Should We Contact ET?

my name's John Byrne's I'm the chairman of the board of the SETI Institute and I've been called upon within the last 30 seconds to moderate this panel with very little preparation or speak I'm going to introduce the panelists first in absentia is John Bellingham the former head of NASA's astrobiology unit they had one of the great founders and fathers of setting who for health reasons if the last month would not be here today we have a statement from him that would be red duck they are a senior scientist at the setting is Institute whose field of study is expertise is in there communicating to et so this is the one man in the world who has been thinking over and over again and in great depth about how do we construct a message to send out to et either in responsible message that we've received or as we're about to discuss today whether we initiate that dialogue Seth Shostak senior astronomer of the SETI Institute is our spokesman to the world Seth you you've probably seen on The Colbert Report or Burnham on Science Friday or or any or the BBC or any of their a number of places but he is for the SETI Institute he's our guy our go-to guy he runs our fantastic radio show aren't we alone would you if you have not downloaded it you can find it at SETI org or iTunes or if you're here in San Francisco Bay Area it's on klw and some NPR stations all over the country it is an unbelievably entertaining fun dance that it's science Friday means hard talk meets this American life it's amazing Robert Sawyer is probably needs no introduction to anyone here he's a winner of the Hugo nebula prize he's a fantastic sci-fi writer they don't get any better than this but his particular focus inside lioness setting so if you want to just let the imagination run but I'm gonna but on the basis of hard science you can't go to a better off than Robert Sawyer all right so guys one at a time five minutes each tell us should we or should we not initiate dialogue with a teen should we be the first ones to send out the signals I'm going to start in absentia which I'm telling you I hope you don't be an abstention and the season decided to just say no actually he Jonathan could not make it here who sent a signal which I will read John Billington by the way was the gentleman who headed up the NASA SETI project for many years physician from UK in January Stephen Hawking did a show about aliens on the Discovery Channel in his remarks about SETI he said that there were two basic approaches the first is to use telescopes to attempt to detect electromagnetic signals transmitted by an extraterrestrial civilization which is actually the subject matter about to this conference the majority of searches carried out to date numbering about 90 fall into this category and form the basis of the long term program of the SETI Institute as well as other organizations the second approach is for us to transmit messages from Earth promising star systems in the galaxy in the hope that they may be detected by extraterrestrial intelligent species might respond to us this is messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence Mette is also known as active say it has been used occasionally in the past but is now proceeding apace under the aegis of alexander's sites at the Victoria telescope in the Ukraine Hawking is concerned that it might be unwise to transmit you've reminded us that if our many signal were to be detected by a civilization much older than we are it might also have unlimited power that civilization with the ability for example to harness the entire output of its star warp space create wormholes or travel huge distances in the blink of an eye statistically it is likely that such a species would be much older than us because we are essentially the youngest communicating civilization in the galaxy Arthur Clarke put it this way for any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic it is impossible for us to know today what is the societal cultural political and ethical makeup of such a society as many have pointed out they could be benign and benevolent races main interests and the comparatively primitive beings of Earth and with us is to foster long-distance intellectual exchanges with kindness and munificence I once gave a talk and suggested that this could be a possible outcome of SETI or Betty only to hear a voice on the back of the room say don't count on it Hawking is asking if they could pose any risk to us he used an old analogy at past context between sorry past contacts between the peoples of Earth has frequently resulted in disastrous results for the less technologically advanced races and quoted the unhappy fate of many of the indigenous tribes of the Caribbean in the centuries after Columbus first landed there similar devastating consequences have resulted in many places on earth if the extraterrestrial species encountered as a result of establishment future long term many endeavors of great magnitude and cost or somehow to fit this film what might become of us we cannot be specific about the possible risks involved but no Hawking's concerns that the other civilization might have powers that would be beyond our own understanding and interstellar mores and policies that are unknown perhaps the time has come to address these issues on an international scale by establishing a global conference on many some have argued that many of our current radio submission speak out into the galaxy anyway and will be detectable at increasing distances with a passage of time and with the rise in transmitter powers by one to two orders of magnitude within a couple of decades this just adds to my this just adds to any risk from many itself so perhaps we should have the global conference as soon as possible such an international gathering with experts and non-experts of all walks of life would cover a wide range of topics related to Medi and SETI risk analysis would be a driver but there's a long list of other topics the science and engineering standard passive SETI as it exists now the study historical analog sociological issues national and international law education in the media and many more which address different aspects of our human society here on earth the goal would be to try and reach a consensus of what to do about many and leakage from Earth and to reach an agreement on whether it should be just left in the hands of individuals or small groups or national organizations that just want to transmit for various reasons but whether there might be informal or formal trees between nations you take some sort of action to resolve the risk issue perhaps Metis could be included in an amended version of the outer space treaty international conferences which lead to a grievance happen all the time other various auspices often there is a leading organization which then inspires other to join in there are many possibilities for us for example the International Astronomical Society is the American Association for the Advancement of science the International Institute of space law or the Royal Society the UN Committee on the peaceful uses of outer space is an obvious candidate in fact the UN was earlier approached on a related issue by the International Academy of astronautics I'm going to skip to the last paragraph I've done this only because of Billingham can't be here so this is the only time you're going to hear from them Hawking did not say that there was a risk in just listening the standard approach to setting today in fact there is no innate risk in just listening regardless of how the term incites if and others may need to undertake many because they that conventional SETI is not working it should be recognized that we still have only scratched the surface of the multi-dimensional surface space searching space of current SETI let's continue until we have it at least excavated more of this huge search space let's have the global conference anyway to try to resolve a many issues anyway and soon let's see what the findings are note that no one can say that there is no risk to transmit personally I agree with Hawking and am also worried that it may be unwise to transmit at least and until the global conference has actually taken place yes Michael Michaud have said quote if there are risks the many or to transmitting back to them after we detect their signal we could be neglecting our responsibility for the future well-being of mankind by John Bellingham thank you very much very comprehensive well-thought-out response this will not be one of those so you'll see the range of human ability to respond to SETI here which i think is actually the core issue we've all seen the building contact we all saw Jodie Foster give the impassioned speech trying to get funding for what she wanted to do about how setting if it succeeds is going to be transformative for the human race last night Frank Drake closed us wrote compassionately at the banquet that many of us attended and said that were setting to exceed in its goals it would be the end of old history we'd have to close all those history books and start a new set of history books it would be the signal transformative moment or the entire species that's one possible response the Jodie Foster Frank Drake approach the other is I think it was Tim Russ who said in the panel yesterday it'll be one 24-hour news cycle and then it's gone or on to the next row pants and that'll be a big news story now if the latter is true doesn't make any difference in a lot of ways if the former is true that we really are talking about something that the whole human race will be transformed by not just momentarily but forever then the question becomes who gets to make proactive forward moving steps towards changing the entire human race there is no danger in passive listening but there also has been zero success in passive listening as well there are those starting with Frank Drake who felt it could devolve to a single individual or a small team of people to say you know what we will take it on to our own selves and decide we're going to do this without consultation certainly not an international consultation without government approval and just kind of say you know what we're going to do it now one of the big issues in SETI has long been why are we failed for 50 years to find what we're looking for the Fermi paradox where are all the aliens one possible answer that fits all of the biological and physical arguments we have or the universe should be teeming with life is that it is what they're all right enough to keep their mouths shut and we're the idiots who are standing up saying pick me pick me pick me when the preservers are looking for the next race to wipe out now the easy argument is what we already announced ourselves and they've already all seen I Love Lucy and Adolf Hitler and all of that so what harm can be done well the reality is as we well know from trying to decipher what previous civilizations on earth had recorded in their documents that it's an extraordinarily difficult task for even members of the same species to decode previously written documents and figure out what the intent and the content was there's a very significant difference be sending between sending I Love Lucy and watching Lucy and Ethel try to eat the chocolates really fast off the conveyor belt before they fall off the end in that famous episode and sending a map of the DNA molecule and an arrow pointing to the third planet from this particular star salt and saying you know not only I know you know we're generally here you hear the noise this region it's actually this particular spot if you're looking for us and hey here's what we're made of it if you don't actually approve of nascent DNA life-forms who have broadcast noisily to the universe when you do show up send something that causes DNA to dissociate a break apart and you'll just clear the infection from this planet very easily there's a great difference between sending random content that even ourselves would have great deal of decoding if I sent you I Love Lucy and you didn't know anything about NTSC broadcasting or how do i encode that signal you could spend half your life trying to figure out even that it was information content there's a huge difference between that and saying here we are this is the exact spot this is what we're made of this is what we look like in case you happen to find us ugly and do your do your damnedest here we are and it's more an issue to say and we can decide to do that on the basis of a nonprofit organization in the bay area of California can decide to do it independently individual nations who decide to do it independently individual persons can decide to do it independently so I think when Hawking said you know we got to stop and think about this whether this is a wise thing to do we have to recognize that and as a science fiction writer this is a a crucial reality that we have faced over the years the single biggest mistake science fiction made is this it's not that we didn't predict the internet it's not that we didn't predict that we weren't going to go to the you know we go to the moon in 1969 and 36 months later we decide been there done that got the t-shirt never going to do it again right it wasn't those failures it was a systemic failure which was we thought that the tiny segment of the population that read science fiction had the same psychology as the rest of the human race but the whole human race shared the science fictional vision that they wanted orbiting space stations and interplant them talk about 2001 here they wanted the 2001 agenda no they wanted iPads and apps that they could play their games on constantly and that's what we did with our culture and technology and the is there if I may use the word the arrogance that can be and I think Hawking does fairly ascribe to the SETI movement is the belief that those of us who have self selected out of 300 million Americans and a few foreigners including myself to come here ie maybe 500 or 300 million actually have the right to decide for speak on that behalf of and take transformative world-changing species risking actions without consultation because hey we know better and that actually is something I think Hawking is very validly raised as a legitimate concern okay okay I'm gonna speak for myself in the audience do you think it would take you more than a week to figure out what the encoding is and NTSC signals you probably don't have a job because I happen to be the chair of the and for the last three to four years we've had a very very contentious discussion about this issue because John Bellingham whose statement I read earlier and some others have suggested that we should put into the protocols which are not laws they were simply gentlemen's agreement ladies agreements amongst any organizations that wish to sign this document about what to do in case of a detection and so they describe what to do in case of a detection it's apple-pie motherhood it says verify let the world know right and no response without international consultation no response to anything you detect but the suggestion was to put in another clause that said women no have initio transmissions in other words don't start transmitting even before you've got that signal back and I objected to that and it turns out that the committee eventually objected to that it remains a contentious issue and that's why it's come up again Stephen Hawking actually made these statements many many years ago it's unclear whether it was ten or twenty years ago okay well I don't agree with your dad on this either in this let me just say what I think the problem is here first the idea that we can solve this problem with international consultation strikes me as naivete of the first water how is international consultation supposed to decide well I might be able to broadcast to them or Australia the British will be able to deal with but the idea that don't don't no worry earth is protected because we've had international consultation if they pick up I Love Lucy they don't like Fred Mertz as jokes that they will then therefore destroy the earth in two ways to look at it what does he say well that's alien sociology and our data set for alien sociology is very sparse yeah we have no idea what Bailey's might be interested in doing and you know and if they were going to do something hostile this planning this plants been around for a half billion years right there wipe out the dinosaurs or the trilobite that means that we are similarly interesting in terms of provoking them to do something terrible you know they don't want competition in the used car market I don't know a lot of sense the other thing is and this is the point I'm a little uh pet peeves and new scientists couple weeks ago whatever you think of the danger you know people say look it's shouting in the jungle why risk it why risk it you don't know maybe their house so maybe they're not house so maybe they just want to enlighten us who knows what they want to do but don't shop in the jungle that's don't shout the gentleman could be dangerous I would recommend the jungle and people will say do it away though those TV signals leaking into space those are so weak that very very difficult to detect and so forth that's true our SETI experiments couldn't pick up our TV more than a less much less than a light year away right they aren't hard to detect but they're only hard to detect for us a hundred years after Marconi any society any society that has the capability of threatening us by either coming here and you know blowing up the earth which by the way takes a lot of energy or are just launching their Photon Cannons in our direction which you know just fries the landscape or whatever it is you think they're going to do anybody who can do that has gone more than a hundred years beyond their markrony they can do what Frank Drake is talking about at this conference and people have talked about for twenty years they can use their star as a gravitational lens and you can work out what they could pick up with that and it turns out very easily they can pick up all the TV of course but they can pick up the street lamps from our cities okay so and that signal those signals have been going out into space for seventy years and you say oh well but yeah but there's nothing hostile and I Love Lucy or Howdy Doody so the point is this this horse has left the barn this vowel has been run any society that could possibly be a threat to us can easily know seventy years in advance of anything we do in the future at least that we're here right so there's no point in losing sleep about this finally turn it over to a reasonable guy let me just point out that if you buy into this if you think that that's somebody within society community obviously the semi community should be doing is we're not law enforcement but that somebody should be trying to enforce an injunction against you transmitting into space against you going up into the sky denied with your laser pointer aiming at a fatal juice and typing out what hath God wrought Morse code they want to stop you from doing that right if they want to do that then what they're also gonna have to do it's just down the radar sets at San Jose Airport not to mention JFK which may be no loss but what you said it San Jose let me if you can't blame him at night or in the fog or anything else right obviously shut down the BBC NBC CBS I mean maybe that's really no loss but what you are doing is you are circumscribing the activities we space colonies no transmissions you are circumscribing the activities of us not for this generation not for the next ten years for ever for ever and I think that paranoia is not the inheritance we should be giving to our descendants yeah I like that began by acknowledging how emotional this issue could be because I think that's often where has left I think the focus of Hopkins concerned that the big reason not to transmit as a fear of annihilation by another civilization really actually obscures much more important issue so let me take a few minutes to highlight why I think the international setting community actually should be doing accuracy now I what I'm going to argue essentially is there a number of assumptions for why we shouldn't be doing active setting and that they may well hold for a lot of civilizations like those civilizations that are advanced enough to come here through the interstellar travel but there may be other civilizations that don't follow our assumptions and so basically I'm suggesting a research diversification strategy something very much along the lines of what happened at that date ago in the beginning of settings of years ago we searched only for radio signals and then about a decade ago we realized hey we didn't look for brief nanosecond laser pulses and so we now expanded to optical SETI I would suggest there are good reasons to expand over the next 50 years into including active SETI searches to complement our existing SETI searches and I think it's important not to take what I'm saying as in any way suggesting that somehow this last 50 years of silence has been a failure I think that actually just reflects a lack of understanding of the magnitude of the search and that very plausible it could take decades for traditional passive SETI search to succeed I know we're running short on time so let me brief but what I want to do is highlight about five interrelated reasons that have been given for why we shouldn't be doing active setting that these are the concerns that have been more of a reason that scientists don't want to have one thing that you've heard sometimes over the course of this intervention is the idea there's we make contact with another civilization it's likely to be much longer lived than we are and the reason for that is it has to be that way just on purely statistical grounds for the whole thing to work you know now it could be that other civilizations only have the ability to communicate for say a hundred years and then they annihilate themselves they turn inward and they stop trying to communicate but if that's true then over the thirteen plus billion year history of this galaxy it's an infinitesimal chance that they're hundred years in our hundred years are going to overlap you know it's kind of like over the course of an entire night two fireflies each of look on for a second what's the chance that's going to happen at the same time so for our current searches to succeed when we're looking for signals coming in I mean the big problem in transmitting thousands and millions of years that's why I would assume that they are older than we are now we also often make a second assumption that with greater age becomes incredibly even the recent technological capability for many civilizations that may be in the case but I'd argue maybe not for some may be long-lived staple civilizations have a modest energy consumption modest capabilities and so that they're really not going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting that in fact is one of the reasons the in fact set has given sometimes more why we should be focusing on listening instead of transmitting let me do the heavy lifting and that's great for me if they're willing to do it my concern that there may be some out there who are saying we'll wait if you're the young guy if you've got a lot more to gain from this than we do why don't you take the initiative Ron Bracewell want to suggested the metaphor of a galactic Club that that's what we're trying to do in SETI is to become members of this sort of a Galactic Federation of Planets and people talk about trying to get in the Galactic Club but no one that seems ever talks about paying your dues and so maybe that's what we need to do at least submit an application for it and maybe an I Love Lucy doesn't count so maybe we need to let them know that we want to get in another objection to active setting that I've heard is you know we we will have no way of anticipating their galactic protocol well but in that assumption is the idea that you know part of the galactic protocol is that they're going to be transmitting so really maybe that galactic protocol is the less advanced civilization should take the initiative and again these arguments don't have to hold for all civilizations what I'm suggesting is there may be some civilizations that don't fit the standard assumptions and that's a good enough reason to go ahead with active SETI providing we can assure ourselves that the benefits outweigh the risks a third common assumption objection to to act as Eddy is that there is no need to transmit now Seth has just mentioned this so the idea of gravitational lensing even our weak link that we leakage radiation couldn't be detected use the Sun as an amplifier that's great if you have the technology to send a satellite out 550 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun that's pretty far out and that's great that gives you a line to one point in space but if you want to come entire celestial sphere either that's well that's a lot of different satellites or those things are really tooling around and that's a quite listen so so again I don't discount the possibility that a very advanced civilization would have that capability but I think we should also open up the possibility of contact with less advanced civilizations ones intermediate between our abilities and those well yeah I mean obviously the panel would be uninteresting if I didn't take a contrarian point of view I'm obviously very I wouldn't be here if I wasn't pro se they're not part of this camp here but that said there are a couple of very interesting things that Doug said one of those things that we should be doing is let them know that we want to be part of the Galactic Club and that's true for sufficiently small values of we I'm not sure that the seven billion people on the planet have actually had a flemeth sight on whether they want to join this particular Club and I actually wrote a science fiction short story a couple of years ago called flashes about it's a starts off with a police officer who's investigating a spate of suicides amongst researchers at universities and why are these all these researchers killing themselves well we got Carl Sagan's dream guess what the beneficent aliens are leaving the encyclopedia Galactica an article a day to us in Alien alphabetical order so you never know what's going to come next and lo and behold loop quantum gravity isn't even close to being right to describing the reality of the universe you've devoted your whole Academy career to this thing here's the right answer Oh chef well that was a waste of career you know what here's how actually information theory really works on large-scale oh well there goes all industry and you know what here's this this and this and actually it turns out to be the worst thing that could ever happen to the intellectual enterprise of the human race is you guys as if baikman I think it was so many famously said was a Fineman you're not even wrong you're so far off a civilian that's a big wake up call when you have this thing where we think we are questing and curious and when it's just nope wrong wrong wrong wrong stupid dumb wrong stupid is what you hear from the sky every day or the rest of eternity because we don't know is actually an interesting issue Doug also alluded to the fact that you know it doesn't matter what and it actually forgive me Doug but it was somewhat contradictory there's a Galactic Club but what is a club but a unitary a federation what we've agreed between civilizations on a coded contact otherwise it's not a club it's just a random aggregation there's some either monolithic galactic entity we could join or as you said there are a variety of cultures and civilizations out there and we may not be doing what the majority want but there'll be a minority available sufficiently large number of civilizations will be a minority and the fear that Hawking and others have articulated and is worth mentioning is if there's only one civilization that is so Senna phobic and my goodness we have a lot of experience with highly evolved intelligent individuals or xenophobic in this culture and decide that it is an affront to their belief system that anything else claims to be sentient or intelligence intelligent and those things should be wiped out the question is if there are aberrant civilizations you only need one who's taken it as their mission with technology not just a hundred but a thousand or a billion years more advanced than ours that they're going to wipe out the upstarts and again that raises the question of hey when we don't know what their response is going to be should we be assess that although he was against it against a prescription of a shouting importance I say we go to the audience you make a good point about my use of the Galactic club metaphor so it was very the other arguments really I was assuming there could be many different we'll see just one thing the idea of a galactic Club I find difficult one because that assumes that there are a whole bunch of societies out there that are more or less than our level you probably don't you know you may be belonging to some clubs bowling clubs book clubs whatever thank you we go by the aphids to join actually different from you too much in cosmic time in terms of evolution 10 a century or something like that there are no real Club members alright let's open it up please so I I find an interesting that we automatically assume that will be more intelligent than us but it seems much more plausible to me that it would be like an extremely long-running reality TV there I Love Lucy because we are dismissively referred to I Love Lucy repeatedly but in fact there's very little value in saying you know what the value of high over yours 2.14 bah bah bah bah bah is it that over there as well and waiting five hundred years for the response yep same thing here Wow way more than interesting to say here's our art our culture our music our paintings and if we can find some way to encode them in a way that might be readable by somebody else our literature here's who we are what's way more interesting to share is what's here in the human heart than what's we which is going to be shared by everybody what the basics of physics 3r that we've deduced in our human brains alright first yeah just up the road is another conference the singularity summit it's that interesting we did they make this thunderous go this weekend they make the assumption though that when you get to a certain level very rapidly you move to a singularity where it becomes asymptotically advanced and it seems to me that we're all assuming that there will be continuous of evolution of the species towards more and more technologically sophisticated where in fact it's possible that when they get to our level very quickly they move to a singularity which we can't imagine what that would be like and I was wondering if you could just comment on the possibility that these aliens might all be very similar to each other because they've reached that singularity whatever that is I don't think so this theory the university was founded by grapefruits colony oh no records one should know recurse on Ray is very optimistic sort of guy he's waiting for the within 10 years you see the computers and your washing machine will start talking to the computers in the fridge and decide they don't need you anymore they're mice mother work together and take over another thing that ray says of course is that he's figuring that within the next 5-10 years we're going to increase life expectancy by more than one year per year and that means he's going to live forever so it's investing you realistic anyhow but the point about the singularity is I think just the opposite of what you suggested you suggested that it would lead to a situation where everybody's more or less at the same level right I don't think that's what happens at all I think what happens is that it to the extent that you have a sink you very I mean that's just saying Moore's law is going to go on forever and a person long know exponential law goes on forever they always saturate out something happens but it you know it may be that within 50 years you've invented Thinking Machines shifted the paradigm as we like to say here in the Silicon Valley and now suddenly the idea of intelligence being a three-pound slow speed computer operating on the soft water in your brain right that that becomes antiquated kind of quaint in a hundred thousand now the real sentence of this part of the galaxy will look back hey do you remember absorbed when they had biological intelligence a hook right I read about that somewhere I don't know write that but the point here is that to the extent that once you have synthetic intelligence that can itself and prove very very quickly and that's the experience with technology here it's not Darwinian Darwinian kind of random and very unpredictable and slow very slow whereas look at what happens to computers right once you get technological intelligence monkey two balls very quickly and I think what that says is that once you do that so what you do it and once you do it that it's winner take all at least in this part of the universe that nobody can catch up because you're moving along in some very fast rate and those guys got started you know 20 million years after you they never catch up and so there are their dominant sanctions in any given part of the galaxy something like that so I don't think it leads to the level let me go way to the back fellow in the black shirt but boom with your voice okay yeah clearly is with the biologist but why is it that biologists like Richard Dawkins and Jared Diamond our very very pessimistic about aliens wanting to eat our brains and very or women or whatever and astronomers are pretty saying what about it this is an issue I think the more relevant question is regardless of the motivation or the interest in an extraterrestrial would they have even if they tend to be kind of hostile folks as any harm resources it would seem that in history most migrations both violent and otherwise was based on the search for natural resources so given that how would that temper the panel's views on interstellar or intergalactic travel or madness who was science advisor for Star Trek was talking about what was the fight that he'd lost with in Star Trek all the shows that he worked on it was in the pilot of Voyager when there was an implication that aliens were coming towards to take our water and of course water is hydrogen and oxygen common elements in the universe easy to manufacture if you don't have enough at home it's still easy to make in your local solar system you'd never go hunting for it to me it's almost inconceivable that there is a material resource that's worth traveling light-years to collect the energy required to collect it will always be more expensive than the cost of making it at home again I come back to the only thing that's worth exchanging this culture which has no material value but can be infinitely enriched in other ways at the risk of here within 10 years their rockets could do it in ten years it's four and a half light-years okay so then you just worked out that energy costs for you by the ten cents a kilowatt hour which efficient here in the Bay Area from PG&E all right that worked out the cost of the energy to transport that on the unobtanium was so far beyond the value of the unobtanium it was completely analogous you ordering the book from Amazon and paying sixty thousand dollars for the shipping there's probably a likelihood that we may not be around when the answer comes back is there is there any value that having some sort of a Kilroy Was here kind of passive marker beacon on an outer rocky moon or something saying you know that would survive say the earth being Annihilator or all traces of us being on the bus vanishing so is there any value to that and I think one of the strongest objections to Mount Ayr series at the SETI program is we won't be around in order to get the reply so if you major the success of an SETI program by our progeny our great-great great-great grandchildren get over to reply then that requires that the other recipients get the extraterrestrials get it then they send something back and then that our great great-great grandkids be around but if you define success in terms of the same sort of criteria that we're expecting extraterrestrials to have which is sort of sharing information with other civilizations then it becomes plausible and you know if the concern is that were in some sort of danger and then we're a lot less dangerous we're not around at all so I mean that you know if if I think you can always argue any civilization can argue that you're not old enough yeah I can imagine a building new year old civilization say Wow we'll wait until we're 10 million years old Apartments are transmitting and it could be the audacious young civilizations that actually start the transmitting escape but I think even if we do start transmitting I think another thing that we can do is we provide a lot of great data for extraterrestrial sociologists one of the big factors in the Drake Equation that's most difficult to estimate as L a longevity of civilization if we start transmitting systematically and then for whatever reasons stop that's going to give at least one data point to extraterrestrial sociologists to figure out how long did this civilization last and that's transmission stage I would say the idea of a legacy by the way is a very good one it's been pointed out anytime that for example the pioneer in the Voyager spacecraft are in a sense legacies of humanity also the things that are been landed on the moon the weather on the moon is fairly mom so things can last a long time and in fact there have been planned projects to put if you will a time capsule on the moon exactly for what for the reasons suggesting and there's a guy down in Southern California on the desert monuments and stuff yeah he's hovering me over the whole history of it as he understands it in stone since we're looking for intelligences that have some vastly different level of development than we have in all probability are you also at least looking at the literature and things of understanding different intelligences here on earth like animals and things because if we under have the same kind of languages and concerns that we do but even an animal as simple as a crocodile can get the concept of a name of an individual has which indicates that for a very long time we've had some kind of innate linguistic very crude ability of unearthed creatures is there are you guys looking at say studies of the way parents communicate in their flocks or the way cats and dogs interact with their human companions because it seems to me if we're trying to figure out how a lien who's very different development from us would communicate looking at how the semi alien intelligence of other communicate might help us here that we do have people at the SETI Institute who's studying precisely that on the theory that if you know if we can't even communicate with a parent or or a whale with buoys you know share an entire planet and and the genome up in this boat some X number of tens of millions of years ago how are we going to communicate with et but Doug here I think is the closest expert here today so don't you start yeah I think that we can do a lot of work with comparative psychology so one of the big challenges that to anticipate who are different from us human beings rely very much on a sense of vision and a sense of hearing if you look at how much of our brain is used to process those sensory modalities or the dominant ones and much of the way we think about our world is dictated by the fact that that's how we're gathering sensory information one of the things about those two particular senses is that in both hearing and vision we're able to localize objects in space very distinctly and that's not the case with as a a sense of smell same with time you know something is either here in this room or someone is gone understand imagine an olfactory creature where there may be a medium or great sense of time or maybe mathematics isn't even in discrete mathematics but it makes sense to say on that world two plus two equals approximately 2 plus approximately 2 equals approximately 4 so I think think looking for analogues here on earth of other animals there's only so much by imagination that there's so many other creatures here on earth that encounter the world with other sensory modalities that's been started the question of L the final term of the Drake Equation at the time of the technological civilization came up and there was a gentleman over here brought up the singularity Institute right here and the singularity is some of that's going on right now one of the interesting issues to me about L and the cingulate arian point of view is this and also it goes to the heart of what we talk about we talk about SETI your radio show is called are we alone and we talk about wanting to have a conversation with and talk to others they're very much as an ocean of individuals discrete individuals even in your far future said do you remember Zork 10,000 years ago when we were made out of meat there was a there was orc to have a conversation with one of the great dangers to our civilization the thing that may define the other end about we know when help me began in 1895 radio was invented when does L and in terms of a technological civilization it may be and it might be indeed our epitaph is that where a data point for some future sociologists but that's 100 or 500 years is the lifespan what's going to kill this civilization maybe ecological flux will it be a nuclear holocaust between two warring factions or will it be an act of terrorism that is is the defining limit on a civilization the amount of time after great powers have devolved to individuals biological warfare powers nuclear warfare powers to individuals for how long you allow there to be differing opinions in your society and is in fact the most dangerous thing to the long-term survival erase individuality with some of it being aberrant psychology so you get the Star Trek board metaphor which is why does the board Queen want to absorb every life-form she encounters into this collective because no one in the collective is a dissenter no one in the collective is a suicide bomber no one in the collective is going to take the red banner and blow up the universe and their collective is secure because there is no individuality so the thing that singularity post singletery civilizations may converge on is in fact a lack of individuality and this notion that we need is someone to talk to may very much be an adolescent notion of species that are in accentuated in diverse individuals when we join the khalaqtu Club we may find there only is one we in the whole universe and it is an absorbent collective because the alternative is short lers short-lived civilizations that will ultimately fall to crazy individual acts of terrorism I have a question for Rafi if you have opportunity to invite you extracted STR wealth around the world and the special place then you invite them you know there will be some kind of contact with me you and then and about the safety not only you but others did you think about that oh I can repeat the question yeah I think I got the gist of it is where would I if I had the opportunity to fight the people to have this international confrontation confrontation who would I invite where would I bring them and the answer is you know what we don't enforce we don't we're not going to resolve the abortion issue by saying everybody who's pro-choice come over here let's have a conversation and we'll vote and that'll solve the issue what you have to do is a pleb asite if it's a worldwide species transforming moment in which we close the old history books and start new with a fresh page you don't invite individuals who either you have selected or have self selected to participate in that process if it affects everybody it ultimately devolves to be something that has to be decided by national photo sites that are aggregated into a global website I like to call this the feature can under it may be the good guy club in the galaxy club is Piniella and Olson they're good guys what we made meet first is approaches it was kind of single-minded that just wants to sell out of rock samples and will it mean let me give you a little parallel here because it I think this is very similar actually and what I look for when we talk about this and we're all gonna go and I would love to talk to aliens and meet them but what are the principle distinctions okay suppose that instead of being a bunch of astronomers here we're a bunch of biochemists and one of the biochemists says you know what the single scourge of humanity is viruses viruses are bad they're evil they reproduce they take over our pilots I've got a system that I've developed here that's going to of viruses and I think it's going to be ultimately good that we transformative the end of I will cause the disease a whole new chapter in human history entirely beneficent I'm going to do it I'm going to introduce it into the water supply without government or public consultation and oh by the way it goes wrong and it turns out it doesn't just destroy viruses it also destroys RNA which is important for the transcription DNA and reproduction and guess what it's the worst disaster human rates and what do we say at the end of that we say but you know scientists should be able to do what they think is best without any oversight what's the principal distinction between the scenario I just described and the scenario of active SETI being initiated by the small self-selected group I'll take one last question maybe on this side we have written to the side for a while yeah what people keep talking about L as it's a one-time thing that similarly she rises radio transmits and then it dies no one seems to talk about it right up and down in cycles I mean civilizations rise and falling Chinese civilizations risen and fallen just because we get to a bad spell where we do exhaustive research and got in the global war but you know he killed 99 percent of the human populations an awful lot less and so it rises again and extra so for me I don't know what weapons World War 3 will be bought with but world war war will be fought with sticks and stones when you not have a technological civilization you really not for lose for a long time I got a good enough Oh Oh coffee handle no I don't think I I think if you've not that 99% of the world it wouldn't take you know another 150,000 years to get back to where we are of course not because you had the legacy that information but beyond that let me let me just suggest something about L what happens is you'd that radio you go on the air so now maybe somebody can detect you at the same time you invent the h-bomb you know within 50 years right so no maybe you have a chance of going off the air with a lot of mushroom and cloud activity right okay but at the same time did you invent the h-bomb you invent rockets for the very practical reason that you need something to carry the H bombs around okay once you've invented Rockets you're within 100 or 200 years of at least having some settlements beyond your very planet we're not doing it now but remember you know Jerry O'Neill says it but the 1990s would be tens of millions of you living in colonies orbiting colonies around here has some happy because it's still cheaper to build condos in Arizona but but it didn't have to be that way at some point it won't be that way and it may be it'll take to the end of the century maybe it'll take to the end of the next century it doesn't matter it's going to happen within a few hundred years after inventing the h-bomb so the point is you have a bottleneck during which maybe are vulnerable to self-destruction I think all the same arguments could be made in terms of environmental catastrophe but if there's this problem like well you're in danger for a while and maybe we don't get through it but I can hardly believe that nobody gets through it and so I think that the point is that once you're dispersed you can't get rid of everybody right and it's just very hard to get rid of everybody when some of them are bars and some of them are orbiting so I honestly think that the future if not of Homo sapiens because were you know just saw squishy intelligence but at least of the culture that Rob keeps talking about here I think that I think it's thumbs up we're in for the long haul

Channel: SETI Institute

Views: 23,468

Keywords: should, we, contact, et

Id: ogau9iLby4A

Length: 57min 46sec (3466 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 29 2011