by Ben Miller
On July 20, 2015, at the Royal Society in London, the Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner called a press conference. Accompanied by luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Frank Drake, and Martin Rees, as well as by Carl Sagan’s widow and co-collaborator on Sounds of Earth, Ann Druyan, Milner announced a game-changing new SETI initiative called Breakthrough Listen. Over the next decade, mankind will search the nearest million stars and the nearest hundred galaxies for signals. If ET is calling, we are about to pick up the phone.
In essence, what Milner has done is provide SETI with a big pot of cash1 to buy time on three of the world’s most powerful telescopes. The Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales will search for radio signals,2 while the Lick Telescope in California will hunt for optical laser transmissions. Up until now, it has been very hard for SETI to afford more than one day a year on this kind of kit, which is just one of the reasons why they built the Allen array. Now they will be getting thousands of hours a year, vastly increasing the speed, scope, and resolution of their search.
SETI has been conducting searches for visible light transmissions—known in the trade as “optical SETI”—for over a decade, but the recent step increase in our own use of lasers makes the Breakthrough Listen search seem all the more timely. In January 2014, NASA used a laser to broadcast an image of the Mona Lisa to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a robotic craft which is currently making a survey for future Moon landings. That was swiftly followed by the International Space Station’s Otical PAyload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS), where NASA proved they were able to send data much faster over laser than they are currently able to with radio waves. Could it be that in looking for radio transmissions we are way behind the times? Maybe ET has moved on, and communicates with its satellites and lunar base stations using lasers?
Adding the Lick Observatory to the search means we can ramp it up for just this kind of signal. One of the disadvantages of radio waves is that they spread out over a wide area, dissipating their power; lasers, on the other hand, are much more directional. The snag is that to detect a laser beam you need to be close to its line of sight. There’s also the risk that laser signals would be heavily encrypted; after all, anyone broadcasting with radio waves is happy to be overheard, but if you are using a laser there’s a chance you are trying to keep your communications secure. As ever with SETI, the slim chance of success is outweighed by the extraordinary advantages that detection would bring. What if we suddenly find ourselves plugged into the galactic internet? Imagine how many videos of Richard Dawkins arguing with creationists we could watch then.
As well as Breakthrough Listen, Milner also teased a second, equally enticing prospect called Breakthrough Message. Although full details have yet to be announced, the gist is that a million dollars in prize money awaits anyone who can create a digital message that will “represent humanity and planet Earth.” As Ann Druyan explained, “the Breakthrough Message competition is designed to spark the imaginations of millions, and to generate conversation about who we really are in the universe and what it is that we wish to share about the nature of being alive on Earth.”
And if all that’s not enough to get your head spinning, try this: All of the data will be available online, as will any code that SETI writes to crunch it. If you want to get in on the act by analyzing the data yourself, or by pimping Breakthrough Listen’s software, you are most welcome. Or if that seems a bit hands on, you can just download the SETI@home app and allow it to piggyback your laptop’s spare processing power, becoming yet another node in the world’s largest supercomputer. As a man who made his money via social networks like Facebook, Milner is clearly intent on making Breakthrough Listen a club that everyone wants to join.
ANOTHER EARTH
The timing of Milner’s announcement couldn’t have been better, coming just days after the Kepler Space Telescope found Kepler 452b, the planet they are calling “Earth 2.0.” It would probably be more accurate to call it “super-Earth 2.0,” because it’s actually 60 percent bigger in diameter than our home planet, and would have twice the surface gravity. If it has water, it would have all the exciting life-friendly features of super-Earths that we mentioned in the last chapter, with Indonesian-type volcanic archipelagoes surrounded by shallow seas.
In that case, of course, we were talking about super-Earths orbiting close to orange stars; Kepler 452b, on the other hand, is orbiting in the habitable zone of a yellow star like our own Sun.3 Like all of the Kepler planets, it’s quite some way away; 1,400 light-years away, in fact.4 In other words, if we did intercept a message, they would have to have sent it 1,400 years ago, just as if they were to receive one from us tomorrow we would have had to have sent it in ad 615, fifteen years before the Prophet Muhammad’s conquest of Mecca.
On the other hand, the star that Kepler 452b is orbiting is six billion years old. Again, let’s assume that the Earth is typical, and, on average, intelligent communicable life arises on Earthlike planets after four billion years. Remembering that, thanks to gamma ray bursts, no life would have been possible on any planet before five billion years ago, we can conclude that life on Kepler 452b could have a billion-year head start. What will life on Earth look like after another billion years of evolution?
I’m not one for predicting the future, so let’s do our usual trick of falling back on what we already know. One billion years of evolution on Earth takes us back before the Cambrian explosion, to a time when life was, by and large, single-celled. No trilobites, no sponge-like Ediacarans, just the odd brightly colored microbial mat. It’s an unsettling thought, but whatever we find on Earth in another billion years might easily be as different from us as we are from bacteria. Martin Rees proposes that such creatures won’t even be carbon-based life-forms as we know and love them, but the robots of a long-dead civilization.
Whatever the case, it’s becoming clear that, when it comes to communicating with aliens, there’s a timing problem. They may be out there, but are their signals reaching us right now, and are we capable of understanding them? When Frank Drake formulated his famous equation to calculate the number of communicable civilizations, a crucial factor was the length of time for which a civilization is detectable. But there’s a world of difference between detectable and decipherable. We might be able to receive radio broadcasts from Kepler 452b—albeit via some extraordinarily poky transmitters—but how would we ever be able to decode them?
Let’s imagine for a moment that Breakthrough Listen is wildly successful, and in seven years’ time, after searching 752,656 stars, we finally detect a laser signal from an Earth-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star 355 light-years away.5 Just like in the movie Contact, there’s a recognizable call signal—prime numbers, perhaps, or the digits of π—followed by a short broadcast. How will we know if that broadcast contains a message, rather than just being random noise? And if it does contain a message, how will we translate it?
Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time that scholars have confronted such a question. For centuries, some of the greatest minds in Europe struggled to understand the sacred texts of a distant people, convinced that they might contain wisdom that would speed the technological and spiritual progress of mankind. So many had tried and failed that whoever managed to crack the code was guaranteed immortal glory. Against the odds, one young linguist succeeded, becoming a French national hero. We are about to meet the brilliant Jean-François Champollion.
THE PAST IS AN ALIEN COUNTRY
At the time of the French Revolution, if you were seeking answers to the big questions in life beside the Bible there was really only one place to look; the secrets of the Ancient Egyptians. Not only was the Hebrew story entwined with that of the pharaohs, but there were hints that Egyptian civilization had equally divine roots. There was a catch, however. While a few Ancient Egyptian artifacts had found their way to Europe during the time of the Roman Empire, Egypt itself had long been out of bounds.6 And even more tan
talizingly, the script on those artifacts, known as hieroglyphs—from the Greek for “sacred writing”—had been indecipherable for the best part of fourteen centuries.
Thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte, that was about to change. In an attempt to emulate his hero Alexander the Great, he decided to colonize Egypt, with the added intention of digging a canal through Suez that might renew France’s interest in India. On July 1, 1798, after evading Nelson’s fleet in the Mediterranean, he landed near Alexandria with over 400 ships and 38,000 men.7 Among them were the cream of French intellectual society, such as the mathematician Joseph Fourier and the naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,8 spread among seventeen different ships for safe-keeping. While Napoleon ultimately failed to subjugate Egypt, it was these so-called savants who were to bring back the real prize: the Ancient Egyptian artifact known as the Rosetta Stone.
THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS
After Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt in 331 BC, the country had been ruled by the Ptolemaic Dynasty, a rather decadent line of Macedonian noblemen who had eventually assumed the role of pharaohs. It was Ptolemys I to III who built the world’s first library at Alexandria, for example, and Ptolemy XIV who married his sister, the famous Cleopatra VII, only to be cuckolded by Julius Caesar.9 Following the Islamic conquest, Egypt was ruled by a succession of Islamic Caliphates and Sultanates, the last of which was that of the Mamelukes, which lasted from 1250 to 1517.
At that point the Ottomans took over, controlling the country from Constantinople but retaining the Mamelukes as an aristocratic ruling class. By the time of Napoleon, however, the Mameluke leaders Ibrahim Bey and Murad Bey had become increasingly powerful, disrupting trade and generally doing little to ingratiate themselves with the Ottoman Sultanate. It was this power vacuum that Napoleon intended to exploit, presumably relying on the fact that France’s erstwhile allies the Ottomans were cheesed off enough with the Mamelukes to remain neutral.
To begin with, he was largely successful, easily capturing Alexandria and Rosetta on the coast, then defeating the Mameluke forces of Murad Bey at Shubra Khit on the Nile on July 13, 1798, and taking Cairo following the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21. It wasn’t to last. Barely two weeks later, on August 1, Nelson finally caught up with the French fleet at Aboukir Bay (otherwise known as the Battle of the Nile) and delivered one of the most crushing naval victories in recorded history. No British ships were lost, while eleven of Napoleon’s thirteen ships of the line were sunk. Napoleon had his colony, but they were a long way from home.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
While Napoleon battled both the British and the Mamelukes, his savants were conducting just as earnest a campaign on the cultural front. Their first Ancient Egyptian find, at Alexandria, were two obelisks, one standing and one fallen, both of which were covered in hieroglyphs. Nicknamed “Cleopatra’s Needles” by the savants,10 each contained a high proportion of what Napoleon’s soldiers called cartouches, or “gun cartridges”; namely, groups of hieroglyphs encircled with an oval and abutted by a line. For example, toward the top of Cleopatra’s Needle in London you can clearly make out the following:
To put you out of your misery, this is the so-called throne name of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh in whose honor the obelisks were commissioned, the great military hero Thutmose III, who ruled Egypt from 1479 to 1425 BC.11 In appropriating the needles for Caesar’s monument, Augustus certainly knew what message he was sending out to the Egyptians.
Thanks to Augustus and others, who brought many obelisks back to Rome as trophies, cartouches had been known to Western scholars for centuries. The belief at the time was that they were made up of what we call ideograms, that is to say, pictures with a symbolic meaning. The sedge ideogram, for example, that sits above the cartouche for Thutmose III, represents Upper Egypt. The bee, on the other hand, signifies Lower Egypt. The semicircle, for reasons best known to the Egyptian scribes, represents “Lord” or “King.” Putting it all together, you get “Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt”; or maybe “He who will unite Egypt.”
Part of the problem about ideograms is that you can argue about them all day. Some scholars have suggested, for example, that the sedge, being constantly renewed, represents eternal life, while the bee signifies mortality. It may be that as far as the Ancient Egyptians were concerned, those four hieroglyphs contain all of those meanings and more. The cartouches of Alexandria, however, were nothing compared to the riches that awaited the savants in Upper Egypt.
THE FOUNDATION STONE
If Napoleon was disheartened by the defeat of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, he wasn’t letting on. Apparently undaunted, on August 22, 1798 he inaugurated the Egyptian Institute of Arts and Sciences, and installed its member savants in one of the Mameluke palaces of Cairo. The work of the Institute was to be published a few years later as the Description de l’Egypte, and launched a wave of Egyptomania in Napoleonic France every bit as feverish as the one that had once gripped Ancient Rome.
While Napoleon’s generals attempted in vain to engage Murad Bey in the deserts of Upper Egypt, one particular savant accompanied them in the hope of discovering further Ancient Egyptian monuments. Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon was an artist who had been big news at the court of Louis XV, but had managed to avoid proscription, eventually befriending Napoleon via Josephine’s Paris salon. At Dendera he encountered the extraordinary Temple of Hathor, with its every wall and ceiling covered in Ancient Egyptian inscriptions. They contained far fewer cartouches, and a profusion of new, as yet unknown hieroglyphs.
Returning to Cairo in the middle of August 1799, Denon impressed upon his fellow savants the vital urgency of translating the hieroglyphs. Any lingering doubt as to whether these elegant drawings were literal or symbolic was gone; all the wisdom of Ancient Egypt was suddenly theirs for the taking. More savants—Fourier included—were dispatched to Dendera to make further copies, while others attempted to decipher those in Denon’s drawings. Yet with no way of knowing the subject matter, there was no way to begin a translation. Just days later, all that changed with the surprise arrival in Cairo of a large lump of dark grey granite.
TONGUE AND GROOVE
As luck would have it, a mere month earlier, on July 19, 1799, a group of French soldiers had been hard at work strengthening the defenses of Fort Rashid, an Ottoman-built outpost at the mouth of the Nile near Rosetta. As the British now controlled the Mediterranean, this was to be a vital link in the defense of the Nile, and hence the entire colony. An ancient wall was being demolished when a soldier called D’Hautpoul spotted a grey slab with some sort of inscription on the side. The stone was passed up the chain of command to an officer named Michel Ange Lancret, who had been recently elected to join the Institute of Egypt.
On examining the stone, Lancret saw that the inscription was made up of three different scripts. One was Ancient Greek, one Egyptian hieroglyph, and the third he failed to recognize. Working on the Greek script, he was able to see that the text was a fairly workaday decree by the priests of Memphis detailing the good deeds of Ptolemy V and how precisely he was to be honored. Dull though it might appear, Lancret immediately grasped its immense importance. If the text of all three scripts was the same, the savants finally had the means of decoding Ancient Egyptian.
IDIOT SAVANTS
Sadly, no sooner did the savants have the stone than it slipped through their grasp. Following the French defeat at the Battle of the Nile, the Ottomans got off the fence and sided with the British against Napoleon. With his hold on the colony looking increasingly shaky, Napoleon first repelled Ottoman forces in Syria, and then marched to the coast, where on July 25, 1799 he led a decisive defeat of the Ottomans at the Battle of Aboukir.12
While exchanging prisoners following the battle, Napoleon learned from the British that the political situation in France had deteriorated, and that the Directoire Exécutif were facing a potential coup d’état. Sensing his time was at hand, Napoleon hastened to Alexandria and set sail for France on Aug
ust 22, leaving the colonists in the lurch. Back in France, and buoyed by his recent victory over the Ottomans, Napoleon was able to stage a coup of his own, and by November 9 he was installed as the First Consul; by 1804 he was Emperor.
Needless to say, Egypt soon fell to the Ottomans and the British, and the savants were placed in the undignified position of having to barter their way back to France. One of the many treasures they were forced to surrender was the Rosetta Stone, which was acquired by the British and transported to the British Museum in London, where it has been on display more or less ever since. The savants, of course, had their copies of the Rosetta Stone, made by applying ink directly to its surface and using it as a printing block, and which they eventually presented over three plates in the Description de l’Egypte.