How to talk to aliens

Scientists have been searching for aliens for decades. But if we ever do get a signal someday, how will we communicate back? And will anyone out there be able to understand us? Guests: Doug Vakoch, president of METI, and Sheri Wells-Jensen, linguist at Bowling Green State University For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! [email protected] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, Thomas.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 1:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  What is going on? What are we talking about today?

• 1:28Speaker 02

  So I know you're a big sci-fi fan, right?

• 1:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  I am a big sci-fi fan. I don't know if I've admitted this before, but I...

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Uh oh.

• 1:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  Growing up, my family had an entire closet full of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes on VHS. We would tape every single one as it aired, and then we put them in the closet, nicely labeled in order, and then we had every episode.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  What an organized and nerdy family. I love it.

• 1:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, we didn't have cable, so I always had something to watch if I needed it.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness.

• 2:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  Big fan, big fan.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Well, since you're such a big fan, let me test your sci-fi chops a little.

• 2:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  If you could send a message out into the universe, potentially to an alien neighbor, what would you say?

• 2:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  Well, in my Star Trek mind... I would try to say something about how nice people are and, and, and please don't hurt us. That might be, that might be what I would focus on. Please don't hurt us.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Very reasonable. Uh, personally, I'd send out like a recipe for cheesecake, something food related. But you know, that's just me.

• 2:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's, that's unexpected, but I can, I can, I can get behind that.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Right. But the reason why I ask is, as you know, there are scientists out there who've dedicated really their lives to searching for aliens.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, we think that this, this may be a beacon, some kind of a, an announcement to get our attention.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  We've seen the Hollywood tropes of an astronomer, you know, sitting in a basement.

• 2:57Speaker 04

  I, I think you should listen to this.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  In front of their computer, just listening to beeps, boops and blobs.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  Detection protocol, now.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Those are numbers. That was a three. The one before it was a two.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  It's 42 seconds of non-random, non-Earth-based signal. Wait, this can't be right. It's coming from the moon.

• 3:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, we, we did an episode on this, uh, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, right? SETI?

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, SETI. But you know, those, those Hollywood films and SETI even, I feel like there's something a lot more interesting that they don't really touch on.

• 3:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Which is that we get this message from a distant star, right? But then what do we do with it? How do we communicate back?

• 3:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hmm.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  There isn't that much discussion on how we can connect with whatever civilization just sent us a message. And to be honest, I, I think figuring that out is a lot more interesting than just the act of listening, you know?

• 3:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, like in, in a lot of those movies, it's kind of just like, if you found the aliens, that's it. Story over.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, but maybe that's not the end. And that's what I want to tell you about, how scientists are reaching out to aliens. What would we say? How would we say it? And whether anyone out there can actually ever understand us?

• 4:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, Thomas, I guess my first question here is, how long has this been going on? Like, when did people start trying to send messages out to aliens?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, scientists have been trying to message aliens for decades, right? But the first one I want to tell you about is the Arecibo message in 1974.

• 4:48Speaker 05

  From the great dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, the observatory director beamed a message at the stars.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Arecibo had just been upgraded, and they sent this message to kind of show what it was really capable of. It was three minutes long and sent up as a binary code, so zeros and ones.

• 5:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  Great.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  But basically, the hope is that whoever receives this would be able to decode it and construct it into this two-dimensional image. And the image would show the position of Earth in the solar system. It would show a double helix and also a stick figure of a man.

• 5:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  The message was sent to a group of stars about 25,000 light-years away.

• 5:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wait, so they're sending a message that will take 25,000 years to get there?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Exactly, and then another 25,000 years if we were to get a reply to come back. So for a total of 50,000 years.

• 5:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  So this is just straight up a PR stunt, then?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Definitely a PR stunt.

• 5:43Speaker 06

  It was really just that, a demonstration that we can create a message based on some ideas of math and science.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  This is Doug Vakoch. He is a former SETI Institute researcher, and he's the founder and president of a nonprofit organization dedicated to the messaging of extraterrestrial intelligence. It is called Meddi International.

• 6:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  So wait, so like SETI, but Meddi messaging?

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Meddi with an M.

• 6:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, okay.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  And he told me that they weren't necessarily seeking a reply.

• 6:11Speaker 06

  One of the assumptions of the Arecibo message is time really doesn't make a difference. You know, let's send a message, and you know, if we need to wait 50,000 years, no big deal. It is a big deal.

• 6:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I don't know, 50,000 years seems like kind of a long time to wait.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  A very long time to wait.

• 6:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  Have there been any other messages sent, anywhere maybe closer?

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Right, so in 1977, we sent two spacecrafts into space as part of the Voyager missions.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Today toward Jupiter, Saturn, and a study of their moons. The goal was to take photos of various planets and to do some scientific instrumentation experiments. And as soon as this was done, the idea is that these spacecrafts would kind of just drift off into the universe.

• 7:04Speaker 06

  Scientists had the idea, hey, let's put a message on there in the very remote chance that someone stumbles across them millions of years from now. And they used 1970s technology of long play record albums. And in those grooves were recorded binary information.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  On the record were pictures of life on Earth. Greetings from 55 different languages around the world.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  But also music and sounds that at the time were meant to depict kind of life on Earth.

• 7:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  Did they include a turntable or like did the aliens need to bring their own?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  They did not include a turntable, and I think that-

• 7:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  What are they doing?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  But they did send it up with a needle and the etched pictorial instructions on the case itself to basically show that you have to spin the disc a certain rate per minute and have the needle set at a specific place for it to actually work.

• 8:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Seems like they don't want anyone to listen to the record.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Other than that, it was kind of sent to drift out into space and let the world see what happens.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  It feels a little bit like writing a little message, stick it in a glass bottle, sealing that glass bottle, and then just throwing it into the ocean.

• 8:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  That's how you get found on a desert island. SOS in a bottle.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  SOS in a bottle.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  This is something that Doug has really thought a lot about. Like, yes, they were meant for alien civilization. But it wasn't them saying, I want to talk. Here's our phone number. It was more just like, here you go, aliens. Take it. And if you happen to find it, great.

• 8:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, it sounds like it's more about what we would include in a message to aliens rather than like actually trying our best to get in touch with the aliens.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. In a way, it is a reflection of what we think human society is and how we want to portray ourselves to the, to the universe.

• 9:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  So if we were to do it with more intentionality, is there a way that's not just throwing a message in a bottle or shooting a message to one extremely far away star cluster?

• 9:27Speaker 02

  It's a great question.

• 9:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, too far away, honestly, too far.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Too far away. And Doug told me that if we really want to start a conversation with ET, we have to start sending messages to much closer stars.

• 9:40Speaker 06

  Start with the stars closest to Earth and move outward so that we reduce the time it takes for an exchange.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  And in 2017, this is exactly what Doug did.

• 9:50Speaker 06

  We sent a message from a radio transmitter north of the Arctic Circle to a star just over 12 light years away.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  So for a round trip interest stellar pen pal, we could potentially, potentially get a response within 25 years or so.

• 10:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, 25 is, is a little shorter than 50,000.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  For sure. It's much, you know, much easier to grasp timeline wise.

• 10:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  What's in the message?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  So Doug thought about what we'd have in common with an alien civilization.

• 10:21Speaker 06

  Let's stick with the only thing that those aliens directly have in front of them if they get our signal. The radio signal itself.

• 10:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  So the message that he sent was basically a mini scientific lesson, sent as a binary code using two different frequencies.

• 10:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, that feels like a lot less abstract than sending a message about the basic building blocks of human life.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, they started with the basics of counting. And then they increased that to the basics of frequencies. And then eventually wavelengths. And what they were building up to is this idea of, hey, what you just received from us on Earth is what we consider a radio signal.

• 11:11Speaker 06

  There's this wonderful interplay between not just saying something about ourselves, but really trying to develop a shared mindset.

• 11:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  And also, it feels like, you know, when you're trying to learn a new language, you know, the person who's teaching you the language maybe points to a tree and goes, "tree." And it's sort of like Doug is pointing to the signal and saying signal.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Exactly. And Doug is hoping to send, you know, similar signals to a whole bunch of other relatively close, potentially habitable exoplanets, just to, you know, up the odds of bumping into somebody out there in our galactic neighborhood.

• 11:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  I like the effort. It's very creative.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  I love the idea of using the signal itself to be this common reference point. But I guess it feels so almost impossible to actually be able to ensure that an alien would understand what we're trying to say at all. Like, even if we do get a message out deep enough to the right exact star system, and there are intelligent aliens there to receive it.

• 12:20Noam Hassenfeld?

  I guess I wonder whether they would even be able to understand what we're saying.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, that's a big question that kept on coming up in my reporting. The scientists that I talked to were also wondering something very similar. You know, we can send as many messages as we want, but if there isn't a basic legend or a key or a way to clearly decode this interstellar note, who's to say the aliens are going to understand what they're getting?

• 12:50Speaker 06

  The big risk is that we send a message out and it's more like a cosmic inkblot test. It says more about the recipient and their interpretation than what the sender intended to say.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  That's after the break.

• 13:07Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 13:14Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 13:39Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 14:29Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 16:49Speaker 04

  Doctor, the word for healer and wise man throughout the universe.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  We get that one from Unexplainable.

• 16:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, Thomas, before the break, you were saying how even if we somehow do get a message exactly to the right place, to the exact aliens we mean to get the message to, even after all of that, they might not understand it.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, one big issue is that people often assume aliens would look like us.

• 17:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, like the little, the little green people, just they have bigger eyes.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Yep, totally. The exaggerated limbs, the two legs, very human-like figures.

• 17:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  But if we want to meaningfully understand an alien civilization, we first have to remember they're extraterrestrials, meaning outside of Earth. The most problematic assumptions that we're making, we don't even know we're making them. That's probably the one that's going to get us. The thing that we're not thinking about, that's the one that's going to bite us in the butt. That's Sherri Wells-Jensen. She's a linguist who works with Doug, and she thinks a lot about assumptions. So a lot of my job as a blind human being who wants to be in the world is I've got to work on getting around an environment that's built for the convenience of people who see because it's not built for me. So Sherri is blind, and she likes to think about what blind aliens might be like,

• 18:15Speaker 02

  or how their language might be different from ours, because ours is biased towards sight. Maybe smell, or tastes, or hearing is their primary sense. Or, you know, like, would it even be possible for a society to be organized around something like smell? I think so. I want my imagination to run wild with parameters so that I'm investigating

• 18:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  all the possibilities. Yeah, I don't, I have no idea what that would even mean. Like, how could you build letters and words around smells?

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a complicated idea to grapple with.

• 18:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right, right.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  But there's another big issue. Language changes over time. 900 years ago, you know, English was a totally different language, and a lot of the texts that we have from Old English are still being interpreted and still being debated.

• 19:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, we can't really, like, sit down with Beowulf and have a beer.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  No, no. Like, we understand those individual words, we understand kind of different parts of that text, but the interpretation of it all, the cultural and the bigger meaning of those texts. Some of that, I don't know if we've actually really translated or really fully understand.

• 19:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and if something takes 25,000 years to get to an alien, I feel like our language is going to change a lot.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, time is a thing, right?

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Our languages will change, their languages will change. But let's just say we figure all of this out, and we're all in the same room as an alien. It still wouldn't be easy to talk to them. Imagine you walk into the office, and then I point at the coffee maker and maybe give you a little eyebrow action. What would you say or think?

• 19:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Eyebrow action.

• 20:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  Probably, probably you're asking me to pour some coffee, or you're pouring me some coffee?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I would hope you think. I'm offering you coffee.

• 20:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right, right, okay.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  But Doug says me pointing at a coffee machine could also mean a variety of other things.

• 20:16Speaker 06

  It could mean, oh, this is this new coffee machine that I got. Don't you think it's cool? Or it could be, I'm going to teach you the word for coffee now. So it becomes really kind of complicated. So you need to take into account not only what you're uttering and the context, but what is the intention?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  And this idea of intention gets at a bigger question here. How do we clearly communicate our desires, our hopes, our dreams, when we barely know anything about the aliens we're communicating with? But Doug, Sherry, and the many community have proposed a framework.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  It's called xenolinguistics.

• 20:56Speaker 06

  Xenolinguistics is a study of what might language at its core be, no matter where you find it. Whether you find it here on Earth, which is the only place we know of it, or whether you find it on another world. Is there really something like language throughout the universe?

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Basically, xenolinguistics is the attempt to study a hypothetical alien language and to meet ET somewhere in the middle. And Sherry gave me an example of how xenolinguistics can work.

• 21:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  If we have a creature that moves around in the world, we can start to make some guesses about things that they probably can do, right? So they probably have a way of referring to objects in the world. And so I might go out on a crazy limb and call that nouns. They might have a way probably of referring to actions in the world, things that you do to nouns, right? So I'm gonna go out on another limb and call those verbs. Holy smoke, they've got nouns and verbs. That's amazing.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Sherry is kind of oversimplifying, but she's trying to get some kind of basic point where we can start to build a language from.

• 22:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know, I feel like just knowing that nouns and verbs of some sort might exist doesn't really get me all that closer to communicating with someone.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. And that's why xenolinguists say if we're trying to communicate with aliens, we have to ask ourselves a bunch of different questions.

• 22:18Speaker 06

  How do we communicate the same thing in multiple ways so that the aliens have more than one chance at understanding us?

• 22:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Maybe I need to make not one message, but a jillion messages. Maybe I need to make as many messages as there are people. Maybe you send some special number of messages, or maybe you send it and then maybe I should just reverse it and send it again.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  And who knows what they won't understand? Maybe they won't understand numbers. So we'd have to send a different kind of message.

• 22:47Speaker 06

  Maybe they'll understand a certain kind of pictorial message. Maybe the key is to talk about triangles instead of talking about numbers. Maybe that's what we should be doing.

• 22:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  Language is more magical and more powerful and more deeply embedded into our psyches than is capturable in the definition that I might make my undergraduates memorize.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Some kind of alchemy through which I can take a thought in my head and do something to it and put something like that same thought in your head. If you don't think that's magic, you just aren't paying attention.

• 23:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  Given how complicated all of this is, I can imagine a lot of miscommunication, right? Like sending something out to the aliens and having them understand something we just completely don't intend.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a little bit of a concern there. You know, you mentioned at the top about wanting to say something to aliens like, don't hurt us.

• 23:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  And given how hard it might be to communicate exactly what we want to communicate to aliens, some people think we shouldn't be messaging them at all. Stephen Hawking once said that if aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America.

• 24:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, that would not be a great outcome for our first messages to anyone out there.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Not a great outcome at all.

• 24:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  It does feel like in all of this, there's a huge amount of unknowns about whether we can get a message there. There's an unknown about whether they can understand us. There's an unknown about whether we should even be doing this. It feels like there's a very low chance of success here.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, but when I chatted with Sheri, she wasn't really worried about it. How can we ensure that what we're sending will mean the same to whoever receives it?

• 24:46Speaker 03

  We cannot, we cannot. We don't know. We don't know. Oh, my God. But, okay, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I think, okay, so go into it knowing that you can be wrong. We have to go into this with a huge double scoop of humility, which is good because that means we'll be careful.

• 25:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Makes sense to be humble when you're working on something as, I don't know, out there as xenolinguistics.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, humble, humble is the key here. And the work of xenolinguistics isn't to guess right or to make the most accurate predictions. It's just about being curious. Ask the questions.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  For Sheri, xenolinguistics isn't just about studying aliens. It's also about us.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  The good of the discipline is not just to prepare for what is to come. Hopefully, we'll get a signal, but it's also

• 25:36Speaker 02

  A tool that we can use to examine who we are and what it is that we do and how language works for us. Xenolinguistics pushes us to think about our biases. It pushes us to think about how we can relate to our environment. But also, and I think this is the most important bit, right? Like, xenolinguistics pushes us to learn more about ourselves and how we connect to our communities, here on Earth, but also out in the universe.

• 26:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  This episode was reported and produced by Thomas Lu. We had editing from me, Noam Hassenfeld, and Meredith Hodnot, who runs the show. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Music from me. Fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. And Bird Pinkerton ran into the octopus hospital looking for survivors. She dug out the rubble, but there was no sign of the docopus, no sign of Dr. Pepper. And then she saw it, pinned to the main control panel. It was a note from the birds.

• 26:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating Unexplainable. And if you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at [email protected]. And you can leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. You can also support the show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you signed up because of us, send us a note. We'd always love to hear from you. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

• 27:29Speaker 01

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