Interstellar Messaging: Five Questions for a Galactic Visitor

A creative writing course, funded by the Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium, "Interstellar Message Composition," is the first class to enlist creative writers in a potential cosmic conversation.  The course was designed to fill a practical – if potentially theoretical – need. "We've thought a lot about how we might communicate with other worlds, but we haven't thought much about what we'd actually say," says Lockwood, a professor of natural science and humanities.

The mind-bending exercises inspired one student to sculpt an alien cellphone. Perhaps their first call should be to Steve Jobs.

The students came up with five questions for an interplanetary visitor: "If you have fear, what do you fear? What is the ultimate purpose of your species' life? How can we extend the longevity of our civilization? What makes you and your kind happy? What should we know?" Not only did students create the questions, they had to answer them as well.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the planet there has been some outrage over attempts to contact intelligent aliens, where instead of hiding in the corner and listening real hard some astronomers beamed intense directional messages up up and away.  Critics decried these actions as dangerous, though their fears reveal more about us than any eventual ETs.  They assume that they would be similar to humanity, so their first response to finding a more primitive culture would be to exploit the hell out of it.  While such a fate might be pleasingly ironic (for anyone who isn't human, at least), others contend that any species that can make the journey here has advanced to a point where their goals are rather higher-minded than "Shoot us".

Dr Alexander Zaitzev, of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, doesn't think much of these worries either way.  A proponent of METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), in a recent paper he shows that the odds of one of the METI messages being detected is a millionth of that due to powerful radar pulses regularly used in astronomical investigation.  Though whether writing a paper saying "This METI thing we're doing has only a tiny chance of working" is overall a good idea remains to be seen.  An important point is that METI represents an intentional will to make contact, rather than the accidental alien interception of some random radiation from Earth - the difference between saying "Hello!" and just being a suspicious strange noise late at night.

Michelle Nijhuis in her article in the May 15th edition of the Christain Science Monitor notes that humans have dreamed about conversing with extraterrestrials for centuries: "We've considered lighting kerosene-filled canals in the Sahara Desert; we've listened for radio signals from Mars; and we've sent NASA spacecraft aloft with representations of human beings and the solar system, and recordings of the Brandenburg Concerto and 'Johnny B. Goode'."

As powerful space-based telescopes allow astronomers to study stars in greater numbers and at greater distances, the chances of running into another civilization are better than ever.

"It could be tomorrow that we'll need to be ready to decide if we should reply," reported Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition for the nonprofit SETI  Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

Dr. Vakoch, who advises and has visited Lockwood's class, says decisions about whether and how to answer shouldn't be made by researchers alone. "I think it's really critical to have people start thinking about it – and it makes sense to start with writers," he says. "These are people who are really trying to express the human condition."

In Lockwood's classroom, Nijhuis reports, questions are asked about how might extraterrestrials communicate? "Would they be able to see and hear, or only see, or have a sense completely foreign to us? Might they have technology able to translate human language, or would they better understand messages written in mathematical patterns, or with an extremely limited vocabulary?"

Lockwood, who trained originally as an entomologist, found that the class drew on all his disparate interests. "Some insects can see into the ultraviolet spectrum, and can't see red light – others are acutely sensitive to odors, while we're basically blind to odors. Their world is not our world, and in some ways that primed me to be very interested in what it is to think and understand in a way that's radically different from our own."

Most of the objections to contacting aliens are weak under close examination.  We can't suddenly decide to hide after fifty years of pumping electromagnetic radiation into space without rhyme or reason - in fact, we'd better hope that an advanced civilization doesn't catch an episode of "American Idol" and just vaporize us outright.  Suddenly keeping quiet would be like a drunk boyfriend carefully taking off his shoes after knocking over a bookshelf on his way to the bedroom.

Then there's the assumption that aliens would have the same kind of technology we do - despite the extremely obvious fact that our technology can't actually get to other planets.  Any attempt to mask radio emissions will likely look like cavemen closing their eyes to hide from satellite imaging.

The simple fact is that certain people have always opposed progress while other, better people have driven it.  "Experts" decried boiled water as unhealthy compared the vital stuff straight from the river, cursed antibiotics as a temporary placebo, and confidently declared that computers were nothing but expensive toys.  As an intelligent species we must make every effort to contact anyone or thing we can - and if you don't like it, there are some lovely caves you can move back to.

Posted by Casey Kazan with Luke McKinney.

Related Galaxy posts:

"The Great Silence" -A Galaxy Insight
Babelfish -Universal Translator Will Allow ET to Speak English
The 1.5 Gigayear Technology Gap Advanced Civilizations in the Universe -A Galaxy Insight
GAIA -Mapping the Family Tree of the Milky Way
The "Hubble Effect" -A Galaxy Insight
Stanley Kubrick & the Mythology of Extraterrestrial Life -A Galaxy Insight
James Cameron & Arthur C Clarke on 2001 A Space Odyssey
New Technologies & the Search for Extraterrestrial Life -A Galaxy Insight
NASA's "New Worlds Observer" Will be Able to Spot Oceans, Continents and Clouds on Small Rocky Planets
MIT Asks: How Would Extraterrestrial Astronomers Study Earth?
Harvard-Smithsonian Scientists Zero In On Key Sign of Habitable Worlds

Source link:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0515/p20s01-woam.html?page=2
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/05/20/what-would-you-say-to-et/

Comments

[callum hogg]

i love it how the 1st question is If you have fear, what do you fear? GO AMERICA!

[Scott Smith]

Is it presumptive to think visiting cultures would find our bellicose natures and barbaric political schemes interesting!?

[crissysdad]

After I read Charles Stross's "Accelerando", all I thought we would get from SETI was the equivalent of E-mail spam and ads for anti-impotency pills (like we need help reproducing, 6x10^9 of us).
Could just listening be the best strategy?
DavRos

[Alkhemist]

Amazing. "...certain people have always opposed progress while other, better people have driven it." "Better"?? I just wish we could get over our constant need to put others down who don't agree with our point of view.

I love the first question, too: "What do you FEAR?" Typical Americans, looking for a weakness before even saying "Hello!" Any race that is more intelligent than we are would most likely refuse to respond.