The Messengers
Should we send messages targeting distant planets capable of supporting life? Or should we just listen for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence?
Today’s New York Times includes my cover story in the Times Magazine on the emerging movement and organization known as METI, short for “messaging extra-terrestrial intelligence.” At 8,000 words, it’s the longest magazine essay I’ve ever written; I’ve been working on and off on this project since January, when Alexander Rose, director of the Long Now Foundation, mentioned the METI project to me in passing after a talk I had given at Long Now in San Francisco. I’d mentioned during the talk that I was working on a new book about long-term decision-making, and he thought it might be worth investigating METI as part of my research. It was a fitting connection, given the time scales involved in sending messages across the Milky Way. As I ultimately wrote in the piece: “the whole concept of sending interstellar messages is the epitome of long-term decision-making. The choice to send a message into space is one that may well not generate a meaningful outcome for a thousand years, or a hundred thousand. It is hard to imagine any decision confronting humanity that has a longer time horizon.”
This essay is one of those pieces where you start off thinking it’s about one thing, and then the scope of the piece keeps widening as you read. On the one hand, it’s a piece about the technical and intellectual challenge of trying to communicate with an unkown form of intelligence that has evolved in a completely different part of the universe (the science of which is known as exosemiotics, which warms the heart of a former semiotics major like myself.) But it’s also a piece about what kind of civilization we might encounter through such outreach, and the survival odds of technologically advanced societies, and whether patterns of “first encounter” violence that we’ve seen on Earth will hold true on an interstellar level, and how we make decisions on this planet that involve extinction-level risk.
Even with 8,000 words to play with, we had to cut a number of passages that might still be of interest. About fifty people asked me on Twitter (or in the Times comments section) why the piece didn’t reference The Dark Forest trilogy, and particularly its opening novel The Three Body Problem, which features a METI-style outreach that goes spectacularly wrong. We did originally have a nod to the books, but just didn’t have the space to keep it; but they are indeed terrific (and haunting) and well worth reading if you’re interested in this question.
There is also a fascinating pre-history to these investigations. The piece begins with Frank Drake’s Arecibo Message, sent in 1974 from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico (featured prominently in the film version of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact.) Almost two hundred years before that, the German mathematician Karl Gauss proposed building vast geometric shapes in the Siberian tundra to communicate with the imagined inhabitants of the moon. As the likelihood of life on the moon grew less promising, exosemioticians shifted their focus to Mars; a number eminent scholars in the late nineteenth century — including statistician Francis Galton — proposed signaling the Red Planet via a combination of giant mirrors, flashing an optical morse code that would begin with elemental arithmetic and slowly advance into more complex ideas.
The other theme that the piece explores — one we could have spent another 8,000 words digging into — is the range of potential explanations for the Fermi Paradox: the question of why after scanning the stars for signs of intelligent life for almost half a century we haven’t heard anything yet. One explanation that I discussed with both Drake and David Brin could be that life is abundant, and intelligent life common, but it just happens that almost all of that intelligence evolves in oceans, and never ventures onto land. Maybe the universe teems with creatures as smart as we are — they’re just all dolphins. Perhaps an entirely aquatic existence keeps intelligent life from thinking about space or radio waves, for the simple reason that they live on an ocean planet with no land to conquer.
When I ran this scenario by Brin, he was immediately enthusiastic. “Oh, you’re describing the Waterworlds scenario. That’s one of my top ten!” (Brin, it turns out, has cataloged over a hundred explanations for the Fermi Paradox.) He went to frame the problem in terms of the famous “Goldilocks-zone”: the term astrophysicists use to describe planets capable of sustaining liquid water (and thus supporting life):
We skate the very inner edge of our sun’s Goldilocks zone and that is anomalous. It’s very, very hot here at the inner edge. [And that] implies that we may be abnormally dry for a water world. So we may be among the few that developed hands and fire and all of those tools, in which case it is the softest landing we could possibly have in the cosmos, because we’ll go out there, and we’ll find plenty of people to talk to, but they will be no danger to us. We’ll be the ones with the starships; we’ll be the cops.
If you’re interested in these themes broadly — complex long-term decision-making, on both a societal and personal level—my new book wrestling with these same issues will be out next year sometime. But in the meantime, I recommend following the work of Doug Vakoch and the team at METI. Whether you agree with their agenda or not, I think it’s clear they are thinking through these issues — and engaging in public discussion of them—with admirable civility and intellectual curiosity. It was a real pleasure, given everything else going on in the world, to explore this debate for a few months with both the METI group and their critics.
