Douglas Vakoch's job is to answer two of the hardest questions on Earth: if we try to communicate with aliens, what should we tell them, and how can we make sure they understand us? He believes that the best answer so far is to use altruism in communications.
Vacoch manages the interstellar message project at the SETI Institute, a not-for-profit venture in Mountainview, California that seeks intelligent life in space. As part of this project, related to the creation of a message that can be sent to aliens, the idea of sending messages has already been considered, conveying basic scientific or mathematical principles, suggesting that they should be clear to any civilization technologically advanced to communicate with Earth. However, Vakoch believes that this approach is not enough.
“If we try to describe us by talking about the periodic table of elements, or by reporting that we know that two plus two equals four, then the aliens will have a very poor idea of us,” he said.
For the past six years, Vakoch, a psychologist and the only sociologist employed by SETI, has been brainstorming for a way to tell aliens about the better side of human nature, the side characterized by kindness and generosity. He thinks it's very important to tell aliens about the altruistic inclination of humans, because that way they will give us one thing we hope to get - a response message. Vakoch believes that the main thing about altruism is that it lies among our highest ideals, and unlike other ideals: beauty, truth, justice, some forms of altruism can be communicated to aliens in relatively direct ways. Vakoch stresses that he has no illusions about human nature. “I think that if we sent a message that we are a fundamentally altruistic civilization, then, only then,it really would be a lie."
However, Vakoch believes that the desire to show that we strive to become altruists is not at all dishonest. And he thinks it would be fair to illustrate certain forms of altruism that are widespread among humans. For example, psychologists have long studied mutual altruism, a tit-for-tat scenario where we give someone a gift and believe that it will eventually pay off. Vakoch finds this concept necessary if we hope to see a response to our message.
A large part of the problem in communicating with aliens lies in finding a language and grammar that would be understood by an alien civilization. To cope with this problem, Vakoch diversified the specialties of the people involved in his project: anthropologists, philosophers, physicists, astronomers, theologians, musicians, artists, etc. Over the past five years, Vakoch has brought these people together several times, beginning with a workshop in Paris in 2003 called "Encoding Altruism." Discussions at these meetings propelled the project in directions not often seen by space explorers. For example, to get a better sense of how to communicate with aliens, they conducted an anthropological study of intercultural communication, and even looked at how different species of animals communicate with each other.
"So far, much of the discussion on the SETI message has been done in engineering and astronomy," says Roger Malina, an astrophysicist who participated in the Altruism Coding Workshop. "The Douglas Project kicked off the debate by drawing on research and ideas on intercultural communication, and even an understanding of how historians interpret the texts of earlier civilizations, into the project."
Through discussion with colleagues, Vakoch came to the conclusion that mutual altruism can greatly facilitate communication. Several of Vakoch's colleagues have proposed sending computer programs to aliens that simulate various forms of altruism. The “actors” in the script would be entities that exist as long as they cooperate with each other. How they work together - they thrive. When they don't cooperate, they die out.
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Vakoch also believes that his project could also show family selection, another form of altruism, in which people give their lives for a close relative in the hope that that relative, and their shared genetic material, will live. To illustrate family selection, Vakoch said, the new messages could reflect parent-child relationships, showing how bits of genetic material are passed from one generation to the next. What is the likelihood that any of these messages will be read? Vakoch replies that the more we advance in astronomy, the more likely it seems that aliens might exist. Until the mid-1990s, there was no direct evidence of planets outside our solar system. Today, with the advent of new planet detection methods, more than 250 planets have already been discovered.
However, Vakoch emphasizes that if ever humanity decides to send a message, or even respond to a message received from aliens, the SETI staff will not want to do it alone. “Any decision to transmit a message concerns all of humanity,” says Vakoch. "It cannot be done by a handful of scientists." He notes that while SETI scientists have already given a lot of ideas to the topic, there are no laws governing interstellar communication.
Anyone can transmit a message into space at any time without consulting SETI or anyone else, although it will take hundreds or even thousands of years before the message reaches its destination. Wakoch believes that no matter when or how these messages are sent, the interstellar message project has already been beneficial here on Earth.
“The whole process of deciding what we want to say in communicating to the other worlds has forced us to explore what some of our highest values are,” he says. "And it also makes us realize how often we forget about them."
Based on materials from Infuture.ru