Encountering Life in the Universe: Ethical Foundations and Social Implications of Astrobiology

10. Contact: Who Will Speak for Earth and Should They? - Jill Cornell Tarter

178 chapter ten Contact Who Will Speak for Earth and Should They? Jill Cornell Tarter Center for SETI Research For millennia humans have looked at the sky and wondered whether or not we are alone in this vast Universe. The modern tools of astronomy now give us the opportunity to try to find the answer to this old question; SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is a scientific exploration that might provide an answer in the near future, much farther in the future, or never. But if one day this search (or some other methodology ) detects evidence of a distant technological civilization, humans will have to decide whether and how we might communicate, and who will speak for Earth. As we think about contact with other intelligent life, we do well to consider the physical facts first: where Earth lies in the Galaxy, and what this means in terms of connecting to any other life that might exist. Our home lies far out in the outskirts of the Milky Way, most of the hundreds of billions of other stars lie closer to the Galactic Center and far from us, and the tens of billions of other galaxies are much farther still. Connection and communication will be a long-distance affair. When and if we do eventually connect, what rules should we follow to converse? Who should decide the rules? What are the concerns for the larger society? And what should be scientists’ concerns for this world’s and the external world’s society in such communication? Also, see Race’s article in this volume for more general policy considerations when life elsewhere is finally detected. Contact · 179 Searching for Contact Who cares about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? Scientists are justifiably excited about searching for, and finding, life on Mars and other Solar System objects. But this life is expected to be microbial at best. Laypeople do not necessarily care about microbes but (as Hollywood proves repeatedly) they do care about intelligent life and contact with such life. Before considering the details of such contact, we need to think about how we even begin to recognize intelligent life elsewhere. Basically we are looking for technology. If technology is short-lived—if a technological civilization develops and then dies out quickly—we will not find them, although we may detect their relic messages. If their technology is long-lived, we may find them. So the success of SETI depends on civilizations exhibiting long-lived technology. Consider these three facts, which highlight the great Galactic asymmetry (see figure 10.1): • We are a very young technology in a very old Galaxy: 100 years versus 10 billion years. • If a detectable technology exists elsewhere in the Galaxy, it is very likely to be older than we are. • If the technology were younger, it would probably not be detectable (by us at this time). Physicist Phil Morrison referred to SETI as the “archeology of the future ” because a detected signal tells us about their past and the potential for our future. The detection of even a cosmic dial tone will tell us that it is possible to survive our technological adolescence. But how do we search for their technology? In the theory of the structure of the human brain and functions of the mind, left-brain thinking is logical, sequential, objective, and analytical; our right-brain thinking is intuitive, holistic, subjective, and synthesizing. Our left brain tells us to search for analogs of terrestrial technologies—Earth on steroids; null results from such a systematic and extensive search could eventually be significant. By modeling what we are searching for, it is possible to delimit the volume of search space in which we did not find it, and to draw conclusions about whether or not that is significant. In searching the oceans for fish, the null results of scooping a single glass of water could not be considered significant. Our right brain tells us to search for markers of advanced technologies, those we ourselves have not yet conceived or invented. Our best chance of success from this right-brain approach is 180 · Encountering Life in the Universe to keep our astronomical eyes open for the unusual, the unexplainable. What advanced technologies could be out there? In this volume, Peters further considers the ways we might interact with an alien life form that we consider “the other.” 10.1 Any detectable technology will probably be...