SHOULD WE BE SIGNALLING OUR EXISTENCE TO ALIEN LIFE?

Astrobiologist and extraterrestrial researcher Dr Douglas Vakoch speaks to Sara Rigby about transmitting messages into the cosmos in the hope of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life

- Sara Rigby

PEOPLE MIGHT BE FAMILIAR WITH SETI – THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE. YOU’RE THE PRESIDENT OF METI (MESSAGING EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE). TELL US ABOUT WHAT YOU DO.

METI reverses the process of SETI. SETI, searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, listens for radio or laser signals from space. At METI, we flip it around and instead of listening, we transmit powerful, intentional messages to nearby stars in the hope of eliciting a response.

WHY DO YOU WANT TO SEND OUT A SIGNAL? AND HOW WOULD THAT HELP US FIND ALIEN LIFE?

My big concern is that there are, in fact, a lot of other civilisations out there, but they’re doing exactly what we are. They have these robust SETI programmes and everyone is listening, but no one is saying hello. And so this is our effort to join the galactic conversation.

HAVE MESSAGES OF THIS SORT BEEN SENT BEFORE?

Yeah, there have been sporadic messages sent out. The most famous message was transmitted from what was the world’s largest radio telescope at the time in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. To demonstrate to extraterrestrials, and ourselves, that we could do it, a brief threeminute message was sent out into the Universe.

The message itself was the numbers from 1 to 10 in the binary format, then a description of chemical elements important to life on Earth in terms of their atomic numbers. And there was a description of our DNA, what we look like, how tall we are, how many of us there are on Earth, what our Solar System is like, what the telescope is like. So it was pretty ambitious to cram a lot of information in three minutes.