by Sarah Scoles
The first speaker, John Gertz, approaches the podium, and Tarter and her sheer floral skirt take a seat. She will soon believe it was a mistake not to put Gertz on her list of people in need of reining. Gertz holds the license and copyright to all things Zorro—movies, T-shirts, Z-shaped slashes people make in their curtains. He’s wearing cargo hiking pants, but he speaks with the fire of someone in red leather.
“Maybe the galaxy is so silent because ET knows something we don’t,” he says. “That there really are planet-destroying dangers that we don’t know about out there.”
He goes on to describe a “berserker civilization,” one composed entire of psychopaths, who might begin “quietly diverting comets in our direction” if we reveal ourselves. It sounds like a war game, like Halo: don’t come out from behind that rock, or player 2 will know you’re there and will shoot in your general direction until your game is over. There’s no going back behind the rock.
“Earth is currently whispering its coordinates by way of electromagnetic leakage,” he says, speaking about the radio and old TV broadcasts that flit past our atmosphere and out into the great beyond.
“They,” he continues, gesturing in Tarter’s direction, “would have us scream out our coordinates to the attention of ET intentionally.”
He begins to talk about how any advanced civilization would act peaceful and perhaps pat our cute little heads, because to survive so long, violence would have bred itself out of them. That’s the party line. Jill nods her head; it’s something, Cold War in its logic, that she’s said since the eighties. But Gertz smashes it down: he doesn’t buy it, and he definitely isn’t willing to bet the planet on it. He looks in the direction of the pro-broadcasters, and he holds the podium with both hands like he might pick it up and throw it out the back window and into one of the tasteful planters.
“Really?” he asks as he leans forward, fully 80 percent of his weight on his palms. “You’re going to risk the entire fate of the planet just to get a conversation going?”
It may sound crazy, but danger is a possibility that can’t be automatically dismissed. Because we’ve never met an ET, we don’t know if an ET might want to stamp us out. We can say “long-lived civilizations have to be benign” all we want, but lots of predictions have been wrong, from tomorrow’s weather to whether or not Donald Trump would become president of the United States. The only thing we know for sure is that if an extraterrestrial civilization exists, its citizens were raised in a culture, and possibly with a moral system, totally different from ours. They might not even have eyes, let alone diplomacy.
“Scientists who I otherwise consider reasonable throw logic out the window,” Gertz closes. “With METI, we’re playing Russian roulette, and we don’t know how many bullets are in the chamber.”
Broadcasting should be illegal, he concludes. Future generations should decide if they are ready, rather than having us decide their fate for them when armies of laser blasters show up 1,000 years from now after a 20-light-year trip.
Tarter smiles and shakes her head in the front row, scribbling notes in the way I used to admire in adults, her hand shifting across the page and making that scritch scritch of tiny friction you can hear from a few feet away.
The next speaker saunters to the podium. He’s a lawyer, crisp and ultra-American in appearance: Adam Korbitz.
“We do not have enough evidence to conclude active SETI is inherently risky,” he says.
But people who advocate against it follow the precautionary principle, even if they don’t know that legal jargon: protect against potential harms, even if causal chains are unclear and we don’t know if these harms are founded.
“The weak version,” he says, “is better safe than sorry. Do not require unambiguous evidence of harm before taking protective action.”
It’s meant to protect, like a gun in the dresser drawer. But like a gun in the dresser drawer, it may do the opposite. Being too cautious could cause us to miss out on vital cosmic information, like what the hell is up with quantum mechanics and how to stop our planet from becoming a climate-changed hellhole.
“It would seem colonization, et cetera, would be worse than losing out on a little help from our friends,” Korbitz said, “except we face many challenges to the long-term survival, which may depend on joining the galactic club.”
Speculating about the dangers, in other words, is no less speculative than speculating about the benefits.
Tarter is back to nodding, and Brin and Gertz are shaking their heads. It’s a room full of cranial sloshing.
In 2016, believing that the SETI Institute was too split on the issue of broadcasting, Douglas Vakoch, who had been the institute’s director of message composition, split off to form his own organization, METI International. By 2018, they plan to be broadcasting, board members and naysayers be damned.
So if people are going to broadcast, how are we (or they) to decide what to say? The truth is, we have sent a few pings out into the universe already. In 1974, astronomers blasted a powerful radar signal from the Arecibo telescope, whose dish amplified it 10 million times. It contained some remedial math, the basics of DNA, a dot-matrix picture of a human, and a map of the solar system, among other things.
Three years later, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, and Jon Lomberg created a physical proclamation for aliens to find: the famous Voyager golden records. The twin Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, on courses to pass by the picturesque Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, snapping the kind of up-close tourist photos that would have made them Instagram famous. But then, they just continued voyaging—always voyaging—out beyond the solar system. Inside their spidery, synthetic bodies, though, live two gold discs onto which are etched 54 sound clips, 90 minutes of song, 116 images, and greetings in 55 languages. Inhabitants of a distant star system, or perhaps aliens themselves voyaging through the cosmos, might someday find our dinky-looking spacecraft, pluck out the record, follow the instructions, and hear a dog bark or a rocket lift off; they might look at World Book’s anatomy drawings or snowfall on sequoias. They could listen to Ann Druyan’s heartbeat. The four attempted to take the experience of Earth—all Earth—and condense it down onto this compact disk. And they did a pretty good job. But they were just four white people in a room, making decisions for the whole world.
Don’t feel too slighted, though: even if extraterrestrials exist, they are unlikely to find those spacecraft or our electromagnetic missives. Leakage from I Love Lucy is 60 light-years away, but those broadcasts will have quieted so much—their volume turned down by the long journey through space—that an antenna many times bigger than any humans currently have would be required to pick them up. Our purposeful broadcasts, like that from Arecibo and two sent from Yevpatoria in Russia, were of short duration: an inhabited planet would have had to be tilting its electromagnetic ears in our direction at the exact right time, and what are the chances of that?
Slim.
And the physical artifacts, like the Voyager record—their chances are much, much slimmer. No one is going to find them unless they have infinitely good luck or whatever the cosmic equivalent of a metal detector is.
But what the scientists sweating and pointing fingers in that Silicon-Valley conference room are discussing is a bit different: sending a strong, purposeful broadcast, like a military-grade radar blast—perhaps constantly, perhaps for years, maybe thousands. Aliens wouldn’t have to be trying particularly hard at a particular time to stumble upon it.
And what if they did find it? What would they learn about us? Well, that depends on what we tell them.
Figuring out what to broadcast, especially if our missive is supposed to somehow represent all of humanity, is a task for patient geniuses, deep-learning algorithms, or, if we listen to Shostak, Twitter. In our past, the Voyager message was the most serious attempt to represent civilization. But it was hardly comprehensive. “I thought we had lied through our teeth. It was a really good effort, but it was unrepresenta
tive of the Earth—no poverty, no disease, no war, no fame,” says Tarter. “Put your best foot forward.”
On top of that was its insularity. What about the rest of the Earthlings? A new project called the One Earth Message hopes to be an update, and an improvement. Led by artist Jon Lomberg, who worked on the Voyager message as well as Sagan’s Cosmos television series, it aims to capture the crowd. Anyone with an Internet connection can send in pictures, video, or audio that they feel someone capture our experience on Earth. Lomberg then hopes to broadcast the message to NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in 2015 and is headed out into the wider universe. Once New Horizons has completed its extended science mission, flying by the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 in 2019 and sending its scientific data back to Earth, scientists could clear its memory to make room for a new message: a digital and more representative version of Sagan’s analog, etched record that would fly with New Horizons until space radiation begins to deteriorate its bits in many millions of years. The One Earth Message, which NASA hasn’t yet approved but for which it has expressed approval, will certainly be more inclusive than the Voyager record, which four people in a room put together. But still, just half of the world’s population has Internet access. And the media that ultimately make it on to the craft will be chosen by some kind of voting or voting-and-algorithm combination. Neither method is neutral. A dominant group will have a dominant say, and someone has to write the algorithm, which means it will contain their or their culture’s biases.
But the One Earth message is a start, and an attempt to out find out what we—as individuals and as a collective—value, how we think of ourselves. Maybe as important, we may find out how our self-images differ, which could jolt us, like finding out that a best friend has an opposite interpretation of a poem that we’ve read during every hard time in our lives. Or like finding out that your best friend saw the Dress as blue and black, not white and gold. It’s a good way to work together and sing kumbayah and think about the long-term future of humanity and its place in the cosmos. But it’s probably not going to be truly representative, and it’s probably not going attract the attention of beings beyond Earth. The most important audience for the message is ourselves.
And maybe that’s good, because scientists haven’t historically had success gathering input from the crowd. From the crowd came no wisdom. A few years ago, for instance, the SETI Institute tried the Earth Speaks program, in which people sent in the words and images in answer to the question, “What would you say to an extraterrestrial civilization?”
Some people drew My Little Ponies; others wrote “Don’t eat me.”
The Deep Space Network sent 130,000 Craigslist messages to aliens. For $99, you could even record a five-minute voice message. TalkToAliens.com charged people $3.99 per minute to record their greeting. In the 2008 “A Message from Earth,” Russian astronomer Alexander Zaitsev used the social site Bebo to collect 501 textual and visual messages for solar system Gliese 581, including side-by-side photos of George W. Bush and Barack Obama: Good, evil, get it?
Hint: They won’t. Without a Rosetta Stone of sorts, all our collective shoutings and scrawlings are meaningless, even if an alien does intercept them. But the One Earth message has a veteran at its helm and NASA’s support, and is dedicated to inclusion, even if the chances of interception stay slim. And METI International has powerful telescopes and the world’s foremost expert in how we could make extraterrestrials understand us.
But now there’s another big player in the interstellar message game—a kind of competitor—that also wants to create such a message. This initiative is called Breakthrough Message. It all started with Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who made his money in Internet entrepreneurship. But Milner had begun his career intending to be a physicist. “And when he looked at a list of the most famous people in the world, and none of them were scientists,” Pete Worden said at the 100-Year Starship conference in 2015. “He wanted to change this.”
And so he founded the Breakthrough Foundation, which dispenses the Breakthrough Prizes, which Worden called, in the same talk, the Academy Awards of science. The award ceremony itself, held in a hangar at Ames Research Center where SETI got its start, is the only black-tie event in hoodie-saturated Silicon Valley. Worden was the director, and so the landlord, of Ames at the time the awards began, and that job brought him face-to-face with Milner. They got to talking about SETI, and Milner, as people with money decide to do sometimes, wanted to start and sponsor a program.
“They asked if I knew anyone who could run it, maybe someone who had run a NASA center,” said Worden, metaphorically winking. “So I put in my paperwork.”
He is now the chair of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and represents Breakthrough Message, which aims to encourage discussion about whether to send something to extraterrestrials—and what and how. The organization plans to soon open a competition—with a $1 million prize—for the best and most representative digital messages. But the dates and details are still TBD, and the team promises “not to transmit any message until there has been a global debate at high levels of science and politics on the risks and rewards of contacting advanced civilizations,” according to their website. Good luck.
The Breakthrough Foundation also runs Breakthrough Starshot, which is investigating how to send a tiny spacecraft to the close-ish star system Alpha Centauri, and another project, called Breakthrough Listen, which is a traditional SETI program headed up at the University of California, Berkeley.
Breakthrough Listen’s existence reads a bit competitively, the new manifestation of the Berkeley-SETI Institute divorce that happened during the recession. Everyone is nice to each other: Dan Werthimer, who once worked with Jill on collaborations between the SETI Institute and Berkeley, now leads the Listen program. And Tarter sometimes attends their meetings and sits on their advisory committee. There’s room on Earth for two SETI programs; after all, it’s not like there’s only one Milky Way Galaxy Research Center on the planet. But there’s a bit of bad blood there: Breakthrough began without Tarter and the ATA—and without their advance knowledge, which, in a small community, felt like a slight.
Breakthrough Listen came to be when Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy (now as famous for sexually harassing students, according to a 2015 Title IX investigation that led to his resignation, as he is for discovering many, many exoplanets) gave a talk about said planets at Milner’s mansion in Silicon Valley. The mansion, not coincidentally, once belonged to Barney Oliver, SETI’s former benevolent warlord. Marcy’s talk extolled the virtues and successes of exoplanet science.
“At the very end, he showed a few slides about SETI, what he was doing with SETI, what I was doing with SETI,” says Werthimer.
That caught Milner’s attention, and he asked if there was anything he could do for the field. The answer, pretty much always, is money. So soon, Milner promised the team $100 million total over 10 years of support.
“I spent my whole life trying to raise funds,” says Werthimer. It was never this easy, or this substantial.
Considering how most of Tarter’s career was spent worrying about the checkbook, and how many projects limped or faltered because of financial concerns, that rings true, and stings.
And Tarter heard about the project first not from the Breakthrough people but from Tony Beasley, the head of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which then ran the Green Bank Telescope. Marcy asked Beasley if Breakthrough Listen could pay for time on that telescope. Beasley, surprised by the request, called Tarter to ask if Marcy was “acting on his own.”
“Look,” Tarter told him, “I can’t tell you what Geoff is doing because he hasn’t told me.”
And Marcy did not, in fact, tell her till the day the project went public, and neither did anyone else.
When, after the Title IX revelations, Marcy was forced to step down from his positions at Berkeley and with Breakthrough, a young guy named Andrew Siemion took over. He and Werthimer now lead
the charge. Their project is flashy, with its many millions and its use of big telescopes: Green Bank, Parkes, and, soon, China’s new 500-meter FAST antenna. Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg sit on the initiative’s board.
But more than a year into the project, the team has hardly analyzed any of the many terabytes of data they have collected. Their philosophy—get the data—is different from the SETI Institute’s, which is, “Get the data and dig into it right away, so that if you find an intelligent shout from the void, you follow up and confirm.”
Breakthrough, though, has focused on getting the data, starting observations at new telescopes, and figuring out what to do with their abundance of bytes later. And they do not use a back-up telescope, like Tarter and the SETI Institute did during Project Phoenix, to look at the same spot in the sky as the main telescope, confirming it sees the same thing. Tarter believes these differences between their program and hers are mistakes. But Werthimer feels confident they’ll eventually get their data analysis under control and can do confirmation differently.
“I’ve observed for decades, deliberately doing something else because I thought it was a better idea,” says Tarter. “But it doesn’t mean that I’m right and they’re wrong.”
Breakthrough Listen has also invested resources in a different kind of SETI: optical SETI, which looks for bright laser beacons that pulse fast. First suggested by Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes in the 1960s, this kind of search has only recently become financially and technologically feasible. Other groups, including the SETI Institute itself, a Harvard group led by Paul Horowitz, and a UC San Diego team helmed by astronomer Shelley Wright, have also dipped into this new kind of observation. But moving from radio-only to radio and optical is likely only the beginning of the search expansion. “People say, ‘Fifty years, that’s such a long time, and you haven’t found anything,’” says Tarter. “And then you think of all the things we’re not looking for, haven’t had the capability to look for, don’t even know to look for. We reserve the right to get smarter.”