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Summary (Aug 23, 2003): To design an interstellar message, does one have to find ways to communicate that humankind has the potential to be friendly, loving, and altruistic toward non-kin individuals or strangers? How to announce our stewardship of the planet as a good neighbor?
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Being Good Neighbors Spock: To hunt a species to extinction is not logical.
Gillian: Whoever said the human race was logical?
Star Trek, The Voyage Home
In nepotism, by contrast, altruism is extended to one's close relatives, not necessarily with the expectation of direct payback. Rather, by helping relatives, indirectly the altruist also benefits.
 | Dinosaurs dominated the planet for over 150 million years, occupying all the niches mammals currently occupy.
Image Credit: National Geographic |
By increasing the chances that relatives will survive to reproduce, the altruists genes also have an increased chance of being passed on to the next generation, simply because close relatives share a predictable percentage of genes, depending on how closely they are related. Barkow suggests that nepotism may be even more common than reciprocal altruism in intelligence beyond Earth. Good Neighbors How does the relative importance of these two forms of altruism among extraterrestrials affect interstellar communication?
Consider first those species in which reciprocal altruism predominates. Might they not be suspicious if we proclaim our willingness to take turns being nice, when each turn of message sending could take centuries or millennia? Reciprocal altruism on those timescales, Barkow argues, becomes meaningless. He suggests that instead, we should emphasize our kinship to extraterrestrials - if nothing else, kinship of a symbolic nature. This might resonate with extraterrestrials who have an inborn proclivity toward nepotism, and might even seem plausible to extraterrestrials who are more reliant on reciprocal altruism, but who exhibit nepotism to a lesser extent.
 | | 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 |
German theologian Hubert Meisinger, another workshop participant, agrees. According to Meisinger, "to relate all of this to interstellar message design, one has to find ways to communicate that humankind ... has the potential to be friendly, loving, and altruistic toward non-kin individuals or strangers because of its bio-cultural evolution."
But should we really expect extraterrestrials to be sympathetic to our pleas to be altruistic because of the symbolic kinship we might share with them?
Australian archaeologist John Campbell will argue during the meeting that, at least sometimes, we see examples of caring for other species than our own right here on Earth, citing cases from such diverse mammals as carnivores, primates, and cetaceans. Indeed, many of our cultural and religious norms support such other-concern.
Oxford University scholar Ulla Lehtonen will emphasize at the meeting ways that indigenous religions focus on forms of altruism that go beyond the concern with other humans. As an example, she cites a painting called Ozone Hole. As she describes the painting, "It depicts an elk whose eye is pierced by a ray of the sun; the presence of a human figure in a ozone hole in the sky implies the cosmological guilt carried by humans in the suffering of the other-than-human world."
According to Lehtonen, a study of indigenous worldviews helps us understand more than altruism. It might also give those from other cultures right here on Earth some experience encountering alien worlds. As Lehtonen puts it, "Indigenous symbols expressing altruism give us yet another way of thinking about communication with other-than-human beings." Encoding Altruism Planetary scientist Alfred Kracher, another workshop participant, takes a similar approach, noting that "virtues such as compassion, sacrifice, serenity, etc., have been promoted across diverse human cultures for a long time by the world religions. Symbols of various kinds have been developed to convey these ideas - stories, images, music, rituals, etc."
But how does this help design intelligible interstellar messages?
In Krachers view, it is exactly the sort of approach that Barkow takes that might help identify cross-species universals, even of artistic symbolism: "Insights from evolutionary psychology allow us to assess which kinds of images and ideas are likely to be the universal results of any evolutionary process." Kracher argues that we might expect symbolic representations of such possibly universal relationships as the parent-child bond.
William Edmondson, of the University of Birminghams School of Computer Science, suggests in his talk that we might not need to convey our altruism through encoded meanings at allit might be enough simply to send intentional signals. In his view, making contact across interstellar space signals altruistic intentions. If communication of any sort is to occur at all over such vast distances, he reasons, great efforts must be made to understand the perspective of the other.
 | SETI@home uses the idle time of over three million personal computers to sift through radio data for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Credit: SETI@home |
Indeed, Edmondson points out the many difficulties humans and extraterrestrials would have to overcome to establish a common ground of understanding. Ideally, he says, we would like to have interactive communication. But given the immense distances between stars, that is simply impossible. A more modest initial goal, Edmondson suggests, is to convey the intention to communicate, providing references to objects known by both humans and extraterrestrials, such as prominent pulsars, an idea harkening back to the Pioneer plaques sent in the 1970s.
David Rosenboom, Dean of the School of Music at the California Institute of the Arts, has a partial antidote to Edmondsons concern that it will be difficult to communicate anything beyond our intention to communicate: send messages that ET can interact with. In his workshop talk, Rosenboom will draw on analogies to experimental music composing, in which the creative process is the responsibility of both the "composer" and the "audience."
From this perspective, if we humans send out messages, some day extraterrestrial intelligent beings (ETI) might becomes co-creators of those very messages through their engagement in decoding them. Instead of sending messages containing static, fully-formed representations, Rosenboom suggests that "sending processes that co-evolveeven in ways we may not be able to predictmay communicate far more
Related Web Pages Terrestrial Planet Finder Home Page
What Does ET Look Like from 40 Light Years Away?
Anybody Out There? Part I
Anybody Out There? Part II
Search for Life in the Universe: Neil deGrasse Tyson Interview
Aliens Depend on Time to Grow Brains
Eddington Mission
Darwin Mission
Herschel Mission
Rare Earth? Are we so special?
SETI Institute
Note: Messages
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