Unexplainable - How to talk to aliens

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

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! [e-mail] 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

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I am a big sci-fi fan. I don't know if I've admitted this before, but I... Uh-oh. 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. What an organized and nerdy family. I love it. I mean, we didn't have cable, so I always had something to watch.

if I needed it. Oh, my goodness. Big fan. Well, since you're such a big fan, let me test your sci-fi chops a little. Yeah. If you could send a message out into the universe, potentially to an alien neighbor,

what would you say? Well, in my Star Trek mind, I would try to say something about how nice people are and please don't hurt us. That might be what I would focus on. Please don't hurt us. Very reasonable. Personally, I send out like a recipe for cheesecake, something food-related.

But, you know, that's just me. That's unexpected, but I can get behind that. 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. Yeah, we think that this may be a beacon, some kind of an announcement to get our attention. We've seen the Hollywood tropes of an astronomer, you know, sitting in a basement. I think you should listen to this.

in front of their computer just listening to beeps, boops, and blobs. Detection protocol. Now. Those are numbers. That was a three. The one before it was a two. It's 42 seconds of non-random, non-Earth-based signal. This can't be right.

It's coming from the moon. Yeah, we did an episode on this, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, right? SETI. Yeah, SETI. But, you know, those Hollywood films and SETI even, I feel like there's something a lot more interesting that they don't really touch on. Okay. 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? There isn't that much discussion on how we can connect with whatever civilization just sent us a message. And to be honest, I think figuring that out is a lot more interesting than just the act of listening, you know? Yeah, like in a lot of those movies, it's kind of just like, if you found the aliens, that's it. Story over. 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? 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? Yeah. Scientists have been trying to message aliens for decades, right?

But the first one I want to tell you about is the Erocebo message in 1974. From the great dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, the observatory director beamed a message at the stars. Erecebo had just been upgraded, and they set 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. 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. Okay. The message was sent to a group of stars about 25,000 light years away. Wait, so they're sending a message that will take 25,000 years to get there? 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. So this is just straight up a PR stunt then? Definitely a PR stunt. It was really just that, a demonstration, that we can create a message based on some ideas of math and science. This is Doug Vakic. 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 METI International. So, wait, so like SETI, but METI, messaging?

Medi with an M. Okay, okay. And he told me that they weren't necessarily seeking a reply. One of the assumptions of the Erecebo 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. Yeah. I don't know, 50,000 years seems like kind of a long time to wait.

A very long time to wait. Have there been any other messages sent anywhere maybe closer? Right. So in 1977, we sent two spacecrafts into space as part of the Voyager missions. The spacecraft Voyager 1 was launched 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. Scientists had the idea, hey, let's put a message on there

and a 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. On the record were pictures of life on Earth. Greetings from 55 different languages around the world. But also, music. and sounds that at the time were meant to depict kind of life on Earth.

Did they include a turntable, or like, did the aliens need to bring their own? They did not include a turntable, and I think that... What are they doing? 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. Seems like they don't want anyone to listen to the record.

Other than that, it was kind of sent to drift out into space and let the world see what happens. 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. That's how you get found on a desert island. SOS in a bottle.

SOS in a bottle. 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. Yeah, it sounds like it's more about what we would include in a message to aliens

rather than actually trying our best to get in touch with the aliens. 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 universe. 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? It's a great question.

I mean, too far away, honestly, too far. 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. Start with the stars closest to. to Earth and move outward so that we reduce the time it takes for an exchange. And in 2017, this is exactly what Doug did. We sent a message from a radio transmitter north of the Arctic Circle to a star just over

12 light years away. So for a round-trip, intrasteller pin-pal, we could potentially, potentially get a response within 25 years or so. Yeah, 25 is a little shorter than 50,000. For sure. It's much easier to grasp timeline-wise. What's in the message? So Doug thought about what we'd have in common with an alien civilization.

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. Oh. So the message that he sent was basically a mini scientific lesson, sent as a binary code using two different. frequencies. I mean, that feels like a lot less abstract than sending a message about the basic building blocks of human life. 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. There's this wonderful interplay between

not just saying something about ourselves, but really trying to develop a shared mindset. 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.

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. I like the effort. It's very creative. Right. 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, I guess I wonder whether they would even be able to understand what we're saying. Yeah, 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?

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. That's after the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment. to the next level. With a private wing to check in in your own security channel at London Heathrow,

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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. Yeah. One big issue is that people often assume aliens would look like us. Yeah, like the little green. people just they have bigger eyes. Yep, totally. The exaggerated limbs,

the two legs, very human-like figures. Yeah. But if we want to meaningfully understand an alien civilization, we first have to remember they are 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 Sherry 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 Sherry is blind, and she likes to think about what blind aliens might be like 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 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? Yeah, it's a complicated idea to grapple with. 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. Yeah, we can't really like sit down with Beowulf and have a year. 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, meeting of those texts. Some of that, I don't know if we've actually really translated or really

fully understand. Yeah, and if something takes 25,000 years to get to an alien, I feel like our language is going to change a lot. Yeah. Time is a thing, right? Our languages will change, their languages will change. But let's just say we figure all this out, and we're all in the same room as an alien. It still wouldn't be easy to talk. 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?

Eyebrow action. Probably, probably you're asking me to pour some coffee, or you're pouring me some coffee? Yeah, that's what I would hope you think. I'm offering you coffee. Right, right. Okay. Doug says me pointing at a coffee machine could also mean a variety of other things. 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 in the context, but what is the intention? And this idea of intention gets at a bigger question here. Okay. 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. It's called Xenolinguistics. 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? 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.

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 going to go out on another limb and call those verbs. Holy smoke, they've got nouns and verbs. That's amazing. 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. 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. 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.

How do we communicate the same thing in multiple ways so that the aliens have more than one chance at understanding us? 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. 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. 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. 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. It's some kind of alchemy through which I, 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. 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. 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah, that would not be a great outcome for our first messages to anyone out there. Not a great outcome at all. 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. Yeah.

But when I chatted with Sherry, she wasn't really worried about it. How can we ensure that what we're sitting will mean the same to whoever receives it? We cannot. Get out. We don't know. We don't know. Oh, my God. But, okay, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Okay. 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. Makes sense to be humble when you're working on something as, I don't know, out there as xenolinguistics. 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. For Sherry, Xenolinguistics isn't just about studying aliens. It's also about us. 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 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? Zeno linguistics pushes us to learn more about ourselves and how we connect to our communities, here on Earth, but also out in the universe. This episode was reported and produced by Thomas Liu. We had editing from me, Noam Hassanfeld, and Meredith Hodnott, 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 octopus, no sign of Dr. Pepper. And then she saw it pinned to the main control panel. It was a note from the birds. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating Unexplanable. And if you have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at Unexplanable at Vox.com. 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 slash members to sign up. And if you signed up because of us, send us a note. We'd always love to hear from you. Unexblainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.