What if the reason we're not hearing from aliens is that everyone out there is listening, but no one is broadcasting messages?
Host | Matthew S Williams
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/matthew-s-williams
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Episode Notes
What if the reason we're not hearing from aliens is that everyone out there is listening, but no one is broadcasting messages? This is the essence of the "SETI Paradox" and the ongoing debate between proponents of SETI and METI - Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence
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Resources
Beyond Fermi's Paradox: What is the "SETI Paradox" Hypothesis?: https://www.universetoday.com/149513/beyond-fermis-paradox-xvii-what-is-the-seti-paradox-hypothesis/
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For more podcast Stories from Space with Matthew S Williams, visit: https://itspmagazine.com/stories-from-space-podcast
Where is Everybody? The SETI Paradox | Stories From Space Podcast With Matthew S Williams
SETI Paradox
[00:00:00] The authors acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the
traditional unceded lands of the Lekwungen peoples. Hello and welcome back
to Stories from Space. I'm your host Matt Williams, and today we are going to
be capping off our ongoing series about the proposed resolutions to the Fermi
Paradox by looking at what is known as the SETI Paradox.
Now, this theory essentially states that what if the reason we haven't heard any
transmissions or seen any evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations is that
everyone is listening, but no one is broadcasting. Everyone is listening to the
cosmos for signs of transmissions from other potential civilizations, but no one
is broadcasting messages of hello, greetings, is anybody out there?
And possibly out of fear, but for any number of reasons. Now, a key point to all
of this is the distinction [00:01:00] between what is known as Passive SETI and
Active SETI, which has really only become formalized in recent years. Passive
SETI describes listening to the universe for signs of transmissions, whereas
Active SETI consists of trying to make contact with extraterrestrial civilizations
by sending messages.
And this has since come to be known as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence,
or METI, which in recent years has become its own separate field. And as we
explored in previous podcasts, SETI experiments have been going on since the
1960s, even though there were a few predecessors, a few Pathfinder studies,
such as those conducted by Nikola Tesla.
In particular, in 1899, while he was conducting experiments in his laboratory in
Colorado Springs. However, arguably the first true SETI experiment was
Project Ozma in 1960, which was [00:02:00] conducted by Cornell astronomer
and inventor of the Drake Equation, Frank Drake, and his colleagues at the
Green Bank Observatory.
So it's fair to say that SETI experiments go back at least 60 years at this point.
And in that time, only a few METI experiments have been conducted. In fact,
the concept itself didn't really emerge as a distinct idea until 2006 when Russian
scientist Alexander Zaitsev coined the term and he said that the science known
as SETI deals with searching for messages from aliens.
METI science deals with the creation of messages to aliens, thus SETI and
METI proponents have quite different perspectives. SETI scientists are in aposition to address only the local question, does active SETI make sense? In
other words, would it be reasonable for SETI's success to transmit with the
object of attracting ETI's attention?
In contrast to active SETI, [00:03:00] METI pursues not a local and lucrative
impulse, but a more global and unselfish one, to overcome the great silence in
the universe, you. Bringing to our extraterrestrial neighbors the long expected
annunciation, you are not alone. And as I said, the history of METI, the number
of experiments that have been conducted, it's humble compared to the many
SETI surveys that have been conducted over the past six decades.
And these experiments, they benefited not only from NASA support and
support from the Soviet government to Soviet's own experiments, but in more
recent years from the private sector in the form of Breakthrough Listen, which
is the largest SETI survey ever conducted. It began in January 2016 as part of a
10 year experiment with 100 million dollars in funding and thousands of hours
of dedicated telescope time from multiple state of the art facilities, including the
Green Bank Telescope, the same facility where Project Osmo was
conducted.[00:04:00]
Nevertheless, many experiments 20 years. Almost as long as SETI experiments
have, and the first attempt was in 1962, when a team of Soviet scientists from
the Evpatoria Planetary Radar Center in Crimea sent what's known as the Morse
Message. And this consisted of a radio transmission sent in Morse code, which
relayed the letters M I R, or Mir, the Russian word for peace, followed by Lenin
and S S S R.
And in 1974, The most powerful and famous broadcast was sent to space from
the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. And this was known as the Arecibo
message, and it consisted of a 1679 bit transmission arranged into 73 lines, with
23 characters per line, in binary code. And binary code was specifically chosen
because it was believed, then and now, [00:05:00] that mathematics is the only
universal language that an extraterrestrial intelligence would be capable of
recognizing and processing.
That would not be tainted by cultural bias or what have you. And when the code
was broken down, it revealed a set of simple images that showed the Arecibo
telescope, the solar system, a representation of the double helix structure of our
DNA, a stick figure of a human, and some of the chemicals that are integral to
terrestrial life.And this message was aimed at the globular star cluster M13, which is roughly
21, 000 light years away near the edge of the Milky Way, which was seen as a
good candidate for hosting sun like systems and possibly Earth like planets. So
it seemed like a good candidate for making contact with civilization.
And by the turn of the century, and with the end of the Cold War, there were
renewed attempts and renewed interests. [00:06:00] Between 1999 and 2003,
scientists, once again at the Evpatoria Planetary Radar Center, sent three
transmissions out that were named Cosmic Call 1, Teenage Message, and
Cosmic Call 2. And whereas the two cosmic calls consisted of code denoting
the alphabet, numbers, the periodic table, and scientific concepts, the teenage
message consisted of an analog message encoded in music with digital data,
including images and text, and a coherent sounding signal.
And in 2008, NASA followed this up by transmitting the song Across the
Universe by the Beatles towards Polaris, otherwise known as the North Star.
This was done using the 70 meter or 230 foot dish of NASA's Deep Space
Network, located at the Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex. And this
event marked a number of [00:07:00] anniversaries.
In addition to NASA's 50th, it was the 45th anniversary of the Deep Space
Network and the 40th anniversary since the song's recording. And speaking of
anniversaries, in 2012, which coincided with the 35th anniversary of the WOW
signal, which was the most compelling radio transmission from space ever
recorded, in 1977, And which is still considered by many to be the strongest
candidate for a possible transmission from an extraterrestrial civilization.
So, to mark this occasion, a reply signal, known as the WOW Reply, was
transmitted from the Arecibo Observatory. And it consisted of more than 10,
000 Twitter messages and videos submitted by celebrities and willing
participants. And in 2016, another campaign known as a Simple Response to an
Elemental Message was transmitted from the [00:08:00] ESA's Sobrero Station
towards Polaris.
And this message consisted of 3, 775 worldwide responses to the question, How
will our present environmental interactions shape the future? And this was
accompanied by a series of images of Earth. And, as I mentioned, in 2016,
Breakthrough Initiatives, which is responsible for Breakthrough Listen, the
largest and most dedicated SETI experiment to date, alongside this, they
launched Breakthrough Message as well in 2016, which was an international
competition to create an interstellar message.And to encourage debate and raise awareness of how humanity could someday
communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence and whether or not we should
attempt this. As such, there's no plans to send the message yet, not until a long,
wide ranging debate has taken place between scientists and world leaders about
the [00:09:00] ethical implications.
And so, while METI experiments have been ongoing, and have been taking
place SETI experiments have, there is a disparity between the two, in terms of
overall funding, commitment, effort, and just the sheer number of experiments
taking place. In fact, according to Zaitsev, the ratio between METI and SETI
experiments is about 1 to 100.
So, about 1 percent as much effort has gone into messaging extraterrestrials as it
has searching for signs of their transmissions. And as Zaitsev explained, this
data followed from a review of Jill Tartar's collection of papers, which were
called SETI 2020, released in 2003, Jill Tartar being the famed SETI researcher,
for whom the character in CONTACT Carl Sagan's story and the movie
[00:10:00] adaptation about SETI researchers making contact for the first time.
The character played by Jodie Foster was based on Jill Tarter. And according to
her collection of papers, Zaitsev said, It lists 100 various SETI programs
starting from the first OSMA project to our time. The total time of search is
several years, whereas the total transmission time is only 37 hours.
This characterizes the attitude of researchers. However, we must also take into
account the metaphobia inherent to the planetary consciousness as a whole. In
short, he was saying that, yes, the reason why SETI experiments outnumber
METI experiments is because there is a lot of fear, some would say entirely
justified fear, that by sending out transmissions of greetings and is anybody out
there and alerting the universe to our presence, That we are tempting fate,
basically.
We are letting a potentially hostile, more advanced [00:11:00] species out there,
or several, we're letting them know exactly where we are, and we are practically
rolling out the welcome mat to them. And this is something that a number of
scientists have cautioned against, not the least of which is Stephen Hawking,
and famed scientist and author David Brin.
In 2006, Brin published an article titled, Should We Be Shouting at the
Cosmos?, where he summarized the objections that many notable scientists had
to METI. And as he put it, Let there be no mistake. METI is a very different
thing than passively sifting for signals from outer space. Carl Sagan, one of thegreatest SETI supporters and a deep believer in the notion of altruistic alien
civilizations, called such a move deeply unwise and immature.
Even Frank Drake, who famously sent the Arecibo message towards the
Andromeda Galaxy in 1974, considered active SETI to be, at best, a stunt and
generally a waste of time. Sagan, along with early SETI pioneer Philip
[00:12:00] Morrison, recommended that the newest children in a strange and
uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about
the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that
we do not understand.
But of course, what if this is the reason that humanity hasn't heard any signals
yet in the course of its SETI experiments? What if, in fact, we are not the
newcomers to this whole cosmic arena? If, in fact, life and technologically
advanced civilizations, if they're a recent addition to the universe, Then it would
make sense that all civilizations that are currently existing in the Milky Way
right now are holding back when it comes to Broadcasting their existence
because they don't know what's out there they fear that they could be inviting an
invasion or an attack by a hostile species and This of course is very much in
keeping with the dark forest hypothesis Which we reviewed in another episode
and this essentially argues [00:13:00] that Intelligent civilizations are not in the
habit of broadcasting their existence because of a little thing known as chains of
suspicion.
In this case, you have benevolent civilizations who may very well outnumber
malevolent ones by ten, a hundred, a thousand to one. But given the fact that we
don't know what the intentions of any other civilization are, We are not prepared
to make contact with them. We're not prepared to advertise our existence.
Malevolent civilizations, on the other hand, would very likely project their own
intentions onto others and assume that if they were to broadcast, Here we are, is
anybody out there? that another civilization would capitalize on that. And
further, in keeping with the chain of suspicion, The benevolent civilization and
otherwise peaceful civilization is left to consider whether it would be wise to
attack first and ask questions later, rather than risk being overrun by a
malevolent civilization.
So [00:14:00] there is an inherent logic to this. There is a Certain instinctive
logic to it. Oftentimes, it's assumed that extraterrestrial intelligence will be more
highly evolved, more advanced than we are. They can't possibly be worse than
us, is often the reasoning too. So this does introduce a bit of Machiavellian
scheming into the mix, a certain sort of realism or real politic.It recognizes that an extraterrestrial intelligence out there is likely to have the
same instincts as us, self preservation, fear of the unknown. And so, therefore,
they're not going to give their position away. They'd much rather find out who's
out there, get a feel for things first. However, this hypothesis Chief Strength
may also be its biggest weakness.
It assumes, like many other proposed resolutions to the Fermi Paradox, a certain
uniformity of motive. It [00:15:00] assumes that all extraterrestrial civilizations
in our universe today, and certainly within our galaxy, are all following the
same basic protocol. Stay quiet, don't broadcast. And so, it would only require
one civilization, or a minority of civilizations, breaking with this protocol, and
you no longer have a Great Silence.
And, as the history of many on Earth shows, that there isn't even uniformity of
motivation for us, as a single species. We don't follow this basic protocol where
we refuse to broadcast, we've done it several times, and there are people and
organizations and institutions. All they really need is access to a radio telescope.
And so if the means exist, they will do it. They'll send out a signal. And as
Douglas Bacotch, the president of the METI Society, he argued that if, in fact, a
message were ever detected, we would not be able to prevent a [00:16:00]
cacophony of responses from Earth. So any transmissions that are sent out are
likely to get a ton of answers.
At which point you could say goodbye to the great silence and hello to the great
hubba, or the interstellar message board, because there's gonna have to be some
kind of organization to all these signals, all these calls, who's talking at who,
wait, was that for us, or was that meant for Earth, Proxima Centauri B, What
have you.
Now that still leaves room for the possibility that what we're seeing right now,
since humanity first began using radio telescopes and radio transmitters roughly
a century ago, is a lull. That there is a period of silence, which is caused either
by a lack of advanced civilizations in our galaxy right now, perhaps the older
ones died off, or they transcended, in the sense that they are [00:17:00] using
advanced technology to communicate that we would have no means of listening
to, such as quantum communications, that's one suggestion.
Or solar gravitational lenses to send enhanced signals with quantum encryption
or that in fact, we're currently in a state of transition where civilizations exist in
multiple places in our galaxy, not yet close enough to listen in on just radio
traffic, radio noise that's been broadcast from Earth for you.Yes, about a century now, and that they too are concerned and wary about
sending out a message of sufficient strength to truly reach another star system,
or better yet, towards a star system they know has habitable planets. And so
therefore, we may be finding ourselves in a period where a whole bunch of
species are capable of making contact, or they're getting to the point where
[00:18:00] there would be.
And. We're all just waiting for somebody to make the first move, because we all
share the same basic fear. So, that too does assume a certain uniformity of
motive, but with the caveat that this won't last. Our galaxy may have been noisy
before, and it may once again become noisy. We're just in a intervening period
where There's no discernible radio traffic that we can pick up on right now.
And as always, there's the argument that perhaps we're just not listening in on
the right frequencies. We're not tuned to the right station, so to speak, that we're
not looking in the right place and that we need to consider other techno
signatures. And so like every other proposed Fermi paradox solution, the SETI
paradox reminds us that we have a limited frame of reference, and anything we
suggest is going to be subject to assumptions and bias, [00:19:00] and yet we
really have no choice but to accept it.
So drawn with that and attempt to test these theories by coming up with
hypothetical scenarios. We therefore established constraints on what we're
looking for, where we're looking for it and eliminating certain possibilities and
certain ranges of frequencies. With every strategy that we test, even though it
may reveal no evidence of extraterrestrial life out there, it moves the ball
forward or pushes the rock just a little bit more up that hill.
It's much like rocket testing. There really is no such thing as failure. You test
again and again and again, and you accumulate data over time, and this is how
ultimately success becomes routine and habitual. So, in short, we just need to
keep looking, and we need to keep coming up with theories that we can test.
Not only because it gives us something to look for, but it [00:20:00] lets us
know if the tests fail to produce any viable technosignatures, we know what not
to look for. And frankly, I can think of no better words to conclude this segment
on proposed resolution to the Fermi Paradox. Keep looking, keep theorizing,
keep testing, keep moving the ball forward.
Because if something is in fact out there, if there are advanced and
technologically inclined civilizations, some of which may be far more advanced
than our own, we will find it eventually. So thank you to my listeners who havebeen with this podcast and the segment there from the beginning. For those who
joined later on, I recommend that you go back and check out all episodes with
the tagline, Where is everybody?
Because there are some very, very fascinating answers to that question. And I've
enjoyed it immensely reading about them and researching the different theories,
[00:21:00] the different proposed hypotheses over the years, and really just
wanted to share the same sense of inspiration and awe and mystery that they
instilled in me.
And I hope that I've accomplished that here, at least to a point. So tune in next
week when we will be discussing the Chinese space program, its inception, its
evolution over time, and what it is poised to do in the coming years and
decades. We'll also be looking at the Indian space program and expect
additional episodes on indigenous astronomy where we take a look at the
Mayan traditions and the traditions of the indigenous people of the Pacific
Northwest.
In the meantime, thank you for listening. I'm Matt Williams and this has been
Stories from Space.