Calling All Aliens*

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Our hunt for aliens is about to take a giant leap forward.

The experiment known as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is getting a boost,

as the use of a large radio telescope in northern New Mexico is scanning the skies for signals from alien civilizations.

This experiment, known as COSMIC, will be the most ambitious SETI search ever undertaken.

Could it lead to the detection of a civilization elsewhere in our galaxy, and if so, what would be the consequences?

This is Big Picture Science from the SETI Institute, and I'm Seth Shostak.

I'm Mollie Bentley. In this episode, we provide an update on the search for intelligent life in the universe,

a conversation with writer Ted Chiang about his speculative visions for how alien contact might unfold,

and while we're at it, we're also going to talk about some of the most interesting research we've done so far.

And why some scientists don't only want to listen for messages, but also broadcast them.

Is that wise? And if we did it, what would we say?

We explore all that in this episode, Calling All Aliens.

I've worked as a SETI astronomer since 1988. That's a long time now.

And since the start of SETI back in 1960, you know, astronomers have used existing radio telescopes,

which are really nothing more than giant antennas, to try and eavesdrop on alien radio traffic.

That's true for SETI's newest experiment, but this one is far more ambitious than what's come before.

You might be familiar with the image of Jodie Foster wearing headphones as she listens for extraterrestrial signals in the movie Contact.

Well, Jodie was listening using the Very Large Array, or VLA, in the New Mexico desert.

The Array is a collection of 27 radio telescopes, but that type of listening experiment hasn't been done very often or for very long in the past.

But now the VLA is being used 24-7 in a project called COSMIC.

COSMIC piggybacks on conventional radio astronomy observations made with the Array, meaning that the search can be done

without tying up one of the world's most popular instruments for doing astronomical research.

COSMIC stands for Commensal Open Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster.

So COSMIC is a computer system that we are building at the Very Large Array in New Mexico

to input signals from the telescope to search for these extraterrestrial intelligence.

COSMIC will survey the sky continuously and will be, by far, the most audacious SETI search engine

ever undertaken.

Chenoa Tremblay is a postdoctoral researcher in radio astronomy with the SETI Institute.

This is a new data stream where we can specifically look for SETI at all times that the telescope is turned on.

All right, somebody's using the Very Large Array, presumably a radio astronomer from somewhere, right?

And so they're pointing at particular places up in the sky.

You don't get to control the telescope under this scheme.

No, exactly.

So our system is designed to be flexible.

It doesn't matter where they are looking in the sky.

And what we do is we pluck out of the field the nearest stars,

and they're able to look for signals just towards those stars in particular.

And so it doesn't really matter what anybody else is doing with the telescope at the same time.

Okay, on the assumption here that we don't know where ET is hanging out,

so one piece of sky is as good as another piece of sky.

Exactly, exactly.

And we know from projects like Gaia

that there are hundreds of billions of stars out there.

So we can just pick some number of them and look towards those and see, do we see a signal there?

And if multiple people want to point the telescope at the same patch of sky,

there's no hurt in looking again, or we can choose a different star to look at next time.

So this is a survey that can extend over basically the entire sky visible from the northern hemisphere.

That in itself is a big step forward.

Are there any other aspects to COSMIC that would sort of make it stand out when it comes to the search for ET?

I think also because of our ability to tag along with what the telescope is doing,

instead of a dedicated search,

we are going to be covering a lot more wavelength space than a lot of the other previous SETI searches.

Now, you say you're looking for a signal that would, you know, betray some alien presence there.

How is that signal different from the...

signal you might get from a quasar or some other natural radio emitter?

So most natural sources in the sky are what we call broadband.

And that means that they emit across a very wide range of wavelengths.

What we're looking for from a technological standpoint are things that emit over a very narrow number of wavelengths.

And so COSMIC is designed to split the information into very fine channels of wavelength.

And so we can look for these small changes instead of very broad changes.

That sounds like if I'm, you know, in my car driving around and I'm turning the knob on my radio.

I have an old car, it has a knob.

Turning the knob on my radio, you know, I'm looking for a station and it's at, you know, one spot on the dial.

It's at one frequency and it only extends over a very narrow range of frequencies.

So maybe it's at 680 kilohertz on the dial or whatever.

So this is sort of the same thing.

You're looking for a signal that's kind of just one spot on the dial.

Even a fraction of a dot on a dial sometimes.

And so, you know, we might go from 98.3 to 98.4.

But, you know, COSMIC can actually go to a much finer detail than that to look for more specificity of the signal.

So this is really a step forward in our search for COSMIC company.

In our search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Aliens.

If you will.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's, you know, in past searches, we might have covered in a five-year survey one to two thousand stars that we could look to find if another set of beings were trying to communicate somewhere in the universe.

But now with this setup and covering all the sky and a lot more frequencies, we are hoping to search for millions each year.

And so that's several orders of magnitude.

Several orders of magnitude higher.

When you say millions, you mean millions of places in the sky?

Yeah, millions of stars.

And we know now that almost every star has at least one planet.

So we're covering entire solar systems with this search.

And so we're covering more planets than we even know to exist at the moment.

Our computer system for COSMIC is so fast that we're able to do these millions a year.

And all the data are processed already.

So we just have to go and look at them.

Now, of course, it isn't just a matter of pointing antennas at a particular star system.

Even if there are some aliens on a planet around that star broadcasting into space, right, you still might not pick up that broadcast.

I mean, given the fact that maybe you're looking at the wrong frequencies at the wrong time or maybe you're just not sensitive enough to pick up a signal that might be coming from 50 light years away.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think one of the benefits of using the very large array is it has 27.

It has 27 dishes, radio dishes.

And these dishes are extremely sensitive in comparison to most of the search we have done previously, which is using a single powerful radio dish.

And so we can reach much higher sensitivity.

So this means that maybe we can see a signal that might be coming off from a planet that's, you know, a few hundreds of light years away versus maybe only four light years away previously.

You know, members of the public.

And members of the public who obviously aren't doing SETI, they often say, OK, but what are you listening for?

And they figure that you're listening for some sort of message on the signal, some sort of modulation, you know, right?

Here's the value of pi or here are some, you know, prime numbers or the Fibonacci series or something like that.

But that's not what you're looking for, is it?

That would be really nice.

But I think the chances of that happening are a lot smaller than just kind of a signal.

A signal that's just being transmitted.

So essentially, we're just looking for a spike in intensity at a specific frequency that we can map because essentially because the Earth is moving and we would expect another planet to be moving.

We have something called Doppler.

And that means that the signal will change slightly depending on which frequency you look at.

And this is called a Doppler signal.

And so we're looking for that type of change.

OK.

And the Doppler change is just the slight shift in frequency because the planet is rotating like our planet rotates once every 24 hours, right, as seen by the aliens, that kind of thing.

OK.

So that's the kind of signature, if you will, that you're looking for.

You're not really going to say these are aliens because they're broadcasting their top 40.

You're just trying to find out if they're on the air at all.

Exactly.

And so maybe it's not just on their planet.

Maybe they have an equivalent of a Mars rover.

Maybe they have a Voyager that's somewhere within their solar system or just outside of their solar system that they can communicate with us.

And we would be sensitive to those types of signals as well.

I see.

OK.

So, you know, what motivates you, Shanoa, to, you know, do this kind of an experiment?

I mean, you know, it's a bit of a long shot.

Nobody's ever found an alien transmission before.

But what's exciting is to try to work on an experiment that's the largest in history to try to answer the question, are we alone in the galaxy?

So I know, Seth, you've also published a lot in SETI and you've worked a long time in SETI.

What has motivated you to work on the project as it has changed over the years?

Well, actually, Shanoa, I don't think it's so different from what's motivating you.

I mean, it's just the excitement of being able to find that we have some company out there.

That there are other beings out there that have also developed radio.

So they're technically competent civilizations out there.

And just to find them, I mean, it might not have any practical consequences, but it would be really exciting to know that, you know, we're not the only kids on the block.

Yeah.

I've only been involved in SETI for the last six or seven years.

I got involved with it during my Ph.D.

But I think you've been involved with it and probably seen more of its growth where I've just kind of read some of its growth.

What do you think has really changed?

What has really changed a lot about SETI in the last few years?

Yeah.

Well, that's the kind of question I get a lot at, you know, when I'm with other people and they ask what I do for a living.

And their question, you know, you can talk to them about radio astronomy if you want, but their question is almost always, but is there anybody else out there?

Are we alone in the cosmos?

Everybody's interested in that.

They're not maybe so interested in the behavior of a pulsar or whatever like that.

They want to know if there's somebody out there.

And that's a very strong motivation.

I think that when they ask me about that, they'll also say, well, okay, you haven't heard anything.

Is there anything new?

You know, what's happening?

I mean, you haven't heard anything for a long time.

And then you have to point to the fact that the equipment keeps getting better.

That's the news in SETI is almost always about, well, we're using this new telescope or we have better receivers or we have different algorithms for sifting the incoming cosmic static or whatever.

So there's always progress, even if you haven't found DT.

And you personally, your own motivation, you know, you said, you know, what could be more exciting than finding ET?

I mean, that is a pretty exciting prospect.

How do you rate the chances that you'll succeed?

I think that cosmic brings us significantly closer to that capability.

And recently I was talking to somebody and they asked, well, will we find ET in our lifetimes?

And I think that if we can keep up with cosmic.

And other processes similar to this in the future, I think we have a very good chance within the next five to ten years.

But don't hold me on that.

Don't hold you to it.

Well, you have to have the courage of your convictions here, Shanoa.

I know.

Well, Shanoa Tremblay, thanks so very much for speaking with us.

You're welcome.

Thank you for having me.

Shanoa Tremblay is a postdoc researcher in radio astronomy for the SETI Institute.

She has been studying the

The idea of contacting aliens is one that award-winning writer Ted Chang explores in his engaging short stories.

How do his visions compare with those of scientists who are searching for aliens?

A conversation between Ted Chang and our own alien hunter Seth, next.

This episode is Calling All Aliens on BigPicot.com.

Welcome to Calling All Aliens on Big Picture Science.

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Detecting an extraterrestrial signal with our SETI experiments would be an extraordinary

achievement. But what if our contact with aliens was more intimate than,

eavesdropping on their transmissions? What if we had a conversation?

For scientists, the idea is tempered by the reality that the vast distances and time scales

make a back and forth conversation impossible. But science fiction writers can imagine the scenario

as Ted Chiang did in a short story about first contact, Story of Your Life. It became the basis

for the film Arrival. In this scene, a linguist and a mathematician ponder how to have a conversation

with visiting aliens.

How did they get here? Are they capable of faster than light travel? A list of questions

starting with a series of handshake binary sequences.

How about we just talk to them before we start throwing math problems at them?

While Story of Your Life may be his best-known work, Ted Chiang's prodigious three-decade

writing career has earned him many awards and led some to compare him to science fiction giants

like Isaac Asimov. In his stories, Mr. Chiang,

Ted Chiang, and some of the other scientists on the team can be found in our podcast,

The First Contact, on the YouTube channel.

Ted Chiang's story cuts to the core of some of humanity's most profound and complex ideas,

like free will and our moral obligation to non-human sentient beings, including AI and to the

environment.

We were pleased to have the rare opportunity to talk to Mr. Chiang about how he came up with the

idea for the alien human conversations in Story of Your Life and the imaginative leaps he makes

when envisioning first-contact scenarios.

I actually have to say that the aliens were not the initial inspiration for this story.

inspiration for that story. The initial inspiration for that story was my desire

to tell a story about a character who knew the future and couldn't change it.

And I had the problem of how does my character gain this knowledge of the

future and the solution that I arrived at was that I would have my character

learn a language and I thought it was it would be much more interesting if it

were an alien language. So the fact that it it's a first contact story yeah that

was sort of secondary to my initial impulse in writing the story and you do

I mean at least judging by the film there's a lot of time spent on the

writing scheme of the aliens how they write this language. It's rather complex

they have to sort of draw a circle and then festoon it with squiggles of this

sort and the other. How did you come by that? And of course you know the

way that I came up with the idea of the first contact story was that I wanted to

the writing system used by the aliens in the story is somewhat different than

the one that's shown in the film. But one of the things that occurred to me was

that traditionally when say linguists or anthropologists first meet an

uncontacted population and they have to you know try and learn that society's

language you know they are always dealing with a culture that has no

writing system. And I think that could pose some difficulties which might be a

little alleviated if you were trying to you know engage in first contact with a

culture that had a writing system. I thought that a writing system might make

things easier. You know it turns out in the story that the writing system

doesn't actually make things easier but I thought that that was a reasonable

approach and it also gave me the opportunity to just sort of speculate

about the types of writing system that might conceivably exist. Okay but but I

noticed that you didn't resort to the usual tropes of alien languages or

writing for that matter that are based either on music or mathematics. These

seem very popular and I suppose mathematics appeals to sci-fi writers

because it sounds well scientific. But on the other hand try and describe I don't

know the concept of government or love using mathematics. I wouldn't know how to

do that. I think that your approach is maybe as good as any of the others maybe

better.

Well there are a lot of different avenues of communication. You know one of

the things that linguists point out is unique to language is just how how

widely applicable it is. How many things it can refer to. You and I are

having this conversation in language. We could not be having this conversation in

music. Yeah I agree with you. Although it makes for interesting cinema. It doesn't

sound like a great way to great way to communicate. So I gather then your

interests are not really so much in the technical aspects of this. Could we find

a common language even. Or you know how do you really conduct a conversation if

the aliens instead of being down the block are a hundred light years away

where each exchange takes 200 years. You're more interested in what we would

say to one another.

For the purposes of my story it was essential that it be a rapid back and

forth type of interaction because I needed my protagonist to learn this

alien language.

And that's not going to happen with a 200 year lag. So yeah for

story purposes I made it basically a face to face conversation.

Maybe you could just sort of give me a little bit of how a science fiction

writer explores the idea of alien contact and contrast that with how

scientists think about it because I don't think they you know viewed it in the

same way.

So I think in science fiction aliens stand in for a couple hours a week.

different ideas. One is just foreign cultures. A lot of stories about contact with aliens

are just a different way of talking about contact between human cultures. If you want to tell a

story about cultural misunderstanding or colonialism or imperialism, those are stories

that you can tell by having humans contact aliens. Another thing that science fiction uses aliens for

is to represent the unknowable, to represent something truly foreign, something that we

cannot really comprehend. Almost the diametrically opposite approach of the stories where

aliens stand in for, say, just a foreign culture. Yeah, it's kind of a cosmic peace enforced by the

distances between objects in the universe. I mean, that's what it is. And the finite speed of

light or...

Radio or whatever you're using there. In your story, Ted, The Great Silence,

humans use the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, may it rest in peace. They both try to detect and

to send messages. And it tells itself where a parrot is near the telescope. And, you know,

complaining about the fact that, doggone it, these humans are trying to contact, you know,

some Klingons 100 light years away when there are, in fact, species right here on Earth just

outside the door that they have to contact. And so, you know, it's a very, very, very, very,

I haven't bothered to try and make contact with.

One of the things I talk about in that story are experiments with African gray parrots, who, at least

one example of which, the parrot named Alex, demonstrated, you know, some really astonishing

linguistic capabilities. So I think there's very strong evidence that there are animals that have,

you know, much greater, you know, communicative abilities than what we normally,

you know, highly associate with animals. You know, they still don't have the equivalent of human

language. They can't hold a conversation like this, like the one that you and I are having.

That seems to be unique to human language because of various properties that human

languages possess and animal communication does not.

And are you suggesting in your story about the parrot that we should be spending more of our

effort trying to communicate with the parrot?

I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't

Well, I don't think it's one or the other. I don't think that our pursuit of SETI as a project is

in any way stopping us from also studying animal intelligence. I do think that there is a kind of

implicit social resistance to accepting animal intelligence because, you know,

that would force us to confront how badly we treat animals.

And, you know, so research into animal intelligence,

I think, can cause people to feel uncomfortable

about a kind of like ongoing atrocity

that is factory farming.

So I think there is, I think, something sort of fraught

about recognizing the intelligence of animals

that, you know, makes it a more viscerally difficult question

to grapple with.

Suppose we were to establish communication, if you will,

with some alien entity, as they like to say,

what would you want to know from them,

assuming you could ask?

Mostly, I would want to know what is their history?

You know, what has the history of their civilization been like?

What is the current state of their civilization?

Do they have a better sense

of the prevalence of intelligent life in the universe than we have?

Do they have multiple data points?

You know, if we encounter them,

you know, our data points will have increased from one to two.

Do they have a bigger number of data points?

That's what I would want to know.

So you would ask questions about the prevalence of intelligence.

You know of the Fermi paradox,

that is the fact that if the universe is really chock-a-block with,

you know, intelligent species,

you would think that there would be some evidence of that

that we could easily find.

It's like saying, if there are really, you know,

millions of squirrels roaming the suburbs of America,

you know, I should be able to walk into my backyard

and find a squirrel or two.

That sounds kind of reasonable,

but the Fermi paradox is a paradox

because even though the assumption sounds reasonable,

we haven't found any evidence

of anybody trying to communicate.

How do you look at that?

Well, actually,

I think I'm going to quote your colleague,

Jill Tarter,

who said,

I believe that,

you know, based on the amount of, you know, spectrum

that we've, you know, listened to

and how much of the sky we have monitored,

we have taken a sample of,

you know, equivalent to maybe a bathtub

out of the Earth's oceans.

And so that is not really a good basis

on which to say that

that we really lack evidence

that we should be finding.

You know, it's too early to say.

So, of course,

you know, one of the proposed solutions

to the Fermi paradox

is that intelligent species

tend to go extinct

and that's why we haven't heard from any of them.

But I guess, you know,

I'm going to go with Jill

and say that, you know,

we actually don't have enough data

to draw any kind of conclusion.

Yeah, maybe there isn't even a problem.

Yeah, there might not be.

You know, when people inquire of me,

they say, why haven't you heard anything?

You've been doing this for a long time, right?

Not a peep.

And, you know, there's several possible answers

and one is, well, there just aren't any aliens.

But that makes humanity so incredibly special

that it's suspect from the get-go,

in my opinion.

But what's not so suspect is simply that,

look, we've had technologies like radio

or, for that matter, lasers.

You know, communication modes.

We've had them for a century or less.

Alien species out there could very well have had

those kind of technologies for a million years or more, right?

So our experiments are simply not sensitive enough

to pick up a cacophony

that might be going on among the stars right now.

And they might, you know,

we might look back on this 100 years from now

and say, oh, yeah, we hadn't found anything yet.

It was like the Europeans in 1491.

They didn't know too much about the Americas.

They didn't understand.

Well, I mean, okay,

so where are you relative to Jill's position

that, you know, like, yeah,

we really don't have enough info to,

you know, we haven't even, you know,

we don't have enough observations

to really say that there's a paradox.

Do you disagree?

Do you think we have enough observations?

Do you think that it is like a real puzzle

why we haven't heard anything?

I don't think it's so clear-cut.

I mean, fair enough.

I mean, the data set is very, very limited.

On the other hand,

the universe is three times as old as the Earth.

There are presumably civilizations out there

that are literally billions of years more advanced

than Homo sapiens is, right?

And with an advancement of billions of years,

it seems to me not unreasonable

to suggest that they maybe have changed the universe

or disturbed the universe,

as Freeman Dyson says, you know,

that something has changed that is so obvious

that any astronomer

will have noticed it.

And we don't see that.

We have never found anything in the skies

that doesn't have a natural explanation.

And I have to say that that troubles me a little bit.

I don't know why, but it does.

There's that.

And do you have any sense of,

like, what that would look like?

Like, for instance, is it like,

is it an artificial star?

I'm thinking of a science fiction story

where they discover a star,

which has no trace elements in it at all.

Like, it is clearly a construct because,

you know, it is, yeah, just by,

just the spectrogram is not that,

not the spectrogram of a natural star.

Is it, is that,

is that the sort of thing you're thinking about, or?

Well, it could be.

By the way, you might have such a star

that made a story idea.

You might have a star like that

if it's a really, really old star

that formed before, you know, other stars,

big stars had made all those trace elements,

as you call them,

to put in the atmospheres of new stars.

But anyhow, that's a technical thing.

Yeah, I do think that there's something to it.

I don't know, I don't, you know,

make a point of this in polite conversation,

but it does seem to me

that we really don't see any evidence

of the intelligences, vast and deep,

to borrow H.G. Wells, right,

you know, in space.

We can look, you know, all through the galaxy,

a large chunk of the galaxy,

we can look at other galaxies,

we can look at galaxies

that are literally billions of light years away,

and we don't see anything happening

that's very clearly non-natural.

You sort of wonder

why isn't there something that is more peculiar?

It's sort of like, you know,

asking the Native Americans in 1500,

hey, you seen any Europeans lately, right?

And they say, yeah,

you just look down the street here,

and now there's some sort of thing

they call a church down there

that wasn't there five years ago or something,

that there might be something

that has been done to the universe

that we might detect.

And, you know, it's somewhat subjective,

but it seems to me that that's a bit puzzling.

Okay, okay.

Well, finally, Ted,

suppose we were to make contact with aliens.

Would that be a good thing for us?

I would say that,

I think, you know, Carl Sagan said it,

that, you know, any civilization

that has reached a level of technology

that would enable them to contact us

or, you know, certainly if they were able

to actually come visit us,

if they have achieved that level of technology

and they have not destroyed themselves,

they might have something to tell us.

The fact that they lasted that long

and, you know, that they would be engaged

in something which, you know,

has no conceivable economic value,

you know, sending signals out into space

or visiting another planet,

you know, in what we consider economic value.

So if they are doing things like that,

they might be doing something

which we ought to emulate.

Ted Chiang, thanks so very much

for speaking with us.

Thanks for having me.

Ted Chiang is a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning

science fiction writer,

best known for his collections

Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation.

The idea of a real-time conversation with aliens

may be firmly in the realm of fiction,

but some scientists want to do more

than try to detect alien signals.

They want to transmit.

Up next, the project to message extraterrestrials

raises questions.

Is it safe?

And what should we say?

In this episode of Big Picture Science,

we are calling all aliens.

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We've been talking about the ongoing effort

to detect aliens by eavesdropping

on their transmissions,

whether those broadcasts are deliberate

or simply leakage signals that we could pick up.

But some people wonder if we might have better luck

if we encourage the aliens to signal us

by first sending a signal of our own into space.

This is known as METI,

Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

It's challenging because it requires

the technology necessary to launch

a strong, easily-detected radio signal into space.

And in addition, it's not entirely obvious

in which direction such transmission should be sent.

Consider, there are about 60,000 star systems

within 100 light-years of Earth,

close enough that they might have picked up

signals from our planet

and thereby know of our existence.

But targeting all 60,000 in a METI project

is more than a little ambitious.

Still, some people think we should not remain silent.

Among them is Doug Vachoch,

who heads an organization that he founded,

METI International.

So I think we should be doing

what we hope the aliens are doing,

which is sending us messages.

Because, you know, maybe as much as we hope they will,

maybe they think,

come on, you're the new kids on the block,

you need to take the initiative.

The rationale is that if we make contact at all,

we know the aliens are going to be a lot older than we are,

and therefore maybe a lot older

and a lot more patient than we are.

And the reason is,

we have had radio for 100 years.

That's how long we've been able to communicate with the stars.

But if that's the norm in the galaxy,

given that the galaxy is over 13 billion years old,

if we get a signal,

it means the aliens have been at this

a lot longer than we have.

But what happens if the aliens are saying,

yeah, we have greater capacity,

we've done this hundreds, thousands of times.

And here you are,

the new kids on the block,

and you all of a sudden want to get the Encyclopedia Galactica?

Come on.

So you send us something,

and then maybe we'll think about replying back.

So that's what we're trying to do.

We're saying we're reaching out.

And by reaching out and letting them know

that we want to make contact,

that may be the critical issue.

I like your assurance that with age comes patience,

at least among aliens.

I hope that is true also with humans.

So these will be patient aliens.

They've been around for a while.

And when you say a while,

you mean many, many centuries.

Millions of years, yeah.

Well, some messages have been sent.

What I mean by that is some deliberate messages

have already been sent.

Perhaps the most famous messaging

was done 40 years ago

and is known as the Golden Record.

And this was a pair of records,

phonograph records,

that contain sounds of Earth

and human voices that were launched

aboard the twin Voyager spaceships.

But then you also have the message

that was sent out in 1974

from the Arecibo telescope,

known as the Arecibo message.

And that one was encoded in binary form.

Can you just compare and contrast

those two messages?

Sure.

Well, they're based on the idea

that if you want to communicate with an alien,

unfortunately,

they're probably not going to know English

or French or Swahili.

So you have to find

some sort of a universal language.

And on the Voyager recordings,

as you say,

on one side there were sounds of Earth,

there was music,

there were greetings in 55 languages.

On the flip side,

there was a tutorial,

a bunch of pictures,

and even a description of some basic math,

how we count,

a description of some chemistry,

and over 100 photographs of life on Earth,

the majority of them featuring human beings.

So it shows a little something

about our narcissism as a species.

So that's a picture that used math

and science

and pictures.

And then that was actually the basis

of the Arecibo message.

As you say,

it was sent in binary code,

two different frequencies,

very close to one another

on the radio dial.

And the hope is

if the aliens reconstruct it correctly,

they'll see that,

yes, this is a postcard from Earth.

It's a snapshot of what we're like.

And then the most cryptic part

to the aliens

is right in the middle of it,

which is this stick figure.

A stick figure of a biped.

And, you know, humans look at it and say,

oh, that's another human being.

The aliens might look quite different,

so that may be the hardest part to understand.

Well, the question underpinning

all of these endeavors

is what kind of language

could be our common language

with the extraterrestrials?

As you said, it couldn't be English.

French mathematics, we're hearing,

is perhaps a language we could use

to communicate with them.

Perhaps music.

What do scientists think

could be a common language?

Well, I think all of those

common characteristics,

because what you have to do is think,

what do we and the aliens have in common?

So if we get a radio signal

from the aliens,

that means, oh,

they can generate radio signals.

So that means they need to know

some basic physics.

They need to probably know how

to do some basic math.

I mean, if you can't do something

as simple as add 2 plus 2 and get 4,

you're not going to be a good engineer

on Earth or any other planet.

So that's where we start.

What do you need to make contact itself?

You need a shared technology

and you need some shared understanding

of the universe around you.

You probably know

what the universe is made of

if you're going to be exploring it.

But the tricky thing is,

even if the aliens have math

and they have a science,

are they going to communicate it to us

in a way that we'll understand?

So all the math

and all the messages we've talked about so far,

the Arecibo message,

the Voyager recording,

they use a lot of pictures.

They use a lot of sounds.

And that reflects human beings

being creatures who have

a lot of our brain dedicated

to interpreting pictures, images.

We're very visual creatures.

We're very auditory creatures.

But what happens if you're an alien

that evolved on a world

with a really noisy environment,

sounds not going to be very good.

It's a very murky cloud-covered planet.

Vision's not going to be very good.

Maybe you'll get around

through a sense of touch

or a sense of smell.

And what if we have to communicate

with blind aliens?

And so we designed a message

that, yes, is based on some math and science,

but that could be interpreted

without ever drawing a picture.

Doug, is the message

that you and your METI team designed,

that you just referred to,

the one that you sent in 2017,

because I believe that your team

did send a message a few years ago?

That's right.

This is part of a project

called Sonar Calling.

Unlike the Voyager recording

that tried to take a picture

of everything and explain

everything on Earth,

we wanted to explain a few things

very well with the hope

of really being understood.

And so we started

with some simple counting,

but we pointed to the only thing

we and the aliens could do

that aliens have in common.

So what we pointed to

is the radio signal

and key characteristics

of that radio signal.

So we wanted to introduce

the notion of time.

And so we sent pulses

of different durations,

one second, two seconds, three seconds.

And then we described those

in our mathematical language.

We introduced the idea

of different radio frequencies.

And then we tied those descriptions

to the two radio frequencies

we were using in our binary code.

So very rudimentary math,

but we wanted to show

that the radio signals

can describe the thing

that we're sending to the aliens,

the message itself.

And so if they can get that,

now that's an opening

to send something

even more sophisticated,

something more unique,

something more distinctive

about Earth.

It's to let them know

we want to make contact.

Many of the themes

that you have brought up

over the course

of this conversation

are captured

in Ted Chiang's short story

The Story of Your Life,

which was made into a movie,

Arrival,

and in the movie Arrival,

When the Aliens Come,

they need a mathematician

and a linguist present

to interpret the messages,

the conversation

that the aliens

are trying to engage in.

You need more than one interpreter.

And that's the reality

of the complexity

because, you know,

within the SETI community,

look, it has been dominated

by astronomers and engineers

and computer scientists,

folks who think, you know,

a binary code may be enough

to explain the whole world.

But it takes a linguist

to say, you know,

language is much more

sophisticated than that.

What I loved is that

the aliens actually came to Earth.

You know, with SETI and METI,

we're stuck with sending

or listening for a signal

that's traveled trillions of miles

between the stars.

And so if you don't understand

and you say, I'm sorry,

could you repeat that

or could you explain this,

you may have to wait decades

or centuries

or even millennia

to get that reply back.

Here, Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner

had the advantage

of being face-to-face

or face-to-tentacle

with these aliens,

the heptapods,

who had come to Earth.

And even then,

it took weeks

to finally figure out

some way of pointing

at the same thing,

the kind of thing

that we tried to do

with our radio signals,

pointing at radio waves.

And so I think

that has implications, too.

If we get a signal from aliens,

there's not going to be

a quick and easy

decoding of it.

Even if they do use

something like math

or say they're sending us

the periodic table of elements,

who's to say they're going

to arrange the elements

in exactly the same way?

So even though I hold out hope

that there are universals,

really being able

to identify them

and then building on those

to really establish

sophisticated communication

could take generations.

Is our desire, though,

to communicate,

to communicate with aliens,

is it simply transactional?

We want to learn something

from them, perhaps something

that would benefit us,

help us solve climate change,

or maybe they would give us

the secrets to some kind

of energy device.

Is that the reason

why we want to communicate

with them, or is there

a bigger question here

about understanding

our place in the universe?

Well, we could reduce

sending a message

to being something transactional.

So we send them something

and maybe we'll get

something in return.

And then the question is,

who has to be the first one

to initiate?

We hope they're initiating

with SETI.

With METI, we say,

maybe they're not,

maybe we need to take

the initiative.

But we can also view it

in a much more altruistic sense,

in the sense of which

we're not guaranteed

to get anything,

but that we think

there's something

about this experience

of being human

that's worth remembering,

that's worth sharing.

And that even though

we may have really

modest technology

or understanding of the universe

compared to the aliens,

that there is something

so distinctive about being human

that it matters.

Because what we know is that,

yeah, they may be more powerful,

they may be wiser than we are,

but the twists and turns

of biological and cultural evolution

mean that there's never going to be

another species out there

that is a twin of human beings.

And I think sometimes

people are afraid

that if we do discover aliens,

somehow we won't be

as special anymore.

I think it's just the opposite.

The more we learn about aliens,

the more we will realize

no matter how powerful

or wise anyone is,

no species is going to be

more human than we are.

Doug Vakoch,

thank you so much

for talking to us

and best of luck

with your project.

Thanks very much.

Appreciate it, Molly.

Take care.

Doug Vakoch is the founder

and head of METI International

in California.

Well, Seth, that brings us

to the big picture

in this discussion

of the search

for extraterrestrial intelligence.

You know something about this.

You are a SETI astronomer.

Yes, indeed.

And frankly, Molly,

I'm actually quite excited

about this new project, COSMIC,

because it will be so much,

you know,

well, we used to say

more comprehensive,

but nobody knows

what that means.

It's just that it will be

a bigger search

than has ever been done before.

Well, we have a sense

of how important SETI,

the search

for extraterrestrial intelligence,

is for the scientists

who are undertaking

that endeavor.

But what does it mean

to the public?

Well, I think

that the public actually

would find it very interesting

if we could point

to some spot on the sky

and say, well, you know,

25 light years

in that direction,

there's a world,

there's a planet there

with some sort of life forms

that are clever enough

to broadcast signals

into space.

I mean, even if they didn't

know any more than that,

I think it would be

really interesting

to know that all those

sci-fi shows that they had seen

ever since they were kids

actually had some basis in fact.

Well, let's say

we did detect a signal.

Let's say that the COSMIC project

did detect a signal.

What happens next

in the minutes and the days

after an interesting signal

is detected?

Well, the immediate reaction,

of course, would be,

you know,

a huge news story.

So, you know,

every publication,

every TV show,

every radio show,

they'd all be handling

this story.

That's interesting.

So you would say

that the media

would react to it

before the scientists

say confirm the signal

or just talked about it

among themselves?

Oh, yeah.

And I say that, you know,

not to merely provoke

our listeners,

but because I've seen

it happen in the past

when there was a hint

of a signal

that we thought

maybe we had found something,

but it still hadn't been

confirmed by the scientists.

But the media

were all over it.

I mean, you know,

most of them,

the responsible ones,

would say something like

possible alien detection.

But, of course,

you know,

the public's going to read

right over that word,

possible.

They're going to think

we're in touch.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

So the public

is having its reaction.

They're getting excited.

But the astronomers

are having,

taking a more sober,

careful view.

What are they doing

behind the scenes

as those headlines

consume us?

Well,

there's no any other

research result,

really, Molly.

It's just

the first thing to do

is to check it out

to see if you get

the same result

that those other people got.

In other words,

anybody with a big antenna

and the capability

of pointing it

in the direction

from which

the signal is coming

would, in fact,

do that.

They would just stop

whatever else they're doing,

you know,

to try and confirm

that this signal

is real.

And those that had

even better equipment

would try and see

if there's any message

on that signal.

Well, Seth,

you know,

when we talk about

what contact would be like,

to what degree

have you and other scientists

who work in this field

imagined

what the aliens

will look like?

Now,

in the movie,

Arrival,

we heard about that.

They were heptapods.

They looked a little bit

like squid

or something like that.

Do we think the aliens

could look like squid?

Would they look like humans?

Would they be biped?

Do we have any idea

how they would manifest

physically?

Well,

of course,

we don't.

On the one hand,

you know,

they've got their own story

of evolution to tell

and,

you know,

evolution on their planet

certainly wouldn't be

a duplicate of evolution

on Earth.

So,

they wouldn't necessarily

look like us.

But on the other hand,

having said that,

it's also the case

that,

you know,

one thing you do know

about them

is that they're capable

of building

a radio transmitter.

So,

they've got to have,

you know,

appendages,

hands,

arms,

whatever,

that would allow them

just to hear them.

So,

they can't just be,

you know,

like fish in the sea,

which really don't build

very much in the way

of technology.

So,

you would at least

know that.

Well,

finally,

Seth,

there's been a lot

of speculation

about what we should say

to the aliens.

What would you say

to the aliens

if we did make contact

and you could have

that conversation

in real time,

one that was not

interrupted by

200 or 2,000 year lag?

Yeah.

Well,

then I would be asking

them questions,

of course.

And the kinds of questions

that I would ask

are certainly

the obvious ones,

you know,

what do you look like

and,

you know,

tell us something

about your society

and so forth.

But I would ask

specific questions

about things like,

well,

do you have music

or do you have religion

or,

you know,

things like that

that humans are special

with regard

to those sorts of things.

And it would just be

interesting to me

to know

how different species

would develop

these kinds of things

as well.

Yeah.

I'd be interested

if they had been watching us

or if they understood

our society,

how they think

we're doing

and if they had any advice

for us.

Yeah.

Well,

it's nice

to seek help

from the aliens,

but on the other hand,

I mean,

imagine if,

you know,

the Neanderthals

could pipe up today

and ask us,

hey,

look,

we've got various problems,

maybe you can help us

solve them.

To begin with,

I'm not sure

I'd even want

to spend the time

solving the problems

of the Neanderthals,

but the other thing is

I'm not sure

I would be able to do so.

This show

would not be possible

without the extraordinary talents

of senior producer

Gary Niederhoff

and assistant producers

Shannon Rose Geary

and Brian Edwards.

I am the executive producer

of Big Picture Science,

Molly Bentley.

Thanks also

to financial support

from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation,

Lauren Trottier,

Reena Shulsky-David

and Sammy David.

Big Picture Science

is produced

at the SETI Institute,

a nonprofit education

and research organization

that tries to answer

the question,

are we alone?

I'm the Institute's

senior astronomer,

Seth Shostak.

Also a big thanks

to our listeners

and our Patreon supporters.

The original music

in the show

is by Dewey DeLay

and June Miyake.

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of Big Picture Science

looking at the latest

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Calling All Aliens.

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