Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  For active SETI, Brin is urging some comparable communal process of risk assessment updated for the twenty-first century. He envisions a global effort that would use modern telecommunications tools and include public input and professional guidance.

  At the AAAS symposium, the opposing view that “We should launch active SETI as an ongoing complement to our traditional passive SETI projects” was represented by Doug Vakoch. He defended his plan to start broadcasting from Arecibo with what he described as “a more aggressive, ongoing series of transmissions.” Unlike previous broadcasts, his would repeat messages to the same target stars over periods ranging from weeks to years. He justified this as a next, more mature phase of SETI. Though he expressed support for broad-based discussions of active SETI, he also declared an intention to begin his program of transmitting without waiting for these discussions to occur, saying,

  We need to get over this idea of either promote consultation or go ahead with active SETI. We should be doing both. We are growing up, I would say, as a civilization. SETI has been going on for fifty years. In this first half century, we’ve focused on what we can gain from it. But I think it’s a sign of maturation of SETI that we’re now thinking about what we might give to future generations of humans and even other civilizations.

  His SETI Institute colleague, Seth Shostak, however, in his presentation, belittled the idea of international, public input. Seth asked,

  How do you do that? If you have this World Wide Web inquiry, and you say, “Look! Push this button if you think we should and push that button if you think we shouldn’t.” And, say, 55 percent of the people say, “Yes, we should,” and 45 percent of the people say, “No, we shouldn’t,” what do you do? You say, “Well, okay! Now we know whether it’s safe or not.” Do you really think that? I don’t know how that tells you whether it’s safe or not.

  Seth has a point that a broad public process would be difficult and perhaps unsatisfactory. Yet I think he is missing the larger point here, perhaps willfully. There are ways to develop tools and educational products that are more sophisticated than a simple yes-or-no, push-one-button-or-the-other vote. And, really, the benefit of broad public input would not be to “learn whether or not it is safe.” Obviously, this would not tell us that. But, if we are going to act, and speak, on behalf of Earth, a good-faith effort at gaining some sense of buy-in is necessary. If it turned out that a majority of public input reflected that people thought it was a really bad idea, well, that would be useful data to which we ought to pay attention. It could mean that those of us in favor of transmitting someday would have our work cut out for us. Maybe, if it really is such a good idea, then after a generation or two of public education, people would come around. After all, what is the hurry?

  A woman from the audience asked, “What are the benefits of doing it now rather than thirty or fifty years from now? You are talking about a round-trip communication time of hundreds or maybe thousands of years. Is there an advantage of getting that time shaved by a few years?”

  My answer to her was:

  There’s obviously no real urgency to commence broadcasting, because this is inherently a project of decades, centuries, millennia even. There’s perhaps impatience among individuals who are champing at the bit, in feeling that one wants to do something while one is still alive and working. We shouldn’t allow that to be the motivation that decides how we proceed.

  But there is an urgency in the need to learn how to have a global conversation and decision-making process, in imagining how we could speak with one coherent global voice, and learning how to act on behalf of the planet and its biosphere. We’ve mentioned climate change, geoengineering, and the perils and promise of biotechnology and artificial intelligence. We have increasing existential threats right now that are very much related to our difficulty in making global decisions, with a long-term outlook, about deploying powerful technology, and our inability to speak with one voice and act, in a sense, with one mind. So, that part of this discussion, I think, is actually very much related to things we need to be doing immediately. The question of METI can at least help encourage us in the direction toward becoming the kind of global civilization that will be able to hang around for many more millennia and perhaps ultimately be able to engage in interstellar conversation.

  A final bombshell was dropped at this session: a new statement was circulated, and released to the press, arguing strongly against unsanctioned METI broadcasts. It had come out of the well-respected Berkeley SETI Research Center and was signed by Elon Musk and a crew of heavyweights from the worlds of astronomy, SETI, and astrobiology. This document left no doubt that, regardless of how it played in the wider world, any new, powerful METI broadcast would be extremely divisive and disruptive in our professional community. The statement read, in part:

  We feel the decision whether or not to transmit must be based upon a worldwide consensus, and not a decision based upon the wishes of a few individuals with access to powerful communications equipment.

  It ended with this declaration:

  Intentionally signaling other civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy raises concerns from all the people of Earth, about both the message and the consequences of contact. A worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent.

  At the SETI Institute workshop the following day, Jill Tarter presided with her calm, inclusive intellect and things stayed for the most part very civil and friendly. Vikki Meadows from the University of Washington, whom I have known since we were both little postdocs learning at the knees of our common mentors, and who is now a formidable leader in studies of exoplanet habitability, treated us to a masterful talk on the exciting prospects over the next few decades for identifying signs of life on distant planets. It was good to be reminded that this landscape is not static, but evolving rapidly and in promising ways. This seems a strong counterargument to any sense of urgency in commencing a broadcasting program. If we wait just a few decades, which amounts to nothing at all in the necessary timescales of interstellar discourse, we should know an awful lot more about what kind of universe we’re dealing with.

  The most passionate and challenging presentation was given by John Gertz, an important figure in the SETI world, having served three terms as chairman of the board of the SETI Institute. He was by far the most aggressive opponent of METI in general, and in particular of Vakoch’s plans to initiate powerful METI broadcasts. As he described it, “Some of us who have thought a lot about this actually are deeply worried that aliens could present a serious danger,” because “Our inadvertent electromagnetic emissions may have the unintended consequence of inviting death and destruction from malevolent aliens.” His talk, first of the morning, woke us all up with its intensity of emotion. He became visibly angry while describing how “a handful of misguided individuals propose we scream out our coordinates to attract the attention of ET intentionally.” This, he said, is not science; it’s unauthorized diplomacy, and it should be forbidden.

  In his view, not only should active SETI be banned, but we should take other measures to reduce our visibility to potential threatening aliens. For example, we should curtail our use of planetary radar. These are the powerful radar blasts that we send occasionally toward asteroids or other planets in order to study the reflection we get back, and so learn something about the targets. Several observatories are engaged in this, including Arecibo, and it has provided our best images of numerous asteroids and important information about the surfaces of other planets.4 It’s a completely harmless activity—unless you are worried about the fact that these concentrated radiation bursts will be highly visible from many light-years away to anyone who happened to be observing Earth from the right place during the brief instant when one of those flashes occurred. But planetary radar bursts are not aimed at any star. If you really want to be paranoid, you could fret over the fact that sometimes stars are randomly lined up behind whatever planetary object you are targeting. This is ex
actly what Gertz is worried about. His suggestion is that we should adopt best practices so we don’t turn on our radar systems when they are pointed toward nearby stars, or intersecting the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, where there are, unavoidably, many stars in the background. It ought to be mentioned here that planetary radar is one of our main tools for learning about the properties of asteroids that may someday threaten life on Earth, and how we might mitigate against them. So any serious curtailment of this technology to avoid one suspected existential risk might cause increased vulnerability to a known one.

  Gertz’s radical anti-METI view put David Brin in an interesting position at the workshop. I think it helped him out by revealing his position to actually be quite measured. Brin has never said he supports an outright ban on METI, only that it is irresponsible, arrogant, and callous to proceed with such broadcasts without first conducting a good-faith effort at inclusive global consultation. After Gertz’s talk, Brin went out of his way to differentiate himself from the extreme of blanket opposition to all future broadcasts. Suddenly he was the moderate in the room.

  Changing My Mind

  Up to this point, in my public discussions of this conflict, I’ve remained neutral. Now, however, after these events of 2015, I’m ready to get off the fence and join with those who urge a moratorium on broadcasting while we sort this out.

  During these three days of intensive deliberations over METI broadcasts (press conference, symposium, and workshop), I found myself, as I often do, in somewhat of a diplomatic role, thinking and saying, “You’re both right!” On one side are those who warn of some possible grave danger if we start screaming into the dark. They urge, at the very least, some globally inclusive evaluative process before we start. On the other side are those who feel that it makes no sense just to listen and not to send, and that a mature technological civilization must reach out for others. I find both arguments worthwhile and the discussion itself valuable, as it forces us to think hard about what might be out there, what role we might play in the universe, how we evaluate and handle existential risk, and how we might try to speak for all of Earth. At the time I wrote my SEED article in 2007, I was careful not to take sides. This wasn’t hard: I am quite fond of all these brilliant people and felt that they all made excellent points, albeit with certain blind spots.

  Still, at that time, in private, my sentiments were more with the broadcasters. Although I found the call for a global process of consultation intrinsically worthwhile, I thought, “What’s the harm in sending a few messages while we work toward a global consensus?” I am sympathetic to Sasha Zaitsev’s argument that if we are going to listen, we should also send. Maybe SETI karma requires broadcasting in order for listening to work. If we want there to be a signal, it seems the least we could do is send one. Sure, let’s talk it over, I thought, but don’t waste time worrying about a moratorium. Let’s become a broadcasting planet: start sending and see what happens. In my heart of hearts, I don’t really believe there are grave dangers involved in reaching out to our ET cousins. Yet, my views on the subject have evolved. I am increasingly swayed by those who urge caution, who say we must at least talk it through before we sanction more aggressive broadcasts.

  It is still my personal belief that technologically superior aliens would be very unlikely to present any danger, and I can tell you plenty of reasons why. It’s quite unlikely that aliens so advanced they could come here would also be so primitive as to want to harm us or so inept as to harm us inadvertently. It seems extremely unlikely that such an advanced entity would perceive of us as any possible threat. I can describe my sense that true intelligence will not be aggressive or careless or clumsy. I can rationalize that technically advanced civilizations are likely to have survived their own adolescence by becoming “morally advanced” in a way that kept pace with their technical achievements. I could offer my opinion that, if anything, such civilizations might be more inclined to have an ethic of wanting to help species such as ours make our way through the bottleneck of technological risk. Still, I must also admit that these are just my opinions, semi-informed at best. We absolutely can’t know any of this. Maybe it’s all wishful thinking. There certainly are logically valid arguments for the possibility of great dangers. So how do we proceed, if the risks seem absurdly low, but the cost of being wrong is everything we have, everything we love?

  Ultimately I do favor active SETI. For me, the rationale is similar to my enthusiastic support for returning samples from Mars and other planets, but only with appropriate precautions. Even though I personally don’t think there is any significant risk to these missions, I agree that we must take seriously the problem of containment. I could list other scientific experiments that I support even though they carry nonzero existential risks. (Biotechnology comes to mind.) During the first atomic bomb tests, the brilliant Manhattan Project physicists/designers were pretty damn sure (almost 100 percent certain) that this would not initiate a chain reaction that would destroy Earth. Although I wish now they had never built those damn things, at the time, I would have done the same. And what about those giant particle accelerators that some physicists admit may have a teensy, weensy chance of destroying the known universe? Some level of risk is inevitable. The only way to be completely certain of safety would be to not explore at all. Even then, there is no guarantee of safety. If the universe does have dangerous elements, what is to stop them from coming and looking for us? You can’t be too careful—or, rather, you can. You could never leave the house in the morning so as not to expose yourself to random events. Even so, something could still fall on your house. At some point in the future, we’ll want to reach out to other minds across the void, even though we’ll never know that it is entirely free of danger.

  One could make an argument that even just listening with passive SETI is not without some risk. What if we discover something horrible or depressing or shocking or otherwise dangerous? What if a message is designed to trick us into behaving in some way that does us harm? Few would argue that because of these dangers (which seem absurdly remote), we should not proceed with listening.

  Yet if we really think there could be something dangerous out there that might come to harm us, to what lengths should we go to prevent it from learning of our existence? If we really wanted to do everything to guard against a possible existential risk from evil aliens, we should not only ban METI broadcasts but also make ourselves invisible. Should we turn out all the lights, treat the planet like London during the Blitz and enforce a global blackout? Ban all radio transmissions? No, of course not. At some level we live with risk because it would compromise us too much to worry about it. Right? So we agree we are operating on a continuum bounded on one end by excessive caution and paranoia. Then it’s just a question of where to draw the line.

  With planetary exploration, after assessing the risks of interplanetary contamination, and a process of international consultation, we elected to proceed. Ultimately, I think this will be the right decision with METI as well—but only when we’re ready, after we have some kind of inclusive global process and agreement about how and whether it should be done.

  The Berkeley statement does not argue that METI broadcasts should be forbidden. It says, “We strongly encourage vigorous international debate by a broadly representative body prior to engaging further in this activity.”

  I’ve come around to agreeing, and believe that a voluntary moratorium while such a process is worked out would be the responsible approach. Arguably, if some humans, on behalf of our race, speaking for our planet, plan to announce our appearance on the galactic scene, we all ought to have a say in the matter. I think that having such a dialogue is more important than asserting anyone’s near-term right to broadcast.

  Stop, Look, and Listen

  A cost-benefit analysis is particularly hard when you are dealing with very remote risks that could possibly be completely catastrophic. One of the points I made at the AAAS press conference was that, in addition to remote but real r
isks, we should also consider possible existential benefits of alien contact. By “existential benefit,” I meant something that could fundamentally help us or change us in a way that allowed us to persist, to survive, to thrive.

  A message could provoke a response that has very positive effects. After all, we are currently living with some existential risks, as the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reminds us. You may quibble about how many minutes from midnight we are, but you’d have to be extremely naïve to think that with our current nuclear arsenals, changing climate, and a host of other issues there is not some risk in maintaining the status quo. We don’t know how to construct a sustainable technological civilization with assured longevity. Any advanced civilizations out there will have solved this problem. Perhaps they can give us useful information. This is no more far-fetched than the notion that they would want to harm us. We sure could use some help in solving this global civilization puzzle. If we are depending on alien intervention to solve our problems—well, that’s a pretty thin reed of hope. Yet, even the discovery that they do really exist could help us achieve a more united outlook, and could also be seen as an existence proof that there are solutions to our seemingly intractable problems.