Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  Right now I would submit that lack of self-knowledge is an existential risk. An inability to act with global intent and consideration of multigenerational timescales is an existential risk. It may well be that the greatest value of METI will come not from anything we learn in response to a message we send, but from what we learn about ourselves in the process of attempting to reach some common ground and find our global voice. If we decide to send a message to possible extraterrestrials, we are also sending a message to our descendants. We are gifting them with possibilities of both benefit and harm. Such an endeavor requires us to form an alliance with future generations, to enter into a common project with them. That is clearly something we need to learn how to do. So, then, starting the conversation about whether to broadcast, the effort to have a globally inclusive process, becomes a worthwhile goal in itself.

  As with biotechnology or artificial intelligence, you won’t be able to stop someone from going rogue. Yet what we could do, by declaring a temporary moratorium and getting a lot of weight behind it, is to nurture a culture of responsibility in the field, as Max Tegmark and his colleagues are attempting to do with AI. Nobody is legally forbidden from doing anything, but the culture in their field is shifting. Similarly, we can create guidelines, urge our community to abide by them, and let it be known that it will be considered rude and egotistical to broadcast during this consultation phase. Say we declared a voluntary moratorium for ten years. If anyone unilaterally decided to start a broadcast during that time, it would amount to a stunt, comparable to those that have already been conducted, and would not obviate the need for a coordinated global approach. If anything, it would highlight the need.

  What might such a process look like? There are two components. We would need a wide professional consultation, perhaps modeled after the Asilomar process for biotechnology, or the Future of AI conference in Puerto Rico. It should be broadly international and interdisciplinary, including experts in ethics, international law, and the study of existential risk. The goal would be to come up with some kind of consensus road map and best practices.5 We would also need some kind of mediated global public discussion.

  At the very least we could take some time to collectively assess the potential risks and benefits. We could also discuss what kind of message we would like to send, how to inclusively construct such a message from Earth, and what we will and won’t reveal about ourselves. Some have argued that we should avoid drawing attention to some of our less exemplary characteristics, such as our history of deadly internecine conflict and our current inability to stabilize our global environmental impact. It has been suggested that exposing these warts might even be dangerous, revealing us to lack promise or seem like a threat. Others have promoted honesty. Lewis Thomas once wrote that we could send only Bach, “but that would be boasting.” True. Or we could send only Hendrix, but that would be showing off.

  As I’ve described, projected advances in radio technology suggest that the time when any lone yahoo can claim to represent Earth, and effectively announce our whereabouts, is coming, but not for a couple of decades, during which time a moratorium could more or less be expected to hold. If this adds a slight sense of urgency to the conversation, maybe that is all for the good. During that twenty years, things would not remain static. We are going to be developing the tools and building the instruments to scour the atmospheres of exoplanets, perhaps finding biosignatures or even technosignatures. Such a discovery would obviously force the issue of active SETI. In this same time frame, we can increase the power of our radio and optical searches by many orders of magnitude, and see if, under more systematic scrutiny, the silence holds up. Also we can attempt to involve the people of Earth in an extensive exploration and discussion of what our role in the cosmos should be.

  How would we do that? What might such a public process look like? This question was not the main focus of the 2015 workshop, but after the symposium, I had lunch with Brin and Tarter and we batted some ideas around. Jill, with her mix of pragmatism and idealism, spoke of a wish to find the right tools that might be used for a Web-based project where broad global input would be sought and somehow organized and facilitated. I love that idea because if we could do this right, the process might also be helpful for a wide range of issues that humanity is facing right now involving tough global choices on how to wisely deploy transformative technology.

  Several groups have initiated various online processes to try to get broad cross-cultural input and acceptance of content for possible messages from humanity.6 Curating content is easier than gaining buy-in, but these efforts could form a template for the tougher question of how to get some sense of global approval for the idea of messaging and some wider appreciation of the issues.

  Brin’s idea is that this might be started with an innovative, widely aired television series. He suggests that such a deliberation would actually make for great drama, airing the debate for the global masses, and potentially reaching an audience of millions or billions. It’s an enticing vision. Done well, it could serve a massive educational mission, covering astronomy, planetary science, biological and cosmic evolution, human history, communications technology, risk assessment, and ethics—all in a fun and compelling “reality” show in which articulate hosts hold a friendly debate over whether humanity should decide to purposefully reveal ourselves to any other civilizations out there. And then what? Hold a vote? Why not?*

  In his AAAS talk, Shostak belittled the value of attempting a global process. Sure, it will never be perfectly inclusive or democratic (or substitute any value that you would like to see a global conversation have), but that is no reason not to give it a try. In fact, it is quite clear that we need the practice. I think that Shostak and Vakoch are right that achieving global consensus will be very difficult. That difficulty speaks directly to our most challenging problem as a species right now. That is why I’ve decided that Brin and the signers of the Berkeley statement are right. If we really can’t hold some semblance of a global discussion about this, then perhaps we’re not really ready to start shouting into the cosmos.

  Doing It Right

  I hadn’t heard from Zaitsev in a couple of years, but as I was finishing up this book I reached out to him by e-mail and heard back almost instantly. He is no longer pursuing his provocative messaging activity. His last interstellar transmission, called “A Message from Earth,” was sent in October 2008 from Yevpatoria toward the star Gliese 581, a red dwarf about twenty light-years away that is known to have several planets, one of which may be habitable. As of this writing, the signal is nearly halfway there. If a reply is sent instantly, it could be received on Earth by 2048. After this project, Sasha suffered some health problems and retired from the Institute of Radio Engineering, where he had worked for forty-four years, since 1968. Today he is in good health, living as a pensioner in Moscow, and still writing about, and advocating for, METI. He is not planning any more broadcasts.

  I don’t think Zaitsev has really done any harm. I’m not that worried about consequences from his few targeted broadcasts. Maybe in a roundabout way he did us a favor by forcing this issue to the fore of our awareness.

  Seth Shostak addressed the active SETI controversy in a 2015 New York Times op-ed in which he argued against a moratorium, ending with the statement:

  I, for one, would hesitate to let a paranoia based on nothing more than conjecture shackle the activities of our children and our children’s children. The universe beckons, and we can do better than to declare that future generations should endlessly tremble at the sight of the stars.

  I am with him there. I would like to see humanity proactively answer the call of the universe that beckons like a liberation. I would also add that there is no hurry, and much to gain by doing this the right way. I don’t think we can properly “speak for Earth” if we’re in too much of a rush.

  Many scientists are uncomfortable with the idea of taking the public pulse before embarking on any research project. We turn on our comput
ers and TVs and are confronted with a cacophony of ignorance and superstition, and we don’t want to hold our ambitions for scientific or policy progress hostage to the illiterate mob. In some areas this is understandable. What if we were required to take a vote about programs involving vaccination or the fluoridation of water? (Well, actually, in a democracy, we sort of are.) Should we wait for consensus before implementing every solution that science says is clearly needed?

  No, but this is different. Science itself is divided. One cannot look at the list of signatories to the Berkeley petition and credibly claim that expert opinion does not swing both ways on this debate. We have the obligation to seek some semblance of a global consensus. We could try to do it right, and in some small way demonstrate that this can be done.

  Making Earth drastically more visible to extraterrestrials is not the most worrisome technological change facing our planet. Unwanted and dangerous alien attention is far from our most pressing problem. We’ve got more immediate worries. Yet this is something that our community, my community, needs to address responsibly, and in a small way it could serve as a model for how we could approach such issues. Because it is not pressing, and is even kind of fun to talk about, perhaps we can use it to widely engage people in a discussion of humanity’s role on Earth and in the universe, with an inclusive process by which a policy, an approach, a set of guidelines, is hammered out. No, we would have no authority to impose or enforce our rules on anyone. Yet if we do our job well, perhaps we can gain some measure of moral authority, of respectability, and help create a culture of responsibility to guide our behavior so that when we do reach out to the universe, we will seem like a civilization that truly intelligent minds might actually want to engage with.

  We can’t avoid these kinds of questions. Like it or not, we humans are changing our world, and it would behoove us to learn how to make decisions about how we should do so. Clearly in order to survive to become one of those advanced species, capable of sustained galactic discourse, we need to develop mechanisms for collectively anticipating, discussing, and acting on long-term threats before they become crises. As I’ll discuss in the next chapter, we are developing such mechanisms.

  Vakoch and Zaitsev are right when they say that becoming a broadcasting civilization is part of growing up. Even if nobody is listening, in becoming the kind of species capable of making purposeful broadcasts, we’d be changing our role on the cosmic stage and acknowledging our changed role on this Earth. But you can’t will yourself to be an adult by starting to do grown-up things without the maturity to handle them. You don’t hand a child the keys to your car in the hope that driving it will force them into maturity. They are (hopefully) not allowed to operate heavy machinery until they are ready.

  We do need to transition to the kind of species, the kind of civilization, that can initiate projects that will run for generations, for millennia. Yet we can’t really do that by having some of us just decide to start broadcasting. We need buy-in. We need patience. We need a thousand-year plan. In my discussion of “the continuity criterion,” I explained why for intelligence to be an observable phenomenon it cannot be ephemeral. Given the vastness of time, in order to be picked up, a signal or beacon needs to be on air for millennia at least. Can we do that? We have the technical knowledge but not yet the self-knowledge.

  Philip Morrison once suggested that perhaps after one hundred years of just listening it might be time for us to send some messages. By then we may know a lot more. Maybe we could decide now that we want to start broadcasting in another forty years if we haven’t learned anything before then that would indicate that this would be a mistake. Such a way of thinking, making such a long-term plan, seems foreign to us, alien, if you will—which is why it seems to me like a good idea. Maybe it’s okay to admit that sending is a project for the next generation. By making a multigenerational plan, we begin to become that which we seek. I think we should plan to broadcast for one thousand years and see if we get anything in return, but it’s fine with me if we wait forty or fifty years to begin.

  We are indeed still so young. Sixty years after Sputnik and Ozma, the Voyagers are still just beginning their journey out of the solar system, now about twenty billion kilometers from the Sun, about 0.05 percent of the distance to the nearest star, and the New Horizons spacecraft will soon join them. Having passed by Pluto, it, too, will now coast out toward the stars—five tiny pieces of Earth stuff returning to the galaxy. A sphere of weak radio and television babble also expands outward. But don’t worry: our embarrassing belches of sitcoms and infomercials are probably too weak to be picked up. We have not really announced ourselves to any galactic community that may be waiting.

  All meaningful communication involves risk. Every new relationship starts with taking a chance. If it weren’t the unknown, why would we need to bother exploring it? As a society, and as a species, we have to become more comfortable acting without definitive knowledge. We have to be smart and play the odds. To take the most pressing current example, to wait until we are absolutely sure about the risk of climate change is to wait too long to do anything about it. Someday we will want to shout our names out there, and we will have to do this without fully knowing what we’re getting into.

  Ultimately there may be no completely rational basis on which to decide. We can discuss probabilities and scenarios and continue to gather evidence, but the decision whether or not to make ourselves known may come down to what kind of universe we think we’re living in. I still feel that we cannot be frightened of the universe. I believe that we should start pursuing active SETI, reaching out to our space brethren and sistren, letting them know they are not alone and seeing if we can spark some cosmic conversation. There is no way to defend ourselves from, or hide from, some superadvanced entity that means to do us harm. So let’s not cower, but let’s take a good long look before we leap.

  We already know a lot more than we did when we started doing SETI, and we will know so much more in the next twenty years. At some point we’ll have to decide we’re ready and go all in. The Universe or nothing. When will we be ready? When we’ve examined a lot of exoplanets. When we’ve pursued SETI (the listening kind) for another couple of decades. When we’ve been able to have some kind of satisfactory global conversation about it.

  In the meantime, let’s figure out how to manage ourselves as a planet, and speak with one voice. Let’s grow up, and then introduce ourselves.

  8

  EMBRACING THE HUMAN PLANET

  We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

  —Adlai Stevenson

  We need to overcome the habit of considering outcomes of human activity as more imperfect than those of nature’s activity—understandable as such a habit may be at the current stage of development—if we are to talk about what is going to happen in a faraway future.

  —Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologiae

  Originally you were clay. From being mineral, you became vegetable. From vegetable, you became animal, and from animal, man. During these periods man did not know where he was going, but he was being taken on a long journey nonetheless. And you have to go through a hundred different worlds yet. There are a thousand forms of mind.

  —Rumi

  Usufruct

  It has taken us a long time to realize that the world is not infinite, and not infinitely resilient. This discovery is still ongoing and is at the heart of our angst about the Anthropocene.

  Here in DC, working close to the pulse of power there is much that
remains inscrutable to me. During the time I’ve been working here, the U.S. Congress has been widely described as a place where nothing gets done, an institution impervious to data or insight. How strange to be ensconced right across the street, in the Library of Congress, arguably the greatest collection of knowledge in the world. The John W. Kluge Center, where the scholars work, is in the Jefferson Building, the original and most impressive of the Library’s structures. I’ve heard it described as the most beautiful building in the United States, and that’s hard to argue with. The architecture and interior details seem to be relics of an American government with different values. It is a lavish temple to scholarship, indulgently and lovingly crafted, built to last, full of artwork, symbolism, and inscriptions meant to provoke and inspire. Looking out my window across First Street to the Capitol Dome, you can feel the drift of standards and ideals over the generations. You cannot escape the shadow of Thomas Jefferson here at the Library, which he founded. After the original burned in 1814, he sold his own books to Congress so they could start afresh. Today these are on display, and I’ve enjoyed browsing through Jefferson’s eclectic original collection. His six thousand volumes seem to cover everything: poetry, gardening, architecture, literature, law, humor, philosophy, and all the natural sciences. At the time, it was possible for an educated person seemingly to master all areas of scholarship.

  One of my favorite places to work is the elegant, Art Deco–style Science Reading Room, in the Adams Building. The buildings, each named after one of our founding fathers (Jefferson, Adams, and Madison), are connected by underground tunnels, hidden veins, coursing with people and books, running beneath the streets of our capital. In order to get to the science collections, I walk beneath Second Street from Jefferson to Adams, take the elegant paneled elevator to the fifth floor, and emerge into the expansive reading room, its heavy wooden tables lit with old-timey lamps. Facing me across this soothing, capacious expanse is a wall engraved with a quote from Jefferson over a mural displaying brave and noble-looking people subduing the wilderness with horses, tools, and guns. It reads,