SETI Should Avoid Actively Beaming Messages to Possible Aliens

The alien species we invite to Earth - and which actually reaches us -  may not be warm, fuzzy and benign like "ET".

I said it before in numerous newspaper articles as well as other (academic) papers, that if we humans have any sense at all we will keep our galactic location a secret and not actively attempt to advertise our presence to whatever alien civilizations might be out there (and there are probably thousands in our Milky Way galaxy alone).

For example in one article I did for the Barbados NATION newspaper back in 1978, e.g.


I cited Sir Martin Ryle's warning that any advanced aliens out there could already have assembled a complete picture of our technological and defense capabilities simply from the electromagnetic waves already dispatched, incidentally, as part of our media broadcasts.

Earlier, in 1972 - at a conference on potential interstellar contact- physicist Freeman Dyson warned that the first species we are likely to encounter is going to be technologically advanced and also highly aggressive - not ready to merely become easy friends- but more likely our worst predators.

More recently, Stephen Hawking has sounded similar warnings comparing the aliens that are most likely to visit Earth (because of stupidity on our part, i.e. in actively beaming messages) to the first colonizers of the New World - who decimated native populations for resources and territory.

All the above bears on some current plans by a group of astronomers (many connected to the SETI project) that we should no longer just sit passively at radio telescopes waiting to hear from "ET" but instead "actively beam messages into the void and invite the closest few thousand worlds to chat or visit." ('Calling the Cosmos', Denver Post, Feb. 15, p. 10A).

TO which I and others (e.g. Stephen Hawking) reply 'bad idea'. Hawking goes so far as to call it 'crazy' (I say it's irrational) and that "instead of sweet and gentle ET we might get the aliens from Independence Day.)

This isn't as far fetched as it seems. Any race able to mount the technological ability for interstellar travel is likely to be aggressive and possibly even conspicuously territorial and warlike. Look no further than the conquering empires on Earth which developed the most advanced tech abilities - say for space travel and going to the Moon, or Mars - they are also the most aggressive. The U.S.- which actually landed men on the Moon, has also engaged in 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations since the end of World War II. It is also responsible for 41 percent of the world's military spending according to a paper in the American Journal of Public health available as a free PDF here.

So there is good preliminary evidence using examples from our own world that high tech and aggression go together. We would be foolish to believe it's any different in the stellar void at large, and believing in fantasy motion pictures as an alien template is as foolish as believing human virgins can give birth or that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. 

Some astronomers like Douglas A. Vakoch - director of interstellar message composition at SETI- don't buy this hesitaton or the arguments for exercising an abundance of caution.  They're convinced that actively "calling out" may be the only to find out if we are alone.  Hence,  we need not fret about too many negative speculations, particularly just "letting sleeping aliens lie". But those of us adhering to the precautionary principle would remind these contact Pollyannas  of the monstrously aggressive sorts that Freeman Dyson once described as a "technological cancer in the galaxy".

Believe me, these characters will find us soon enough, so why press our luck? Haven't we enough to worry about with climate change now on the verge of the runaway greenhouse effect - without adding aggressive, voracious aliens to our troubles?

SO it was good that this dispute broke out last Thursday and Friday in San Jose, CA at a convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. We need to get this out in the open and hope to hell that cooler, more rational heads prevail.  Thanks also to Elon Musk (of Space X fame) and Geoff Marcy for starting a petition cautioning against actively sending out such messages since it's impossible to predict whether extraterrestrial life will be benign or hostile.

The idea they oppose is one called "active SETI". While it is true we've been passively , incidentally sending out radio and TV messages for 70 years - these lacked the strength and power that a directly beamed and focused message would possess as part of active SETI.

Vakoch has described this potential  coordinated, sustained million dollar a year effort as "an attempt to join the galactic club". Fair enough, but what if that "club" is only composed of the most territorial and consumptive species in the galaxy - who give no quarter - and might regard planets like ours as fodder for their machines? (They might even argue that given how we're wrecking the planet anyway with fracking we don't deserve to have a say in how or whether it is preserved).

My pessimism is shared by astrophysicist David Brin (also a scifi author) who thinks inviting aliens here is a bad idea. Even if there's a low risk of nasty creatures arriving (see image) the consequences would be horrific if in fact they do. As he puts it:

"I can't bring myself to wager my grandchildren's destiny on unreliable assumptions about benevolent aliens".

Well put, and I agree!

Why Would ETs Wish to Communicate with Glorified Apes?

In the sci-fi thriller, The Last Theorem, by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederick Pohl, Mankind's foolish continued obsession with nuclear armaments - including multiple megaton tests in the 50s, and later EMP blasts (to knock out terrorist hives, communications) finally draws the attention of a galactic clean-up crew known as "the One-point-fives" (a description based on their peculiar anatomy). These "terminators" (whose job it is to exterminate useless species that may pose a future threat to others) are then dispatched to Earth by the reigning Overlords called the "Grand Galactics".

Their mission is to wipe out Homo Sapiens and not leave a single solitary strand of DNA left to be replicated. When they arrive, they're about to commence their extermination when they're ordered to give the resident species a single test to ascertain if it's worthy to be allowed to survive. The test in alien signals, entails a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

As fate would have it, only one single living human, a mathematician who's already proven Fermat's theorem in 3 pages (thereby besting Andrew Wile' 200+ page magnus opus) is able to deliver the goods. Thus does an otherwise little known Sri Lankan named Ranjit Subramanian earn major kudos for the deliverance of the species. (Who, because one member showed the species' worth, were then allowed to meet via virtual -digital messaging all the other intelligent species inhabiting the Galaxy.)

Yes, it's fiction, but it brings up a key question, as we learn that the SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) project is "buying more lotto tickets all the time on the chance of scoring the Big one" (See e.g. 'What Happens When We Detect Alien Life?', by Seth Shostak, in Astronomy, May, p. 24).

The question is: WHY would any truly advanced civilization wish to communicate with a species that is barely 1 million years evolved from ape-hood? Indeed, our brains still bear the evolutionary marks of not only the ape, but our reptilian ancestors - the former in the meso-cortex and the latter in the reticular formation. (For a very readable account, see Carl Sagan's: The Dragons of Eden).

Yet, filled with human hubris, no one on the SETI team appears to have even considered this! According to them, we're perfectly eligible to join the Galactic Round Table. I hardly think so! Another assumption is that any such signal sent would be intended for the likes of us. Arguably, the destination would have to be a truly intelligent species, but do we qualify?

Consider simply these documented "accomplishments":

- We've overpopulated the Earth to the point that the existing resources (even if somehow distributed perfectly equally) would not last more than a generation.

- We've recklessly polluted water resources, not only by careless dumping of industrial wastes but by using energy drilling methods which require millions of cubic feet of fresh water for each acre drilled. And aliens on learning this would have to conclude we're morons.

- We've actually taken food crops (e.g. corn) and converted them into fuel (ethanol) despite over a third of a billion starving people on the planet.

- We've done absolutely nothing....not one damned thing...about the gigatons of carbon added each year to the atmosphere, thereby pushing the planet's climate toward a permanent instability in the form of the runaway greenhouse effect.

Note here that if an advanced alien species actually visited, say enticed by early promising radio band communications, any advanced measurements they employed on arrival would quickly show them how we'd driven the Earth to the point of catastrophe as an abode for life. They'd conclude instantly they'd made a whopping error in their estimations of humanity, and we were little better than advanced chimps - from which our DNA differs by less than 1%.

Beyond this, as Sir Martin Ryle first pointed out in the 1970s, advanced alien telemetry and signal recovery would have shown them clearly how warlike and dedicated to destruction we are. (Ryle warned that it would be foolhardy to be anything but passive listeners given we don't know anything about alien intentions.) They'd have perhaps assembled the equipment to detect the dozens of multi-magaton nuclear blasts set off in the 1950s, and concluded - somewhat like the aliens in 'The Last Theorem' - that even if total destruction wasn't warranted, we're a species best left to itself. At least until it grows up.

So, again, why would any truly advanced aliens have any genuine interest in us, other than say as possible laboratory animals subjected to ongoing experiments? (Which would be the basis for being studied by alien craft, assuming such exist and have visited the Earth, or their occupants interacted by taking human specimens. )

Let us note that Carl Sagan( Icarus, Vol. 19, pp. 350-52, 'On the Detectivity of Advanced Galactic Civilizations') observed that:

"civilizations only a thousand years in our technological future become disinterested even in communicating with civilizations as backward as ours."

He goes on to note:

"A society thousands or millions of years more advanced than we are, beneficiaries of an exponentiating technology over all those intervening millennia, will not be engaged in a simple extrapolation of our activities, or be driven by our motives."

This would seem to go without saying, yet if it does, one wonders why those like Seth Shostak would bother tilting at this windmill.

At the same time, in a subsequent paper (The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 24, pp. 113-121, 1983) Sagan and Newman do give us hope that it's unlikely we'll encounter an advanced aggressive alien species such as bruited by Physicist Freeman Dyson in a November, 1972 address to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton (p. 268, in 'Whispers From Space', 1976, by John W. MacVey, Paladin Books, UK):

"We are more likely to discover first the species in which technology has got out of control, a technological cancer spreading through the galaxy. We should be suitably alarmed if we discover it and take our precautions. It is just as well to be warned ahead of time."

But according to Sagan and Newman (op. cit.):

"The idea that there will be no new and more compelling challenges for such (technological) civilizations than relentless galactic colonization, represents a serious failure of the imagination."

Despite that bit of good news, the authors do warn that it's very unlikely for an aggressive species to survive what they deem a critical threshold period- generally within two generations of the first atomic explosions. According to the authors (op. cit., p. 120):

"Weapons of mass destruction force upon every emerging society a behavioral discontinuity:if they were not aggresive they probably would not have developed such weapons; if they do not quickly learn how to control that aggression they rapidly self-destruct. Those civilizations devoted to territoriality and aggression do not long survive after the development of apocalyptic weapons.

Long before they are able to make any significant colonization of the Milky Way they are gone from the galactic stage. Civilizations that do not self-destruct are pre-adapted to live with other groups in self-respect."

The question then becomes: Are we a civilization destined to self-destruct or not? If we are, and if alien advanced technological civilizations possess data which confirms this, why on Earth would they want to make any contact with us? Why send a beam in our direction?

Is there evidence we're on such a path to self-destruction? Consider that right now the U.S. and Russia have collectively enough nuclear warheads to destroy everything and everyone on Earth 14 times over. A beginning had been made to eliminate stockpiles of each nation's nuclear weapons - especially in the former Soviet states- but Republican lawmakers have protested like stuck pigs, declaring it "appeasement". (Note: Defense contractors, their lobbyists and assorted Pentagon groupies and whores have also kept assorted Dems plowing taxpayer money into more war-making, useless combat air brigades....and weapons such as building 2,443 F-35s at a cost of 0.3b each!)

Consider the words of Jon Kyl, Republican Senator from Arizona, writing in The Wall Street Journal ('What's At Stake in the Missile- Defense Debate?', April 3, p. A15).

"Would the world be safer and more peaceful if the U.S. had fewer nuclear weapons? Is the current nuclear balance unstable?...The answer to these questions is 'No'.

Yet very low numbers of deployed nuclear weapons, as the president appears to have in mind, could engender instability."

Thus, despite the fact the U.S. has enough nuclear warheads (about 1,280) to kill the world's population eight times over, Kyl demands we make more!

In effect, Kyl as well as his warmongering Gooper confederates (Romney wants to double the Pentagon budget if elected, and we already spend more than the next 25 nations combined) makes my case that we are on a path to self-destruction. This type of territorial and aggressive thinking is exactly what Sagan and Newman have warned against in their paper. (Doubtless the Russians also share it, and that makes it doubly clear the human race isn't ready for any advanced ET contact).

My prediction, grim as it is, is that the Human species will obliterate itself within another generation, if not by nuclear holocaust (say on account of implementing a stupid missile "defense" system near Russian borders, or invading Iran) then by climate catastrophe in the Runaway Greenhouse Effect.

We just have not shown, all the SETI folks beliefs to the contrary, we are worthy to be equals on the galactic stage with those who've displayed that "mutual respect" indicated by Sagan and Newman, including respect for the planet they inhabit.

Despite that, any blog readers that still have hope (we know hope springs eternal in the human breast) can log onto the SETI site at:

http://www.setilive.org/

ET Isn't Talking

The movie 'Contact', starring Jodie Foster, was based on the premise of radio contact with extraterrestrials (ETs). Foster played the role of an 'alienated' radio astronomer, who was determined to search for extraterrestrial signals, and actually managed to acquire some extremely sophisticated ones.

But, is the central premise of 'Contact' valid? Is it plausible that astronomers should spend innumerable hours listening for radio messages from ET? Are there advanced extraterrestrials pummelling our atmosphere with their coded messages even as these words are written?

The assumption of the plausibility of radio contact with ETs led to SETI ('Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence'). In its early stages, millions of radio channels were scanned nightly for any sign of intelligence. Now known as Project Phoenix, its scope has expanded to the radio coverage of some billions of channels to search for some sort of alien calling card. In particular, an incontrovertible intelligent calling card - left by an advanced race of beings.

Is the Phoenix group wasting its time and money? My contention is that they are, but the reasons are somewhat different from others that have gained wide currency. For example, some, like physicist Frank Tipler, assert that no intelligent aliens exist, because if they did they'd have already visited us by now. They haven't, ergo they do not exist![1]

However, I don't necessarily preclude alien existence, merely their communicating with us. I believe the two premises must be treated separately. Unfortunately, the standard assumption made by most humans conflates them: if intelligent extra-terrestrials exist, they must want to contact us.

But why? What if we are little more than a galactic 'ants' nest'? Why should they even care about our existence? The fact is, it is we who inflate our own self-importance by believing we deserve this much attention. But I am getting a bit ahead of myself.

Let me refer to a basic physical law, to show how and why I believe ET messages are improbable. I am referring to the so-called 'entropy law', also known as the 2nd law of thermodynamics. What is entropy? Basically, a measure of the disorder in a physical system. For example, gasoline that has undergone combustion has more entropy than gasoline which has not. Firewood which has been burnt has more entropy (states of disorganization) than firewood that is stacked next to the fireplace.

Entropy is not restricted to our planet. It applies throughout the universe. This is part of the fundamental principle known as 'the cosmological principle'. It says that the same exact physical laws apply throughout the cosmos. There is no region that behaves differently, in a physical sense, from the region we inhabit.

For example, in the case of the whole universe, maximum entropy (disorder) will be reached if it continues to expand forever reaching a final 'heat death'. (Where all parts of the universe eventually have the same temperature - so there is no flow of energy to any other part, say from a star to a planet). If the universe turns out not to expand forever, it will still reach a maximum entropy - this time in the 'Big Crunch', in which all the galaxies collide with each other, after reaching maximum expansion.

The entropy law simply says that - for a closed system - the total entropy is always increasing, never decreasing. People cannot help but use food, process chemicals, and burn fuels. The effect is that the total amount of disorder in the world is increasing. To slow this down (or try to stop it) more energy must be expended from the outside, than the closed system uses in generating entropy. (A simple way to put this is that if you leave your house, and never apply energy to clean it up, the resulting disorder will soon occupy all existing space.)

The tendency for entropy to increase is invariably accompanied by a loss of useful energy. When an amount of disorder is produced, say in burning gasoline, it is at the expense of the useful energy that was originally in the tank. One might write a simple expression to represent this:

Ten gallons gasoline -> 1 gallon useful energy + 9 gallons waste energy

This means that 90% of the initial energy is converted either to heat, or to effluent (carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide etc.). Is there a way to get ten gallons worth of energy, from ten gallons of gasoline, without waste? No. It is impossible. It goes against the entropy law and the nature of the physical world we inhabit. The first commandment of the entropy law is 'The universe provides no free energy lunch.'

So what does all the above have to do with the ability of ETs to communicate with us? (Assuming they would wish to) As it turns out, everything. In order to communicate, say over thousands (or even hundreds) of light years' distance, information is transmitted. It requires energy to do this. Interestingly, a relation between energy and information is available. It can be written as:[2]

E = 0.693 kT

Here, E is the energy associated with transmission of 1-bit of information. T is the temperature of the environment in which it is sent (say the radio transmitting antenna) and k is a physical constant known as the Boltzmann constant.[3]

Imagine an alien civilization sending the equivalent of a small novel to humans. This would be approximately 10^20 bits of information. The associated energy would be about 0.3 (three tenths) of a Joule.[4] The energy required, from a practical standpoint, would be much, much larger - maybe 100 million times larger. Why? Because in the process of pure transmission (over light years distance) a significant fraction of signal dilutes. So, at least 30 million Joules would be needed, to have it get to Earth in a useful form.

Arguably, aliens genuinely interested in contact would not waste time or effort with anything so puny as a small novel. It is more probable, if they went to the trouble of first contact (as in the film 'Contact') they'd send a lot of information. Say, equal to an alien encyclopedia of mathematics, or their most prevalent language. In this case, the information content soars to millions of megabytes, and the energy accordingly. For one million megabytes (10^12 bits) the aliens are looking at an energy for transmission on the order of 3 x 10^19 Joules.

It is well to realize that time factors into this as well. If the aliens kept the transmission going for at least one hour (Earth time), 3 x 10^19 kilowatts of power are needed (assuming the aliens are ale to sustain a rate of energy conversion of 1 Joule per second). In the civilization classification scheme of the late Russian astrophysicist I.S. Kardashev, this would put them at a bit beyond Type I, but not quite Type II. Kardashev's three-class scheme is:[5]

I: Able to harness the equivalent power of the planet Earth
II: Able to harness the power equal to a typical star (10^23 kw)
III: Able to harness the power equal to a typical galaxy (10^33 kw)

The question is: To what extent have the ETs circumvented the Entropy law? This is important, in terms of how much their energy use (say to transmit powerful radio messages) compromises their own world's environment.

For reference, consider a terrestrial example: the United States. It is currently reckoned to have as many cars as people: about 250 million. Say one half of those are being driven at any one time: 125 million vehicles. Each one consumes on average 1000 Joules of energy and 1 kilowatt of power. That is 125 million kilowatts of power. If each vehicle runs 1000 hours per year, that is 125 billion kilowatt-hours of energy. Nine tenths ends up as waste heat, and effluent. The effluent contributes dramatically to The Greenhouse Effect. (Last year EPA statistics showed that the carbon levels in the country rose 3%).

What about the alien civilization which I hypothesized above? Well, their energy/power use would be absolutely enormous. Just for the purpose of interstellar communication, I would estimate 3 x 10^19 kw. This is nearly a quarter of a trillion times more than what the vehicles in the U.S. generated last year. Imagine the pollution, atmospheric damage and other ills triggered on the alien home world! (And we are not even looking at all their other possible energy expenditures - whether for agriculture, domestic energy use, transportation, or whatever.)

Could aliens be sufficiently advanced to beat the entropy law? Hardly. For example, even if the alien civilization had perfected its technology to the point that it obtains 50% energy efficiency (totally unheard of in any practical terms) they still have 1.5 x 10^19 joules of energy ending up as waste every hour they attempted radio transmission! (Given the same set of assumptions made earlier). And remember, this is not reckoning all the other energy conversions, for their own needs!

Since the cosmological principle shows the law of entropy is applicable everywhere, it must apply no less to alien species and alien worlds. These other civilizations, in some form or fashion, passed through the same reckless, energy consumption phase humans are confronted with on Earth. In other words, they were threatened by a similar global warming effect, or some other manifestation of entropy (like ozone erosion). At some critical junction, they made similar calculations, and were forced to make a profound decision. To expand energy use for a temporary higher life quality, or curtail it for the greater planetary welfare.

My contention is that they chose the latter path: they rejected the imperative for ever increasing energy consumption. This includes all mammoth energy-consuming projects, such as transmissions to other worlds, re-shaping whole planets and solar systems into imitations of their own planet, constructing black hole-based energy devices, and space faring to other worlds.

Like us, they may have long conjectured about 'ETs', and perhaps listened for a time. But eventually, they realized someone needed to 'break the ice' in respect of transmitting. However, seeing the exorbitant energy cost, they decided they would not be the first. Thus, in my conjecture, they backed away from any grandiose schemes of interstellar contact. This is exactly why no signals are being picked up from ET - because frankly ET isn't talking. 'He' is not willing to pay the cost, in terms of disastrous energy change on his own planet. He is not prepared to purchase a dream at the expense of suffocating in pollution, or roasting slowly in a Greenhouse type inferno.

Our disbelief or non-acceptance of this is a reflection of exaggerated human self-importance, and an inability to accept the harsh limitations imposed by the entropy law. Most humans prefer, in their boundless energy naivete, to believe in an ever more bountiful future, chock full of new energy devices: self-powered robots, anti-grav jet cars, rocket trains, and ion-propelled spaceships. In the end, all childish fancies in which entropy never rears its ugly, limiting, pessimistic head.

In such a fantasy world, engendered by overblown expectations, humans can afford to entertain such grand concepts as 'Dyson spheres' and harnessing whole stars for communication purposes. Such visions will recede into oblivion as the effects of entropy buildup are more perceptibly felt on Earth. Only then will humans appreciate why such reckless and profligate energy scenarios have been studiously avoided on others.

These considerations inevitably lead to my own classification scheme for alien civilizations: alphas and omegas. The alphas are the energy spendthrifts like us, who have not yet been taught the error of their non-conserving ways. They have yet to feel the heat as their global temperatures warm ten or more degrees Fahrenheit, or see diseases spread out of control with Greenhouse warming, or watch helplessly as their coastal lands are reclaimed by rising seas (from their melting polar ice caps). Their visions of energy appropriation have not yet been tempered by harsh realities.

Then there are the omegas. At some point in their development they were confronted by an imminent energy-entropy crisis (such as we are now approaching with the combination of Peak Oil and accelerated global warming). This forced them to make hard choices. Consume energy, and extract a higher 'quality' life - but at the cost of exponentiating entropy, or conserve, and tolerate a life with fewer amenities?

The prospect of compromising their dreams was surely painful, but they recognized that their survival depended on it. As their unrealistic energy aspirations vanished, so did their visions of interstellar communication, and of course, interstellar travel.

As total accommodation to the priority of entropy control took hold, new directions were set. New imperatives defined. Fierce competition for, and reckless use of limited resources was curtailed. Population growth was curbed, by means of forced birth control, or optional inducements. Travel or consumption, without purpose, was inhibited. Agriculture was converted to the least energy-demanding forms. External, consumptive preoccupations gave way to internal ones: art, music, meditation, self-education - the cultivation and maximization of the interior universe.

If my conjecture is valid, as I believe it is, then other alphas are our only hope for extraterrestrial contact. However, I place the probability for this at near zero. For contact to succeed, they need to be at our same stage of technological development, give or take 25 years. This is because all energy spendthrift phases are extremely transitory. At the same time, consider that Earth is at least 50 light years from the nearest plausible alpha planets. At this distance, a minimum of 100 (Earth) years would elapse between sending a first signal and receiving a response. Because of the spendthrift phase limits, either one or both communicating civilizations would never get a chance to make contact. Either one (or other) would have emerged from the alpha stage (becoming embryonic omegas) or gone on to exterminate themselves in a planet-wide ecological catastrophe.

Without waiting further, terrestrial radio telescopes ought to be directed toward more productive pursuits. We’ve had our fling with fantasy, and we’ve dreamed of conversing with ET. It’s been a pleasant diversion, but now it is time to return to reality. For while we indulge in fantasy a whole universe begs further discovery: colliding galaxies, massive core black holes, and sundry distant space phenomena such as cosmic masers.

In every interstellar atom, dust grain and cloud are embedded clues to our history, and ultimately our own identity. Human destiny is to ferret out these clues, and disclose ourselves and our planet in the process. We cannot truly do this as long as we are obsessed, and distracted, with a dream that can never be. So, if ET isn't talking - why should we? The answer may well hold the key to our future, and whether we survive as a species.

[1] Tipler, F.: 'Extraterrestrial Beings Do Not Exist', in Frontiers of Modern Physics, Dover Publications, Inc., p. 155.
[2] Pierce, John, R: 1980, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise, Dover Publications, Inc., p. 204.
[3] Boltzmann constant: A well-known constant from physics: k = 1.38 x 10^-23 Joule/Kelvin.
[4] You use 1 Joule of energy lifting a 100 gram golf ball 1 meter (or 3.3 feet).
[5] Shklovskii, I. and Sagan, C.:1966, Intelligent Life in the Universe, Dell Publishing Co., p. 394.