Tweeting Aliens

Why do you people always call during Bleet-blorp?

So I was away last week, and during my time off I found myself revisiting Space Chronicles by Neil deGrasse Tyson. This was my second read through and I tore through it in about a day and a half. Partly I used the book as a resource for a writing project I have been working on, but it also could have been the trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that helped to re-inspired my return to the words and passions of Dr. Tyson. Either way, I have find myself in a certain mood of cosmic musing.

So imagine my interest when I returned to the real world and started reading about how SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) scientists debated the merits of sending active messages into space in order to look for intelligent life during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This is called Active SETI or METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence,) a name I find ironic, because I am on Twitter and I sometimes wonder if most of us are even messaging any intelligent life here on Earth.

There have been a few attempts at intergalactic emails in the past. My favorite attempt came in 2008, when NASA beamed the Beatles song, Across the Universe to Polaris. Though in all fairness this wasn't considered an actual attempt to make contact with an alien race, more of a publicity stunt cooked up NASA and a Beatles historian. By all accounts Polaris (our North Star) most likely does not harbor any worlds that would be capable of supporting life. However, there have been other more serious attempts at sending isolated messages to nearby star systems, such as A Message from Earth.

This message was a high powered digital radio transmission aimed at Gliese 581, specifically Gliese 581c, which is a possibly habitable planet with a warm and temperature climate that is a good candidate for housing life. The message was sent in 2008 and contained 501 messages that were selected through a contest on the social media site, Bebo. These messages will reach the planet in 2029, and then I guess we wait and see if we get a response or just some version of an answering machine message. (Maybe they are screening us.) Similarly, in 2013, the somewhat controversial Lone Signal project began, founded by two businessmen.

The Lone Signal charges the public money so that they can send messages, 144-characters in length, to the red dwarf star Gliese 526 which has its own confirmed planetary system. Unlike A Message from Earth, this is not a one time time transmission. In fact, the Lone Signal project wants to earn enough money to build a network of radio dishes to actively send messages to a variety of candidate solar systems within our galactic neighborhood... and who better to be our first ambassadors to these distant neighbors than any jerk on the Internet that is willing to pay twenty-five cents to send a penis joke to the real-life equivalent of the Klingon Empire.

This brings us back to the debate among the SETI scientists, which was held at the AAAS 2015 Conference this past week. If we are going to start sending active messages of greeting out into the universe, we will need to be prepared for the consequence of getting an answer back in return. For most of its life, the SETI Institute has only listened to the heavens, like some creepy dude in the 90's that cruised around with a baby monitor to listen to people talk on their cordless telephones.

SETI themselves lays out some of the dangers on their website. Until now, SETI researchers have not been very interested in broadcasting... To begin with, we are a technologically young civilization... there are surely societies that have possessed the ability to send high-powered signals for tens of thousands, if not millions, of years... We are the new kids on the technology block, it may behoove us to listen first. Some have also expressed concern that broadcasting might be dangerous, literally calling attention to our existence. Even Stephen Hawking believes that any alien visitors would basically treat us the way Europeans treated Native Americans, (which if you need a history refresher didn't turn out so great for Native Americans.)

Hit me up on Twitter @IWantToBurstOutOfYourChest

Yet, is that just a pessimistic view or is there truth to it? After all, there are plenty of reasons why making a friend request across the galaxy could be beneficial, (and not just for having someone to share our food pics with, either.) No matter who you are, you have to admit that Earth is far from perfect. We have a lot of problems, and some friendly visitors from beyond our solar system could bring some solutions, such as cleaner energy, faster computer processors, maybe even a way to reverse the effects of global warming, to say nothing of the possibilities of interstellar travel. Heck, even if we just got back a message saying, "Hey, how are you? We like your profile, and we'd be very interested in meeting up sometime for a drink," (Which, is basically every message I send girls through my dating profile,) our society would still be irrevocably altered.

If humans were forced to live with concrete proof of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrials, even if they remain as trapped on their world as we do on ours, it would mean that we would have to face some pretty tough questions. We would know that we were no longer alone, no longer special. What does that mean for religion? for governments? for science? for that guy who stands on my street corner everyday with the tinfoil hat? Would there be widespread panic, or something better. Would we start to look at each other differently when we realize that our differences, skin, eyes, ethnic upbringing, are not so "alien" after all, when compared to the face of real ETs? I don't have the answers to any of those questions, and I don't know if anyone will until the time we are forced to answer them.

All I do know is that real scientists this past week debated the merit of announcing our presence to the galaxy, and the possibility of alien invasion, (and whatever else happens, that's pretty cool.) In all fairness, we have been broadcasting our presence for a while now with the slew of radio, TV, and, most recently, Internet broadcasts that have been steadily expanding around our place in the galaxy like a sphere of Nick at Nite reruns, featuring I Love Lucy and (what is sure to be very confusing) Star Trek, but we have never made a large scale and sustained effort to actively send targeted messages to star systems which are candidates for Earth-like worlds. More to the point, an Active SETI search has people nervous enough to voice their opinion about it. After all, there is a difference between waiting with your hand up to be acknowledged and standing up on your desk and screaming at the teacher.

As for my own personal opinion, I find myself being against the idea, and not so much because of the threat of alien invasion, but because I don't want humanity announcing its presence prematurely. We are a young race and we do have a lot to figure out before we start introducing ourselves to our neighbors. Things like the Golden Disks are all well and good as symbolic gestures, but we need to get our house in order first. We need to earn our place among the stars, and not have it handed to us as long as we put on a good face and ask very nicely. As great as it would be to have an influx of alien technology, I don't know if we are ready for it. I think we have to face our present challenges ourselves, and live the lessons that come along with achieving a space-faring society, even if that means we risk our own annihilation. If there is a galactic society out there, whether it be a Federation or an Empire, let us meet its members as equals, not as a charity case or as an easily conquered world.

I'm not alone in believing this either. None other than Dr. Frank Drake (of the Drake Equation fame) listened to the conference and said, I think it’s a waste of time at the present. It's like somebody trying to send an e-mail to somebody whose e-mail address they don’t know, and whose name they don’t know. (We would basically be sending galactic spam,) but even if the call were to be answered and we were to invite our new friends over for a play date, it is worth noting that we really shouldn't know what to expect. I will give the last word of this to the man whose words should carry the most weight, Neil deGrasse Tyson.  

We actually have some evidence of what happens when a high technological culture meets a low-technology culture. Our species bears this out multiple times in the history books, and it doesn’t bode well for the culture that has less technology. But I would say to fear an alien for that reason is more a reflection of how we know we treat each other than it is on how we could ever possibly suspect an alien to treat us. And so why should we be the measure of hatred in the universe?

 

(PS: It is worth noting that the 2015 AAAS Conference also held several extremely important symposiums on Ebola and controlling infectious diseases, climate change, scientific education, global human resources, and much more serious topics than sending out our Instagram photos to Alpha Centuri. [Un]surprisingly, though, it was the Active SETI portion of the conference that the news media actually decided to report on... I just wanted to leave you with that thought.)