This is a transcript of a Subtitle podcast episode
Kavita Pillay: Patrick, if you were to send a message out to aliens, what form would it take?
Patrick Cox: Oh boy, I have no idea. I think I’d just have to go for a message in a bottle. The message would just say, “We wish you no harm, despite everything you may have heard about us.”
Kavita Pillay: Let me try and convey to you the interstellar message that a small group of humans sent out into space 45 years ago.
Arecibo Message set to music
Patrick Cox: Oh, that’s horrible, what is that? And please turn it off.
Kavita Pillay: This is a version of a famous message that was sent out from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974. And it contained 1,679, very precise zeroes and ones. More recently someone set it to music, which is what this “song” of sorts is.
Patrick Cox: Oh right, so that explains why it’s just two notes? The zero and the one?
Kavita Pillay: Mmm, that’s binary code, zeroes and ones. The binary is used to write data for computers. But in this case, the scientists who sent out all these zeroes and ones, they were hoping that an extraterrestrial who received this message would lay it out into a 23 by 73 grid.
Patrick Cox: And why on Earth would they do that? I mean, that’s so specific.
Kavita Pillay: Yeah, because 1,679 is divisible by 23 and 73.
Patrick Cox: Oh, of course.
Kavita Pillay: Of course! And because these extraterrestrials would be advanced enough to detect the message, maybe they’d have enough math to know that.
Patrick Cox: OK, so what happens if they actually end up do making that grid?
Kavita Pillay: They’d see an image of sorts, and it was meant to show a few things: The Arecibo telescope, plus a human type figure, also our solar system, a DNA double helix, some chemical elements, and the numbers one through ten.
Patrick Cox: So, it’s like a series of messages? Not just one — like, “Look what we can do” ?
Kavita Pillay: This is who we are, this is where we are.
Patrick Cox: And what about the picture itself? I mean, does the picture look nice? Is it like, uh, Leonardo or something?
Kavita Pillay: I’d say the Arecibo message looks like Pac-Man’s less sophisticated cousin.
Patrick Cox: Oh, gross.
Kavita Pillay: I mean the Arecibo telescope image in it looks more like the Gmail logo. Even to us now, it would be very confusing. Like, what is this message that humans who are alive today sent out? It hasn’t aged well. And it’s not like we humans have intentionally sent out a lot of other interstellar messages. It’s not easy to do. Plus the ones that we have sent, they’re not so different from the Arecibo message — and Arecibo is probably the best of them.
Patrick Cox: But it’s tough, right? I mean, this is a one-way street. We’re sending this stuff out and we get nothing back.
Kavita Pillay: It’s like we humans have to figure out how to play the biggest, loneliest dating game on our own, and we send out a few earnest but awkward messages, and we get nothing back. And some days it’s like, maybe that’s a blessing! Because truth be told, we’re pretty conflicted about sending messages to extraterrestrials we’ve never met — you know, is that a good idea? And then on other days, it’s like no one’s reaching out. Are we just destined to be alone in a vast universe? An infinitely vast universe.
Patrick Cox: From Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America, this is Subtitle, stories of languages and the people who speak them.
Kavita Pillay: Patrick, the Arecibo message is the most famous of the messages that we humans have sent into outer space. But here’s the thing about it:
Wade Roush: Basically, it was a little bit of a stunt. It was a little bit of a let’s just see if we can do this.
Kavita Pillay: This is Wade Roush. He’s a science and technology journalist and he has a book coming out from MIT press called Extraterrestrials.
Wade Roush: And also, it’s aimed at this globular cluster, which is 25,000 light years away. So, by the time the message gets there, so much time will have passed that the cluster will have moved out of the way. In fact, in a way it already has moved out. So the point of this message was not really to communicate with anyone. It was just to show that you could do it.
Patrick Cox: That’s a bit presumptuous, isn’t it? Just to show that you could do it? I mean, some people would say it’s crazy to think even the extraterrestrials do exist.
Kavita Pillay: Well, there’s a lot of possibilities.
Wade Roush: One possibility is that we really are alone, and it’s not inconceivable.
Kavita Pillay: After all, it took so much for life to get started here on Earth, and maybe we’re just lucky that we’ve survived this long. But, there’s also this matter of math and probability. You know, there are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe. And our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of 100,000 light years. But that’s measured by the speed of light — one light year is ten trillion kilometers long. It’s about six trillion miles and I know you know this, Patrick, but there are twelve zeroes in a trillion.
Patrick Cox: Oh yeah, I knew that.
Kavita Pillay: Of course. So when you do the math, and you consider the vastness of just our galaxy, let alone the universe, it seems like this little speck of dirt with 8 billion specks of human flesh —it seems we cannot be the only technologically advanced life out there. Which brings us to Carl Sagan.
Carl Sagan: The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be…
Kavita Pillay: Carl Sagan was one of the people behind the Arecibo message and Wade is a big fan, as am I.
Wade Roush: He’s for me, sort of as close to a secular saint as you can get.
Patrick Cox: Whoa, secular saint, that’s big.
Kavita Pillay: He was an astronomer and an astrobiologist, a cosmologist, an astrophysicist, a writer. Most of all, Carl Sagan helped elevate this conversation about the possibilities of communicating with life on other planets. And he brought that to the masses.
Wade Roush: And people like Carl Sagan kind of erred on the optimistic side. And their point of view was that there must be thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of other civilizations in our galaxy just waiting for us to reach out, or waiting until we were ready to be contacted. And it was just a question of coming up with the right technology.
Patrick Cox: What kind of technology is he talking about here?
Kavita Pillay: At least for listening, Wade says that radio and optical signals are the focus right now. Things like lasers, because you can shine a powerful laser into space and transmit info. Or nanosecond-long pulses of light because there’s very little in nature that can generate such a short light burst. So, Wade says if you were to detect a nanosecond-long laser pulse, it would almost certainly be from an advanced civilization.
Wade Roush: And the radio search has been going on for 60 years now and the optical search has been going on for 25 years.
Patrick Cox: Oh, a long time. Well maybe not in the scheme of things. Who are the people though, that have got these jobs, looking for extraterrestrials? Sounds like a great gig.
Kavita Pillay: I’m with you, I don’t think they’re hiring people like us. There are a handful of groups that do this work — largely scientists, but also some military. And now there’s some wealthy venture capitalists getting in on it. The SETI Institute is probably the oldest and best-known group. SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. They used to get federal funding until the government cut that off in the early 90s. So these days they’re supported by members and wealthy donors, and their goal is to listen.
Jill Tarter: So, what exactly is SETI?
Kavita Pillay: This is Jill Tarter. She used to head up SETI.
Jill Tarter: Well, SETI uses the tools of astronomy to try and find evidence of someone else’s technology out there. Our own technologies are visible over interstellar distances, and theirs might be as well.
Kavita Pillay: Tarter is one of the pioneers in the search for extraterrestrial life, and she was the inspiration for the main character in Carl Sagan’s book, Contact.
Patrick Cox: Oh, right. The Jodi Foster character?
Kavita Pillay: Yeah. And this is from her TED Talk in 2009.
Jill Tarter: All of the concerted SETI efforts over the last 40-some years are equivalent to scooping a single glass of water from the ocean. And no one would decide that the ocean was without fish on the basis of one glass of water.
Kavita Pillay: And now it’s 2020, and Wade says that this one glass analogy doesn’t quite work anymore because we’re able to listen at higher resolutions for longer periods of time and search more narrow channels to make sure nothing is missed. So, we’ve sampled a little bit more of the cosmos. And now:
Wade Roush: It’s more like a hot tub-worth of water out of the ocean. But it’s still just like a hot tub compared to the ocean. So from that perspective, you just got to keep going because we’ve only started to search. We’ve only scratched the surface.
Kavita Pillay: But Wade brings up another issue with the current SETI approach, which is that humans have been listening in for a while, and we haven’t heard anything
Wade Roush: There hasn’t been even a peep. If there was, it would be world news.
Kavita Pillay: And so, the scientists who do this work might want to try some different approaches.
Wade Roush: It might be a question of whether the media or the languages or the encoding schemes that other civilizations use are just beyond our comprehension or just, either we can’t comprehend them yet or we haven’t invented them yet, or we haven’t stumbled across them yet. Or just we haven’t evolved to the point where we’re capable of listening in. And I think that is a linguistic question on some level.
Patrick Cox: So, it sounds like we’re kind of looking for love in all the wrong places. Like, like we’re looking for radio signals and lasers from extraterrestrials. But if there’s other life out there, they may be communicating in other ways — much more advanced ways?
Kavita Pillay: Right. And so maybe it’s time to reassess.
Wade Roush: I’m starting to think myself that there’s something just fundamentally missing and that we’re not going to have any success until we step back a couple of steps and start rethinking how aliens, how extraterrestrials might communicate.
Kavita Pillay: How might they communicate?
Dolphin sounds
Kavita Pillay :Like this…?
Kavita Pillay: Patrick, my mom once took a taxi with a driver who said, “When you assume, ‘You make an ass out of you and me’”…do you get it?
Patrick Cox: No
Kavita Pillay: Like a-s-s-u.
Patrick Cox: Oh…Very clever.
Kavita Pillay: It turns out that we humans make a lot of assumptions about what communicating with extraterrestrials would entail.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: Most of the things that I do when I’m thinking about building a message are sort of hunting down my assumptions and trying to destroy them one by one.
Kavita Pillay: This is Sheri Wells-Jensen
Sheri Wells-Jensen: I’m a professor of linguistics at Bowling Green State University and I teach linguistics and I study astrobiology and disability studies.
Kavita Pillay: And one of her research interests is xenolinguistics
Sheri Wells-Jensen: I say “zeh-no,” you say, “zee-no.” Let’s call the whole thing off.
Patrick Cox: So, I’m guessing that’s an ‘x’ at the beginning? What is xenolinguistics?
Kavita Pillay: It’s the linguistics of aliens! And if we have any hope of ever communicating with extraterrestrials, Sheri says that we’ve first got to break a lot of assumptions.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: If I make a message and I think, “Oh, well, they will obviously display this on a view screen,” or if I want to talk about stars, they’ve obviously seen the stars. And then I have to think wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait: what if they don’t look? What if vision is not their primary way of accessing the world?
Kavita Pillay: Because even though the 7,000 or so human languages can seem so different from one another, they have some core things in common.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: All of human languages, are products of human brains and products of human bodies.
Kavita Pillay: And the way we humans note directions, that’s a good example of some core human assumptions that are based on our bodies and our earthly origins.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: So human language, we tend to have either we refer to directions by right, left, front, back
Kavita Pillay: Right, left, front, back. And in some languages, they use the cardinal directions, north, south, east, west. Or ‘upstream / downstream’. But that’s about it!
Sheri Wells-Jensen: If I were a sphere with nine eyes or nine sensory organs placed around my diameter, that’d be a whole different way of perceiving the world. And I would talk about it in a whole different way. Maybe you are a creature that has seven arms and so you have seven cardinal directions. So, you don’t have left, right, front, back. You’ve got like my first right and my second right and my two hundred and eighty degree direction. You know what I mean? Like, you divide the space seven ways. How would that affect things?
Patrick Cox: I think I can see what Sherri’s doing there. Seven arms: that’s from a movie isn’t it?
Kavita Pillay: Right. There’s no way we could do this episode without talking about Arrival.
Movie clip: There are days that define your story beyond your life, like the day they arrived…
Kavita Pillay: Arrival is based on a short story by Ted Chiang, called Story of Your Life, and it’s about the arrival of these aliens, who kind of look like a cross between spiders and octopuses but with seven limbs and they’re huge. So the humans call them heptapods. And Amy Adams plays the brilliant female linguist who is called upon to have first contact with the aliens and save humanity from itself.
Movie clip: “We don’t know if they know the difference between a weapon and a tool. Our language like a culture is messy, and sometimes one can be both.”
Kavita Pillay: That’s the fictional linguist. Sheri Wells-Jensen, our real linguist, is a fan of Arrival. But like anyone whose profession is depicted on a screen, she takes issues with certain things. And her biggest objection was that the humans seemed to be in control of communicating with the heptapods.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: OK, so here you have a species that knows how to build a spaceship and actually come to Earth. They’re going to be like, “OK, gang. It’s a type four planet. They’re this smart. It’s Method Six.” We’re not in charge. We are such a young species. We just sent our first intercontinental radio message in 1901. They’re going to have a plan. We are the newbies here. So to think that we are going to be in charge of this interaction is crazy socks!
Patrick Cox: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I also remember that they drop in a linguistic hypothesis as a plot device.
Kavita Pillay: Yes, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Movie clip: “You know, I was doing some reading about this idea that if you immerse yourself into a foreign language that you can actually rewire your brain.” “Yes, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It’s the theory that the language you speak determines how you think and, yeah, affects how you see everything. I’m curious, are you dreaming in their language?”:
Kavita Pillay: That’s Jeremy Renner with Amy Adams. He plays a physicist who is also pulled in to meet the aliens.
Patrick Cox: So what’s the deal with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? I’ve kind of forgotten.
Kavita Pillay: It’s originally a 19th century idea, and it’s named after a 20th century linguist, Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. And it suggests that the languages you speak shape your world view.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: And that is simultaneously very true and not true at all on different levels.
Kavita Pillay: Sheri says there isn’t a huge amount of research to support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It gets disputed for the way that it’s been applied to human language. But she thinks that it could be helpful when it comes to trying to communicate with beings that have evolved in very different ways.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: So all human languages were developed in a place where the people moving around on the surface of the earth had two arms and two legs and that the majority of them had the same sensory apparatus.
Patrick Cox: So, it sounds like Sheri is wondering out loud here that among the many ways that non-humans may communicate differently from us, there are a couple of them that are super fundamental? One, they could have different bodies, and use those different body parts to “speak.” And two, unlike humans, their form of communication may almost define them. It may shape them. And that’s why — maybe — we humans may have such trouble communicating with them?
Sheri Wells-Jensen: It’s like the dolphins, right? Is it a Sapir-Whorf problem that stops us from talking to dolphins?
Kavita Pillay: So, this brings us to a huge question: You know, why spend time thinking about how to talk with extraterrestrials, when we don’t even know what the billions of animals around us might be communicating? People like Sheri and researchers with the SETI Institute, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, they agree that understanding animals would be a great step in possibly communicating with intelligent aliens.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: There are folks at the SETI Institute who who are looking at dolphin communication. But if you map the different sounds they make and the complexity and the patterns of sounds that they make, they obey Zipf’s Law, which is just a way of representing how communication — how language and some natural phenomenon — differ from background noise. And so there’s a great deal of complexity in dolphin communications, but we’ve got very little idea what the heck’s going on there.
Kavita Pillay: And Wade Roush, the author of Extraterrestrials, he also feels pretty passionately about this.
Wade Roush: You can’t be around an animal like a dog, and somehow labor under this illusion that there’s nothing inside there. There’s obviously something inside there.The fact that we’re surrounded by other species right here on this planet who are smart enough to have thoughts and needs and emotions, but who don’t use the same kinds of language we do. I think that provides an enormous fertile field for experimentation, exploration and like trying to figure out what it might mean to talk to extraterrestrials.
Patrick Cox: OK, all of this is incredibly exciting, thinking about how we might communicate with other life in the universe. But there’s a ton of potential dangers. I mean, we’ve all seen those alien invasion films, what if they’re much more powerful than us?
Kavita Pillay: There are scientists who say that because we don’t know what or who is out there or what they could do to us, it’s better for us to just listen for possible messages, which is what SETI does and advocates for. But they’re not the only folks with an opinion about this. There’s METI International, and METI stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. METI is very interested in actively trying to communicate with extraterrestrials.
Patrick Cox: Whoa! So who works for METI?
Kavita Pillay: Well, METI was founded by a longtime SETI researcher who left and started this newer group, and Sheri Wells-Jensen is on the METI board.
Patrick Cox: So, what is Sheri’s feeling about like actively trying to reach out to aliens then, because, I don’t know, I’m wondering if you want to reveal the location of our fantastic, habitable planet, to creatures that might want to plunder us and do us harm?
Kavita Pillay: Well some say that we’ve been giving away our location, in a weak way and unwittingly, ever since we came up with radio and TV signals. But there’s no good consensus on whether it’s better to just listen, or whether it’s okay to also reach out. And so, there’s a SETI vs METI, debate.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: When I have the the SETI-METI argument, I try to be really respectful and hear their caution, because they’re not wrong. And for me, it comes down to: well, who are we? Stop and think about who we are and who we want to be. We are the people that reach out. We’re the people who say, “I want to know what’s out there and I want to be friends.” And I think that that longing for companionship is a profound part of who we are. But do you get in your boat and go adventuring to find the next shore or do you stay where you are? And I think that’s an essential question about who you choose to be.
Wade Roush: If we finally discover that we have some neighbors, we’ll have to stop thinking of ourselves as the apex of evolution, right? That could be a psychological blow. But on the other hand, I think we’ve been rehearsing for that eventuality for a long, long time. For a long time, I think we mostly thought about angels and demons and deities and gods. We’ve, always had this idea that we might not be the only conscious entities.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: How do I say this politely? We don’t have an excess of science literacy in the United States.
Kavita Pillay: The greatest threat to interstellar communication probably isn’t them — whoever ‘they’ are. It’s probably us and our own ignorance.
Sheri Wells-Jensen: If a message comes in and we’re not prepared culturally to understand that, it’s from a star. And if the stars are very far away, and if we don’t know basic physics, we could harm ourselves. And we also have to be in a position where we have some respect for basic science. If we’re still in a culture where we think, “Oh, global warming — that’s not happening,” even though science is telling us it’s happening, we’re going to be in trouble when big things happen. We need to be ethically ready to ask these questions. And we need to have a basic substrate of scientific literacy in place so that we can talk about this like grown-ups and not panic.
This episode was reported by Kavita Pillay. The podcast version of the story is available here and on Apple podcasts.
Subtitle’s sound designer is Tina Tobey.
Thanks to Julia Kumari Drapkin, Paloma Orozco, Gina James, Amber Stark, Tom Cummings, WBGU-PBS, and our partners at the Linguistic Society of America, the Hub & Spoke audio collective and The World public radio program.
Subtitle is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.