Calling all aliens: What's the best way to contact our galactic neighbors?
August 20, 2017 marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of the the first NASA Voyager mission, which is carrying a golden record filled with messages to potential civilizations beyond our solar system. This year is also the 20th anniversary of the sci-fi film Contact that dealt with receiving radio messages from extraterrestrials. Both the record and the film were brain children of the late Carl Sagan and raise an interesting question: which approach has the greater chance of success of making contact with aliens – sending radio messages or unmanned probes?
First contact with extraterrestrial civilizations has long fascinated scientists, philosophers, and writers. It's been the topic explored by serious scientific studies, crackpots, tabloids, science fiction epics, and international debates. The speculated results of the first meeting of man and alien run the entire gamut of imagination. Visits by aliens or receiving greetings from the stars has been seen as ranging from wonderfully transcendent, with the human race raised to the next step in evolutionary perfection, to us ending up as the main course on someone's dinner table.
Whether the outcome is the end of 2001: a Space Odyssey or To Serve Man, how will we establish contact with whoever or whatever lives beyond our solar system? Will our first contact be an alien spaceship carrying little green men? A probe operated by an artificial intelligence? A mysterious artifact buried on the Moon? A radio signal blaring out from the stars? Zaphod Beeblebrox crashing a party in Islington?
The problem with answering this question is that we know literally nothing about any other intelligent life forms. We don't even know if they exist or even how probable their existence is. As to how they think, their limitations, or what manner they might choose to make themselves known to us, these are questions that are so complex that it often wanders into the realm of metaphysics, if not theology.
A much easier way of reaching an answer is to ask not "How will they contact us?" but "How will we contact them?" If we can answer the latter, then we are a great deal closer to answering the former. Knowing how to send messages tells you how to receive them.
August 20, 2017 marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of the the first NASA Voyager mission, which is carrying a golden record filled with messages to potential civilizations beyond our solar system. This year is also the 20th anniversary of the sci-fi film Contact that dealt with receiving radio messages from extraterrestrials. Both the record and the film were brain children of the late Carl Sagan and raise an interesting question: which approach has the greater chance of success of making contact with aliens – sending radio messages or unmanned probes?
First contact with extraterrestrial civilizations has long fascinated scientists, philosophers, and writers. It's been the topic explored by serious scientific studies, crackpots, tabloids, science fiction epics, and international debates. The speculated results of the first meeting of man and alien run the entire gamut of imagination. Visits by aliens or receiving greetings from the stars has been seen as ranging from wonderfully transcendent, with the human race raised to the next step in evolutionary perfection, to us ending up as the main course on someone's dinner table.
Whether the outcome is the end of 2001: a Space Odyssey or To Serve Man, how will we establish contact with whoever or whatever lives beyond our solar system? Will our first contact be an alien spaceship carrying little green men? A probe operated by an artificial intelligence? A mysterious artifact buried on the Moon? A radio signal blaring out from the stars? Zaphod Beeblebrox crashing a party in Islington?
A much easier way of reaching an answer is to ask not "How will they contact us?" but "How will we contact them?" If we can answer the latter, then we are a great deal closer to answering the former. Knowing how to send messages tells you how to receive them.
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