The Argument: Should We Say "Hi" to Aliens?

We're taking this week off from publishing new episodes, so today we're bringing you an episode from "The Argument" about one of my favorite topics: aliens. We'll be back with new episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" on Tuesday. With the U. S. government puzzling over U. F. O.s, and potentially habitable exoplanets in our telescopes, earthlings are closer than ever to finding other intelligent life in the universe. So the existential question is: Should we try to communicate with whatever we think might be out there? That’s the argument this week between Douglas Vakoch and Michio Kaku. Vakoch, the president of the research and educational nonprofit METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, has dedicated his life’s work to intentionally broadcasting messages beyond our solar system. Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and a co-founder of string field theory, thinks reaching out to unknown aliens is a catastrophically bad idea and “would be the biggest mistake in human history.” Together, they join Jane to debate the question of making first contact and our place in the cosmos. Mentioned in this episode: Adam Mann, The New Yorker: “Intelligent Ways to Search for Extraterrestrials” Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker: “How the Pentagon Started Taking U. F. O.s Seriously” Arik Kershenbaum, The Wall Street Journal, “Alien Languages May Not Be Entirely Alien to Us” “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Season 4, Episode 15: “First Contact” (Netflix) The Ezra Klein Show: “Obama Explains How America Went From ‘Yes We Can’ to ‘MAGA’” You can find more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Ezra Klein?

  Hey, this is Ezra. I am taking some vacation this week. But fear not, I'll be back next week with two new episodes as usual. But today, I hope you will enjoy this episode from my friends over at The Argument about one of my favorite topics: aliens.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Today on The Argument, will humanity's fascination with aliens lead us to our doom?

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Are we truly alone in the universe? A report on UFOs by the Department of Defense has many asking that same question.

• 0:38Speaker 03

  The US government's grudging acknowledgement of unidentified aerial phenomena. After decades of public denial, the Pentagon now admits there's something out there.

• 0:49Speaker 04

  We have things flying over military installations, and we don't know where it is. It isn't ours. And in many cases, exhibits attributes of kinds of technology we haven't seen before.

• 0:57Speaker 05

  We can't explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  In June, the Pentagon released a much anticipated report on, quote, "unidentified aerial phenomena," or what you and I might call UFOs.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  They looked at scores of reports of unknown sightings and found 18 cases that might have shown technology beyond what our enemies, and ourselves for that matter, are capable of. So the government finally admitted that there really are unidentified flying objects in our skies, moving in ways they can't explain. So, does that mean aliens? I'm Jane Coaston, and sometimes I come to a debate from a point of view of a blank slate. Anyone could convince me. But I feel like I should be upfront with you here. I do not like thinking about aliens. Just watching Sigourney Weaver wake up out of her sleeping pod an alien was enough to chase me out of the room.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  But it does feel like we've all been thrust into this new paradigm shift. UFOs are real, and the government admitted it. And reality didn't break, hysteria hasn't broken out. In fact, you may have heard the news with a "huh," or "that checks out."

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Whether or not we assume these flying objects that move in a way we don't understand are evidence of extraterrestrial life, experts say we're closer than ever to finding possible life outside of our solar system, which leaves us with a big question: should we try to make contact with possible life on other planets? Should we beam out stronger signals to potential alien life forms to let them know we're here and we want to communicate? Turns out, my guest today could not disagree more on the answer.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Dr. Douglas Vakoch is the president and founder of METI, which stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It's a nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to transmitting intentional signals to nearby stars. Arguing against reaching out is Dr. Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York. He co-founded String Field Theory and has been very vocal about the dangers of reaching out to ET.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Dr. Kaku, what were your thoughts on the report?

• 3:26Speaker 06

  Well, historically, we've only had hearsay and a word of mouth concerning a possible visitation from extraterrestrial civilization. Now, for the first time, we have military metrics that allow us to analyze what's out there. And we find, first of all, that these objects travel between three and 20 times the speed of sound. They zigzag, creating G-forces in the hundreds of times the force of gravity. These objects also break the sound barrier but create no sonic boom, and they also go underwater. The capabilities of what we see exceed the capabilities of drones. Drones will make a sonic boom. The G

• 4:11Speaker 06

  forces would be enough to disturb most of the machinery inside them. So, in other words, you can't rule out the fact that they could be extraterrestrial. I'm not saying that they are.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:22Speaker 06

  I'm just saying that they push the boundaries of what we can achieve with drones.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Do you believe that there is intelligent life outside of our solar system?

• 4:32Speaker 06

  I think with near 100% certainty, not 100%, but near 100% that yes, they're out there, we can do a census of the Milky Way galaxy. Now, for the first time in world history, every single star you see at night, on average, has a planet going around it. And roughly in the ballpark of 20% of those planets are Earth-like or super-Earth-like. Do the math. You come up with billions of possible habitable planets in our own backyard. Now, we don't know the probability that they'll have oceans, atmospheres, microbial life, leading to intelligent life, but I think it would be naive to assume that we're the only game in town.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Dr. Vakoc, do you believe there is intelligent life outside of our solar system?

• 5:22Speaker 07

  I think Michio's analysis is spot on, that it's almost impossible to think there isn't intelligent life out there. To me, the really more interesting question, though, is will we ever be able to make contact? So are they motivated enough to reach out to us? Are we motivated enough to reach out to them?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  There have been efforts to send signals out to hypothetical extraterrestrial life. There's also been an argument that extraterrestrial life, if you're sending out radar, there's no reason why radar would not eventually get out there. And so my question is then, and I'll start with you, Dr. Kaku, if humanity does encounter a signal, or our telescopes and the efforts that we're putting in find a planet that could receive one, then what? What do we do with that piece of information? And how do we move forward from that?

• 6:19Speaker 06

  I think the idea of reaching out and advertising our existence is a catastrophically bad idea. In fact, I think it would be the biggest mistake in human history to deliberately try to make contact with an adversary that we know nothing about. The collapse of civilization as we know it could happen for five reasons. The first reason. History has shown that civilizations of unequal technological rank, when they collide, have catastrophic implications. When Montezuma of the Aztecs met Cortez of the Spanish Empire, Montezuma made the biggest mistake in all of ancient history.

• 7:04Speaker 06

  He assumed that Cortez was a god. But what did Cortez have? He had gunpowder, steel weapons, not bronze, horses. And within a matter of years, this proud civilization collapsed. Second of all, when you negotiate with an adversary, the first thing you want to know is, what do they have and what do they want? It's naive to try to reach out and say, "Here we are," without understanding the level of technology of the aliens and what they want. In War of the Worlds, the aliens wanted the Earth. Mars was dying. They needed a lush planet to colonize. We were in the way.

• 7:47Speaker 06

  In Independence Day, the aliens were like locusts, devouring every single scrap of energy and resources available to them. The Borg from Star Trek, resistance is futile because they would absorb you. What do they want? Our mind. So in other words, we have to understand what do they want? Number three. This could be evolution in action on a cosmic scale. Survival of the fittest. When animals bump into other animals, it's the law of the tooth and fang. Number four. Some people think we already broadcast "I Love Lucy." So what's the big deal? The big deal is we're still in the early stages of radio-telescope technology.

• 8:32Speaker 06

  Perhaps there are only 29, at last count, 29 planets that are habitable within the range of "I Love Lucy" and "Leave It to Beaver." That's why I think that there's still time, still time to stop broadcasting our position to the aliens in outer space. And point number five. What would it be from their perspective? If you're walking down a forest road and you see a bunch of ants. Do you go down to the ants and say, I bring you trinkets. I bring you beads. I give you nuclear energy. Take me to your ant queen. Or do you have this strange, politically incorrect urge to step on a few of them?

• 9:16Speaker 06

  If they can visit us, they are perhaps hundreds of thousands to millions of years more advanced than us. So the point I'm raising is, it's naive to assume that they're peaceful, that they want to give us the benefit of their technology, when they could be like Cortez.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Dr. Vakoch, can you tell me why you think it is important that we're not just scanning the skies for a signal, but emitting our own on purpose?

• 9:40Speaker 07

  Well, sure. Michio raises a number of points that really pull at our primordial response to this possibility of aliens. So let me address a few of the five points that he mentioned. First of all, history is something we go to. We haven't contacted aliens, so we look for an analog. And this is one of the visions that we have of an alien invasion. It's as when Cortez from Spain went to the Aztecs and overtook their empire. But the problem with that analogy is that it wasn't Montezuma who needed to say, come here. Cortez didn't seek their permission. He wasn't waiting for some invitation across the sea before he went there. He went for the gold.

• 10:25Speaker 07

  And so in the same way, if there is an advanced civilization such as Michio talks about, they could already be coming here. If, in fact, they're on their way, it's to our advantage to let them know we make interesting conversational partners. But, you know, as he talks too about the images we get from movies, those images from Hollywood tap into one of our cognitive biases called the availability heuristic. When we're trying to assess some unknown risk, we tap into the most vivid images. And that's what we base our judgment on. I mean, what could be more vivid than an Independence Day invasion, the Europeans going to the New World and decimating the indigenous peoples?

• 11:10Speaker 07

  But that doesn't mean that those are realistic. And I agree with Michio when he says that so far of the exoplanets that we know of, only about 29 have gotten our incidental leakage radiation, because that's traveling at the speed of light. And we have had radio signals for about 100 years. They travel outward continuously. But the critical issue is, we cannot take those back. So because those radio waves are going in a sphere around Earth, every year they're passing by more and more stars. So we have already let ourselves be known. The big question is whether we want to follow that up with an indication that

• 11:55Speaker 07

  we want to make contact, to say, yes, we assume you already know we're here, and now we want to engage in a conversation. Some people would say, well, wait, if they already know we're here, what's the whole point of reaching out? We're trying to test what's called the zoo hypothesis, as a hypothesis for why we haven't yet made contact, if in fact, they're out there. Well, maybe it's as if they are looking at us like we are animals in the zoo. Imagine Jane, Michio, all three of us go to the Bronx Zoo, and we're kind of checking out the animals. We know that they're there already. We're walking by a bunch of zebras, and one of them turns toward us, looks us directly in the eye,

• 12:39Speaker 07

  and starts pounding out a series of prime numbers with his hoof. Now, I don't know, maybe Jane, Michio, you guys are going to go look at the wildebeest. I'm going to stay around and try to communicate with that.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Dr. Vakach, even that zoo metaphor, we have to make these comparisons to something that we already know about. That's kind of our own availability heuristic. There was a quote from Adam Mann in The New Yorker in which he wrote, "It's hard to say anything about organisms on other worlds that doesn't reflect life on our own." And that's why, when you think about movies about aliens, most of them are actually about humans interacting with humans and trying to figure out humans while using aliens as kind of a metaphor. But my question is, why do you think that aliens would even want to communicate with us? Are we projecting that onto an entity that might have absolutely no interest in

• 13:35Speaker 01

  that communication? It's very important for species on this planet, but it might not be elsewhere.

• 13:42Speaker 07

  In some respects, it's impossible to avoid anthropomorphizing. And so the question is, how do we step back a little and gain a different perspective? When we look at the messages we have sent out so far, often it's been an attempt to express what we think is so important about ourselves. But the more interesting thing from an aliens' perspective is to reverse the process and say, what is it that we could teach another civilization? I agree with Michio when he says that civilizations could be thousands or millions of years more advanced than we are. And in fact, if we're going to make contact, that's virtually a necessity. So we've had the technology to communicate at interstellar distances for

• 14:23Speaker 07

  a century. If that's the norm, if civilizations don't reach that point that Michio is talking about, they have radio civilization for 100 years, they either turn inward and become contemplative, they destroy themselves in a nuclear war, we'll never make contact. So the only way we make contact is if they have been at this much longer than we are, and presumably they are a much more stable, long-lived civilization. And then you have to ask, what is it that any of these civilizations need to do to us? What is it that they're so intent on eradicating us? You know, if, as Michio says from some of the Hollywood movie analogies, they want our Earth, they want our energy, again, it doesn't matter

• 15:07Speaker 07

  what we do. I think the big issue involving Maddy messaging extraterrestrial intelligence is, are we Providing any additional risk by doing it. And that's what I just don't find plausible. But again, for those civilizations that are much longer lived than we are, I think the most interesting thing that we can talk about is something that they may have forgotten. What we have to offer is to hold a mirror up to them to let them remember what it was like to be a civilization at an earlier stage of development. So in the same way that entomologists are fascinated by ants and study their communication in great detail, we may well have the equivalent of entomologists on other worlds wanting to

• 15:51Speaker 07

  understand us in our own terms.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  Well, with all due respect, I think that there is a fundamental flaw in this entire reasoning. We assume that they're benign. We assume that the aliens have our interests in mind. We assume that the aliens want to study us perhaps, but maybe they don't want to study us. Maybe we're just in the way. Look at history, not just the history of humans, but the history of animals. Where did Darwin get this idea of survival of the fittest? By looking at the animal kingdom, where animals fight. They fight for limited resources. They kill each other. One species dominates over the other.

• 16:36Speaker 06

  That's the law, not just of human history. That's the law of all life on the planet Earth. Where in human history do we have an example of where technologically different civilizations meet and one becomes benevolent and takes care of and makes sure that the other lesser developed civilization has all the comforts of home? And then it was mentioned that you cannot take back what is already sent. Yes, that's true. However, what we send out there is fairly faint, fairly feeble. Now people want to project beamed images, beamed information that is many times more powerful than I Love Lucy coming out of a TV antenna.

• 17:20Speaker 06

  Beaming messages to the nearby stars, select stars, and I think that's a very Very bad idea. Let's face it, if the aliens are that advanced, they already have been monitoring our communication system. There's not going to be any miscommunication of communiques between them because they've been monitoring us already. So I don't see communication being the big problem. I see the big problem is, what do they want? If you can tell me what they want, then I will concede defeat on this question. But until you tell me what they want, my position is, this is the worst mistake we can make in human history.

• 18:01Speaker 07

  Again, this image of marauding aliens who are on a galactic scale, enacting a Darwinian evolutionary principle out to annihilate any competition at the earliest possibility is simply implausible, given what we see here on Earth. Earth has been making itself known as a life-bearing planet for 2 billion years. That's how long changes to the atmosphere of the Earth have let aliens know that there's life on Earth. If there are any civilizations out there so paranoid about any competition, they've had 2 billion years to get here. I haven't seen any. And so it must be a lot harder

• 18:46Speaker 07

  or a lot less important for the aliens to come and annihilate us.

• 18:50Speaker 06

  Because we had nothing to offer them back then. 2 billion years ago, what did we have to offer them? Now we have resources, energy, materials. There are things that we can offer them now that we didn't offer them 2 billion years ago.

• 19:03Speaker 07

  The energy and resources that we can offer to a civilization that has a warp drive that can zip to Earth are paltry in comparison. And I really need to press the point too about these faint, feeble signals that are emanating from Earth. Now, you're absolutely right that our current SETI systems, the systems that look for signals from other civilizations, radio signals, optical laser pulses, we would not be able to detect our own leakage radiation even at the distance of the nearest star. But... If you look at the growth of our radio technology since its advent, and expand that just a couple of centuries, we will have the capability to detect that level of radio.

• 19:45Speaker 06

  That's exactly the reason for stopping now.

• 19:48Speaker 07

  It is too late because we have all.

• 19:50Speaker 06

  It's not too late because the future hasn't happened yet.

• 19:52Speaker 07

  The future is going to get.

• 19:54Speaker 06

  That's precisely the reason why we should not be broadcasting.

• 20:06Speaker 08

  Hi, Jane. This is Maggie. I live in Hyattville, Maryland. And the thing my husband and I are arguing about all the time, maybe the thing we argue the most about is what is the Midwest? What is the South? What is the West and the Mountain West? Because I'm from Missouri and he's from Sacramento, California. And so he's always trying to tell me that I'm from the South and I'm always trying to say it's more complicated than that. Anyway, hope you have some thoughts on this.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Thank you for calling, Maggie. And let me just say you are not the first person to engage in this argument. People have been debating about where the Midwest is since we started having a Midwest. I will say, though, that I grew up in Cincinnati, which is part of the Midwest, but it's a very southern version of the Midwest. And I would say Cleveland in northern Ohio is more Midwestern to me than Cincinnati was. But I also feel like St. Louis was pretty Midwestern, and that's further west of Cincinnati. So it's complicated, largely because we're all tried to make it up while going along.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  And as always, you can share with me your latest argument in a voicemail by calling 347-915-4324.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  One of the things I keep thinking about is how much of this is about an understanding of aliens that's based largely on our understanding of what we would do. But we aren't whom we're talking about. So what do you think, Dr. Hakul? Why would Darwinism apply to an entity on an exoplanet?

• 22:00Speaker 06

  This is beyond just Darwinism. This is the law of physics. Physics says that energy and resources are scarce. Therefore, there's going to be competition for them. And those organisms that secure the energy and resources are going to survive to reproduce. We expect that on other planets, there will be competition for energy. And as a consequence, I think that alien civilizations will fight for the limited energy that is available to them. And so Darwinism is more than just a line of in a biology textbook. I think it's the law of physics.

• 22:36Speaker 07

  I don't see if these are million-year-old civilizations and they need the energy of our sun, why haven't they come here? Again, it's not energy efficient to travel between the stars, to take scarce resources that are everywhere, or resources that are not that scarce. To me, my concern is that as we look into space and we have this vast unknown, that we project our greatest fears into that void. We know that as human beings, we have a desire to avoid danger. We have an innate fear response.

• 23:17Speaker 07

  So when we walk in that forest and we see a stick, we might say, oh, my God, that's a snake. And that's actually an adaptive thing to do because you avoid the snake. But if it comes at the cost of not continuing to explore, to move forward and try to understand our environment, then that's a heavy cost. I wish I could tell you in good conscience that if we avoid sending intentional messages, we're somehow going to be Safer? I mean, look, we have enough existential threats in the world. We have, you know, possibilities of nuclear war. We're just coming out of a global pandemic. If we could just be safer by not transmitting, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? But as Michio

• 23:57Speaker 07

  has said, there could be aliens out there. They need what we have, and there's nothing we can do to stop them.

• 24:04Speaker 06

  No, there are things we can do. We can stop broadcasting our existence and showing them exactly our capabilities. We should stop that. It's too dangerous. We're gambling on the future of humanity on this idea that they're benevolent, they're zookeepers. And I think if you were to go to Las Vegas and bet with some of the gamblers there, they would laugh at you. What? Gamble the future of humanity itself on this cockamamie idea that they're benevolent zookeepers? I mean, give me a break. This is a gamble that we should not be making because if we lose that gamble, we lose humanity itself.

• 24:45Speaker 07

  I love the comparison because I think this gambler's analogy is perfect. It gets at another of our biases, which is loss aversion. We are much more fearful of losing something. We don't want the risk of something bad happening, and so we're willing to give up something good. We want to avoid the risks, we lose the benefits. So if you're thinking, Michio, that maybe there's a million to one chance that something bad could happen, that the human race is going to be threatened if we make contact, I think we have a much better than one in a million chance of learning something from a civilization that may help us survive. My greatest nightmare about the cosmos is that every planet with the technology

• 25:27Speaker 07

  to communicate has its own version of Michio Kaku out there saying, whatever you do, don't transmit. And that's the rationale for many, that there are SETI programs we have been listening. But, you know, especially if you think about it, the civilizations that have the most to lose by transmitting are the civilizations that are long-lived, very stable. They've got their act together. They don't need to make contact. And so maybe they're just standing back. Everyone is waiting for everyone else to take the initiative.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Can you explain the difference between SETI, which I believe you worked at for about 15, 16 years, and MEDI, the organization you founded and you lead now?

• 26:05Speaker 07

  Sure. SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So this is a group of astronomers who use radio telescopes, optical telescopes, to look for signals that stand out from the cosmic static. You know, they look for radio signals to understand stars and galaxies, but also a signature that could not be made by nature. And so that's what SETI scientists have been looking for. And I think it's a great project. But the problem is, what happens if that's what all of the civilizations are doing? So when we look the other direction and we look for civilizations that have been around for a thousand years, a million years, there's going to be just a big black silence. And so that's what we're trying to do with METI,

• 26:47Speaker 07

  is to say, not only we're here, but we want to make contact.

• 26:51Speaker 06

  You know, it's sometimes said that history repeats itself. First, it repeats itself as a disaster and as a tragedy. The second time, it repeats itself as a comedy. "Once again, we are assuming that the aliens are benevolent. They're kind-hearted people that will use their technology to usher in a humanity utopia." I think that is silly. In fact, it's a comedy.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Dr. Vakutch, clearly you think that there are a lot of benefits we could get. What would those look like?

• 27:22Speaker 07

  I think the benefits are that we can gain a perspective on ourselves and see from another civilization that it is, in fact, possible to get through this technological bottleneck that we're in right now, to have a confirmation that there is a civilization out there that may be able to provide us some advice. I mean, as I look into humanity's future, I do not see any assurance that we're going to make this on our own. And so getting some input, learning from the lessons from other civilizations in itself could be much more advantageous than any of the risks. I do want to emphasize a point where I agree with you, Benicio. And that is that the idea of benevolence,

• 28:07Speaker 07

  of altruistic aliens just sending us something for our benefit... I think that's questionable, and that is at the foundation of SETI. So SETI scientists say, look, the older civilizations, they should do the heavy lifting. They should send us something. There is another form of altruism, though, called reciprocal altruism, where someone sends something to another civilization and hope for something positive in return. But in those scenarios, someone has to take the initiative. But the possibility is that the older civilizations say, look, you young civilizations are the ones who have the most to gain. Show you've got some skin in the game and send us something, and then we will reply.

• 28:51Speaker 06

  I think you've just laid out the argument that kills everything you've been saying. You just stated in very clear language that you hope the aliens will help us, help us during this time of need. I couldn't believe what you just said. This is wishful thinking and naive thinking, and I call this the curse of Montezuma, assuming that your greatest enemy is a god.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  I want to know what it would mean for humanity, for us to be forced to realize that we are not the only special organisms in the universe. And I'll start with you, Dr. Vakoch. What would it mean for me, for the listener who hasn't given up on this episode in terror yet?

• 29:35Speaker 07

  Well, I think there are some people who would say, well, we know they're out there, or we even think they've visited, so finally the scientists are fessing up. So for some people, it won't be a surprise. I think for other people, in the short term, it may be a bit of a blow to the ego. You know, Michio is talking about the revolutions that we have had in science. So Copernicus de-centered us, so the Earth is no longer the center of the universe. That was a bit of a blow. Darwin, who we've talked about it quite a bit, said that humanity is not at the apex of evolution. And so now we would have more evidence that, you know, we aren't so special, that there are other intelligent beings out there. But I think that's the initial response.

• 30:18Speaker 07

  Because the more we come to know about that civilization, the more we will come to realize that no matter what its shape, what its form, it may have a different culture, a different history, different capabilities. But nowhere, given all of the vicissitudes of evolution, is there ever going to be another human civilization. And so I think that concern that some people may have that we're going to lose our sense of uniqueness is not something to be concerned about at all. That in fact, we will have a greater sense of our uniqueness and as a species, and our greater sense of our unity across cultures, across ethnic groups than we have right now.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Dr. Kakuh, what do you think?

• 31:02Speaker 06

  In a best-case scenario, President Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev, and Reagan said something astonishing, which boggled the mind of everyone translating his message. Ronald Reagan said that if the Martians were to invade us, you and me, Gorbachev and Reagan, would be united against the Martians. People laughed at it. But actually, I think he's correct. In a best-case scenario, I think it will unite the human race. However, let's be real. If the aliens were to come, it's not going to be a pretty sight at all. Some people will worship them as gods. Other people will think they're devils. And other people will want to cut a deal. They'll say, what's in it for me?

• 31:47Speaker 06

  Can I be a collaborator? Can I work with the conquering aliens in order to get ahead, to get the privileges of being part of the invading empire? I think it's going to be rather bad. So in conclusion, I think that the nations of the world should have protocols, should have a unified way in which to encounter these situations, which inevitably going to happen. And again, I personally think that we will make contact with some form of alien life within this century, but it'll be a one-way street. We'll listen to them, eavesdrop on them, but they're not going to be able to send signals back because of the speed of light.

• 32:30Speaker 06

  Unless, of course, they are very advanced, a type 3 civilization, perhaps a quadrillion times more powerful than us, capable of breaking the light barrier. Then, at that point, they could begin to have a conversation directly with us by going across interstellar distances.

• 32:50Speaker 07

  My nightmare scenario is that those civilizations who realize that we have been simply listening and not saying anything are going to treat us like galactic lurkers. And they're going to say, you know, if there's one thing you can't get by with in this civilization is to try to get something without giving anything.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Well, on that note, thank you both so much for talking me through this existential cosmic question. I hope our listeners enjoyed it and will not just lie down and stare at the ceiling for a while. Dr. Kaku, Dr. Vakoch, thank you both so much for going on this intergalactic adventure with me.

• 33:31Speaker 07

  Thanks very much.

• 33:32Speaker 06

  Our pleasure.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Dr. Douglas Vakoch is the president and founder of METI, a nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to transmitting intentional signals to nearby stars. Before founding METI, he worked at the SETI Institute for 16 years, where he was director of interstellar message composition. Dr. Michio Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and the author of "The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything."

• 34:07Speaker 01

  If you want to go a little further down the wormhole into the subject of contacting extraterrestrials, I recommend reading Adam Mann's piece, "Intelligent Ways to Search for Extraterrestrials" in The New Yorker from October 2019. Also from The New Yorker, I recommend reading Gideon Lewis Krause's "How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously." I also recommend reading, from The Wall Street Journal, "Alien Languages May Not Be Entirely Alien to Us" from March of this year. And even if you're not a big Star Trek fan, and that's on you, there is an episode from the Next Generation series, which you can find on Netflix that stands on its own as a parable of one civilization encountering another more advanced one.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  It's season four, episode 15, and it's called "First Contact." Finally, I recommend you listen to my colleague and opinion Ezra Klein's interview with Barack Obama when the former president talked about aliens. It was published June 1st.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  I would hope that the knowledge that there were aliens out there would solidify people's sense that what we have in common is a little more important. But no doubt there would be immediate arguments about like, well, you know, we need to spend a lot more money on weapon systems to defend ourselves, which, and, you know, those, the new religions would pop up. And who knows what kind of arguments we'd get into. We're good at manufacturing arguments for each other.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  You can find links to all of these in our episode notes.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  The Argument is a production of New York Times Opinion. It's produced by Phoebe Lett, Elizy Gutierrez, and Pashaka Durba. Edited by Alison Bruszek and Paula Schuman, with original music, mixing, and sound design by Isaac Jones. Additional mixing by Carol Sabarol. Fact checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta.