And so today, we're going to talk about what
happens if and when intelligent life contacts us. So what would that be like, what should
we say, will we understand what they're saying? So to help us discuss this, our first guest
is an anthropologist at York University. And she researches, amongst many other things,
the evolution of intelligence, the colonization of space. She's collaborated with The NASA
Astrobiology Institute, the SETI Institute, and the 100-Year Starship Program. Please
welcome Kathryn Denning! Our next guest is an astronomer at Columbia
University, where he leads the Cool Worlds lab. His research team is focused on discovering
new planets and moons. Please welcome David Kipping!
Also joining us, we have a philosopher from Barnard College, which is at Columbia University.
She specializes in the philosophy of language, and is the co-founder and co-organizer of
PhLip, an annual conference that brings together philosophers and linguists from all over the
world. Please welcome Karen Lewis! And our final guest is a biophysicist, and
head of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at Rockefeller University. Among many things,
he studies the brains and communication skills of dolphins, which is kind of like an alien
species. So he's an expert in deciphering alien languages. Please welcome Marcelo Magnasco!
So David, catch us up to speed on the ways in which science is currently searching for
intelligent life. Sure. So probably the most famous program
that's trying to look for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations is called SETI. S. E. T. I.,
that's the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And traditionally, ever since Frank Drake
first started this project, I think back in the 1960's with a famous project called Project
Ozma, they started listening for radio signals, essentially hoping that somebody was transmitting
our direction. And that makes a lot of sense. Radio, which is a form of electromagnetic
radiation, travels at the speed of light. So it's the fastest form of communication,
and it's very cheap to produce and receive. So it kind of makes sense, as a way to look.
More recently, scientists, and I guess you might bunch me in with this group, have been
thinking about other ways that you might be able to reveal the presence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, one of which might be that they are not intending to tell us that they
are here. They're not deliberately messaging us, but maybe we can still tell that they
are there by virtue of their technologies. Maybe they're building some giant alien engineering
megastructure, and we might be able to see them in their act of building that, or maybe
see the waste heat, for instance, from the giant machines they're using. So recently,
both of those approaches have emerged as sort of the main avenues we're using.
And how do you see if someone is trying to build this weird, alien structure, you know,
thousands of miles away? Yeah, that's a good question. It's almost
like Arthur C. Clarke would say that such an advanced civilization would be indistinguishable
from magic, in a way. So how on Earth can you look for something which could essentially
be magic? And that's kind of what, in a way, we do. We look for things which are unnatural.
So we think we understand how stars work. We think we understand how planets are built
around planetary systems, and we look for stuff that essentially just cannot be explained
by any other means. There's a very famous type of signal that
we look for called a Dyson Sphere, maybe some of you have heard of that before. Freeman
Dyson famously proposed that in the 1960s, and it's essentially saying: well, you know,
if energy growth continues at 2% per year, which is about how energy growth has been
increasing over the last few decades, eventually in the year 3500 or something if you extrapolate
it, we would need the energy from the entire Sun. So how do you take the entire energy
of a star? You build a shell around it. So we could maybe look for these giant shells
built around stars. So you won't see the starlight because it's been blocked out, but you would
see all of the waste heat that they were generating. So they can't get around the laws of thermodynamics,
hopefully. If they can beat thermodynamics, then basically we have no idea about how physics
works at all. And if they have to obey thermodynamics, then they should emit, still, some waste heat
energy. And we look for the heat signature of stars which do not appear in visible light,
but appear in infrared. And that would be a giveaway that somebody is extracting all
of the light energy, and doing something with it. So that's a type of signature that we
can look for. Any luck so far?
No, actually, but people have looked. So there's been about 100 thousand nearby stars which
have been surveyed for Dyson Spheres, and about 100 thousand galaxies which have been
surveyed. And so far, there's no conclusive evidence of such a civilization. Which in
a way, is kind of depressing. It means that theses super-advanced civilizations, if they
exist, they don't do that very often. They don't use entire stellar outputs of stars.
Yeah. So we're not just, as a species, in terms
of trying to find alien life, we're not just searching for it actively. We're also sending
messages. We're broadcasting. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Sure. So there's an institute called METI Institute, so Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Institute. It's an outgrowth of a thread that was kind of present in SETI from the beginning,
which was the idea that one way to conduct the experiment, instead of just listening,
listening, listening, go, “Yoohoo,” and see if anybody answers.
So there's a pretty major division, I would say, within the world of SETI on that subject.
Some people are very firmly of the opinion that we should just listen, not broadcast.
Others say, “Look. If there's anything out there to be worried about, chances are it
knows we're here already. So we may as well say 'hello.'” Really, quite different sets
of opinions on that, and some friction. And where do you sit on this? And it's quite
controversial the things that go down. It is quite controversial, and it's related
to the question of risk. I should say, as an anthropologist rather than a person who
is an astronomer, or somebody composing messages to transmit, I kind of study the debate. So
I'm going to be annoyingly agnostic on this one, as well, and not commit. What I like
to do instead is kind of look at this question for those who say, in the public in particular,
that we should transmit, why are they saying that? What are their interests, and what are
their concerns? And for those who say we shouldn't transmit, what are their reasons? And then
it all kind of spins out into this larger question about, “Okay, well we all share
this planet together. How do we decide these things?” So it kind of spins quickly into
a question of public-scientist relationships, and different camps on Earth, and all of that.
So if we do ... Say SETI does pick up a signal, David, what kind of signal are we likely to
get? Well, that's a hard question to answer. It
could be, classically, the signal that people have been looking for is just a high-powered,
narrow frequency. Narrow bandpass-range radio transmission. But that's all it is. It's just
like a pulse. This star essentially appears very bright when you look at the specific
wavelength of light, which corresponds to radio.
Typically, the frequencies they look at is something called The Water-Hole. That is a
frequency space in the universe which is naturally very quiet. So stars produce radio waves,
quasars produce radio waves, galaxies emit plenty of radio. So you have to choose a frequency
where the universe is not noisy. So there's this one particular bandpass called The Water-Hole
that, collectively, SETI scientists have been sort of honing in on. And if you saw a very
high-powered frequency that was way above the cosmic background noise, then you would
say, “Okay, maybe there's something interesting here.”
But we've seen those. Actually, SETI@home, which is essentially this screensaver you
can download and it processes through data that SETI have collected, sees about 72 signals
like that per day, on average. So there are 72 high-powered frequencies above the background
noise, and most of them are just terrestrial interference. So this is just, you know, our
own radio transmitters bouncing off the atmosphere and coming back down, or satellites in space,
military satellites, even. And it's very difficult to go through each one of those and figure
out is this genuinely something alien, or is this something just that was interfering.
So you know, one of the dreams for a long time of SETI has been: what if you could put
a radio telescope on the back of the Moon, on the far side of the Moon? You wouldn't
get any of the radio interference from the Earth whatsoever. So it'd be a very, very
quiet region, and you just have the cosmos to deal with and no human interference. So
if we could build any kind of radio telescope for SETI, that'd probably be the radio telescope
that'd we'd want and then maybe we would have a much clearer view of these things.
So say we did get a signal that wasn't terrestrial interference, Karen, would we be able to interpret
it? You're the linguist. Okay, well, that's a great question. So I
think there are a lot of challenges in interpreting a signal. First of all, it's a matter of recognizing
the signal as communicative in the first place, right? We don't want to try ... I mean, maybe
there's other ways to tell that it's evidence that there's intelligent life out there, right?
If it's evidence of technology that they couldn't have if they weren't intelligent. That would
be a non-linguistic way of communicating that there is intelligent life. But if you think,
“Okay, there's a signal, and it's a piece of language, and they want to communicate
something,” how do we even figure out that something's trying to be communicative in
the first place? So if you think about what a language is,
a language is a symbolic system, first of all. Meaning, however you encode it, whether
there is sort of sounds that are coming out of my mouth right now, or a writing system,
or a signing system, or braille, or anything like that, those are just ... Say the sounds
that are coming out of my mouth, they're just sounds, but they encode certain meaning. Other
sounds don't encode meaning. And some are very complex and don't encode meaning. For
example, think of a song, or something like that. Music is made of notes, but the notes
don't pick out, or refer to a particular thing in the world. So the first thing is just recognizing
that there's a symbolic system here, rather than something else that occurs in nature,
something that's not suppose to have meaning at all.
And second of all, the way language works, what makes in linguistic is that the speaker
or the sender wanted to communicate something with that message, and we have to figure what
they wanted to communicate. If it's just this random noise that came off into the universe,
then we're trying to interpret something that's not interpretable. So the first thing is just
trying to figure out whether this is something we should be interpreting in the first place.
The next challenge is, of course, if we think it is something we should be interpreting,
is how to decode that. And I think there are challenges in all sorts of levels. One, we
have to figure out just what the individual ... so every language is made up of building
blocks of meaning. So for example if I just say something simple like, “This chair is
red and white,” there's the words in a sentence that are building blocks. There's meaning.
So we want to figure out something like “chair,” where it refers to this sort of thing.
And then there's the syntax, the grammar, how they form together. So when I say, “This
chair is red and white,” predicating the properties of being white and red of the chair,
and we figure that out because we know the grammar of English. So whatever the communication
we have, if it's anything linguistic, it's going to have these building blocks of meaning,
and a way that they go together to communicate a message. And we're going to have to figure
out both what those building blocks refer to, and then, how they click together to make
a message. And that's even furthermore going to be complicated because, chances are, the
aliens have very different things they want to talk about than we do. So they're not probably
going to be talking about chairs, or grandparents, or people.
Internet bubbles. Or internet bubbles, or anything like that.
So even sort of searching for what these building blocks could refer to is really hard, because
chances are it's going to be sort of outside of our concepts. And so, even if somehow we
decode that a certain word refers to something, we have a hypothesis of what sort of thing
it refers to, we're not going to have any sense of sort of what role does that thing
play in their society. Just as if we sent messages about chairs. Even if somehow they
could figure out the word “chair” referred to this sort of thing, they have no idea what
a chair is really, or what role it plays in our society. So there's this sort of ... Even
if you can, somehow, and I doubt you can, get through all those first layers, you're
going to have at the end, even if you somehow decode the message in a certain sense, you're
not really going to understand the message. And if I can just add something to that. In
terms of trying to translate these messages, it maybe seems to us right now like it's a
long way off that we'd be able to do that. So maybe the advanced civilization might anticipate
that, and they might not actually attempt to send, necessarily, a specific message,
but just a broadcast that they are, in the first case, just intelligent. So maybe you
could just send a prime number sequence. So just a series of, you know, like morse code
almost like, “beep, beep-beep, beep-beep-beep,” and just send the series of prime numbers.
And then at least we would know that there's no way that that was a natural process. There's
nothing in nature that just spits out prime numbers. So you might not be able to necessarily
tell how to build some giant machine like in Contact, the 1997 film, but you might at
least be able to say, “Hey there's definitely somebody smart, there, because that shouldn't
happen naturally." And David, at the moment we're just kind of
... The fun world we live in as we get a signal from far away, how far away are we talking
here? What is the closest that intelligent life could currently be based on how much
we've scanned the universe so far? Yeah, sure. So we do ... I mean, one of the
revolutions of the past 10-20 years in astronomy has been the discovery of all of these planets
in our solar neighborhood and beyond. The galaxy is about a hundred thousand light-years
across, to give you some sense of scale, and we have surveyed fairly well within about,
I'd say, about two thousand light-years of the Sun looking for planets. And we now know
that most stars have planetary systems around them, and something like 10% of those stars,
Sun-like stars, have also Earth-like planets around them. So there is no shortage of Earth-like
planets, some order of tens of billions, likely, in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.
The nearest example is probably our nearest star, actually. Proxima Centauri is the nearest
star, you can't actually see it in the sky because it's too faint. It's a red dwarf star,
much smaller than the Sun. But it is the nearest star. It's just four light-years away, and
we now know that it has an Earth-like planet around it. Whether that planet truly is Earth-like,
though, you know, does it actually have a habitable biosphere around it, does it have
liquid water on it? We don't know. We just know there's a planet there that is essentially
the same mass as the Earth, and it has, in principle, the right distance from the star
that it could have liquid water. Okay, so say that is where intelligent life
is, a mere four light-years away. So if they had sent us a signal, how long ago would they
have sent that signal? So if they're continuously broadcasting it,
then we would be able to see it at anytime. All we would have to do is just look up, and
we'd be able to see it. But when did they make the call?
It would be four years. I mean, if it's four light-years, then radio, just like light,
travels at the speed of light. So it would take four years for backwoods communication.
So every text message we would send them, there would be ... Essentially, we would send
it, it would take four years to get there, and then another four years to come back.
So there would be an eight-year turnaround time on communication for us to get a reply
when send a message back. So that makes it very possible that we could
have a little nice back-and-forth, but what happens if intelligent life is thousands of
years away? Thousands of light-years away. Yeah, that's when it gets hard, and this is
where METI, the messaging aspect is somewhat limited because we've only been producing
radio waves for what? A hundred years, would you say? Something like that. So only a hundred
light-year bubble around the Earth, actually, would be aware of our radio transmissions.
Everybody else in the Milky Way, up to a hundred thousand light-years away, they might be able
to tell there's a habitable planet here, but they wouldn't know that we were producing
radio waves because there hasn't been enough time for those radio waves to have reached
them yet. So yeah, certainly when you look at the grander scale of the Milky Way, it's
a very limited volume of the Milky Way that would certainly know that we were producing
radio emissions. So Kathryn, tell us: if we did get a signal
that was from a planet thousands of light-years away, how do we know that civilization is
still existing? We don't. So I mean, that's one of the really
difficult things. So let's assume a signal does come in, and I think everything that
you've said in terms of the content et cetera is super important, and they're all sort of
facets of the search is conducted that means that a signal would be somewhat averaged out,
and so a lot of the content would simply drop out. So first of all, I think it's important
to realize that content, if it is there, would be difficult to decipher.
And so anything that would conceivably tell us kind of the status of that civilization,
we just really, actually, wouldn't have access to. So let's say that we do get a signal,
it's only one as opposed ... I mean, observations would of course continue to see if there is
a steady stream or something like that, but let's say that a signal comes in. We would
really have a difficult time, I think, deciding whether than civilization or that society,
let's use that word instead, perhaps, is extant or extinct. And then that kind of changes
the equation in some ways. There's been a couple of great science fiction stories, for
example, about transmissions from an alien society, but basically they're just transmitting
to say , "Goodbye, we're dying." How does that make us feel better? I don't know.
Is there anyway that we can study societies on Earth to know? Like, does society have
a lifespan, and then we just build nuclear weapons, and eventually kill ourselves?
Right, okay. Great question. When Carl Sagan was writing about the lifetimes
of technological civilizations, he was very concerned about our own. So for example, when
Cosmos came out in 1980, he was kind of fighting a battle on the side at the same time, a really,
really, important one, regarding the effects of nuclear winter, and the fact that a nuclear
war isn't winnable. So he was very preoccupied with at that time with this idea of our technological
adolescence. You know, how do we, as a global society, deal with the fact that we've achieved
the capacity to destroy ourselves? And he was hoping that if we find a signal from the
great beyond, that if would be proof that another civilization has survived this technological
adolescence, and has kind of come out the other side and that maybe they could teach
us something about how to be a sustainable, ideally peaceful, civilization.
But the thing is, you know, if we're trying to understand civilizations out there from
civilizations here ... Personally, my opinion as an anthropologist is that: we can speculate
all we like about alien sociology, but it is speculation.
But we do. But that's what we're here to do. Well, that's what you're here to do. But actually,
I don't think that we can say anything all that meaningful. So there's kind of been every
theory put forward about, for a civilization to last a long time they would have to be
peaceful. Others say, “No, they would just have to be hyper aggressive and wipe everybody
out.” The problem is is that we don't have the data to distinguish between those possibilities
at this time. And so if a detection is achieved, we won't
actually know for sure what that means, and you'll have kind of every conceivable specialty
on Earth saying, “Well, this means this, and this means this.” But we won't actually
know. So then that comes into these questions about, well, what do you want to believe?
And how much do you want to believe it? That kind of is a nice lead-in to ... Let's
take this alien adventure into phase two. So say we don't just get a signal, but the
alien spaceship arrives here, and they come out. We're going to also shift this conversation
into a couple of gears, but Marcelo, let's spend some time talk about your research.
You essentially talk to an alien species, if you will, dolphins.
Yes, sort of. So after decades of research, because when
these aliens come we're going to want to communicate with them. After decades of research, how
well can we communicate with dolphins? Well, I would say not really that well, at
all. In my particular case, I studied dolphins 5 years ago thinking that it was assumed that
we would be able to have an understanding of at least whether or not they have something,
a communication system, approaching the complexity of human language. And 5 years later, I can
tell you that I still don't have an idea. It's remarkably difficult to understand all
of these issues. The moment you step away from, anthropomorphism, right? I mean, it's
very easy to imagine that you can communicate with the great apes, which we have so much
in common. But the moment you step into a completely different physical environment,
like water ... Trying to communicate with these other animals, okay? There is some extent
to which we understand each other as mammals all do with one another, and some extent to
which we don't. Can you tell me, perhaps, an example of where
maybe you had your best communication with a dolphin after 5 years? Where you really
felt, “Yeah, we're getting somewhere here?" My best communication, okay? So my best communication
was once, we were diving. We were pursuing a group. We had a group of teenage dolphins
off of Belize, and they were just lounging around and horsing with one another. Some
of them were sort of sleeping, a siesta. It was 2 pm. And they were all teenagers, if
I recall correctly. They were all male, and they were just horsing with each other. You
know, teenage style, okay? They were raking their teeth on each other and stuff. And there
was a group of these two teenage dolphins that were going like that. The essential group
of teenagers at the cafeteria that are always together going around, and sneaking up to
everybody else. And we had been following them with helicopter drones, okay? And at
some point the batteries cut out, and I decide: Okay I'm going to jump in the water with the
GoPro, and record from the water because we had been on them for like an hour and a half,
okay? And it was really fascinating, you know, all this display of behavior.
And I get in the water and there's these two teenagers that come around. And dolphins always,
when you're in the water, you hear them well before you can see them.
What sound do they make? So the sounds that dolphins make are a combination
of two very different sounds. One of them is whistle-like, at very high-frequency. It's
sounds like. And a different sound is made by the echolocation clicks. That sounds like.
And they can pulse that at an extremely fast pace, okay? And when they do that, it sounds
like a creaking door, maybe. Like this chair that's creaking, like. Kind of thing. And
so, these two guys were just lounging around, okay? They come around, and they look at me.
They echolocate at me. They turn, and the moment they turn, they start chattering. And
I had the most distinct impression they were laughing at me.
So that's the one time I understood what they were ... I don't know exactly what they were
saying about me, okay? Maybe they didn't like my fins, maybe they thought that my figure
in the water was unshapely and gangly, okay? Or maybe they were commenting on the fact
that having both eyes on the front of the face, instead of the sides, makes me look
like a flounder or something. I don't know, okay?
Maybe that's what first contact will be like. They were definitely laughing at me.
We actually have a video of your research. We have two videos. What if we play ... This
is one of dolphins surfing. Do you want to introduce it?
Yes, I think that the video ... So here we are on a boat, okay? You can see we have two
Gopher balls, and you heard the sounds of the dolphins as they came about right to the
front of the boat. So what you are seeing is the film made from the front of the boat.
Dolphins from, you know, we know from the that they love the boat ride. They love to
surf on the pressure wave on the front of the boat, and this is one of the things that
we're trying study. We're trying to get them to catch their communication
in a very restricted activity, so that by restricting the nature of the activity, we
can correlate what they are doing with their emissions. And we have a better chance at
... Otherwise, language is combinatorial and there is no way can explore all possible combinations
of all possible things, okay? You're never going to be able to fill up a table with all
the combinations. So what we do, in this case, is we try to restrict the kind of behavior
so that the presumably there's a restricted set of words, or verbs, or whatever it is
that they use. So they're unlikely to say, like, “Hey,
let's go to the shore,” if you're in the middle of a-
Yeah, so if they are doing acrobatics, and there is a systematic wave that goes like
every time that one is going to jump over the other one, we have at least proof that
there's a correlation between a given vocal emission and given physical act. Okay? Being
next to the dolphins, we don't believe that there's any way that we can actually figure
out the language if we cannot correlate behavior. That's why I don't think that you would learn
an alien language, at least by listening to a transmission, okay? Because I mean, you
would have to find error curves and means of defining how to transmit the dictionary.
Okay? And what I mean by this, and how do you refer to physical objects if you don't
have a common frame. So you talked about this a little bit, but
what does your knowledge about how much we now understand about how dolphins speak, how
much confidence does that give you that we'll understand what the aliens tell us?
Hmm Doesn't look good, eh?
Well, I mean, we live with dolphins. We have known dolphins for two thousand years, okay?
I mean, go to the Metropolitan Museum, you'll see them all over the Greek wing. You'll see
they were sacred animals in Greece. So I don't know. It doesn't give me great confidence.
If the moment that you step away from certain commonalities ... I mean, the interesting
thing is that dolphins are still mammals, recognizably mammals, and they have a certain
... They are able to recognize gestures and interact with us in ways that I would not
anticipate would necessarily be the case with an alien species, who might not even be made
out of carbon. It might be some gas cloud with, you know, entrails and stuff.
Just a walking fart. Yeah. So who knows what they are, okay? I
mean, the moment you posit, you know, people with limbs and stuff, you're really positing
a lot. Right? And it's interesting, dolphins do not have arms, yet when trainers point
at something, dolphins understand they're pointing at something, and they ran to that,
okay? Even though they don't have means of pointing with hands. So there's all these
commonalities that come from having a common neural substrate. We have brains of an essentially
similar texture, okay? Whatever our engines in our brain that powers motion, that powers
attitudes, they come from a common ground, okay?
And therefore, when we interact together, we understand gestures. Dolphins are very
gestural. You know, there's a lot of nonvocal communication between them, in addition to
the vocal communication, which is a lot. So I don't know, I mean if you work together
with an alien with which you cannot even understand physical gestures, where do you start? I have
no idea. This takes us, what a beautiful segue, Karen,
to the linguist. Where do we start? You are our Amy Adams, sent to the aliens that've
come forth. And they say, "Karen, just sort it out." What are they saying? What other
steps? Walk me through what would you do? What are you gonna do?
Well that was great ... I don't know. I don't know how much we could do. In one sense, the
stuff Marcelo brought up is very relevant. Because so now in this scenario I'm faced
with aliens, so I can get a little bit of sense of what ... Do they resemble something
like a mammal? So, in one sense, chances are the aliens share no kind of similarity to
our brain architecture, to our neuro-architecture. So I can't assume that the way they process
the world is the same as the way I process the world, or they way a dolphin processes
the world. But I could at least maybe see if they have something that looks kind of
like arms, or legs, or sense whether they have vision.
So the first thing I think I would do, and I should say I'm not a field linguist, so
I don't ... I'm not like Amy Adams in the movie, a field linguist, I think, and she
goes out into the field. Those are people who actually go out and talk to people, and
try to figure out how foreign languages work. But I think one thing that I would do, and
one thing that I don't think is highlighted very often is just figure out what their physical
senses are. Like, can they see? Do they see things in roughly the same way? Do they process
vision in roughly the same way we do? Can they hear? At what frequency can they hear?
What kind of sounds, or gestures, or other signals are they emitting? To get a sense
of what kind of modality I'm even going to try to communicate with them.
So to go back to Arrival, Amy Adams decides to start writing in English, which is not,
I think, how I would start, by writing on a whiteboard in English. Because that might
be one of the hardest ways for them to figure out what I was saying to them. And I think
at some point, I don't know if I'm remember this right, but she starts to teach them one
of the first things. It's something like her name, and then that she's walking, which is
a really weird thing to start with. Maybe not the name, but you have to assume that
they have a practice of naming, too, and that they're going to understand what you're doing.
And then, these animals don't walk at all, that she's dealing with in the movie. They're
kind of cephalopods that move through this weird kind of substance, like this.
They did walk, though. They kind of walk. They kind of like-
Shuffle. Shuffle.
Yeah. So I'm not sure. This is just to highlight
that it's not clear what kind of concepts they would have. So it's not clear where you
can start, but I think starting by seeing how they respond to the environment. Just
taking data on sort of what sounds, or images, or other kind of data they emit under what
certain stimuli would be the place to start. Can you give me an example?
Can I give you an example? Yeah. Sure. So just very simply, the idea would be suppose
I take an object like a red square, and I put it in front of them. And then I see if
they say anything. Or if they pick it up, what do they say? And then I can maybe vary
that, like try a red ball. And then, if something is in common ... I mean, this is a very toy
example because it would take a lot more data than this. But if they something in common,
maybe they're picking up on red. And then pick at something else that's the same shape
as the cube, but a different color. And if there's something in common that they emitted
with the first thing, then maybe they were talking about the shape. So maybe this gives
me some indication of what their language is like, and some indication of if they're
picking up on color, or shape, or something like that.
Tell me about this idea that David had suggested with using math. Prime numbers, was the example.
Yeah. What do you think of this idea? What if we
just started, you know- So there's two things to think about when
using math. So some people talk about ... His idea of using just a sequence of prime numbers,
I think for that, the question is: what do you want to do in communicating? Now, if you
want to just indicate that there's intelligent life here, then I think that might be a good
way to go. Alright, because if it's true that prime numbers don't occur in nature, you might
be showing: here's some sort of signal that there's something non-natural here, something
that had to be produced by an intelligent species.
They're not going to be in particularly impressed, are they? They're not going to be like, "Whoa,
they're sending me prime numbers, these humans!" Yeah, but if you want to do more than just
say, “Hey, we're here,” if you want to communicate, then you might have to go beyond
math, or beyond at least simple sequences of things like prime numbers.
The second thing, I think, to keep in mind, is some people talk about math as this universal
language. But math, itself, is not a language. When we're talking about mathematical concepts,
they still have to be encoded in some sort of symbolic system. That is, they're still
going to be these units of meaning that are somewhat arbitrary that match on to the concepts.
It won't be completely arbitrary, like in the sense of representing numbers, we can
do one beep for one, two beeps for two, or something like that. But once you get beyond
the numbers, if we want to encode addition, let's say, we encode it in our mathematical
system by writing a little plus. But that's just one of the many ways we could arbitrarily
encode addition, or something like that. And they're still going to have to decode it.
Or if they send a message to us about math, we're still going to have to decode it.
And there's still going to be a syntax. Our writing system for math, if we want to write
two plus two is four, first we write the two, then we put the plus in the middle, then we
put the two, equals and four. But there's systems, like in computer programming languages,
where you might put the plus up front. Right? That's just a very simple system. And so,
there's still a syntax, there's still a grammar to math, and there's still an encoding, and
someone's still going to have to figure that out. So I think it's solves some of the challenges,
because I think there is good reason to think that any ... Especially if the aliens have
arrived on Earth, that they have enough understanding of mathematics to have built a spaceship,
and come here. And so we still have some of the systems because maybe that's the one place
where we share some concepts. It could solve some of the problems, rather, because that's
one place where we share some concepts, but we haven't solved sort of many of the layers.
If I could just add to that a little bit, it actually touches on the METI, as well,
the messaging. Because when the first messages were being designed, and Carl Sagan helped
design some of the messages, one example is the Arecibo Message that was very famously
broadcast from Puerto Rico, this giant Arecibo array. And another was these gold disks, and
carvings that were put on the Voyager spacecraft that Carl Sagan also had a hand in putting
on. And on them, there is a little bit of maths, and they're often designed to try to
teach you the syntax. So it gives several examples of two, two, four, and it doesn't
really matter what the symbols are. If they see enough examples, hopefully they can figure
out what the syntax is. And then also just diagrams. This what a human being looks like,
this is the local pulsars around us so you can locate exactly where the Earth is, for
instance. That was on these original messages. The downside of that is, though, with gold
disk it's kind of ... You just hold it, and you can kind of just look at it, and there's
no way to decode it. You're just sort of really studying the content. The Arecibo Message
was a 23-by-73 pixel image. But if they didn't know it was that way around, if they did 73-by-23
instead, you just get garbage. So you have to know the key to construct the image.
So a visual representation seems appealing because you can teach them all of our maths,
and what a human being looks like, but if they don't know the correct key, they might
unlock it and it looks like garbage to us, and they're like, “Oh, that looks like something
I recognize.” And they might think that's the correct signal. But if they don't know
in advance what they key is, then they're kind of stuck.
May I add that I think that it's a huge assumption to think that the aliens think that 1 plus
1 is the beginning of math. Okay? That we are based on whatever, beings on sort of scale,
energy scale. We have fingers, we count on our fingers. We start with counting, okay?
If we have an intelligence who operated in the quantum mechanical regime, quantum computing
is fundamentally distinct from our mathematic computing. And they might not have the notion
of objects as, you know, counting objects as their primary method of counting. So it
might not be that an alien civilization considers one, two, three, five, seven, eleven, to be
proof of intelligence anyway. Okay? So even at this level, if you do not put a bound on
which kind of life you're dealing with, then you cannot conceivably put a bound on how
we are going to communicate with it. I think you're right, that in a way, you kind
of have no choice but to put a bound. Because otherwise
sufficiently similar to us. So when you take a baby, and you put them
in any culture, they can learn the language. So should we just give the aliens a baby,
and then wait for it to grow up? Let's check with the ethics board.
Child services may be called Could we just make a baby live amongst the
dolphins, and then could we then get it to decipher what's going on?
Yeah. That's going to work. if we were to discover and contact intelligent
life, it would be one of the biggest moments of human history, if not the biggest, how
do you think it would go over on Earth? Kathryn, what does happen next?
It depends. As an anthropologist, that's the only answer I can give. So it depends on what's
happening in the world at that time, it depends on who you are.
Say, right now. Say, tomorrow. Tomorrow, what time?
9:30. Early? 9:30?
Yeah, commute. Everyone's coming to work. Commute? Okay, alright. How does the detection
unfold? Twitter.
Twitter, okay. Alright. So we got Twitter, we got 9:30. Who's it coming from?
The aliens. Oh, it's coming straight from the aliens?
Do you guys want to participate in this hypothetical? Awesome, okay. Now this we can have fun with,
okay. So the aliens have hacked Twitter. Say it comes from the SETI Twitter account.
Okay, say it's coming from one of the SETI Twitter accounts, okay. Found it, “Hi.”
Okay. Yeah, little alien emoji.
Right. So I think, you know, here's the really interesting thing, then. I think we're going
to have a whole lot of human questions at that moment, right? So like, maybe in the
Q and A, we can talk about what your questions would be at that moment. Like what would you
want to know? So there are a lot of really important things that would affect the reception
of that signal. First of all, let's imagine you're in North Korea, and you've just heard
this news from the U.S. What's your reaction? Other places in the world, similarly. So would
they accept, say, the authority of a scientist coming out of the U.S. about, you know, we
really did find this thing. Given all the atmosphere around fake news
and all that, I think there could be a lot of distrust, a lot of confusion, and a lot
of uncertainty about who to trust, let's say. I should specify here, I'm Canadian. So let's
say that the president of the United States decides to get in the Twitter theme.
Kind of hard to- I know, it's really unheard of, but like,
what happens then? So does that contribute, or detract? You know, it certainly messes
things up creatively, and interestingly. Then, you know, there's the effects on the stock
market. So people are kind of going, “Okay, what doe we want to invest in? What do we
want to divest from? Okay, weapons, pharmaceuticals, prepping equipment.” You know. You can kind
of easily imagine things like that. From the surveys that have been done on people's anticipations
about extraterrestrial life, et cetera, some people are very anxious about it. Some people
are very excited. Some people are like, “Beam me up, please.”
Or like, “No, no, no, I'm heading for the hills.” So there could be a lot of different
responses, and I think when I said it depends, it depends also on what else is happening
in the world. So if you're in a war zone already, if you're recently recovering from a war,
if you been traumatized in any way, this might really be the last thing that you want. If,
on the other hand, you're just kind of very hopeful about what aliens might provide to
human civilization, you know ... And there's also, from the surveys that have been done,
there's a real kind of difference in degree of likelihood to believe. So there are regional
differences, there are political differences, there are religious differences.
Can you be more specific? So who is more likely to believe?
Well. So there's also questions about, you know governmental authority, and how people
are more likely to believe in conspiracies, et cetera. So I mean, there is differences
between the West, the Midwest, the Northeast. There's male/female differences.
Wait, wait. So if there was a sign, who is more ... Like the West, the East? Like Californians
versus New York, like a little more specific. I don't have the statistics right in my head,
because I wasn't the one who did the research. I think the point I'm just trying to make
is that there is variation, and then that's going to kind of affect kind of the overall
reception. And then there's the question of, “Oh my goodness, well, what do we do?”
Because, again, some people are very much in favor of sending a reply, and whether or
not there's a global response that's says, “Yes, let's write a message together, and
send it.” You know somebody is going to. It's just going to happen. And then other
people will be upset, because it'll be like, “I wish we had just stayed quiet.” And
I think there could be a scope for quite a lot of friction here. So the research that
has been done on potential receptions to contact, it indicates a lot of instability. So I think
one frame that SETI is understood within is just the idea that this would just be a continuation
of all the research that has indicated that we're not the center of the universe. So we
are just on a planet, orbiting a sun, among many planets orbiting many suns. So that's
been the huge contribution of astronomy over the last few centuries, has been kind of de-centering
us, right? So that's one frame of understanding. But
another is that, okay well, these are other sentient beings, it's not just about our place.
So then it all becomes about, well, what's the relationship going to be like? And how
does that play into existing relationships here on Earth?
So Marcelo, as someone who doesn't research this specific question directly, as a regular
civilian but rational thinker, how would you feel?
Well, first of all, the most important thing is to know what kind of signal we got. Namely,
if we got a signal from two thousand light-years away, okay, and these guys might not even
be alive by now, it's very different than if you have a huge UFO fly into Central Park.
Yeah. So it's obviously a different thing. In every
single science fiction movie which you have an arrival of a hostile civilization, their
UFOs are creepy. And whenever a friendly civilization comes, the UFOs are cute. And this is absurd,
okay? Namely, that there is no basis for thinking that we have a common aesthetic code, or that
they would make any devices for transport according to our preferences of what is creepy
or cute, right? So all of the sudden, here comes this huge, enormously creepy UFO, and
the guy says to us, “Hey, hello, how are you?” Right? We don't know. We're making
this whole thing up. There is actually almost a dress rehearsal
of exactly what happened, though. A real example of this, which is the War of the Worlds broadcast
in 1938. So that was radio broadcast by Columbia Broadcasting Systems, and it's H.G. Wells'
famous story that was made for radio with a narrator. And it's done in a way that's
like a news report, if you listen to it. So people who just tuned in halfway through really
thought it was an invasion, because it sounds ... There's like journalist on the scene during
the moments when the aliens come out of the spaceship, and stuff, and start lasering everyone.
So people were pretty panicked about it, and actually the telephone switchboard of the
broadcaster got completely inundated with phone calls of concerned people. Police arrived
at the radio station, and then there was journalistic reports the next day. And The New York Times
had a headline about, you know, people confused thinking their radio broadcast was real.
So that was kind of like a one of the few insights, although that wasn't really contact,
that was a hostile invasion. So that was not surprising that people panicked, in that case.
But it's one of the few historical incidences where we have some insight as to how people
might react thinking it was a genuine event. That's an interesting one, too, because it
kind of spun out into this whole new kind of distrust in the popular media. Because
the feeling was: well, if you can pull that on us, that's not cool. So it actually started
an interesting trend. But there's also been a lot reanalysis of that one, about you know
just exactly how much people were panicked, et cetera. But there've also been echoes.
So there was a case, for example, a few years later in Quito, where the same thing was rebroadcast.
Unfortunately, it went really, really badly in that particular case, and it was because
they'd only recently come out of a war themselves, horrific invasions, et cetera. And the people
who had fought defensively in that war, didn't think this was funny. They torched the radio
station, people died. You know? And that doesn't get cited, but that's something that I think
of, for example, when I kind of think about potential negative consequences.
Just a question for everyone on the panel, what do you think of this idea that if we
know there's alien life out there, we'll all forget our differences, and like save racism
for the aliens? That's the usual kind of hopeful take on things.
It's part of the kind of Sagan-esque justification for shifting our frame of reference, and for
... And when I say justification, that sounds a little bit harsh. It's the cultural frame
of reference that says by having that confirmation, that again, another society has survived their
technological adolescence, that it could bring out the best in us, somehow. From what I understand
of world history, I don't really buy it. I think it has just as much potential to bring
out divisions, especially if there is actually some degree of actual contact.
I don't think it would be surprising to see jockeying, because this is something that
we've seen in real contact episodes on Earth. It's not just, you know, one side and the
other side. It's like, “How can I make this work to my advantage?” And so, it's people
trying to build alliances, and then it becomes my enemies enemy is my friend. It gets very
complicated, it's doesn't just kind of come down into, “Oh, we're all suddenly unified
in humanity, holding hands, singing Kumbaya,” et cetera. I think it's likely to be more
complicated than that, and not necessarily all so adorable, alas.
I was going to jump in. I agree. I think it's also just very unlikely that, even in the
presence of a new “other,” that's perhaps way more other than any of the ones we have
on Earth, like the alien being the new “other,” it's unlikely that we're going to overcome
thousands of years of racism, and xenophobia, and notice our commonalities in those moments,
rather than, perhaps, those differences being highlighted by the fact that we now have to
deal with some sort of eminent, potentially, harmful event. This is really, highly speculative,
maybe or if the aliens remained interacting with people of Earth over a long, long period
of time, they would be so different that there would be more alliances between Earth people
and they would be the new “other,” but I don't think that would be anything like
an instant reaction. And I don't even think that would necessarily be a likely thing to
happen over a long period of time. David?
Well, I just often say to my class that you could travel for a billion light-years in
any direction in the universe, and you will not meet another human being. That every human
being on this planet is extremely rare, and precious in the context of the entire universe.
Even though it seems like there is a lot of us, there's like maybe 8 billion, or 7 billion
people right now on the planet, if you divide that by the size of the universe, there's
very, very few of us. So I think just even forgetting aliens exist, or not, if you just
take a cosmic perspective, that you would maybe think of your fellow human being as
being a bit more worthy of your kindness and compassion, then if you just had this us versus
them attitude. How's it going to react when the aliens come? So I think it's almost ... The
better approach is just to think about the vast, vast scale of the universe, rather than
to worry about interspecies relations. So if we haven't had the feeling of warmth
already, then forget it. We're done. Yeah.
Is that the bottom line? Marcelo? It's a tough one, right? Basically, everybody
goes “aw,” when they look at dolphins. So maybe there's hope for aliens unifying
us, but of course, it depends on which guise they come, right? If they're hostile, it's
okay, they see immediately an exasperation of all of your divisions. So and so is collaborating
with them. Okay? Or they are going to treason, or this, or that, and that's going to be inflamed
in no time flat, right? So I don't know. David, in the popular imagination, and even
in sort of scientific thinking, now, the pendulum has sort of switched with just with the numbers
game. That there is probably intelligent life out there, somewhere. Whether we would ever
communicate with it, we don't know, but it seems like the scientific pendulum has switched.
It's probably out there. What if it is not out there? What if we are alone? How does
that change your thinking? Yeah. So I'd just first say that I personally
challenge the idea that the numbers game proves that therefore there is intelligence everywhere.
I mean, this kind of goes back to the very beginning of the show, but there's no reason
why the probability couldn't be very, very tiny. People will often cite the fact that
life emerged early on the Earth as proof of the fact that, therefore, life must start
very easily. But it took four billion years of evolution to get to this point, and in
a billion years the Sun will make the Earth uninhabitable. So it kind of had to have started
pretty soon, else we wouldn't be here to observe it. So it's a bit of a circular argument.
So you really can't take the early start to life on Earth as meaning anything.
So to answer your question more directly, if it does indeed turn out that life is incredibly
precious, then I guess that just really reemphasizes my original point about how precious human
beings are on this Earth, that there is obviously a set of circumstances which happened here
in this solar system which makes it extremely special in a cosmic perspective. I would still
be pretty skeptical that forever, throughout the entire history of the universe, there
will be no life elsewhere in the universe. I leave intelligence aside, and just say life
elsewhere. And the reason is because in ten trillion years there will still be some stars
which are burning hydrogen, and will still have planets around them in the right distance
for life. In ten trillion years. And the universe is only about ten billion years old. So we're
at the very beginning of the story of the universe, still. And actually, most stars
are these small-end dwarfs, which will still be burning into the far distant future. So
I think maybe we're just, if we happen to be alone right now, it probably means we're
just one of the first, rather than we're necessarily gonna be the only ones that will ever, ever
exist. I'd probably take that perspective, a little bit more. I think the idea that the
fact that we're alone right now proves that's it, we're done, we're the only ones that will
ever be, I wouldn't quite buy that argument. So there's plenty of time left in the age
of the universe for other things to happen. We're gonna open it up to everyone in the
audience, now. If you have questions, just hold out until we have a microphone on your
mouth. With respect to David's point about being
early, do we think maybe A.I. could help us find them better than humans?
Yeah, sure. I think certainly machine-learning techniques, of which artificial intelligence
is sort of an extension of that, are already being used to help the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence. So this algorithm that you can download on your computer called SETI@home,
actually basically does that. It essentially uses some machine-learning algorithms to scan
through these huge libraries of data, which have been collected, all the radio transmissions,
and see if there is anything that looks like a significant pattern amongst that data. And
those algorithms are improving all the time, and as we get closer and closer towards these
very sophisticated A.I.s, I have no doubt that it would greatly help us sift through
more and more data. So yeah, I think you're exactly right, that as our software more generally
improves, we can expect to be able to do a more complete job of surveying the sky for
advanced civilizations. So you tossed this idea in a haphazard way
of giving a baby to an alien, and I'm actually curious if there might be a sort of more realistic
implementation of using the natural resources that we have in our own children to bridge
languages with dolphins, or aliens, or other human civilizations. Is that something that's
been done, or that could actually be, you know, labor laws notwithstanding, used?
I guess I can take that one. So there has been a large number of what's called cross-fostering
experiments, and I'm nowhere familiar with all of that literature. But what typically
happens is that unless you're actually giving a human child to another human ... And let's
remember that there really are, genetically speaking, no races, so it's just a member
of the same species, okay? That's not cross-fostering. But for instance, if you raise a canary among
zebra finches, the canary will try to learn to sing like a zebra finch that has a very
different song. And at some level, it will acquire many of the elements of their song,
and it will fail to acquire others because at some level there's a breakdown in how matched
their hardware can imitate the, you know ... Canaries sing something that, if you slow it down,
it sort of Gregorian chant, where zebra finches are rappers. And there's simply no way in
which a canary can sing a zebra finch song. They just are ill-equipped.
So cross-fostering experience really run a whole lot of differences in hardware that
are insurmountable, right? Like in this particular case, you can't have a human baby breathing
underwater. So you can't leave it to dolphins. I mean, it's part of the joke, right? But
you really cannot ... There's a limitation to how much you can cross-foster across species
that are actually physically distinct. So dolphins, for instance, they communicate
in another sound range, some of which we can hear, most of which we cannot. They see in
a visual range that, they don't see red, they don't see orange. Their vision starts in the
green, and it goes all the way to violet, and maybe beyond. And therefore, they see,
naturally, in a different spectral range, just like they speak and hear in a different
spectral range. There's nothing innate in a human baby that if a human baby is raised
with a species that speaks at a different frequency range ... They wouldn't be able
to hear that, because they're ill-equipped in the same sense that we will never, no matter
who raises us, we will never see ultraviolet or infrared. It just the way our sensors are
encoded. So there's intrinsic limitations of how much you can do of this. And because
the physical environment determines so much how we perceive the world, our senses are
exquisitely adjusted to our sensory environment, and to our evolutionary history. So I don't
think there's anyway to actually do anything of the sort.
I just want to jump in on that and say another limitation on this kind of thing is that a
lot of linguists think that humans have something called universal grammar, which is something
to do with like an innate language faculty. Even though languages can be very different,
all human languages have some commonalities in their grammar. And in a sense, there's
some part of us, some part of the hard-wiring in our brain, that we're the kind of creatures
that are just born knowing how to pick up human languages. And then we're immersed in
particular language, and that's why babies can learn whatever language that they are
born into. But there's no real reason to think that an alien language ... Maybe dolphin language
because at least we have some commonalty, I'm not going to speak on dolphins. But there's
no reason to think that an alien language is going to share the universal grammar. So
even if we could take one of our human babies, all the other concerns notwithstanding, and
send them to live with the aliens, it's not clear that a human baby would have the righWSt
kind of brain to even pick up the alien language. I was just going to say, following on, I think
one of the things that children have, and are encouraged in, is curiosity. And I think
that's the first place that any kind of communication challenge starts.
And the reason that I'm just thinking about this is because of laboratory mice. So one
of the most studied creatures on the planet, right? And it took decades for somebody to
notice that they sing. I know, right? So google white mice singing, it's going to be really
interesting. But you know, it's because they're outside of our frequency range, so nobody
could hear them. And nobody noticed that when the mice are doing this, it's like and they
have their little mouths open, they're singing. But it took somebody kind of looking differently,
and micing them, and then putting it through a computer to realize, “Oh my goodness.”
And now of course, there's this lovely study on what are mice singing, and when are they
singing to each other, and what does it all mean? But it took that kind of spark, that
moment of curiosity. And I think that's something that we can all kind of encourage in ourselves
as we address our many different communication challenges, aliens or not.
And with that, we've run out of time.Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone. And please
thank our guests.
