A new initiative to send messages to space may be the best chance to find out if we are alone in the universe. There is only one problem: what if we are not alone?
On November 16, 1974, several hundred astronomers, officials and other high-ranking officials gathered in the northwestern part of Puerto Rico, surrounded by tropical forests, a four-hour drive from San Juan. The purpose of the meeting was the re-opening of
the Arecibo Observatory , while the largest radio telescope in the world. The huge structure - a giant plate of concrete and aluminum, with a diameter comparable to the height of the Eiffel Tower, improbably spreading out in a limestone depression in the middle of the mountain jungle - has been updated to increase its accuracy tenfold and ensure that it survives the hurricane season.
To mark the re-discovery, astronomers serving the observatory decided to temporarily turn the most sensitive of all created devices for listening to space into a machine capable of responding. After several speeches, the crowd gathered in silence was on the edge of the telescope, while the system for almost three minutes gave out a loud squeak consisting of two notes, carried in the suffocating heat of the day. Listeners could not make out this message, but, nevertheless, the feeling of listening to these two notes, quivering in the air, many were moved to tears.
168 seconds of noise, today known as the
Arecibo message , were invented by the astronomer
Frank Drake , the then director of the organization responsible for the observatory. Radio broadcasting marked the first time that people deliberately transmitted a message intended for a different solar system. The engineers translated the message into sound so that the assembled group could perceive something during the transmission. But the real carrier was a quiet and invisible impulse of radio waves traveling at the speed of light.
For most viewers, it was an act of hope, albeit symbolic: a letter in a bottle thrown into a sea of deep space. But a few days later, the Royal Astronomer of England,
Martin Rale, endured a terrible censure of Drake’s antics. By telling the cosmos about our existence, Reil wrote, we risked a catastrophe. Claiming that "any creature from space might turn out to be angry and hungry," Reil demanded that the International Astronomical Community condemn Drake's message and ban any new messages. Very irresponsible, Rail was indignant, to play with interstellar spaces, since such gestures, albeit with noble intentions, can lead to the destruction of all life on Earth.
Today, more than four decades later, we have never found out whether Reilly’s fears had grounds, since the Arecibo message will go to its recipient for a very long time, a cluster of 300,000 stars
M13 . If in the summer you find yourself in the northern hemisphere, on a clear night find the constellation Hercules, 21 stars, forming an image of a man with outstretched hands, and a little bent knee. Imagine that you were transported 400 trillion kilometers towards these stars. Although you have gone far beyond the solar system, you have gone only a small part of the way to M13. But if you could turn on the radio and tune it to 2380 MHz, you could catch a message in flight: a long sequence of rhythmic pulses, 1,679 pieces, with a clear, repetitive structure that could be immediately recognized as a handwork of reason.
Surprisingly few initiatives support the goal of the message of Arecibo - the transfer of messages to life forms outside our planet. One of the most well-known is likely to be a message on board the Voyager-1 spacecraft — a gold-plated audiovisual disk containing greetings in different languages and other evidence of human civilization — that flew away from our solar system only a few years ago and 56,000 km / h In contrast, by the end of the three-minute broadcast of the Arecibo message, his first impulses had already reached the orbit of Mars. The message took only one day to leave the solar system.
Yes, some of the signals emitted by human activities could have gone farther from us than even Arecibo, due to occasional leaks or broadcast television or radio broadcasts. This served as the basis for the story of Karl Sagan's “Contact”, which describes an alien civilization that revealed the existence of people through the first television programs from the Berlin Olympics, which also included the videos with Hitler performing at the opening ceremony [this was the first live broadcast in history; TV broadcasting itself began in the late 20s in the USA and in the early 30s in the USSR / approx. trans.]. The grainy images of
Jesse Owens , and later
Howdy Doody . transl.] and
hearing McCarthy , went into space further than Arecibo's impulses. But over the course of 40 years after the message transmitted by Drake, a little more than ten intentional messages were sent to the stars, and most of them were certain exponential numbers, such as the broadcast of Beatles’s “Across the Universe” song [40]. the anniversary of her record. It remains to hope that the aliens, if they exist, will discover this song before recordings with Hitler.
In the era of radio telescopes, scientists spend much more time searching for signs of the existence of other life forms than on sending signals about the existence of us. Drake himself is now more famous for launching the SETI extraterrestrial intelligence search nearly 60 years ago when he began using a telescope in West Virginia to scan two stars for structured radio emission. Today, the
SETI non-profit
institute serves a whole network of telescopes and computers that listen to signals from deep space in search of aliens. A new project, similar to SETI,
Breakthrough Listen , sponsored by $ 100 million by Russian billionaire
Yury Milner , should radically improve our ability to detect signs of intelligent life. Humanity has gathered around more interstellar mailboxes than ever, looking forward to the arrival of the letter. But until recently, we showed little interest in sending our own message.
Now this phase of silence can come to an end, if a growing group of scientists from different areas and space enthusiasts succeed. The newly formed
METI group (Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, messages to extraterrestrial civilizations), under the guidance of a scientist, a former member of the SETI group,
Douglas Vacocha , plans to send several messages starting in 2018. The Milner's Breakthrough Listen project is also designed to support the accompanying Breakthrough Message project, in which an open contest will be held to create a message, which will then be transmitted to the stars. But the increase in the number of message sending schemes is meeting increasing resistance. Among the successors of Martin Rail’s style of thinking are luminaries such as Ilon Musk and Stephen Hawking, and they warn that interstellar friendship assumptions demonstrate a wrong approach to the question of extraterrestrial life. They argue that advanced alien civilization can respond to our interstellar greetings with a grace similar to that shown by
Cortez to the Aztecs, and therefore it will be best of all to be silent.
If you believe that these broadcasts have a chance to get to the aliens, then the decision to send them should be one of the most important, taken by us as humanity. Are we galactic introverts hiding behind the doors and just listening for signs of life outside? Or extroverts starting a conversation? And if so, what can we say?
Among the written off grandeur of Fort Mason [former US naval base / approx. transl.] in the north of San Francisco, there is a bar and a playground called Interval. She is headed by the
Long Now Foundation , founded, among others, by
Stuart Brand [writer] and
Brian Eno , to cultivate long-term thinking. The most famous plan for the group building hours, which will be able to count down the time over 10 000 years. Long Now claims that the site in San Francisco should divert the mind away from the present-requiring present attention, as can be seen from their activities, from the prototypes of 10,000-year-old hours to the menu of “extinct” cocktails.
Interval seems to be a suitable background for my first meeting with Doug Vakoch, in particular because Long Now advises METI on the planned messages, and also because the concept of sending interstellar messages is a textbook example of long-term planning. Choosing a message to be sent to space may not lead to a result for a thousand years, or hundreds of thousands. It is difficult to imagine a more long-term solution facing humanity.
When Vakoch and I sat down in a booth, I asked how he came to his present condition. “As a child, I liked science, but I couldn’t decide exactly which area,” he told me. As a result, he learned about such a fast-growing new field as
astrobiology (or exobiology), which studies the possible forms that life could take on other planets. This area was speculative by nature - after all, researchers have no real specimens to explore. In order to present other forms of the life of the universe, astrobiologists need to be well versed in the astrophysics of stars and planets; chemical reactions capable of holding and storing energy in the alleged organisms; climatology, describing the weather systems on planets potentially compatible with life; biological forms that could develop under such different conditions. Choosing astrobiology, Vakoch realized, he would not have to be content with one discipline: "When you think about life outside the Earth, you can mess with all the disciplines."
Already in high school, Vakoch began to think about how it would be possible to exchange messages with an organism that developed on another planet - a living question for a fairly little known subdomain of astrobiology,
exosemiotics . By that time, in the 1970s, radio astronomy had progressed far enough to transform exosemiotics from embellished mental experiment into something more practical. For the science fair, Vakoch made a project on interstellar languages, and continued to work in this field in college, even when he studied comparative religion at Carleton College in Minnesota. “The problem that I understood very early, and which continued to be with me, is the difficulty of creating a message that could be understood,” says Vakoch. In order not to put all his eggs in one basket, at the institute he studied clinical psychology, deciding that this could help him better understand the mind of some unknown organism on the other side of the Universe. And if exosemiotics turned out to be a professional dead end, he could always return to a more traditional career as a psychologist.
When Vakoch studied, SETI was transformed from a budget-funded NASA program into an independent non-profit organization, partially supported by people who had made new fortunes in the technical sector. In 1999, Vakoch moved to California and joined the SETI project. In subsequent years, Vakoch and other scientists of the program increasingly expressed the opinion that it was necessary not only to listen to the messages, but also to send them. They argued that, although the passive approach was mandatory, active SETI — high power radio signals directed at nearby star systems would increase the chances of contacts. Concerned that a proactive approach would jeopardize the financing of the program, the SETI board of directors resisted Vakoch’s attempts. As a result, he decided to form his own international organization, METI, with a team of scientists from different areas, which includes former NASA chief historian Stephen Dick, French historian of science Florence Rolin Serceau, Indian ecologist Abhick Gupta, and Canadian anthropologist Jerome Barkov.
New-found interest in sending messages has become popular for the most part due to the explosive increase in the number of exoplanets found. Now we know that the Universe is full of planets that are, as astrobiologists say, in the “habitable zone”; not too hot, not too cold, with just the right temperature for the presence of liquid water. At the beginning of Drake’s career in the 1950s, not a single planet outside the solar system was known. Today we can choose from a large list of potential planets from the habitable zone, and not just remote star clusters. “Now we know that practically all stars have planets,” says Vakoch, adding that among these stars, “probably every fifth has potentially inhabited planets. So we have a huge amount of living space that someone can inhabit. ”
When Frank Drake and Carl Sagan first began to think about creating a message in the 1960s, their approach was equivalent to writing in a bottle. We may not know the exact address of the planets with a high probability of having life, but we have identified many promising zip codes. The recent discovery of the
TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, in which three of the four planets are potentially habitable, has generated a strong excitement, particularly because these planets are relatively close to home: only 40 light years from Earth. If the Arecibo message somehow reaches the advanced civilization in M13, then we will not be able to hear their answer in the next 50,000 years. A directed message to the TRAPPIST-1 system can lead to an answer before the end of the century.
Frank Drake is now 87, and he lives with his wife in a house located in an old forest where redwoods grow, at the end of a narrow winding road in the hills near Santa Cruz. The driveway to the house rings the stump of the sequoia larger than the pool table. Coming out of the car, I recalled the Long Now initiative: a person sending messages with a potential lifetime of 50,000 years lives among the trees that originated a thousand years ago.
Drake retired more than a decade ago, but when I asked him about the Arecibo message, his face lit up at the memory. “We just finished a big project at Arecibo, I was the director then, and I was asked: could you organize a big event? - he recalls. - We needed to hold some kind of solemn ceremony. What could we have done so bright? Send a message!"
But how can you send a message for a life form that may or may not exist, about which you do not know anything except that it has developed somewhere in the Milky Way? It is necessary to begin with an explanation of how to read this message, which is called “primer” in exosemiotics. On Earth, the primer is not needed - you point at the cow and say: "The cow." The dies sent by NASA to space on Pioneer and Voyager vehicles had the advantage of physical objects capable of transmitting visual information that allows you to match words with objects that relate to them. In other words, you can draw a cow and put the word “cow” next to it, and then slowly, after a sufficient number of comparisons, language begins to appear. But physical objects cannot be moved fast enough to reach potential recipients in a reasonable time. To send a message across the entire Milky Way, you need electromagnetic waves.
But how to point out something with a radio wave? Even if you came up with a way to indicate a cow with electromagnetic signals, the aliens in their world will not have cows, so this reference will remain incomprehensible to them. Instead, you need to seriously think about the things we have in common with our hypothetical friends from the TRAPPIST-1 system. If civilization is developed enough to recognize structured data in radio waves, they should have a lot in common with our scientific and technological concepts. If they hear our message, they are capable of analyzing structured perturbations of the electromagnetic spectrum, which means they understand the electromagnetic spectrum in some meaningful way.
Then the secret is to just start chatting. Drake decided that he could count on intelligent aliens who had the concept of numbers — one, three, ten, and so on. And if they have numbers, they probably should have basic mathematics: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Moreover, as Drake argued, if they have multiplication and division, they probably understand the concept of primes — those that are divided only into themselves and the unit. (In the film “Contact,” the intercepted message from aliens began with a sequence of prime numbers: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, etc.) Many objects in space, such as pulsars, emit radio signals with a certain frequency: flashes of electromagnetic activity, turning on and off at the same time. Prime numbers, however, are a sign of intelligent life. "Nature never uses prime numbers," says Drake. “And mathematicians use.”
When creating the Arecibo message, Drake relied on close relatives of prime numbers. 1679 , 1679 — : , , 73*23. . , , 10 5 : XOXOXXXXOXXOXOX. , 15 – , 35, . :
-, , «HI», .Drake chose a similar approach, only used a larger semi-simple number, from which it is possible to construct a 23x73 grid and send a more complex message. Since the imaginary recipients of the message in M13 are unlikely to understand any human language, he filled the grid with a mixture of mathematical and visual references. At the top of the grid there is a score from 1 to 10 in binary code - this explains to aliens that the numbers will be represented by these characters.
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Like many other SETI / METI debates, the issue of visual messages quickly rolls into deeper areas, such as defining the relationship between mind and vision. It is not surprising that the variants of the eyes, independently of each other, appeared so many times as a result of evolution, given that light transmits information faster than any other channel. The speed advantage probably applies to other planets in the habitable zone, even if they are located on the other side of the Milky Way, and it seems plausible that intelligent beings should develop some kind of visual system.But the sensation is more universal than the sight, must be the sensation of time. Hans Freudenthal in his book " Lincos: a scheme of language for communication in space ", , , . . . , (, ), , «»; «». , «» «», . « , », — .
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METI proponents are criticized by two main arguments. The first - the bird has already flown out of the cage. Considering that we already emit radio waves in the form of television shows and news channels for many decades, and that other civilizations are more likely to be more advanced than ours, they most likely have already seen us. In other words, they know that we are here, but so far they have decided that we are not worthy of talking with them. “Perhaps in fact there are many civilizations, and even nearby planets are inhabited, but for now they are just watching us,” states Vakoch. - As if we are in a galactic zoo, and they look at us, as if they are talking to zebras. But what if suddenly one of these zebras turns to them and starts to draw a hoof in the sand with simple numbers. You would immediately react to a zebra differently! “, METI , . „ , , . , , , , , . – , 1980-, , , “.
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gray nanosleam , a kinetic projectile moving at a fairly high speed relative to the speed of light, or some unimaginable weapon. ”Bryn regards our technological progress as an example of the level at which the advanced civilization’s capabilities in space warfare will be: “It’s possible that within 50 years we can create an antimatter rocket capable of accelerating a projectile of a few kilograms up to half the speed of light from the orbit of a planet 10 light years away from us. " Even a few kilograms, colliding at such a speed with the planet, will lead to an explosion much more powerful than the sum of the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki . „ 50 , , , “.
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Since Drake first derived his equation in 1961, since then two fundamentally new factors have changed our understanding of this problem. First, the values of the variables at the beginning of the equation (the number of stars with inhabited planets) increased by several orders of magnitude. Secondly, we have listened to signals for several decades and have not heard anything. As Bryn says: “Something keeps the Drake equation low. And disputes among SETI members are not about whether this is true or not, but about where the gap lies in the equation. ”, , . , , , L, . , ; , , L, , , . . , – , , , .
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In a sense, disputes over METI go along with other existential issues that we will face in the coming decades, as our technological and scientific capabilities increase. Should we create super smart machines that exceed our intellectual capabilities so much that we will stop understanding how their intellect works? Should we "cure" death, as many technologists suggest? Like METI, these decisions are perhaps the most important of all that humanity has encountered, yet the number of people involved in making these decisions, and even knowing that they are being taken, is not enough.», , , — . – . , . , , . – , . , , ".
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