can't do science or build a radio telescope without
understanding things like natural numbers and exponential ation and stuff
like that. It's just it's necessary. It's interesting because he
actually says, you know, we can't really be entirely sure
(33:45):
that math as we communicate about it here on Earth
is not essentially a human construct that allows us to
deal with this. You know, it's a it's a concept
we have created so that we can deal with this
natural thing. So not that there isn't an underlying universal
element here, but just the way that we describe it. Yeah,
the way we deal with it is in fact a
(34:05):
construct that we humans have made. Now, he he argues,
or at least he says that he believes that natural
numbers are distinct, that those are those are uni platonic ideals.
He believes there are things that exist in the world,
but that the way we deal with those to express
mathematical concepts is probably to some extent that human construction construction,
(34:28):
and therefore may not make any sense to an alien
intelligence in that form. Not that the alien intelligence wouldn't
have their own methods of conveying similar concepts, but it
may be in a fundamentally different way than we humans do.
At which point I said I needed to get an
ice cream sandwich and left my computer, and then I
had a nice tasty treat. Um. Yeah, well, yeah, okay,
(34:52):
So we we think that math might be useful to
some extent, but the question is in what what's the
best way to present math in such a way that
it will be understood. Um, here's another problem with language,
especially written language. Our whole concept of communication is influenced
by the presence of language. In other words, language isn't
(35:13):
just the tool we use to communicate, but it actually
changes how our brains work when we're trying to send
and receive messages. So, in what ways is an earth
language centrism shaping the assumptions we make about alien communication?
And what ways is the way we use language blinding
us to how best to talk to aliens? This is
(35:35):
a question that came up in another presentation. Dr Sherry
Well Jensen and a presentation called Extraterrestrial Linguistics discusses the
possibility of studying all about seven thousand existing human languages
to look for universal features. What do they all have
in common? And what do they all lack? What are
they all not have in common? Uh? And she points
(35:58):
out that while this is still a very limited starting
point because all languages on Earth are still based on
Earth conditions and human biology and all that. In the
words of the presentation abstract quote, we can't think outside
the box until we've identified the box, right, And I
totally I agree with that. That's kind of where I
was coming from with the idea of Earth as our
(36:19):
single sample sizes that we don't even have a full
idea of what that sample size entails like big picture wise, right,
And and so her idea is we need to do
a full sort of look at all of human language
and the way human language shapes the assumptions we make
about communication. There may be things that we don't even
(36:42):
realize we're getting wrong about how to communicate with aliens
because we don't realize the way language is blinding us
to some aspects of communication we don't understand. Sure. Yeah,
And obviously our physiology does have a big part to
play with that, because a lot of you know, language
is are are essentially, especially when you get down to
(37:02):
the written part, are a way of translating the sounds
we make into meaningful thoughts, and in spoken language, a
lot of our communication actually occurs nonverbally. Yeah, so this
gets really complicated. She she said that that we need
to ask, and I love this quote. Um, she said,
she said about the languages, all of the languages of Earth,
(37:24):
what presuppositions do they all make? What things are unsaid
or even unsayable because these things are too obvious, to
obscure or somehow foreign to human cognition. Yeah, yeah, this
These are big, heavy questions. The thing I love about this,
by the way, is that even if we get to
a point where we say, alright, communicating with aliens is
(37:45):
is uh. You know, that's a super far reaching goal,
and we more likely than not will not achieve it,
or if we do achieve it, there's no way of
us knowing that we succeeded, because we will all be
gone long before it ever happens. Even if you accept
all that is true. We're gonna learn so much about
ourselves as a species just through the process of self
(38:08):
reflection that there is genuine use out of this. So
even for people like me who who get a little
grouchy towards the end and say, oh, what's the years
I can't even communicate with the kids that come around
with the bogo sticks in the scoodas all over my
front yard. What just happened in here? I get a
(38:29):
little grouchy. Okay, I'm just saying saying, yes, yes, there's
there's always learning to be had, even from those kids
with their new fangled internet. Stay and me nothing. Okay, okay, Okay,
enough talk. Let's get down to the real deal. Okay,
we've talked about theory, We've talked about what what can
(38:51):
we expect about alien minds? What can we expect about
the nature of communication? What could possibly be understood? Let's
just get to some real propose those what should we send?
So it's going to be data of some kind? Well,
but what what do we want to tell them about us?
I mean, what do we not want to tell them
about us? In some cases it's not just data. Some
(39:11):
people have suggested actually sending stuff. I mean, if you're
if you're already talking about it, taking forever in a
day for the message to get there, then what's a
few thousand more millennia between friends? So one idea is
to send earthly artifacts or images of those artifacts. Of course,
that assumes that the alien life will be able to
perceive such things, which you know, granted again, if we
(39:33):
get too far out from the human concept of perception,
then communication is meaningless anyway. So it does end up
becoming a moot point. So eventually we can say, like,
all right, fine, those people won't or aliens won't pay
attention to it, but maybe the next step will. Uh.
Kerrie Patterson, who is an artist, had an interesting idea.
She suggested we send smells as part of our message,
(39:55):
so sort of like chemical signatures that kind of give
an idea of what life on Earth is like. And
she included you know everything among that, like including things
like you know, an orange blossom or the smell of
car exhaust, you know, um, so that yeah, yeah, And
and maybe they don't have noses per se, but if
they can, if they can interpret chemicals in a way,
(40:17):
it all similar to the way that we do I mean,
we we can scientifically define what the smell of of
orange blossom is. So sorry, I have to say her
presentation was called making Sense of Life on Earth. Oh,
that's that's worthy of us. Good job, good job carry patters.
That's exactly what I would have titled that. Yeah, as
long as whatever alien species doesn't immediately get poisoned by
(40:40):
said chemical signatures, I think they would be a pretty
good Yeah, we weren't really trying to do that. Um now, personally,
I wouldn't. I think that worrying about what des send
is almost as moot as the consideration of whether or
not the aliens are going to be able to understand us,
because if the aliens, if the aliens can and understand us,
(41:01):
then it almost doesn't matter what we send anyway, because
whatever people will be around by the time the aliens
receive the message will be so different from what we
are today that we can't even anticipate what's going to
be alien to humans of the future, much less to
a species living off on another planet. So so you're
getting into the kind of moral decision of whether to
(41:23):
whether to send, for example, the car exhaust as a sample,
or or only the beautiful orange blossom, or you know,
whether to if we're sending them an encyclopedia, if we're
going to cut out all the parts about war and
terrible stuff, right right. I mean, there are some people
who say, you know, they the messages they want are
all very positive messages of peace and greeting and uh
(41:46):
and friendship, that kind of thing. And there are others
who say, well, we maybe we should send a more
complete picture of what we humans are with all complete
with our frailties, are failings, the dark side as well
as the light that, and and there's there's debate back
and forth, and I ultimately think it doesn't really matter. Oh,
I just I think it's such an interesting question though.
(42:06):
I mean, it's such a huge difference between saying like, hey, y'all,
we exist and saying, hey, y'all, here's the sum of
all of our knowledge, here's our weaknesses, um, and here's
the really terrible stuff that we've done to each other
a whole bunch over the course of history. Yeah, I mean,
it depends on how you what kind of information you
(42:31):
decided to send. If you're trying to send something about
the history of humanity, it's not necessarily at the zoomed
out view a very pretty picture. Well, in a large
law census, it's not. But I mean, there are a
lot of things that you could include about just general
progress that are pretty amazing. The the the strength of
the human intellect is a really incredible story. But the
(42:55):
the ultimate thing I keep coming back to is that
you're talking about tens of thousands of years into the
future before the message is even received. The people. The people,
if there are people, so if there are humans at
that at that time, are going to be fundamentally different
from the way you and I are right now. We're
talking about more time than has been in the recorded
(43:15):
history of humans, and with things changing as as quickly
as they do, I don't think that it will be
pertinent to whatever people are alive at that point, much
less any point when an alien species decides to respond back. Right.
This is touched on by Albert A. Harrison of U. C.
Davis in the presentation he gives, which is about the
(43:36):
fact that when you're when you're sending a message to
an alien species, you're sending a time capsule. You know,
when it reaches them, it's not going to be about
Earth's present it's about Earth's past. It's it's almost a
point of vanity, I would say, of whether or not
we're including the bad stuff along with the good, because
it's it's it's it's the equivalent of intergalactically speaking, creating
(43:58):
a an okay Cupid profile and and just deciding what
you want to put on it. This one picture makes
me look awesome, I'd say. For that reason, I'm definitely
on the side of of let's be real. I mean,
you don't want to start a conversation spanning perhaps hundreds
of thousands of years on a note of deception. Well, again,
(44:20):
it might be a moot thing by the time the
message gets there. Sure, Sure, I mean I mean that
that too. I mean, you know, the humans who would
possibly receive a message back at least fifty thousand years
in the future, whatever it happens to be, um would
probably think that we're just as gross as those aliens.
They might, they might. They might not even know what
(44:40):
the aliens are referring to, because we have no way
of knowing if there if their history is going to
be at all accurate totally, But here's the question, what
do we send? I mean, we're talking about sort of
the tonal approach of the say what is the actual thing?
Do you send them the Encyclopedia Britannica, What is the thing?
(45:01):
I really liked? Um Dr Seth show stack Dr I'm
going to go with that pronunciation. Yes, who is the
senior astronomer and director of the Center for Seti Research.
Um suggested that we send everything the whole Internet actually
UM or or a very large part of it at
the very least. He He argues that since it's that
(45:22):
the Internet is so wide ranging and also redundant at
the same time, UM, that it would be the most
likely thing to help aliens understand us. I do think
that it's a tragedy that fifty years into the future
humans and aliens are going to go to war because
four chan I would declare war on us for fortuneably.
(45:44):
I'm sorry, fortune I. I don't really mean that. I
love you. No, No, I mean it's I think it's
a beautiful idea, honestly, because it's such a sum and
a breadth of humanity. I agree with it. I mean,
you know, practicality aside the idea of whether or not
this is actually ever going to have any any practical outcome. Um,
(46:06):
and it may not. I think it's a worthy endeavor,
and I also think that if you're gonna do it,
you go whole hog. I agree with both of you
that that all this information needs to be conveyed because
that is who we are. And if if the purpose
of this is to say we are here, this is
who we are, and this is what we're all about,
then you've got to include everything. You can't just do
(46:27):
the the pretty roses and everything what happens in You
don't want to get to the first state and have
them say you're not what you look like. What if
they were to show up? What if they were to
show up. Let's say let's say this. I'm going to
take this semi positively. Let's say that the aliens show
up many hundreds of thousands of years from now, and
by then we as a species have left Earth and
(46:49):
what is left behind is a shell of what was there.
They're going to wonder, how did this happen based upon
this picture we received where everything was really awesome. It's
some other alien species get here before us and wipe
them out. No, we pretty much to ourselves. We just
left that out of the profile, in which case they
(47:09):
would create a new species of intelligent robots to populate
our shell of planet, turn it back into a nice place,
and then create a new human race that was never
aware of the one that came before. And there's the
premise for your new movies. And they leave behind one
Rosetta stone and they Okay, Well, I wanted to finish
on one last note, which is that after the conference,
(47:31):
Dr Seth show Stack wrote a peace in the Huffington
Post that had some sort of post conference reflections that
I thought were interesting, and the main one he said
it was sort of emerged as a late motif of
the conference, which was avoid anthropocentrism. It's tough to do
because it's the only thing we have. Humanity is the
only intelligence we we know about, and it's it's the
(47:54):
hardest thing, but we also recognize it's the most important thing.
You've got to rem ember to think these are not humans,
these are not humans. But how do you do that? Yeah? Now,
how do you do that and still do any meaningful action? Yeah?
It's it's, by its very nature a very difficult thing.
And uh, you know, but it's cool to have these
(48:16):
thought experiments because, like I said, if nothing else, we
start to push forward everything from our own understanding of
us as a species to technology as well. Obviously, what
we should send is the movie Space Jam. You want
to declare hostilities towards an alien race, I think the
best way to give the the aliens a sense of
(48:37):
what humanity is like would be to send them Space
Jam and Cop and a half. I look, I've seen
Star Trek the Next Generation, and I'm perfectly aware that
sending aliens our media is not the best way to
introduce us to them, because it will all end in
some bizarre holiday experiment where they think that pulp novels
were real. But they didn't send Space Jam. We send
(49:00):
the wrong thing. Whereas I've seen Galaxy Quest, and I
know that by sending aliens are pop culture, we can
to invade us because of our basketball prowess. I think
we need to send them Theodore Rex starring Whoopi Goldberg.
That's my own personal opinion. I think that this is
precisely why neither of you are in charge of this
kind of thing. Very likely so so, this has been
(49:23):
largely a philosophical discussion and in some cases of debate,
which is awesome. That's one of the reasons why. I
like that we have multiple hosts for the show so
that we can actually have a discussion and not just
a This is the part where I recite the things
that we have researched. Um, it's good and and I
really have enjoyed it. It was also a real mind
bender of a topic because it forces you to sit
(49:45):
there and say, well, how do I think about not
being human? But it's it's the sort of thing we
love to tackle. So guys, if you out there have
suggestions for other topics that are also real mind benders,
you should let us know. Send us a message our
email addresses fw Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
or drop us a line on Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook.
(50:06):
Twitter and Google Plus we are f W Thinking. Just
search f W Thinking and Facebook will pop right up.
Leave your message, let's know what you think. Maybe you
have you want to weigh in on this alien communication topic.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Tell us
and we will talk to you again really soon. For
(50:27):
more on this topic in the future of technology, I'll
visit Forward Thinking dot com. H brought to you by Toyota.
Let's go places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says I talk talk,
I talked to you. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Vocal
(00:21):
Bomb Hi, and I'm Joe. How y'all doing today? Not
too bad? I'm sorry, But before we started rolling a
little look behind the scenes here y'all, Jonathan apologized in
advance for his lyric today. And so that was just
my reaction to that one. Um, I feel I feel
good about it, uh, and I feel good in general. Joe, Yes,
(00:41):
But Joe, I think that you had something more serious
and not nineties pop music related to ask us. No,
I have something very fifty sci fi related. So the
other day I was watching a great old classic called
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Thank God. I thought
you were going to say some other thing, attack the
crab monster jam No, no, no, that wasn't from the fifties.
(01:05):
I know, but he didn't start with okay, no, the
Day the Earth Stood Still. So aliens arrived, Clatto comes
out of the flying saucer addresses the ambassador from Earth.
I think he gets shot almost immediately in peace. Yeah,
but here's how it almost always is in the old
(01:26):
movies especially, Aliens are very easy to communicate with because
they come down, they arrive at Earth, and they are
bipedal primates who speak English with varying degrees of sliminess
or tentacles on their heads. Occasionally they are not able
to speak in English. However, they are able to use
(01:49):
another human as a conduit through which it can speak English,
for example, Independence Day. Sure, yeah, let us speak not
of Dr Oakin. Uh, that's the same guy who played Data,
wouldn't it. Well? Anyway, In reality, if there are aliens
(02:09):
out there, we've got a few problems. They're not coming
to Earth, or at least not yet, not that we
know of, And so that means if we want to
talk to them, we need to receive and transmit messages
over long distances. And also in the real world, there's
no reason to assume aliens already speak perfect American English
or have any kind of universal translator. Yeah, let's let's
(02:31):
first point out that there are a lot of Americans
who cannot speak anything close to perfect American, like all
three of us. Yeah, sure, all the time. There are
even more basic assumptions than that we probably shouldn't make.
So after that, you may be thinking, huh, well, if
we can't assume that aliens can speak you know, English,
(02:52):
or Chinese or any other Earth based language, why on
Earth could we ever expect to have a converse station
with them? How could we possibly set up communication between
different solar systems? And I do want to impress upon
you guys exactly how huge of a problem that is,
because we humans have a really hard time understanding each
other's languages a lot. I mean, I mean modern languages
(03:15):
all right, right, and that's not even taking into account
ancient languages. Yeah, yeah, I'm one of the things I
wanted to point out. I had a quick aside in
the notes. I love having my asides before we're even
able to really dive into the topic. Is just the
the proof that we would have some significant challenges being
able to decipher any sort of alien language or be
(03:36):
able to communicate meaningfully to aliens. Uh. In a way
that I feel confident about that is, we just look
at how we've treated ancient languages that we had lost
practically all context around, so that we were unable to
understand them for the longest time. So say, for example,
you have a bunch of examples of ancient Egyptian script,
got some some hieroglyphics, but there's no translation for them, right,
(04:01):
You don't know you don't know that this symbol in
ancient Egyptian means this symbol or this s phonetic unit
in another language. So on earth can you make sense
of it? The way we made sense of it in
the sense of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs was because we were
lucky enough to come across the Rosetta Stone. Now, the
Rosetta Stone is a stone that has UH generally the
(04:23):
same passage with minor differences, written three times in three
different languages. So there's uh. Egyptian hieroglyphs are one of
the languages, Ancient Greek is another, and Demotic script, which
was a later Egyptian language. Those are the three that
are written. And by using those three texts and being
able to make comparisons, linguists were able to say, oh, well,
(04:46):
this tells us what these different hieroglyphics symbols mean, what
they represent, and that was how we began to understand
the language of the hieroglyphic images. That we would find
everywhere that you know, we're we're artifacts from the ancient Egyptians,
but that all depends on a particular archaeological discovery. If
we had never discovered the Rosetta Stone or I don't know,
(05:08):
there may have been other archaeological discoveries since then that
could have played the same role. I'm not sure, But
if we didn't have those things at our disposal, what
would we do? Basically, we would be completely unable to
truly understand this language that that beings that were biologically
identical to us more humans. Yeah yeah, wrote in what
(05:32):
was that three to five thousand years ago? Yeah? Yeah,
So we're talking about our own species and not being
able except through on our own planets, right, except through
fortuitous circumstance, being able to understand. And on top of that,
you get to the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian. We aren't
entirely certain exactly what it sounded like. So if someone
(05:55):
were to speak ancient Egyptian like in a film like Stargate,
it might be exactly what it actually sounded like way
back when, because I mean, we still have scholars disagreeing
on what the pronunciations were like. So, uh, you know
when we point that out. The reason I point that
out is to say, any message that we send that
(06:17):
would be purely language based to an alien life form
could be completely indecipherable. I mean, if we're having that
much trouble with languages from our own species in our
own history, imagine how much challenging, how much more challenging
it would be when either an alien race receives something
(06:37):
we send or we received something from an alien race.
And understanding what that means, and that sort of brings
us to the main thing we want to talk about today.
So this month, on Monday and Tuesday, November tenth and eleven,
the Seti Institute held a conference about communication with alien civilizations.
And they brought together experts from a vast array of
(06:59):
different dis to sort of combine their knowledge, put their
heads together and and and see what they're different intuitions
based on their different subject areas would come up with
with reference to insights about and recommendations for communicating with
alien civilizations. So it's called communicating across the Cosmos, And
the central question was how can we make ourselves understood
(07:21):
by other civilizations in the galaxy. So the conference had
seventeen presentations over a couple of days, and we don't
have time to talk about all of them here, but
we wanted to discuss some of the ideas that were
brought up at this conference and also just talk in general,
have a discussion about what it means to try to
communicate with aliens, how we could do it, what should
(07:44):
we say, how should we say it, and is it
a is it something that's possible to achieve? This is
something that we've been thinking about for a while, We
as a species have been thinking about for a while,
not just steady but you know, pre steady days. And
so I wanted to talk a little bit about some
of the earlier ideas people have suggested and some of
the actual things that we have done that could at
(08:06):
least you know, in in theory be a communication with
an alien presence um and and so it's it's interesting
to kind of look at what we've done before. Also,
before I forget, I should mention this reminds me a
lot about the episode of how do you warn the
people of the future about something like a nuclear waste
(08:27):
disposal area? We talked about that, and I think in
our second episode about dealing with nuclear waste for the future,
the problem of communicating the fact that a very certain
location has been made highly toxic for thousands of years. Right,
how do you how do you create symbols that will
last the test of time, knowing that things, even things
that you would first ascribed to being dangerous, like skull
(08:49):
and crossbones, today our fashion statements on like clothing and
even kids toys. So it's you know, it's a legitimate issue. Well,
the same sort of thing, except kind of magnified when
you're talking about aliens. That doesn't mean that we haven't tried.
So some of the some of the earlier attempts before
we get into the actual conference details. Uh, there were
(09:10):
some folks in the in the nineteenth century who thought, well,
there might be life on the Moon or on Mars.
We don't know, especially way back in the very early Yeah,
they had no idea, So spell it out on a
corn field, right, Actually one person did say, yes, one
person suggested. One person suggested going into uh, something like
(09:32):
a corn field, cutting pathways through it and planning wheat instead,
so that through the contrast, you could create geometric patterns
that could be seen from the moon, therefore being an
indication of an intelligence that had put something there, because
the thought process went no natural occurrence would create such
perfect shapes. Okay, alright, that's cool, But but what about
(09:55):
something further away from than the Moon. I mean, what
if there are aliens on Mars Martians where That was
a big one, right, because for a long time, even
the patterns that could be seen with the telescopes, we
had suggested things like possible canals. You guys have probably
heard about canals on Mars Um. So this was an
idea that was thrown around for a long time. And
there are various people who are coming up with ideas
(10:15):
of how we might be able to indicate to any
source civilizations that might be on Mars that we are
also here. And there was one guy, Joseph von Littrow,
who said, why don't we just create these enormous channels
of water and then pour kerosene on top of the water.
It'll float on the top of the water. Then we
set fire to the kerosene and so these flaming channels
(10:40):
will create the same sort of shape. So I was
talking about before, but on a massive scale. I'm talking
like huge, so that they would be visible from the
surface of Mars, especially if we're lighting it at night. Yeah, totally. Yeah,
so well you have to do it at night. That
that ridiculous, right foresight to plan it when Mars would
(11:00):
be in a position to see Earth on that side
of Earth at night. I don't think they ever got
to a point where any actual work was done. This
was purely on the theoretical. It's probably good because that
also sounds really quite dangerous where going to come from?
You know, yeah, who needs light scale kerosene burning? I
(11:21):
like it moving into the actual space age when we
could do things more meaningful than setting stuff on fire. Uh,
you know, in this case, we could set things on
fire and make it fly up into space. But the
Pioneer ten and Pioneer eleven spacecraft each had plaques on
them that detailed the origin point for those spacecraft as
well as when they were launched. So the plaques measure
(11:42):
six by nine inches, which is fifteen by twenty three
centimeters um. The plaques were bolted to the frames of
the spacecraft and they show a naked man and a
naked woman. The man is waving as if to say, hello,
we have no clothes and we are probably good to eat.
The plaque also has a symbolical layout of our solar
system as well as our son's position relative to nearby pulsars,
(12:04):
so that an alien craft, if it were to encounter
one of these, would be able to triangulate the position
of our solar system based upon the information um And
so that's kind of interesting. Yeah, but that's essentially just
like a like a giant postcard. Yeah, yeah, it was
really a I mean it was more than just literally
it was symbolic for a couple of different reasons. Sure, now,
(12:26):
it was a lovely idea. And in nineteen seventy four
we had another one, which was to beam up a
message using a radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory and uh,
it was to the globular cluster M thirteen, Lovely Neighborhood,
um gated community. This is a cluster of stars that's
actually pretty dense. So it was thought, well, there are
(12:47):
a lot of stars in this cluster, so if you know,
it's just as good as any other potential target for
possible intelligent life. And since there are more stars there
than they're potential, Yeah, there's probably more planets in that
general area, but it's about twenty five light years away,
so that message would take years to get there. I mean,
(13:08):
they're that message travels at the speed of light. So uh.
The digital message was a twenty three pixel by seventy
three pixel bit map image. Have you seen the pictures
of this? It looks like it's a level from an
Atari game. I'm wrong, I have seen it. It looks
very interesting, yeah, very So what's what's in the image?
(13:30):
There's a stick figure or a block figure if you prefer, uh,
some chemical formulas, some numbers. There's also a very simplistic
depiction of the radio telescope and the beam that was
sent out. But here's the sad trombone moment of this message,
which is that the way they aimed the message, they
aimed at where the globular cluster in thirteen was at
(13:52):
that moment, not where it will be in Now. You've
always gotta lead it. Now they didn't lead it, so
have taught me. Yeah, so in twenty five, in two years,
that message will be where in thirteen was, not where
in thirteen is. So even if there were some sort
(14:13):
of intelligent life there, it's not going to be in
line with the message by the time it actually gets
to where it used to be. So the official response
to that particular little stickling fact is that the message
was really a technological demonstration rather than a sincere effort
to make contact with alien life. Uh. And again, if
you think, well, it would take fifty thou years for
(14:34):
a message to go out and get back to us,
assuming that there isn't some sort of trans hyper communication
thing that we don't believe exists, and assuming that they're
really prompt with answering their man right, they might they
might be like, just let that's in the inbox for
you know, a couple of millennia. We're talking about fifty
thousand years before we would hear back. So I'm inclined
(14:55):
to believe that, yes, this is really more of a
symbolic show of look at what we're able to do.
Um and fun side facts, since that radio telescope has
gathered data for the City at Home project, which we've
talked about, and distributed computing. What about those golden records
we put on the Voyager spacecraft. They're pretty cool. Uh.
First of all, they are actually copper discs that are
(15:16):
gold plated, so they're not pure gold. So if you
were thinking about leaving the solar system so that you
could scavenge the gold records aboard the voyage of space. No,
you you people salvage copper for scrap. Yeah, but but
gold by weight is far more valuable than copper. Yes, really,
you wanted me to pull up the buy ounce. Always
(15:39):
go with gold at any rate. Uh. Actually, boys, both
of your metal is precious. This whole conversation is precious.
So the message was about our history as a species,
leaving out some of the more grim details. The records themselves.
They were twelve inches in diameter, which is a little
more in thirties and meters. They had to be played
(16:01):
I think at sixteen and two thirds repetition revolutions per minute,
so not the same as what are typical records here
on Earth, you know, the thirty threes. And this was
but there. But there were instructions for how to play them,
kind of symbolic instructions, yeah, yeah, kind of a pictionary
type thing. They also included a needle and a cartridge
inside the aluminum plated UHL that held the the discs
(16:26):
and uh they had a committee that decided what went
on this particular these pair of disks, and it was
chaired by Carl Sagan, so there were billions and billions
of submissions for that he went through. No, but I
had to say billions and billions because so uh, it
(16:47):
did include music from different cultures and different eras and
greetings spoken in fifty five languages. And here are some
of the music that you could find on the those disks.
I'm going to take issue with one of these, but
you can go ahead and read them. You're gonna take
issue what that that it was included or that I
put it? All right? So there's a box, Brandenburg Concerto
number two, Mozart's Queen of the Night, Aria from the
(17:09):
Magic Flute, Stravinsky's Sacrificial Dance from the Right of Spring,
and Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Good. Is that the one
you want to take issue with, No, it's the Right
of Spring. We so we're deciding to set up a
channel of communication via physical record with some future alien species,
and what we give them is, I'm sure a very
influential and great piece of music, but it's about human sacrifice.
(17:34):
It's a ballet about a girl who dances herself to death.
And also it's something that pretty much started a riot
the first time it was performed. What's okay because none
of that context is included with the records, so the
aliens will have no way of knowing unless they you
have a riot as soon as they hear it, in
which case we realize that Stravinsky's effect is truly universal.
There's also music from Japan, China, Bulgaria, from Native American tribes,
(17:57):
from Aborigines, and more in fluded on those discs. There's
also this is one of my favorite stories of all time.
There's there's a soundtrack of the heartbeat and brain waves
of andrew Ien that was taken over the course of
an hour in ninety seven. And Drew In was Carl
Sagan's wife until the time of his death. The two
of them had fallen in love a couple of days
(18:18):
before she went in to do this recording. They had
been colleagues for years and years and years and uh
or months and months at the very least, and and
had been working very closely together, and over the course
of a telephone conversation just a couple of days before
these readings were taken, she and and Sagan had this
revolutionary like like I love you, let's get married kind
of moment and so so she she says that that
(18:41):
while she was in this e G. Machine, Um, she
was meditating on falling in love. Yeah, so there's so
that is going out into the universe. And I mean
and there were also there were also images that were
converted into analog uh well a hug waves essentially and
(19:02):
recorded onto these discs. So, um, it wasn't just sound,
it was also pictures that you could get again you
would have to follow the instructions on the plaque. Um.
So these are all examples of previous symbolic attempts at
least to send messages out to the universe that essentially
say we are here and we are curious about out there.
(19:25):
So this is some of the stuff we do that
leads into the conference that about well, what if we
took this the next step Instead of it being essentially,
you know, we're just hurling a rock out into space
that happens to have information about us on it, what
if we wanted to take a more uh you know,
a more serious and more concentrated effort to say we're here.
(19:47):
What can that step be? Yeah, And so at this
conference recently, there were I would say we could sort
of group different discussions from the conference into sort of
different categories. So one of the first ones I wanted
to talk about, because I think it's kind of fundamental
to all the other approaches, is what kind of assumptions
can we make about the nature of alien minds? Like
(20:09):
what kinds of alien minds should we aspire to talk
to and what kinds of organisms will be able to
receive and understand messages that we send in principle. And
it's interesting because there's a law of discussion on this
right about all the different types of assumptions that we
may or may not be able to make, uh, you know.
And I'll withhold my own opinion about assumptions until we
(20:31):
discussed the other ones, because obviously, you know, I don't
want to. I don't want to end up adding my
bias to all the conversation that follows. Well, so, so
some a few of the people spoke very specifically about
this kind of thing, right right Well there, So the
idea is, Okay, if you assume there is a technologically
intelligent species, maybe there are some assumptions we can necessarily
(20:56):
make about their psychology that you could not be a
technological civilization without certain things about your brain being a
certain way or maybe not physically brain in the way
we think of brain. Whatever your intelligence organ is. Uh,
you know, perhaps like an understanding of mathematics are you
talking about or No, mathematics will be fundamental to when
(21:16):
we talk about language, but I'm talking about even more
fundamental psychological conditions. So for example, uh, David Dounair from
Lundon University gave a presentation that was related to well,
he wanted to say that, yes, we can probably expect
to be able to communicate with an alien species, provided
that a feature of that alien species is intersubjectivity, which
(21:40):
he defines as quote, the sharing of experiences about objects
and events. So it's sort of like the basis of
all social behavior and and civilization. I would I would
say it's just the basis of communication, which is almost
a circular argument, saying we will almost certainly be able
to communicate with an alien species is capable of communicating
(22:02):
well well, but without the ability to communicate, we would
not be able to communicate with that alien species, which well, no, no,
I'm just saying that's completely a valid point to make,
because there is absolutely the chance that that a complex
alien life doesn't have any any methods of communicating with
anything outside of itself. Right, Well, he argues, actually that
(22:23):
any alien species that has the technology to receive our
radio messages will possess intersubjectivity. He says, quote intersubjectivity is
a basic requisite for the emergence of intelligence, sociability, communication,
and technology. And I can see the idea there. I mean,
you can't imagine, I really think that he really might
(22:44):
be onto something that you can't come up with a
scenario in which a species that can't communicate ideas or
or experiences works together to create technology. Oh right, absolutely
not so at least not one that has any form
of individual is um right. So he argues that we
should sort of expect some attributes that are likely present
(23:06):
based on this. We we should assume intersubjectivity in alien minds,
and we can expect quote a sustainable complex social system
with a regulated system for collaborations such as ethics. So
sort of social complexity and then complex communication for collaboration
and abstract conceptualization makes sense to me. And then also
(23:29):
a high degree of distributed cognition. And then there is
another presentation that I thought was interesting about what we
could assume about alien minds. And this was from Thomas
love Yanovic, and this idea was the role of empathy. Okay,
so people like us, we can try to empathize with
(23:51):
and subsequently understand the intention of other minds. We can.
We have a theory of mind. We can get inside
other people's heads, and and we do that all the time,
even with non human creatures like we as we assign
feelings and thoughts and emotions to dogs and beetles and airplanes. Right. So, yeah,
imagine you put yourself in a room, in a locked
(24:12):
room with somebody who doesn't speak the same language as you,
and you're working on a task together. You may very
well be able to work together on a relatively simple
task even without sharing any words in common whatsoever, because
there are ways that humans can sort of derive intentionality.
I can sort of figure out what you're trying to
(24:34):
get me to feel, even without understanding what any of
your words mean. So uh Yanovich proposes that empathy might
be a psychological universal. In other words, it's a feature
of almost any intelligent species that could evolve. From that,
we get the following guideline quote. If our communicants are
incapable of understanding the informative intention behind our message. They
(24:58):
still might be able to understand our communicative intention, the
intention to reveal our presence as intentional beings, for it's
much more likely that they will be able to empathetically
recognize such an intention than to interpret a signal embodying
an explicit representational content, right right, that at the very
least they would be able to go, hey, this was
(25:20):
created by beings who want to say Hi, yes. So
in both cases here, it's sort of saying that we
can assume any technologically intelligent species will have these basic
features of psychology, and what can we derive from that
that will help us craft a message, or at least
know that there's something worth crafting, even if they don't
understand it. And I think that's really interesting. But I know, Jonathan,
(25:44):
you're you're probably you don't like assumptions, and yeah, though
I don't think these are just stupid assumptions. Think these
are very logical and well, and I don't think they're stupid,
and I don't think that they're illogical necessarily. However, I
get a little antsy simply because you know, we have
to draw our conclusions, we have to base our assumptions
on on the most minuscule of sample sizes for intelligent
(26:08):
a planet that houses intelligent life, Now there's no way
to get around that. Oh sure, Sure, and Joe, you
actually had a point about that, right right, Well, the
point you make is something that the people at this
conference were highly aware of and talked about it in
uh in their reflections on it. But I wanted to
offer up, for example, one way that I was just
trying to imagine, how could it be that these assumptions
(26:31):
might be violated, because I think maybe the two assumptions
we just talked about do make a lot of sense.
For example, if you try to imagine any species evolving
intelligence through natural selection. But I was wondering, well, maybe
we could assume there's a different kind of species out
there in the galaxy, and that species could be one
(26:52):
that's based on design. Now, I'm not going to that
kind of controversial thing here. I'm talking about. Imagine a
planet populated by intelligent robots created by another alien species,
and now the species that created them is extinct or
or has gone away to another planet. Sure, Or imagine
(27:13):
even genuine chemistry based organic life forms, except instead of
bearing minds shaped by the way intelligence naturally grows out
of self replication and natural selection. You've got minds designed
to be one way or another by the hyper intelligent
species that engineered them, or we encounter aliens that have
re engineered themselves to depart from their natural psychologists. So
(27:36):
like a singularity on an alien platform. Right when you
introduce crazy scenarios like this, which who knows, might not
be crazy given different assumptions about alien technology, whatever we
can assume about psychology based on natural selection and biochemistry
that we see here on Earth kind of go out
(27:57):
the window. Who knows what the purpose of engineered minds
might be created for? Anyway, My point is, well, I
think the points they make are really interesting and good.
We can't be sure that the only life we encounter
will have arisen by the same forces we did. Absolutely,
um I I do think that at a certain point
(28:17):
the question is for for our intents and purposes, and
not this podcast intents and purposes, but for humanities intents
and purposes. Um. It's it's almost moot because that level
of difference in society is going to be I think
that that's going to push it into the impossibility of contact. Um.
(28:37):
That's a good point. Like, like, unless they show up
um and fail to notice us, but we notice them,
Like we're never going to talk to them because they
don't understand talking. They would. Yeah, unless it's well, if
it's a like you said, some sort of of artificial
whether synthetic, robot, chemical, whatever. If it's some sort of
artificial intelligence created by aliens, that it is was designed
(29:01):
for a specific purpose by the aliens, but is not
a reflection upon the actual thought processes however you wanted
to find it of the aliens. Uh. But they have
access to a radio tower, they could theoretically they could
theoretically receive whatever message we send out, but we but
they wouldn't care. Yeah, I guess maybe. I mean, it's
(29:23):
it's kind of hard to say what they would or
wouldn't do, right, sure, Sure, I just I think that
it's pretty solid to to go forward. I like that
they laid out the fact that what we need to
communicate with aliens is essentially uh, empathy and communic ability
or communicativeness. That's communic ability is what colds are. Yeah right,
(29:44):
I don't know, Yeah, Okay, communic anyway. Uh So, so
if we start with the assumption, because I think we
basically have to in order to proceed with the discussion.
If we start with the assumption that that aliens can
understand what intermined communication is and understand intentionality, they can
perceive that there are other minds with intentions. What do
(30:07):
we do from there? And how can we use language?
What kind of tools would we use to get a
message in those alien minds? Yeah, One of the messages
that was included, or one of the ideas that was
included within this this conference, was one that was proposed
by Dr kim Binstead that any message sent must be
by necessity self contained because it will take many thousands
(30:29):
of years for it to get to wherever that intelligent
life might be. Right, So it can't be like, hey,
what's up. It needs to be the whole message at once. Right.
It can't be a text message because whoever owns the
phone now is not going to be owning the phone
by the time the message gets responded to. Right, So
it would just be like humans fifty thousand years from now,
like who is this that's contacted us? And what what
(30:52):
do they want? Did one of you guys ask if
you left your keys somewhere what's what is this about?
So it needs not the start of a conversation actical way. No,
it's essentially saying we are here, this is us, we
are here, and like that. Very similar to the the
attempts we talked about in the previous uh UM section.
(31:13):
But another was that if we want the aliens to
understand what we're trying to say, it beholds us to
make as few assumptions about that alien's knowledge, cognitive abilities,
and even physiology as possible. So, in other words, we
can't we can't put all of our eggs into a
basket of based on lots of different assumptions on the aliens.
We should try and make it as open as possible,
(31:35):
with as many different UM avenues as possible, in order
to make UH at least some attempt of understandability to
an alien intelligence. And also stated that was unlikely that
an alien intelligence would be able to decode natural language text,
no matter how large the sample size. So we talked
about this in artificial intelligence quite a few times, that
(31:57):
by feeding enough data into a machine, the machine can
eventually learn if it's designed a specific way and the
software supports it. She argues that that might not be
the best way to UM to send a message to
alien life. That may not matter that we send. For example,
if we were to send UH a library of books
(32:18):
in in every language on Earth to an alien species,
they might not be able to you know, that might
not be able to do anything like the volume might
not help them. Well, here here's the analogy. I think
if you were to give more and more and more
ancient Egyptian writing samples to the pre Rosetta Stone archaeologists,
they still wouldn't have anything to go on. It wouldn't
(32:39):
be it wouldn't necessarily be helpful. Then you have a
doctor Carl de Vito, who held to talk about whether
or not mathematics can really be considered a universal language.
And that's really interesting question because I think this idea
is one of the best things we have going in
terms of finding a universal constant to communicate. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
The presupposition is that anyone who's intelligent enough to look
(33:01):
at a message and say this came from people who
want to communicate UM is going to have the basis
in mathematics that's similar that to to to what we
have that that mathematics is the universal Yeah, that's it's
a scene in the Day the Earth Stood Still actually
where the clattoo goes into the professor's office and writes
a mathematical equation on the chalkboard that helps the professor
(33:23):
solve his problem, and in the idea is well, math
underlies all of the science of the universe and the ideas.
You can't do science or build a radio telescope without
understanding things like natural numbers and exponential ation and stuff
like that. It's just it's necessary. It's interesting because he
actually says, you know, we can't really be entirely sure
(33:45):
that math as we communicate about it here on Earth
is not essentially a human construct that allows us to
deal with this. You know, it's a it's a concept
we have created so that we can deal with this
natural thing. So not that there isn't an underlying universal
element here, but just the way that we describe it. Yeah,
the way we deal with it is in fact a
(34:05):
construct that we humans have made. Now, he he argues,
or at least he says that he believes that natural
numbers are distinct, that those are those are uni platonic ideals.
He believes there are things that exist in the world,
but that the way we deal with those to express
mathematical concepts is probably to some extent that human construction construction,
(34:28):
and therefore may not make any sense to an alien
intelligence in that form. Not that the alien intelligence wouldn't
have their own methods of conveying similar concepts, but it
may be in a fundamentally different way than we humans do.
At which point I said I needed to get an
ice cream sandwich and left my computer, and then I
had a nice tasty treat. Um. Yeah, well, yeah, okay,
(34:52):
So we we think that math might be useful to
some extent, but the question is in what what's the
best way to present math in such a way that
it will be understood. Um, here's another problem with language,
especially written language. Our whole concept of communication is influenced
by the presence of language. In other words, language isn't
(35:13):
just the tool we use to communicate, but it actually
changes how our brains work when we're trying to send
and receive messages. So, in what ways is an earth
language centrism shaping the assumptions we make about alien communication?
And what ways is the way we use language blinding
us to how best to talk to aliens? This is
(35:35):
a question that came up in another presentation. Dr Sherry
Well Jensen and a presentation called Extraterrestrial Linguistics discusses the
possibility of studying all about seven thousand existing human languages
to look for universal features. What do they all have
in common? And what do they all lack? What are
they all not have in common? Uh? And she points
(35:58):
out that while this is still a very limited starting
point because all languages on Earth are still based on
Earth conditions and human biology and all that. In the
words of the presentation abstract quote, we can't think outside
the box until we've identified the box, right, And I
totally I agree with that. That's kind of where I
was coming from with the idea of Earth as our
(36:19):
single sample sizes that we don't even have a full
idea of what that sample size entails like big picture wise, right,
And and so her idea is we need to do
a full sort of look at all of human language
and the way human language shapes the assumptions we make
about communication. There may be things that we don't even
(36:42):
realize we're getting wrong about how to communicate with aliens
because we don't realize the way language is blinding us
to some aspects of communication we don't understand. Sure. Yeah,
And obviously our physiology does have a big part to
play with that, because a lot of you know, language
is are are essentially, especially when you get down to
(37:02):
the written part, are a way of translating the sounds
we make into meaningful thoughts, and in spoken language, a
lot of our communication actually occurs nonverbally. Yeah, so this
gets really complicated. She she said that that we need
to ask, and I love this quote. Um, she said,
she said about the languages, all of the languages of Earth,
(37:24):
what presuppositions do they all make? What things are unsaid
or even unsayable because these things are too obvious, to
obscure or somehow foreign to human cognition. Yeah, yeah, this
These are big, heavy questions. The thing I love about this,
by the way, is that even if we get to
a point where we say, alright, communicating with aliens is
(37:45):
is uh. You know, that's a super far reaching goal,
and we more likely than not will not achieve it,
or if we do achieve it, there's no way of
us knowing that we succeeded, because we will all be
gone long before it ever happens. Even if you accept
all that is true. We're gonna learn so much about
ourselves as a species just through the process of self
(38:08):
reflection that there is genuine use out of this. So
even for people like me who who get a little
grouchy towards the end and say, oh, what's the years
I can't even communicate with the kids that come around
with the bogo sticks in the scoodas all over my
front yard. What just happened in here? I get a
(38:29):
little grouchy. Okay, I'm just saying saying, yes, yes, there's
there's always learning to be had, even from those kids
with their new fangled internet. Stay and me nothing. Okay, okay, Okay,
enough talk. Let's get down to the real deal. Okay,
we've talked about theory, We've talked about what what can
(38:51):
we expect about alien minds? What can we expect about
the nature of communication? What could possibly be understood? Let's
just get to some real propose those what should we send?
So it's going to be data of some kind? Well,
but what what do we want to tell them about us?
I mean, what do we not want to tell them
about us? In some cases it's not just data. Some
(39:11):
people have suggested actually sending stuff. I mean, if you're
if you're already talking about it, taking forever in a
day for the message to get there, then what's a
few thousand more millennia between friends? So one idea is
to send earthly artifacts or images of those artifacts. Of course,
that assumes that the alien life will be able to
perceive such things, which you know, granted again, if we
(39:33):
get too far out from the human concept of perception,
then communication is meaningless anyway. So it does end up
becoming a moot point. So eventually we can say, like,
all right, fine, those people won't or aliens won't pay
attention to it, but maybe the next step will. Uh.
Kerrie Patterson, who is an artist, had an interesting idea.
She suggested we send smells as part of our message,
(39:55):
so sort of like chemical signatures that kind of give
an idea of what life on Earth is like. And
she included you know everything among that, like including things
like you know, an orange blossom or the smell of
car exhaust, you know, um, so that yeah, yeah, And
and maybe they don't have noses per se, but if
they can, if they can interpret chemicals in a way,
(40:17):
it all similar to the way that we do I mean,
we we can scientifically define what the smell of of
orange blossom is. So sorry, I have to say her
presentation was called making Sense of Life on Earth. Oh,
that's that's worthy of us. Good job, good job carry patters.
That's exactly what I would have titled that. Yeah, as
long as whatever alien species doesn't immediately get poisoned by
(40:40):
said chemical signatures, I think they would be a pretty
good Yeah, we weren't really trying to do that. Um now, personally,
I wouldn't. I think that worrying about what des send
is almost as moot as the consideration of whether or
not the aliens are going to be able to understand us,
because if the aliens, if the aliens can and understand us,
(41:01):
then it almost doesn't matter what we send anyway, because
whatever people will be around by the time the aliens
receive the message will be so different from what we
are today that we can't even anticipate what's going to
be alien to humans of the future, much less to
a species living off on another planet. So so you're
getting into the kind of moral decision of whether to
(41:23):
whether to send, for example, the car exhaust as a sample,
or or only the beautiful orange blossom, or you know,
whether to if we're sending them an encyclopedia, if we're
going to cut out all the parts about war and
terrible stuff, right right. I mean, there are some people
who say, you know, they the messages they want are
all very positive messages of peace and greeting and uh
(41:46):
and friendship, that kind of thing. And there are others
who say, well, we maybe we should send a more
complete picture of what we humans are with all complete
with our frailties, are failings, the dark side as well
as the light that, and and there's there's debate back
and forth, and I ultimately think it doesn't really matter. Oh,
I just I think it's such an interesting question though.
(42:06):
I mean, it's such a huge difference between saying like, hey, y'all,
we exist and saying, hey, y'all, here's the sum of
all of our knowledge, here's our weaknesses, um, and here's
the really terrible stuff that we've done to each other
a whole bunch over the course of history. Yeah, I mean,
it depends on how you what kind of information you
(42:31):
decided to send. If you're trying to send something about
the history of humanity, it's not necessarily at the zoomed
out view a very pretty picture. Well, in a large
law census, it's not. But I mean, there are a
lot of things that you could include about just general
progress that are pretty amazing. The the the strength of
the human intellect is a really incredible story. But the
(42:55):
the ultimate thing I keep coming back to is that
you're talking about tens of thousands of years into the
future before the message is even received. The people. The people,
if there are people, so if there are humans at
that at that time, are going to be fundamentally different
from the way you and I are right now. We're
talking about more time than has been in the recorded
(43:15):
history of humans, and with things changing as as quickly
as they do, I don't think that it will be
pertinent to whatever people are alive at that point, much
less any point when an alien species decides to respond back. Right.
This is touched on by Albert A. Harrison of U. C.
Davis in the presentation he gives, which is about the
(43:36):
fact that when you're when you're sending a message to
an alien species, you're sending a time capsule. You know,
when it reaches them, it's not going to be about
Earth's present it's about Earth's past. It's it's almost a
point of vanity, I would say, of whether or not
we're including the bad stuff along with the good, because
it's it's it's it's the equivalent of intergalactically speaking, creating
(43:58):
a an okay Cupid profile and and just deciding what
you want to put on it. This one picture makes
me look awesome, I'd say. For that reason, I'm definitely
on the side of of let's be real. I mean,
you don't want to start a conversation spanning perhaps hundreds
of thousands of years on a note of deception. Well, again,
(44:20):
it might be a moot thing by the time the
message gets there. Sure, Sure, I mean I mean that
that too. I mean, you know, the humans who would
possibly receive a message back at least fifty thousand years
in the future, whatever it happens to be, um would
probably think that we're just as gross as those aliens.
They might, they might. They might not even know what
(44:40):
the aliens are referring to, because we have no way
of knowing if there if their history is going to
be at all accurate totally, But here's the question, what
do we send? I mean, we're talking about sort of
the tonal approach of the say what is the actual thing?
Do you send them the Encyclopedia Britannica, What is the thing?
(45:01):
I really liked? Um Dr Seth show stack Dr I'm
going to go with that pronunciation. Yes, who is the
senior astronomer and director of the Center for Seti Research.
Um suggested that we send everything the whole Internet actually
UM or or a very large part of it at
the very least. He He argues that since it's that
(45:22):
the Internet is so wide ranging and also redundant at
the same time, UM, that it would be the most
likely thing to help aliens understand us. I do think
that it's a tragedy that fifty years into the future
humans and aliens are going to go to war because
four chan I would declare war on us for fortuneably.
(45:44):
I'm sorry, fortune I. I don't really mean that. I
love you. No, No, I mean it's I think it's
a beautiful idea, honestly, because it's such a sum and
a breadth of humanity. I agree with it. I mean,
you know, practicality aside the idea of whether or not
this is actually ever going to have any any practical outcome. Um,
(46:06):
and it may not. I think it's a worthy endeavor,
and I also think that if you're gonna do it,
you go whole hog. I agree with both of you
that that all this information needs to be conveyed because
that is who we are. And if if the purpose
of this is to say we are here, this is
who we are, and this is what we're all about,
then you've got to include everything. You can't just do
(46:27):
the the pretty roses and everything what happens in You
don't want to get to the first state and have
them say you're not what you look like. What if
they were to show up? What if they were to
show up. Let's say let's say this. I'm going to
take this semi positively. Let's say that the aliens show
up many hundreds of thousands of years from now, and
by then we as a species have left Earth and
(46:49):
what is left behind is a shell of what was there.
They're going to wonder, how did this happen based upon
this picture we received where everything was really awesome. It's
some other alien species get here before us and wipe
them out. No, we pretty much to ourselves. We just
left that out of the profile, in which case they
(47:09):
would create a new species of intelligent robots to populate
our shell of planet, turn it back into a nice place,
and then create a new human race that was never
aware of the one that came before. And there's the
premise for your new movies. And they leave behind one
Rosetta stone and they Okay, Well, I wanted to finish
on one last note, which is that after the conference,
(47:31):
Dr Seth show Stack wrote a peace in the Huffington
Post that had some sort of post conference reflections that
I thought were interesting, and the main one he said
it was sort of emerged as a late motif of
the conference, which was avoid anthropocentrism. It's tough to do
because it's the only thing we have. Humanity is the
only intelligence we we know about, and it's it's the
(47:54):
hardest thing, but we also recognize it's the most important thing.
You've got to rem ember to think these are not humans,
these are not humans. But how do you do that? Yeah? Now,
how do you do that and still do any meaningful action? Yeah?
It's it's, by its very nature a very difficult thing.
And uh, you know, but it's cool to have these
(48:16):
thought experiments because, like I said, if nothing else, we
start to push forward everything from our own understanding of
us as a species to technology as well. Obviously, what
we should send is the movie Space Jam. You want
to declare hostilities towards an alien race, I think the
best way to give the the aliens a sense of
(48:37):
what humanity is like would be to send them Space
Jam and Cop and a half. I look, I've seen
Star Trek the Next Generation, and I'm perfectly aware that
sending aliens our media is not the best way to
introduce us to them, because it will all end in
some bizarre holiday experiment where they think that pulp novels
were real. But they didn't send Space Jam. We send
(49:00):
the wrong thing. Whereas I've seen Galaxy Quest, and I
know that by sending aliens are pop culture, we can
to invade us because of our basketball prowess. I think
we need to send them Theodore Rex starring Whoopi Goldberg.
That's my own personal opinion. I think that this is
precisely why neither of you are in charge of this
kind of thing. Very likely so so, this has been
(49:23):
largely a philosophical discussion and in some cases of debate,
which is awesome. That's one of the reasons why. I
like that we have multiple hosts for the show so
that we can actually have a discussion and not just
a This is the part where I recite the things
that we have researched. Um, it's good and and I
really have enjoyed it. It was also a real mind
bender of a topic because it forces you to sit
(49:45):
there and say, well, how do I think about not
being human? But it's it's the sort of thing we
love to tackle. So guys, if you out there have
suggestions for other topics that are also real mind benders,
you should let us know. Send us a message our
email addresses fw Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
or drop us a line on Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook.
(50:06):
Twitter and Google Plus we are f W Thinking. Just
search f W Thinking and Facebook will pop right up.
Leave your message, let's know what you think. Maybe you
have you want to weigh in on this alien communication topic.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Tell us
and we will talk to you again really soon. For
(50:27):
more on this topic in the future of technology, I'll
visit Forward Thinking dot com. H brought to you by Toyota.
Let's go places
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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