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Summary (Aug 22, 2003): Comparing the task presented to a stellar communicator to the reasoning why past civilizations have prepared for posterity, one considers whether SETI lays the groundwork for future archaeology. Why did our terrestrial ancestors prepare relics like the Rosetta Stone?
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Future Archaeology We humans are familiar with the back-and-forth of face-to-face contact - something we will not have in an interstellar conversation. The timescale of a human life may well not be enough for a meaningful dialogue with another species.
 | | On the chance that someone is out there, NASA approved the placement of a phonograph record on each of the Voyager spacecraft. The recording, called "Sounds of Earth" fits on a 12-inch, copper disc containing greetings from Earth people in 60 languages, samples of music from different cultures and eras, and natural sounds of surf, wind and thunder, and birds, whales and other animals. The record also contains electronic information that an advanced technological civilization could convert into diagrams, pictures and printed words, including a message from President Carter. Credit: NASA |
Interstellar dialogue may make sense only across generations.
For now, SETI scientists solve the problem by placing the burden of transmitting on the other civilization. Whereas we are guaranteed not to receive a reply for many years, if ever, by listening we may succeed tomorrow.
As Jill Tarter, leader of the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix noted recently, "Because transmitting is harder than receiving (in terms of both cost and cultural commitment), and must be a long-term effort to have any chance of success, it is reasonable to place the burden of transmission onto the more advanced technologies."
Rather than conceiving of SETI as a two-way conversation, some have proposed viewing it as an analogue to learning about great civilizations of the past.
For example, according to Philip Morrison, Professor Emeritus of Physics at MIT, "the SETI enterprise can best be understood as a kind of exercise in the archaeology of the future.... We know that it is possible that some other civilization, who wants to, can bring us in. Of course it will be their past, but our future, which we are investigating to some degree."
SETI examines that hypothesis, consistent with Morrison's view that "When you've got the spade ... it seems very wrong not to dig."
To date, Project Phoenix has examined fewer than 1000 stars.
As technologies on Earth increase, that number will explode in the next decade or two. For example, the Allen Telescope Array, now being designed by the SETI Institute, will increase the number of stars observed to 100,000 or even a million.
If in the course of that search we do detect another civilization, should we respond? Uncertain about whether we can exist as a civilization for even another century, should we embark on a conversation that may take a millennium?
If our past is any indication, if Earthly time capsules and monuments to the future provide any lessons, it seems likely that at least some people will try.
As SETI pioneer Carl Sagan noted in his preface to a book on the interstellar recordings borne by the Voyager spacecraft, "For those who have done something they consider worthwhile, communication to the future is an almost irresistible temptation, and it has been attempted in virtually every human culture. "
"In the best of cases", Sagan continued, "it is an optimistic and far-seeing act; it expresses great hope about the future; it time-binds the human community; it gives us a perspective on the significance of our own actions at this moment in the long historical journey of our species."
Related Web Pages
SETI Institute
NSF Life in Extreme Environments (LEXEN) Program
Computational Biology and Protein Music: University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Voyager Music Playlist
Voyager Mission NASA/JPL
The Nucleic Acid Database Project Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Immunogenetics: Ohno, et al. "The all pervasive principle of repetitious recurrence governs not only coding sequence construction but also human endeavor in musical composition"
Periodicity and DNA sequences
Genome Research: Li, et al "Compositional Heterogeneity within, and Uniformity between, DNA Sequences of Yeast Chromosomes"
DNA Music: The Art Institute of Chicago
Infrared Frequencies of DNA Music: IEEE Engineering In Medicine and Biology, S. Alexander
Astronomers Hear Music of Creation: BBC
Note: Messages
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