Doug Vakoch

Testing, testing.

How are we doing?

Are we recording now?

I grew up as a kid on a farm out in a remote part of northern Minnesota.

And so especially on winter nights, you know, I would go outside and I would look up there.

And it's just beautiful.

It's breathtaking.

But it also got me thinking, huh, you know, I wonder if there are any kids out there on other planets who are looking up there and thinking the same sort of thing.

What if you're talking about an exoplanet that has this murky cover where short-distance vision really isn't helpful?

Then you have to use a sense of sound or a sense of touch or a sense of smell.

So we look at other species here on Earth and say, you know, how do they encounter the world?

And what if there were an alien who used that as their primary way of engaging with their environment and with one another?

Yeah, the origin story was, sure, I'd been making the case.

The talks I was giving as a grad student were, and we should be transmitting too and not just listening.

And so I made that case over the years.

The argument is everyone is sitting around waiting for someone else to take the initiative.

And if everyone is simply doing what we are doing, simply sitting here and listening and not transmitting, it's going to be a really quiet universe.

I was able to make my case and I lost.

And one of the big reasons was that people were scared.

That came up when Stephen Hawking was promoting a new science documentary.

He had a documentary and he posed this provocative issue of, you know, if the aliens transmit, don't respond.

Because, you know, when we've seen contact between civilizations here on Earth, it often does not work well for the less advanced civilization.

So, you know, duck and cover.

But Doug was like, okay, look, the aliens know we're here.

I mean, anyone with a technology, a SETI system a little bit more advanced than us can already pick up our leakage radiation.

The cat's out of the bag.

For messaging extraterrestrial intelligence.

Is there an analogy?

I think they're siblings with quite different interests.

I mean, generally shared interests.

You know, we value science.

We want to be doing these kind of things.

But, you know, each of the kids has its own thing that they think is the most important thing in the world.

We may never get the other one to agree with us, but it's okay.

So some of them are very heavily based on math and send them in the form of a picture.

Or some have said, oh, what we really want to do is we want to be able to engage.

And we can't do that because of all these distances.

Let's send an AI, send a computer program that once they have built it on the other end, they can actually interact with it and they'll be able to engage with it even at a distance.

Right.

Others have said, send something like music.

In fact, I'm a strong advocate of using some of these telescopes that have multiple dishes and to turn those into an orchestra of a sort.

The biggest impact that we can make in terms of what we're going to be for another civilization is to show up and start.

I mean, until now, we haven't shown up.

I mean, if we have a reputation in the galaxy, we're lurkers.

That's funny.

They're there, but they're sure not saying anything.

I think some of the big discoveries sometimes require a capacity to say what if and then a willingness to follow through on it.