. . . if you want to contact intex, is it better to use physics or mindscience?

Conundrum Four: Part IV: Carl Sagan Sends a Message to Intex

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Carl Sagan is a hero of mine. When I discovered his books about cosmology, physics, and aliens in the mid-1990s, they had a profound effect on my relationship with intex. To this day, Sagan remains the only public figure whose death caused me to weep. I heard of his passing on the radio while driving through Maryland and I pulled over to the side of the road in my red Ford Tempo and cried. I admired him deeply, and still do. Yet, I can’t help but feel that, all in all, his influence on the public’s expectations about extraterrestrials was more pernicious than beneficial.

Sagan’s probably done more than any single scientist to shape the public’s perception of the scientific conception of the search for extraterrestrials, mostly because of his dominance of the media as the most recognizable physicist in the world from the 1970s through the 1990s. The fact that most people now consider the radio dish the iconic emblem of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is largely due to Sagan’s influence.

Perhaps Sagan’s most defining conception of intex is his deep-seated notion of a lingua cosmica. According to Sagan, if you want to communicate with E.T. and help him phone home, you better speak the syllables of science:

If you wanted to talk to the aliens, you can bet they don’t speak English or French or even Mandarin. Nor would you know whether shaking their hands—if indeed their outstretched appendage is a hand—would be considered an act of war or of peace. Your best hope is to find a way to communicate using the language of science[1].

And naturally, if science is the language then scientists should be the interplanetary translators, concludes Sagan. Especially physicists, who Sagan believed speak science better than anyone. Even when I first encountered Sagan’s thrilling ideas about intex (and it truly was a groundshaking encounter, as I describe in Large Gods for Small Children), when I came upon his claim that aliens speak the language of science, I immediately thought, Clearly, he’s never spoken to intex before.

The specific activities involved with any form of communication between two strangers of different backgrounds—negotiating, building trust, maintaining cultural sensitivity, managing intergroup bias, dispelling verbal illusions, seeking common points of reference, plumbing intentions, parsing non-verbal cues—are all mental dynamics. Studying and articulating these dynamics are central tasks of mindscience. In terms of their training, methods, and intuitions, physicists have about as much basis to opine about social interactions between minds—let alone contend that physicists are better equipped for mind to mind communication than mindscientists!—as B. F. Skinner had to opine about the fluid dynamics of quantum foam.

The fundamental fallacy that Sagan and other intex-seeking physicists make in their conception of communicating with others is largely an autistic fiction: following their own high covenant, physical scientists tend to focus on the machine a mind uses to communicate, rather than the mind doing the communicating. When you are interacting with a stranger, do you focus on the stranger’s message (“If you open the book of life there will be irrevocable consequences”) or the stranger’s messaging device (a deep purple 14 Pro Max iPhone with quad-pixel sensors)?

If your answer is the machine, well, in that case perhaps physicists do have a role. . . but wouldn’t engineers, rather than physicists, be even better suited for such a task? If the mission is to hack an iPhone, do you turn to scientists or engineers?

If your answer is the message, I’m not sure why we’d ever be driven to ring physicists for aid. No physicist had a hand in cracking the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, Incan khipu knots, or Mayan pictograms.

It doesn’t take a scientist to grasp why physicists won’t have a major role in communicating with extraterrestrials, despite Sagan’s heartfelt fantasies. The 2016 movie Arrival reveals what happens when writers imagine how authentic first contact with aliens might unfold in the real world. The movie depicts a scenario straight out of Sagan’s fevered brain: faceless alien “heptapods” arrive from the stars in oblong gravity-defying black ships. And their “outstretched appendages” aren’t hands, they’re tentacles! And they don’t speak English or Mandarin, they speak in bassy moans and inky ringlets that float through the air: a completely novel language! And best of all, they really do want to share science with us! (Time travel technology, as it turns out.) Sagan’s dream come true. Ring the physicists!

And indeed, the writers imagined the American team tasked with communicating with these inscrutable aliens would be led by two scientists, including a Physicist! The other, a Linguist. The presence of the Physicist on this ultrashort shortlist can undoubtedly be traced to the influence of Sagan and other physicists on the public consciousness of extraterrestrials. Yet, despite their attempt at adopting Sagan’s perspective, the writers still encountered the inevitable problem with allowing physicists to tag along on contact episodes: there’s not much for them to do. Physicist actor Jeremy Renner spends most of the movie standing around making serious faces and supportive gestures while Linguist actress Amy Adams does the hard work of figuring out how to communicate with the heptapods, including drifting through the not-particularly-rational reveries and intuitive leaps so essential for communication.

In the end, the only role for the Physicist in Arrival is to make babies with the Linguist.

Honestly, I admire Sagan’s gumption. Though clever and innocuous-sounding propaganda, he almost single-handedly established a mindset across the entire planet of human culture that persuaded both the public and government actors that it will be necessary and natural to include physicists on any mission of intex communication. Imagine if, say, a charismatic information scientist had beaten Sagan to the punch and used their national soapbox to pull off a similar (and highly plausible) feat of sneaky misdirection:

If you wanted to talk to aliens, you can bet they don’t speak English or French or even Mandarin. Nor would you know whether shaking their hands—if indeed their outstretched appendage is a hand—would be considered an act of war or of peace. Your best hope is to find a way to communicate using the science of communication: Shannon’s information theory.

Then the movie Arrival and every other recent movie about alien contacts would have included an information theoretician on the contact team and perhaps we’d all view the digital computer, rather than the radio dish, as the sigil of SETI.

That’s not what happened. Instead, both mainstream science and the global public have come to accept physicists’ leadership in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence as perfectly appropriate and sensible. The media’s deference to physicists’ opinions about foreign communities is evident, for instance, in their breathless coverage of astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s claim that a curious elongated rock that entered our solar system from deep space was a “light-sail—perhaps a derelict from some long-expired galactic culture.”

How did physicists come to be viewed as the go-to profession for credible copy on aliens, even though they don’t have anything more to offer on the subject—and possibly less—than an economist or oceanographer? Three main reasons.

First, Sagan’s commanding influence.

Second, the simple fact that physicists were the first scientific discipline to acquire gear and equipment that could conceivably be used to communicate with aliens: radio technology. (Similarly, the first human surgeons were barbers, because they already owned the blades.)

Third, physicists got organized in the hunt for intex much earlier than anyone else, dating all the way back to the dawn of human physics. This early start produced early results.

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Perhaps the most famous attempt to communicate with aliens was the golden plaque placed aboard the Pioneer 10 probe, the first human-built machine to exit our solar system. The plaque is etched with a message for any extraterrestrial recipient. Was this sacred missive, representing the hopes, fears, and values of our entire species, assembled by a diplomat? A linguist? An anthropologist? An artist? No, the person chosen had no relevant qualifications whatsoever. The man put in charge of humankind’s intragalactic negotiations was a physicist: Carl Sagan.

Perhaps the single biggest reason why physicists have dominated the twenty-first century public’s conception of aliens and persuaded them to accept that physicists should be in charge of any communication attempts was the massive popularity and influence of Sagan at the end of the twentieth century. He leveraged his unprecedented and peerless media presence (for a scientist) to announce to the public that his personal interpretation of the dynamics of matter suggested to him that intelligent life may be abundant in the cosmos. The dynamics of Mind was never a consideration in his reckoning.

Sagan was something of a dilettante in the mindsciences. Sagan believed, for instance, that schizophrenia was likely cultural rather than biological. He believed that watching “violent” 1980s TV shows, like the A-Team and Miami Vice, lead to violent behavior. He believed that inside our skull lurked “the brain of a crocodile” enwrapped in a “mammalian brain.” All of these notions are demonstrably wrong[2].

Nor did Sagan possess any special diplomatic training or experience that would prepare him to serve as an interplanetary ambassador. This lack of training and experience became egregiously manifest—at least, to the eye of a mindscientist—when, as humankind’s appointed envoy to the stars, Sagan chose this message for first contact:

Yes. A nude selfie. Here’s my junk, boys! Ambassador Sagan decided that the best way to open negotiations with a foreign power was by sexting.

Twenty-first century readers might notice an even bigger source of cultural offense. It’s not just nude selfies, it’s nude selfies of Caucasians, complete with hair styles typical of late twentieth century white Americans (the man’s hair closely resembles that of David Hasselhoff). The master race, presumably. Why else include a single nude human form on this intergalactic communique?

And why is the man raising his hand? That’s far from a universal sign of greeting amongst humans, let alone non-humans. And why is the woman passive? (And are we saying that binary genders and heterosexual relations are the norm?) There’s an arrow to indicate the flight path of the message through space… though why would a foreign mind assume that this arbitrary human-invented symbol implies a direction?

The two circles are supposed to suggest hydrogen atoms which are intended to signify… actually, I’m not sure why we’re looking at hydrogen atoms. To demonstrate that we know chemistry? (Maybe that’s why Frank Drake wanted to show the formula for sugar?) Doesn’t the invention of an interstellar probe imply that we already know what hydrogen is? If a stranger opened a conversation with me by informing me that they knew the atomic structure of hydrogen or the chemical formula of sugar (and drew their own idiosyncratic and inaccurate model of it), I’d assume they were a high-functioning autist[3].

Drake’s message to intex was inscrutable. To inscrutable, Sagan added offensive. If it’s both inscrutable and offensive to human beings, then why are we sending this plaque as our glorious beacon of human civilization? Shouldn’t we send something that, at a minimum, most human beings could understand and appreciate?

But the main thing to consider here is how self-congruence once again pushes its way to the fore. The man and woman on the golden plaque bear more than a passing resemblance to Sagan and his wife. Not only that, Sagan, like Drake, presumes that aliens will be highly trained scientists, which is why Sagan shared random and inaccurate scientific facts (a model of a hydrogen atom, nine planets) that would not be of interest to non-scientists, nor to the vast majority of scientists, either. There’s a distinct self-absorbed adolescent male naivete, earnest and contextless and obsessed with digital machines, encoded in the golden plaque: “I sure love science, and I bet you love science, too, my mysterious pen pal!”

Just imagine, for a moment, if Sagan’s plaque did somehow manage to hit an alien’s sweet spot. It’s received by an extraterrestrial master race that loves sharing nude selfies and thinking about hydrogen, so they are primed to comprehend a plaque that Sagan’s fellow humans are not capable of fathoming. The aliens send back photos of their own genitalia (larger and more aggressive) and many peculiar representations of hydrogen, and perhaps helium, too. Where do we go from there? What is the natural continuation of this conversation that Sagan has initiated on our behalf?

“Er, sorry, I know it's only been a few years since we sent that message, but now we prefer to keep our clothes on, and we feel bad about the fact that we only shared pictures of hetero White people, and honestly, we don’t know why we shared a child’s rendering of hydrogen.”

Why did NASA endorse such a racist, inscrutable, and physics-centric message? Self-congruence. Physical scientists ran the show at NASA. It seemed perfectly natural to them: after all, they were merely looking in the mirror.

Fortunately, not all radio telescopes are controlled by physicists! Even though many SETI physicists emphatically contend that only scientists should be in charge of transmissions to aliens,[4]  I personally find it pleasing that several other messages have been transmitted towards extrasolar planets by non-scientists. In 2001, Russian teenagers broadcast a concert of theremin music to 47 Ursae Majoris. In 2005, the entire craigslist classifieds were broadcast into space, including listings of sex for sale. In 2008, Frito-Lay funded the broadcasting of six advertisements for Doritos to the same star, 47 Ursae Majoris, becoming the first corporation to spam aliens. The artist Joe Davis used MIT’s Millstone Hill Radar to broadcast the sound of a ballet dancer’s vaginal contractions to the star Epsilon Eridani. (The U.S. Air Force managed to cut off the broadcast after a few minutes—apparently, male nude selfies okay, vaginal contractions not okay.) It’s not clear to me which message is more compelling or revelatory—Drake’s bitmap gibberish, Sagan’s nudist celebration, or the symphony of celestial vaginas.

But that’s really the whole problem right there, isn’t it? And knowing more physics isn’t going to help you…

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[1] The twelve-year-old boy Elliot was able to communicate with E.T. just fine without knowing the language of science. I suppose that’s a fictional example… just like Sagan’s.

[2] Can’t claim that “Hey, nobody else knew the answer to this stuff back then, either!”: that’s the point, plenty of people knew that stuff back then. Grossberg identified the dynamics of consciousness back in 1982.

[3] Please take it from me: if intex manifest in your living room, you aren’t going to be thinking about the chemical structure of sugar or wondering how many planets are in their home system.

[4] Here’s David Brin, who thinks astronomers should rule intex communion: “During the early nineties, a sober effort was made to develop guidelines for any First Contact event–resulting in the First and Second SETI Protocols. These set down: (1) what principles should guide astronomers and other participants amid the hectic period during and following an actual SETI ‘hit.’ (2) whether, how, and when to transmit de novo messages–wholly of our own volition–far more obtrusive than the 1974 Arecibo signal. All of these imperatives are still deeply believed by the ‘dissidents’ in the SETI community who object to METI [sending messages to aliens]… [these dissidents, including David Brin] resigned from SETI-related committees and commissions in protest over what we deem to be the precipitate, unscientific and unprofessional behavior. Alas, in recent years there has been a fad to ‘beam messages at ET’–everything from rock n’ roll to Doritos ads, rather unlikely to reach their targets… In not a single case was the spirit or letter of the SETI Protocols followed, allowing a public conversation and reciprocal argument to penetrate the rationalizations of those who would eagerly alter human destiny, blithe in their assumptions about the nature of unknown alien societies, assuring us all ‘Don’t worry. We have it under control.’”