Talking aliens
Stephen Battersby discussed the current debate over broadcasting messages into space with the intention of their being detected by extraterrestrial life forms (23 January, p 28). The editorial in the same issue (p 3) endorses the idea.
As an astronomer who has been involved in topics relating to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) for 30 years, and as a former member of SETI advisory panels, I feel there is an arrogance in the transmission of these messages by small groups who have claimed the right to shout on behalf of Earth without consulting anybody else.
Many SETI researchers and others, including the editorial board of Nature, have asked for there to be a moratorium on these messages until broad international discussions can take place. These should involve biologists, historians, ethicists and members of the public.
That doesn’t seem much to ask, given the importance of the matter and our ignorance of the cosmos. However many technological species there are out there, we are almost certainly the youngest children, suddenly shouting in an unknown forest. The daunting silence in the sky has its creepy aspects. Can’t we discuss the implications and satisfy reasonable concerns before yelling “Yoohoo”?
The message zealots label as paranoid anybody who wants open discussion. With their peremptory broadcasts, they bet our future on the assumption that all technological alien species will be altruistic. In doing so they ignore all the indications from human or biological history that suggest this is highly unlikely to be the case.
They deploy a host of blithe excuses, such as “aliens have already picked up our radio leakage” and “harm cannot span interstellar distances”, but they do not hold up under scientific scrutiny.
Eagerness to achieve “first contact”, while laudable, should be tempered by awareness of the history of first contacts between human cultures, and between previously isolated Earthly biomes. These make a sad litany that suggests patience, caution and lengthy discussion are in order before we make our presence known to the cosmos at large.
From Kevin Buckley
The discussion of how to format a suitable message for transmission to an alien civilisation misses the reality of what it means to communicate with beings who probably experience the world in a different way to us.
Most of the current proposals seem to take it for granted that the recipients will be capable of receiving a message if it is in a form that we ourselves could easily pick up and interpret. But there is no reason why this should be the case.
Consider, if you will, how a human civilisation of just a few thousand years ago might imagine “communications from beyond this world” would occur. Stone tablets from the sky would clearly be a good starting point.
These days most proposed templates seem based on images, but how might that be interpreted by, for example, an advanced civilisation of fish? They might sense more through the skin or electronic waves than through sight and smell.
Even if our target alien civilisation is sufficiently well developed that its members can receive, decode and visualise our transmission, we cannot assume they share with us the sensory mechanisms by which we understand the external world.
Unless we take into account the very different ways in which different species could build their internal “world models”, it seems that any form of communication currently under consideration has a very low likelihood of being understood.
Woodcote, Berkshire, UK
From David Collins
I am always concerned that we assume that aliens will all look alike, come from a global village, speak the same language and share a culture.
From H. G. Wells’s time traveller to Star Trek‘s Captain Kirk, visitors to other worlds seem to explore only a few hundred metres from their landing point 鈥� an extremely misleading view of alien life. Suppose our visitors dropped in on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Greenland or Nevada 鈥� what impression would they get?
On our own planet, aliens may have dropped in a long time ago. Prions? Archaea? Slime moulds? Cetaceans? Nematodes?
Harpenden, Hertfordshire, UK
From Tim Malyon
I was born at a time when our own world was not yet even fully mapped. As a child I thought that landing a man on the moon would be the greatest thing that would happen in my lifetime. Now if someone could only provide definite proof of extraterrestrial life, I would feel that I had lived in humanity’s greatest ever period of discovery.
Beattock, Dumfriesshire, UK
From F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
The message that was transmitted from Arecibo more than three decades ago, signalling our presence to extraterrestrials, included a diagram of the solar system as perceived in 1974: nine planets of varying sizes orbiting the sun, ranging from Mercury to Pluto. Now that Pluto is no longer officially categorised as a planet, shouldn’t we transmit a correction?
Glasgow, UK
More the merrier?
Laura Fortunato and Marco Archetti have created a mathematical model suggesting that “monogamous marriage [can be] a better strategy for men as well as for women” (9 January, p 13). They argue that “social monogamy is not inevitable” but arises in agricultural societies where men wish to prevent subdividing landholdings among their heirs.
This model includes the assumption that “women in early agrarian cultures did not provide much in the way of material resources”. However, in agricultural economies women could be considered a resource because of the food and offspring they produce on plots of land allocated by their husbands. In such societies it would therefore be in the man’s interests to have more than one wife and his role would be to provide protection for his family. This system still exists in parts of rural Africa, where women produce most of the food but a husband’s death can deprive them of land and leave them and their children destitute.
Democracy's demise
In highlighting how unlikely it would be for a government to be voted in if it proposed to enforce changes to our lifestyles great enough to mitigate climate change, Richard Platt puts his finger on a profound dilemma for all democratic systems (9 January, p 27).
Historically, it can be argued that democracy has only flourished as long as the promise of “more for everybody” has been capable of fulfilment. Platt rightly points out that this may not be possible for much longer.
A logical extension of this thought is that our cherished democratic political system may not have what is necessary to resolve our current predicament. If this is correct, the future may offer much bleaker prospects than just cutting back on long-haul flights and journeys by car.
Military benefit
You report that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered how the structure of a snail’s shell absorbs and dissipates impacts (23 January, p 17). They are then quoted as saying this could allow us to improve body armour 鈥� a comment I find particularly sad.
I can think of lots of ways this discovery could be used to help make life better: improved car bodies that protect us from accidents, damage-absorbing cases for laptops and other electronic devices, or better bicycle helmets.
Their paper indicates that funding for the research came from the US army, the Department of Defense and US defence supplier Raytheon, among others.
It is high time there was a real discussion in the scientific community of the ways that defence funding of research can distort science. Not only does it change the questions that we ask, directing us towards problems that are applicable to warfare, it also changes how we perceive the utility of our most general and useful discoveries.
Is finding new and improved ways to kill each other the best use we can think of for science?
In your head
Ray Tallis discusses the “insuperable problem” of explaining how intracranial nerve impulses can be “about” extracranial objects, but thinking in these terms rather confuses the issue (9 January, p 28).
Our experiences are not “about” extracranial things any more than your experience of your hand is about the appendage on the end of your wrist. As amputees experiencing phantom limbs know all too well, the pattern of experiences you call your hand is located within your brain. The sensation of pain in your hand is actually an addition to the many other experiences that are generated by the same region of your brain.
We only think of the hand as a part of a body operating in an external world because our brains have evolved to consistently encode data from that part of our body in that part of our experience.
The “aboutness” connection is indeed mysterious but it is not an unprecedented “reaching out” of a part of the brain into the external world as Tallis suggests 鈥� and it should not prevent us recognising as our consciousness whatever neurological phenomenon turns out to be identical with it.
A little knowledge
While I agree wholeheartedly with the concerns expressed in Paul Parsons’s article on the dangers of increased availability of information (16 January, p 38), it is disappointing to see the words “information” and “knowledge” so freely interchanged. When we complain that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, we are referring to the danger that arises when we draw a flawed conclusion from limited relevant information we hold in our brains, and then base our actions on the consequent flawed knowledge.
I suggest that the real risk lies in us not knowing, or even worse not caring, whether we have adequate or good quality information to draw a sound conclusion. However, clearly anything which alerts us to, and maintains an awareness of, that risk has to be of great value.
For the record
鈥� Spencer Brown is the director of research in the Department of Plastic Surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, not a surgeon as we stated (23 January, p 42)