How to Talk to Aliens

[00:05] We have been listening for messages from outer space and so far...

[00:17] Why? Are we truly alone in the universe? and just doing a lot of listening?

[00:31] Maybe we need to send more messages out there. whose language and culture and biology and mind And what do you say?

[00:46] And given all of the unknowns about what they might be, ♪♪

[01:14] I've wanted to design a message A sort of hello from Earth to whatever extraterrestrials I mean, come on, to be the author of the first thing

[01:28] would be a fantastic honor. an opportunity to send a message to space But it might be a waste of time.

[01:43] What if there isn't anything or anyone out there to receive it? of intelligent alien life despite the high probability that such life exists,

[01:56] that attempt to explain it. that whenever two civilizations meet, Which is why in 2015,

[02:11] warning against making any contact at all. [Stephen Hawking]

[02:36] send no messages to space. He is the president of METI, an organization that, despite all of these concerns,

[02:50] extraterrestrial intelligence. I should talk to him first. Why isn't he afraid?

[03:04] home to the largest public refractor telescope -[Douglas] So here we are. -[Michael] Wow. This was one of the prime telescopes of a century ago.

[03:19] [Michael] Jeez! I've seen so many observatories Believe it or not, I've never been this close to one. and yet it's balanced too exquisitely.

[03:34] [Douglas laughs] I'm telling you, I had no idea I would have this feeling, Can I handle what I would see?

[03:48] You just take a look. -Because of the fog. -Because of the fog. [Michael] Just the fog coming in is pretty darn cool.

[04:03] but we've only been actively listening for life out there In 1960, astronomer Frank Drake began the search He scanned for interstellar radio waves,

[04:19] but did not detect any recognizable signals. Soon after, SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, for other life in the universe.

[04:33] we've also launched physical messages both Voyager spacecraft in 1977. that told a story of who we are as Earthlings,

[04:49] Today, Doug and his team at METI are on a mission to send new messages to the stars. Thank you for taking some time to have a conversation with me.

[05:03] where is everyone? You know, we've been looking And so that leads some people to say we must be alone.

[05:16] I mean, we've looked at a few tens of thousands of stars, and there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone.

[05:28] So I think we just need to keep on looking. I mean, we are still discovering species on our own planet today.

[05:40] and instead of just listening for signals, we send powerful, intentional signals to other stars What do you say to people who go, "Hold on,

[05:53] "It's just not worth the risk. I would say it is too late. We have been announcing our presence to the universe

[06:08] since the beginning of radio and television. to travel between the stars So maybe the aliens have been observing us,

[06:21] So our goal isn't to let them know that we want to make contact. and comfortable about sending a message out

[06:36] There are some group of scientists who have said But that's an example of someone very prominent because maybe the aliens will come to Earth.

[06:51] to commemorate his life, his family, Anyone and everyone can transmit to extraterrestrials. for people involved in SETI to say we shouldn't transmit,

[07:07] because the day they succeed, everyone will be transmitting. Okay, so how do we craft a message for E.T.? I would want to know something about that civilization.

[07:21] what is it that we have in common What do you think the aliens would know that we know? So that's the natural starting place.

[07:35] But how can you communicate the idea of numbers? Like this.

[07:47] -Hey, look, we're communicating. -Okay, okay, great, great. to count up to a million. Right.

[08:00] The goal, for me, is to learn about other civilizations But I think even if they're not, do we want to tell about ourselves,

[08:16] forces us to look at ourselves anew. And I think that can only be good.

[08:29] that humans have ever sent for extraterrestrials to some day receive was written in 1974 They sent the message to a star cluster 25,000 light years away.

[08:44] It contained 1,679 binary digits the famous Arecibo message.

[08:57] Up here in the white are numbers. I feel like it's fair to say But what about some of these other parts?

[09:11] that that is supposed to be Could an alien figure out what all these symbols mean? what they all mean?

[09:25] to guess what all this means, I want to give some humans a message, I didn't put in there, or conflicting interpretations,

[09:40] well it could spell trouble for our ability to say much more than simple mathematical truths to whatever might be out there. I recruited Dr. Steve Vance.

[09:55] for JPL's Astrobiology group, meaning it's his job to think about the possibility that if the Arecibo message is received,

[10:10] will see all kinds of meanings in it. of how they experience their world. we would think of the ones we've sent out,

[10:23] And maybe the message contains none of those things. that they will find meaning where there isn't any.

[10:35] -Yeah. Let's do it. -Let's do it. would influence their approach to a message from space,

[10:49] of critical thinkers and problem solvers I'm a sophomore engineer, and I have a PhD in physics. I'm a graphic artist and app coder.

[11:02] This set of experts would be told and would be asked to decode it and computer software.

[11:16] although similar to the original Arecibo message, Would our group of experts notice or apply their own meanings to this indecipherable message?

[11:30] It was time to find out. using a radio telescope from outer space. What we want to know is what it says.

[11:46] A copy of the message as received is on that laptop. This is an audio output of that message. and the tools that you have in front of you,

[11:59] please figure out what this message is saying. -Okay. -Good luck. -Okay, you ready to listen? -Let's hear it.

[12:12] [pings] that our jumbled image is meaningless, to decipher it visually.

[12:26] who received the real Arecibo message. that it's binary. [man] Is there a difference in time between any of these?

[12:43] There's going to be a repeating pattern in there, probably. Yeah, it doesn't seem to go any higher or lower than that.

[12:56] We should probably start transcribing it They're noticing two tones, binary message. because we already come to this

[13:11] So we're already seeing into it what we expect to see. Okay, so, we have a way to encode binary into letters. -and it wouldn't be the same language anyway. -Right.

[13:28] Like, there's, you know, universal language and all that. just so we make sure we don't miss anything. and let's start writing it down.

[13:41] Now they are creating a visual representation The key is to see how many tones there are.

[13:54] [woman] Do we need to play it in half time [Michael] The message is 17 minutes long, with 1,679 individual tones.

[14:08] I decided to help them speed up the process. This thumb drive contains a transcription of the message, -But now you're just kind of jumped ahead in time. - Fast forward, yeah.

[14:23] -All right, we will continue. -All right, I'll leave you guys to it. Does it look like an even distribution No, there's way more zeros than ones.

[14:36] So, what is the total number of--? [man] 1,679. Is that divisible by anything in particular? It's going to be hard to test that without writing a script.

[14:51] [Michael] Just like the Arecibo message, 1,679 total tones. The number 1,679 can only be divided into two prime numbers:

[15:06] When you arrange the ones and zeros the jumbled image will begin to emerge. If the group can discover this feature of 1,679,

[15:19] of the message into an image. Hey, it's-- hey, yo, this is important, guys. Okay.

[15:31] because 23 and 73 are prime numbers. So that is very relevant. Wow. Look at the big brain on that dude.

[15:45] to try and straight up, like, make a 23-by-73 grid, and maybe there's some kind of image being sent there.

[15:57] [man] I'm strongly with the graph idea. -and then we can graph it in Excel and see. -Yeah, that's good. Yeah.

[16:11] -all of the cells that have a one in them. -That's great. of mathematics and physics and music. is proving to be the best skill.

[16:25] the team figured out how to break down Will they try to find meaning in the message, Oh, I'm done! Guys, I'm done!

[16:39] [man] That looks sadly random. That almost looks like it's going to resolve into something. -Those aren't letters, are they? -They could be.

[16:52] Except for little nine over here. -[woman] Baby nine. -[man] That's an "I", right? Do we agree, like, this probably looks like nothing?

[17:06] -Productive. -Okay. even though there wasn't one that made sense. Within a matter of minutes,

[17:20] So it was time to let them in on the ruse. All right, so, this is Steve Vance. Have you learned anything about the message?

[17:34] It seems very random still. Let me show you guys something new.

[17:46] -I see how you're doing this. -Oh, we were almost there! kind of in these blocks. that we don't actually have mapped correctly here.

[17:59] This is the famous Arecibo message. Now, what you have been working on but randomized.

[18:14] [all laugh] In a way, you guys were quite successful. recognized the semi-prime nature of this message very quickly,

[18:29] to see things there that weren't. I think the real reason that we weren't interpreting We're looking for something like this.

[18:45] If I'd seen any symmetry in these patterns, the best kind of message to send, You know, a marker to where we are

[19:01] but then it's like, do we really want to tell them where we are? -I don't know. -What do you guys think? Should we be sending messages to outer space?

[19:13] Every single time any civilization and one is technologically advanced, one guy gets crushed. What if we're at the same place,

[19:26] What if we can just exchange the recipe for fusion? and really nothing to lose in that situation.

[19:41] to send our knowledge to share with other civilizations. Let's just think of this as a way which, by the way, we tell better than the universe does.

[19:56] [all] Thanks. Thank you. to find meaning where there is none would more quickly emerge.

[20:12] What I also didn't expect was just how educational I mean, I saw some human flaws and biases at work, but more generally, I saw the human mind at work,

[20:27] I mean, the Voyager Golden Record really isn't just a neat thing for extraterrestrials. It's a neat archive by, of and for us.

[20:45] about whether or not we should be sending messages But here's the thing. requires technology that not all of us have.

[20:59] can say hello to extraterrestrials if they want. for all of Earth? to talk to a man who is changing that.

[21:14] He is democratizing active SETI, because the service he has built to outer space. with a doctorate in elementary particle physics,

[21:27] and he's the one who's going to help me send my message. and helping other people do it. Well, I have built a website, called SpaceSpeak.com.

[21:41] or a image message out into space. My view is, as many people that can reach out to aliens What are you using to transmit these messages?

[21:57] And once a photon is broadcast into space, it persists. A million years from now, maybe the earth is gone,

[22:09] but your message is still out there, for some future generation to see what we were about.

[22:21] -Awesome. -Great. -And... -This is it. This is a transmitter box here.

[22:35] I've been thinking about this a lot, about what to send, how to write the message, I don't think this is something to take as fact.

[22:51] I don't have any fear that this is dangerous. constructing what I believe I was going to not send a two-dimensional image

[23:05] but a three-dimensional image made of voxels. And then after talking to you and really thinking about the point of communicating with outer space,

[23:20] I...I just think to decide what to say and how to say it. is an exercise in learning how we communicate at all.

[23:32] to who we are. I'm so sorry to hear that. and I'll get to see all of my family.

[23:46] And the way she, you know, made me who I am, that will, in a way, like echo like ripples in a pond, right? But this is a message made of light

[24:02] that will be around forever... So I have the last photograph I'd like to send that picture out.

[24:16] -Let's do it. -Okay. using one of those, like, grabber tools, you know, [laughs]

[24:31] she could pinch. of who we were. as far as I know,

[24:43] that I think I want to remember, So... Yeah. Go ahead and hit "send."

[24:57] -It's already 229,435 miles away from Earth. -Yes. -Now she has. -She has now, absolutely.

[25:09] Your grandmother will touch the universe. Yeah. You are very welcome, sir. It was a pleasure.

[25:22] thanks for watching.

[25:35] ♪♪