For centuries, scientists and philosophers have grappled with whether or not we are alone in the universe. We still don't know the answer, but now a team of researchers is grappling with a related question: If we do find intelligent life elsewhere, how should we communicate with it?
In the 1977 movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," aliens and humans began communicating through a series of musical notes. The encounter was peaceful and ethereal. Humans and aliens seemed destined to coexist.
Hollywood served up a slightly different view of alien-human communication in 1997's "Contact," written by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. In it, a signal received from outer space provided Earthlings with detailed instructions on building a mysterious machine capable of galactic travel.
But so far -- despite our best efforts to find life elsewhere -- contact with alien beings is still only fiction.
What's needed, says social scientist Douglas Vakoch of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, is a whole new approach.
"Maybe we should think about creating new forms of art, not intended for other human beings, but for creatures as intelligent -- or perhaps more intelligent -- than human beings, but without our shared sense of culture," he said.
He says we need to demonstrate to those extragalactic creatures basic human values and traits like altruism, which many humanists believe key to any civilization, regardless of its location in the galaxy.
Sounds good, but how do you teach a little green ET neighborly behavior? Next Monday in Paris, the SETI Institute and several European organizations will meet for a one-day workshop to explore the interaction between art, science, and the humanities in composing interstellar messages. Twenty artists, scientists, and scholars are expected to be involved.
Paper presenters come from a range of disciplines in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Contributing artists will provide expertise in drawing, musical composition, new media, painting, sculpture, and space arts. Scientific disciplines represented include astronomy, biology, computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, and psychology. In many of the presentations, authors will expand beyond their primary disciplinary backgrounds to engage alternative approaches to message composition.
But how can messages be transmitted across the universe in a form that can be understood by alien beings that most likely possess technology different from ours?
"Well, if we've detected a signal from them, a radio signal, we know they have radio technology," said Vakoch, who became interested in interstellar communication as a high school student in Minnesota. "And it seems very likely that, in order to create an advanced technology, you need to know at least some basic math and physics."
In other words, science can form the basis of communication between disparate species. But first, we need to find those other life forms.
Since 1963, scientists have been scanning the heavens with the 1,000 foot-diameter radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico -- the same one depicted in "Contact." So far, the nonfictional reality has produced nothing.
And there's no word so far generated by a gold-plated aluminum plaque NASA attached to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft 30 years ago. The plaque -- designed to be read by extraterrestrials -- describes the inhabitants of Earth and offers an astronomical road map leading to our planet.
"We see the location of Earth described in terms of where it is, relative to 14 very prominent pulsars in our galaxy," Vakoch said.
The spacecraft, and several others with similar plaques, are well on their way to leaving the solar system, but a response is likely a long shot. It's also unlikely we'll receive a response to some early radio transmissions encoded in binary pulses. The messages were so complicated they could barely be deciphered by some of the best minds on Earth.
These are examples of prototypes of the kind of artwork Valkoch has in mind.
Regarding the universality of science, Vakoch said, "One of the nice things is, we can tap into these possibly universal notions of math and chemistry and physics to explain some of that."
But when all is said and done, despite his life's work, Vakoch says we might be better off not answering messages from "out there." After all, remember what happened in the movie "Mars Attacks"?
