The moment was imagined a 1000 times. As astronomers comb the cosmos with the powerful telescopes of theirs, they spot something that makes them gasp. Amid the feeble rays coming from distant galaxies lies a vulnerable but persistent signal: a message from an advanced civilization.
It will be a transformative event for humankind, one the world’s nations are certainly ready for. Or are they? “Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We would resemble headless chickens,” says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the Faculty of St Andrews. “We cannot pay for to be ill prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that might occur at anytime and which we can’t afford to mismanage.”
This particular frank assessment of Earth’s unreadiness for touch with life elsewhere underpins the creation of the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection hub at St Andrews.
Over the following month or even 2, Elliott aims to bring together a core team of overseas affiliates and researchers. They will take on the job of getting ready: to assess mystical signals, as well as artefacts, and exercise every aspect of how we should respond.
“Up to today, the main focus has been on the hunt for indicators, but all along there is been a need to find out, exactly what we likely to do with it? What next?” says Elliott. “We require strategies and scenarios in place to understand what we need to do and how to undertake it. It’s like the Scouts’ motto: be prepared.”
Advances made in the past 30 years have ramped up enthusiasm in the search for ET. Since 1992, when astronomers first confirmed the presence of a world outside of the solar system, over 5,000 such worlds have been recognized. Scientists today suspect a lot of the 300bn stars in the Milky Way host the own family of theirs of planets. “When folks say they don’t believe there’s life out there, they are actually riding against the tide of scientific opinion,” says Elliott.
The abundance of planets, moreover the suspicion that at least some are habitable, is only part of the story, however. Substantially more powerful telescopes are giving time to the search, and will do soon, opening great swathes of the skies for astronomers to eavesdrop on.
Seti scientists already have a number of guidelines regarding how to act when they identify a “techno signature” – an interstellar message from an advanced civilization. A 2010 declaration from the International Academy of Astronautics urges those who detect mystical signals to eliminate prosaic non alien sources initially – like a a microwave oven down the corridor. When there’s consensus that the signal is legit, researchers should inform the general public and the secretary general of the UN.
But there is little guidance on how to proceed next. Exactly how should the message be studied? Must it be released in full before it has been deciphered? Would governments allow that? Should humanity respond? In that case, who decides what we send back?
“After the original announcement, we would be checking out societal impact, information dissemination, the press, the impact on religions plus belief systems, the potential for disinformation, what analytical capabilities we’ll require, and much more: having strategies in place, being transparent with everything we have discovered – what we know and what we don’t know,” says Elliott.
While a smattering and individual scientists of organizations have examined just how best to manage first contact, Elliott believes the expertise needed is fragmented. The Hub will bring together the required brains to draw up a scheme “for any scenario we encounter … or at least all those we – humanity – could think of”, he says.
Another major objective is encouraging serious engagement from the UN, perhaps the one worldwide body with the clout to coordinate Earth’s handling of a message, and particularly any response. The huge distances between stars mean conversations could possibly have to take place over generations. And that is assuming the civilization hasn’t gone extinct in time it’s taken the message to reach us.
Are we actually likely to converse with aliens when we can rarely communicate with wildlife on the own planet of ours? Elliott hopes that innovative civilizations will begin any idea with a dialect guide. But even if a signal is undecipherable, scientists can glean information about the intelligence of the sender out of the intricacy of the structure of its.
The prospect of mailing some response has drawn criticism from some quarters. Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge cosmologist, warned in 2016 that humanity’s first contact with a sophisticated civilisation could mirror what happened when Native Americans encountered Christopher Columbus, which “did n’t turn out so well”.
Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York, said reaching out to aliens “would be the largest blunder in human history”.
Elliott is much more upbeat, however. He thinks it would be a pity if advanced civilizations kept themselves to themselves and made zero effort to communicate. “It’s such an opportunity to link up, if there is another intelligence out there, which all the indications are that there must be,” he says. “If we’ve the chance, I don’t believe we ought to miss it.”
Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist along with professor of science communication in the Faculty of Westminster, said the new hub at St Andrews is “an crucial stage in raising awareness at how ill prepared we presently are” for detecting a signal from an alien civilization.
Though he added that any smart aliens were likely to be hundreds in case not thousands of light years away, which means communication period will be on the scale of countless centuries. “Even in case we had been receiving a signal tomorrow, we would have lots of breathing space to assemble a worldwide team of several experts to make an attempt to decipher the meaning of the message, and thoroughly consider how the Earth must react, and even when we should.
“The larger concern is to establish a bit of form of global agreement to avoid private corporations or capable individuals from responding independently – before a consensus has created on if it is safe to react in the slightest, and what we will wish to say as a single planet,” he said.
