First Contact: Life Beyond Earth
On the 15th of August 1977, Ohio State University's radio telescope Big Ear was listening to the apparent emptiness of the cosmos, as it did every other day. The great silence, as it is often called, persisted, disturbed only by the noisy residents of Earth or the galactic star shows of solar births and ultimately their inevitable explosive deaths. That day, however, their telescope would receive a rather strange signal as it pointed towards the constellation Sagittarius. It wasn't similar to any signal they had received in the past. The signal only lasted for 72 seconds, and it has never been detected since.
Many attempts have been made to explain the origins of the signal, including suggesting that it was man-made. Its non-random nature strongly suggested that the signal could be of artificial origin, which led people to believe that the signal might be from another intelligent civilization. Although we don't have any further evidence about the signal, despite numerous attempts to redetect it, the Wow! signal remains unexplained to this day. It is the closest humanity has ever come to communicating with another potentially intelligent life form. For all we know, that could have been our only chance.
This really makes you wonder, if we came in contact with an extraterrestrial life form, how would we communicate with them? And the better question is, should we even try? Let's start by answering the last question first: should we even try to contact an extraterrestrial and possibly intelligent life form? Historically speaking, at least, the relationships between discoverers and the discovered haven't gone very well. Those that embark on the risk of exploration are often technologically superior, and the natives they discover stand no chance of being able to defend themselves.
An intelligent life form that is able to make the interstellar journey to Earth from a distant galaxy is orders of magnitude more advanced than we are as a species. Given that superiority, we will be essentially at their mercy. Whether they choose to be hostile or friendly is completely up to them. This was the exact worry of Stephen Hawking. But these warnings are possibly too little too late. You see, with televisions and satellite communications, we've been sending our signals for over 70 years at this point. Knowingly or not, we've been buzzing our planetary sirens for a long, long time. We've been loud and clear about where we are, and so it's not necessarily going to make much of a difference if some other civilization is actually listening.
Perhaps a better course of action would be to try and make sure that the signals we do end up sending are the right ones—ones that convey our non-hostility and accurately represent who we are. Besides, it could be argued that a civilization that is so advanced that it can reach other stars is simply beyond the idea of aggression. The aggression we exhibit evolved as a trait because it helps us find and protect resources when they're limited. While an extraterrestrial civilization should have the same problems during its infancy, by the time it can make a journey to a different star, it's likely to have figured out practically an infinite source of energy.
It's pretty unlikely that a civilization that is struggling to make ends meet will have the resources to travel light years to another planet. But how should we send our messages? Well, the Wow! signal from earlier is a good place to start. The wavelength of this radio signal, roughly 21 centimeters, has been used to map the universe. It's used as such because hydrogen gas is by far the most abundant element in the universe. This 21-centimeter wavelength is known as the hydrogen line. It is everywhere in the universe, and so the electromagnetic radiation it emits when its energy state changes is something very useful to astronomers.
The hope is that technologically advanced civilizations will see a similar significance for 21-centimeter signals and recognize them when they're sent. Twenty-one centimeters is also used as a unit of measurement in plaques and other interstellar messages that are hurtling through space as we speak. But more on that at a later time. Once the mode of the message has been figured out, we have to decide what that message will contain.
Here we need to remind ourselves once again that the civilization we're trying to talk to could be a far superior one than our own. That would give us a greater freedom in what we want to say in the message since they should be able to crack the code, if you will. Some of the messages that have already been sent, including the famous Arecibo message with a plaque that the Voyager crafts are currently carrying, are very complicated. These messages are subjective; they can be interpreted in many ways. You could have people from all around the world each come to different conclusions.
So if even humans can agree upon what's being said, the very species that made the message, then how can we expect another species to understand it? Additionally, what is it to say that the extraterrestrial civilization shares our visual senses or any of our senses, for that matter? What is it to say that the images of smiling people in the plaques of Voyager 1 and 2 are not hostile signs of aggression in another planet at another time? Our tendency to be so centered around the human experience can really get in the way.
To eliminate these problems, our messages should be objectively universal. It should make no Earth-centric assumptions about the experiences of our galactic neighbors. At least to start, crafting a message for an alien species is a good exercise for humanity to truly understand who we are. So far, only math and maybe some branches of science seem to be truly universal, meaning their contents seem to be true everywhere we look. The Pythagorean theorem holds as well on Earth as it does anywhere else in the universe, as far as we know. Things like this are our best bet to initiate communication with a civilization with which we share nothing else in common.
The message should also be as non-random as possible, which sounds weird. It should be repetitive so that the chances of detection are increased, and it should also be as time-independent as possible. Space is massive. Interstellar distances mean it could take thousands of years for them to reply. A timeline in which the Earth’s inhabitants may change drastically—even light speed is pretty slow in the grand scheme of things. These and other such details need to be part of a protocol that can be used when sending messages to other stars and beyond.
We also need to figure out who, when, and what gets to represent us all in humanity's most important text message. At the moment, these protocols have no recognition in national or international law. But what if they show up right on our doorstep? What if they were already listening in on our very first television broadcasts and radio signals and have been en route ever since? Is there a post-detection protocol? Who does what, and who gets to decide? Theoretically, such a post-detection protocol would fall under the review of SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and they do have one.
The movie Arrival portrays this very scenario: 12 UFOs land in 12 different parts of the world, and governments are left scrambling to make sense of it all and respond. In such a scenario, the front line would be composed of not soldiers and tanks, but rather cryptologists trying to decode or decipher whatever messages are being exchanged. As the movie depicts, xenolinguistics or alien language would be the focal point in the days after first contact.
Deciphering an alien language would be especially hard, if not impossible, since they might not have the natural sense of grammar and structure that our languages do. Another facet of first contact would be the risk of a viral infection, both to us and to them, whoever they may be. Of course, they would need to be biochemically similar to us for a transmission to occur and cause harm. But as long as there is a possibility, a first contact would most likely initiate a lockdown of the region in which it took place. If we can't even be immune to the viruses on Earth, the planet we evolved to live on, we shouldn't try our luck with viruses from another planet.
The political impacts of first contact would be immense. It would usher in a new era for humanity, and to be able to claim such an achievement would be the first thing on every country's political agenda. This could make the first contact a destabilizing force in the world. Religions will be questioned, and so will science. The presence of just one extraterrestrial species will significantly change the probability of others being out there too and alter our understanding of life forever. We will remember history differently—time before and after first contact.
The lack of an internationally ratified protocol with the force of law behind it means every country is left on its own on how to react. That's bad. The apparent reward for an individual country or person to be the first is far greater than the reward for a level-headed approach, even though it could likely end in the extinction of the human race. We need a post-detection protocol, but it's not that easy. Countries that worked together in the past may not work together now. Russia and the United States have worked rather seamlessly, or so it would seem, in their space missions, especially during the long periods in which America couldn't fly to the International Space Station.
On the other hand, if you look at global efforts aimed at denuclearization, it's a different story. So if an international protocol is so important, why doesn't one exist? Well, it has to do with how real the problem seems. It just doesn't seem very likely that we will encounter another life form. Earth's to-do list is quite full at the moment. But I just don't understand how countries that are willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to create the next big telescope can be so oblivious to the possibility of actually finding something. These technological efforts seem less focused on uncovering the truths of the universe and more on winning the next race for global supremacy.
There are other scenarios to consider too. For example, what if the other species is less intelligent than us? Well, in that slightly less interesting case, we'll likely be the ones to make the discovery, and we'll get to call the shots. What if they are exactly as intelligent as us? Humans, probabilistically speaking, this is the most specific of all the scenarios and is therefore the least likely. Then again, by the time we communicate with each other and receive replies, one or even both species might be extinct.
Another creepy possibility is that of past visitations. What if we have been visited before, and what if we've been observed ever since? The silence at the heart of the Fermi paradox may reflect stealth, not absence. These are all possibilities that we have to consider in our search for extraterrestrials. As exceedingly rare as it may seem, the quest for other life forms, the desire to answer the question "Are we alone?" is incredibly strong—so strong, in fact, that humanity seems to keep looking for it, even if it leads to its own demise.
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