I’ve been following Paul for a few days now. I watched him speak twice yesterday at the Royal Society (it has been hosting a SETI conference). The queue to get into his evening talk snaked around the block. He encouraged the audience, which filled the main hall and an overflow room, not to be depressed. It’s quite possible the aliens do know we’re here, but because they’re a thousand light-years away and are consequently seeing us as we were a thousand years ago—rudimentary and agricultural—they’re going to hold off beaming a signal to us until they know we’ve developed radio technology.
During the question-and-answer session, a man with dark glasses stood up and animatedly announced: “To see the future, one must look at the fringe, at the freaks, the visionaries, the artists. Why does SETI ignore what’s right in front of us? The six thousand abductions! The ten thousand cattle mutilations . . . !”
One or two people nodded in agreement. Paul tried to look kindly, but his annoyance was obvious. “To expect alien technology to be just a few decades ahead of ours,” he replied, “is too incredible to be taken seriously.”
His inference was: You can tell the abductees are lying or delusional because their descriptions of the aliens and their craft are always so unimaginative. As he writes in The Eerie Silence, the giveaway is the “banality of the aliens’ putative agenda, which seems to consist of grubbing around in fields or meadows, chasing cows or cars like bored teenagers, and abducting humans for Nazi-style experiments.”
“At least flaky UFO nuts believe they’ve met aliens,” I say to Paul now. “They believe they’ve been abducted and probed. You lot have rationalized yourselves into a fifty-year void of nothingness.” I pause and add: “I realize what I just said is quite stupid, but will you respond to it anyway?”
“For me, science is already fantastical enough,” he says. “Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance.”
Paul says he doesn’t trust people. But he does have great faith in aliens. His face lights up when he imagines them. My guess is that, since he’s spent so much of his life meeting people who aren’t as clever as him, the aliens are—intellect-wise—his last-chance saloon.
The Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup has been in existence since 1996. It comprises thirty SETI-friendly scientists, writers, and engineers. Paul was invited to become chair in 2008 but has so far convened only one meeting. He hopes to hold a second later this year in Prague so they can update their declaration of principles.
“So what’s the first thing that’ll happen when a signal is detected?” I ask.
“We’ll have it independently verified. That’s really important.”
“And once it’s verified?”
“My strenuous advice,” Paul says, “will be that the coordinates of the transmitting entity should be kept confidential until the world community has had a chance to evaluate what it’s dealing with. We don’t want anybody just turning a radio telescope on the sky and sending their own messages to the source.”
“So you’ll tell the world that extraterrestrials are beaming signals to us, but you’ll refuse to say from where?”
“Exactly,” Paul says.
“They’ll kill you. They’ll grab you and torture the information out of you.”
“But what’s the alternative? Imagine we go to the United Nations: ‘There’s an alien community over there and everyone has to think about what our response might be, so we’re turning it over to you, the United Nations, who are so adept at finding harmonious solutions to the world’s problems.’ Well, of course it would be a complete shambles. And which are the agencies that can truly represent humanity? You wouldn’t go to the Catholic Church, would you? Or the U.S. Army.”
This is why, he says, the most prudent course of action will be to create some sort of science parliament—a bit like the one set up to oversee the scientific exploration of Antarctica—and present to them the draft of a message that will be written by him later this year in Prague.
I am, I’m proud to say, the person who gave him the idea to draft the message this far in advance.
“If you don’t trust anyone else to come up with a decent message, you should do it yourself!” I say. “You don’t want to be caught on the hop. Do it in Prague and just put it in a drawer somewhere until the time comes.”
“That’s a very good idea!” he replies. “I’m thinking on my feet here, but it’s an excellent idea.”
“I’m full of ideas like that. I’d be happy to join the Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup.”
Paul looks panicked. “There’s no money.”
“Oh, right,” I say. “Right. Yes.” It is an awkward moment.
“So what will the message say?” I ask, changing the subject.
“We’re talking about two civilizations communicating their finest achievements and their deepest beliefs and attitudes. I feel we should send something about our level of scientific attainment and understanding of how the world works. Some fundamental physics. Maybe some biology. But primarily physics and astronomy.”
“And some classical music?” I suggest.
“Well, we could, but it’s not going to mean anything to them,” Paul says.
“Yes, yes, of course.” I pause. “Why won’t it mean anything to them?”
“There’s nothing certain in this game,” Paul says, “but our appreciation of art and music is very much tied to our cognitive architecture. There’s no particular reason why some other intelligent species will share these aesthetic values. The general theory of relativity is impressive and will surely be understood by them. But if we send a Picasso or a Mona Lisa? They wouldn’t care.” He pauses. “I mean the phonograph disc that went off on Voyager had speeches by Kurt Waldheim and Jimmy Carter. That’s a world away from what we should be doing.”
“Of course, the world will eventually discover the coordinates and start sending up their own stuff,” I say.
“Yes. So one of the first things we might want to say is that there’s no unitary government on this planet, no unitary political philosophy or ideology. We’re a great place for freedom, if not anarchy, and so we’re putting together the best possible coherent package for your consideration, but expect it to be followed up with all sorts of bizarre and incoherent babble that you must treat with some discretion.” He pauses. “Although how we’ll express all this when we only have mathematics in common will be something of a challenge.”
We get the bill. Paul wants to end on an optimistic note and so he mentions the one time in SETI history when something broke the silence.
“We call it the Wow signal,” he says. “It was a radio telescope in Ohio, back in the days when they didn’t have the electronic gadgetry to go ‘ping’ if there was something weird. So they looked at a computer printout some weeks afterward, and it showed a signal that went on for seventy-two seconds. Nobody was listening at the time. The researcher wrote ‘Wow’ in the margin. And many times radio telescopes have been turned on that star, but nothing odd has ever happened again.”
“Should we feel excited by the Wow signal?”
“I’ve often wondered,” Paul says. He puts on his coat. “What we’re doing is a fantastic and challenging task. It compels us to think about all the things we should be thinking about. What is life? What is intelligence?” He pauses. “And if nothing else, it is a great deal of fun.”
Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes
In 1996 I received a telephone call from a man calling himself Tony.