It's a scenario that many scientists dream about—one
day, radio telescopes on Earth suddenly pick up irrefutable
evidence of a coherent message, a message from across the
heavens, an interstellar greeting card from an extraterrestrial
civilization far, far away. Can you imagine the impact—the
excitement, the anticipation, the profound implications, the
philosophical tsunami that would sweep through the culture? How
would we respond to that cosmic hello? How do you greet ET? What
happens when planet Earth is suddenly holding the galactic
talking stick and it's time to share? Well, before you to get
too concerned about putting our interstellar foot in our
planetary mouth, you'll be glad to know that there are those who
have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this very
question.
Doug Vakoch, a social scientist at the privately funded SETI
Institute (SETI is an acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence), has an official title custom-made to elicit
double takes—the Director for Interstellar Message
Composition. It is Vakoch's job to explore questions that most
of us have never even considered. Questions like: What aspects
of human culture do we want to share with our galactic
neighbors? Do we communicate the universal elements of our
planetary civilization or highlight the many differences? Do we
talk about science, music, art? And one of the fundamental
questions to preoccupy this unusual scientist is: What to do
about religion? How do we communicate the ethical, moral, and
spiritual side of human culture?
Vakoch is not the first to consider these issues. The late
Carl Sagan helped to fashion some of our initial forays into
extraterrestrial communication with the Pioneer and Voyager
spacecrafts. But today, those messages seem limited, “more
a message for us than a message for extraterrestrials,”
says Vakoch, explaining that there was a tendency in those
messages to “avoid anything with controversy.”
(There were no images of war, for example.) Also, there was a
focus on scientific knowledge at the expense of giving potential
ETs “a more complete picture of ourselves.” But
finding a consensus on a subject like religion can be a dicey
business, which is why Vakoch's work with SETI has focused more
on two core concepts to communicate who and what we are to our
cosmic brethren: altruism and evolution.
Altruism is obviously essential to our understanding of
spirituality, and evolution is becoming more and more so every
day. But how do you communicate that to an intelligent species
with no human context? Evolution, which as Vakoch explains
includes “cosmic evolution, geological evolution,
biological evolution, and the evolution of culture,” at
least seems possible to represent with imagery, but the abstract
concept of altruism demands some new thinking. That is why
Vakoch has enlisted some of today's best minds to tackle the
issue at conferences like Encoding Altruism: The Art and
Science of Interstellar Message Composition, held last year
in Paris. Participants embrace the challenge of thinking about
human culture from the perspective not just of another species
but of a life-form that is the result of an entirely different
planetary process of biogenesis and social
evolution—putting themselves in the shoes of aliens, so to
speak.
Still, there may be some aspects of human culture that we
share with our alien friends, knowledge that is truly
universal. Indeed, who's to say that the essence of our
religious sensibilities might not be similar, even across the
cosmic ocean? Will ET have any understanding of
altruism—or of God, creativity, or emptiness? It's an
intriguing contemplation. And in a world where so many are
struggling to understand the perspectives of the people down the
street, much less in Iraq or Afghanistan, it's encouraging to
know that a few scientists are keeping the bar set high. So when
ET finally calls, none of us may exactly be ready, but at least
we might not make such egocentric, ethnocentric, humancentric,
or Earthcentric fools of ourselves, and maybe we'll earn a
little more respect from the Joneses on planet X.