We have been listening for messages from outer space

for more than half a century,

and so far...

silence.

Why?

Are we truly alone in the universe?

Or is everyone else acting like us

and just doing a lot of listening?

Maybe we need to be louder.

Maybe we need to send more messages out there.

But how do you write a letter to an extraterrestrial

whose language and culture and biology and mind

we have no concept of?

And what do you say?

And given all of the unknowns about what they might be,

should we say anything at all?

♪♪

Ever since I was a kid,

I've wanted to design a message

that is sent to outer space.

A sort of hello from Earth to whatever extraterrestrials

might be out there.

I mean, come on, to be the author of the first thing

aliens ever heard from our entire planet

would be a fantastic honor.

And as it turns out,

an opportunity to send a message to space

has been given to me.

But it might be a waste of time.

What if there isn't anything or anyone out there to receive it?

The fact that we still have no evidence

of intelligent alien life

despite the high probability that such life exists,

is called the Fermi paradox.

And there are many entertaining theories

that attempt to explain it.

One explanation is the theory

that whenever two civilizations meet,

destruction always results.

Which is why in 2015,

several prominent experts wrote a letter

warning against making any contact at all.

[Stephen Hawking]

Ideas like that suggest that perhaps we should remain silent,

send no messages to space.

But Doug Vakoch disagrees.

He is the president of METI,

an organization that, despite all of these concerns,

is nonetheless actively messaging

extraterrestrial intelligence.

If I want to design a message for life out there,

I should talk to him first.

Why isn't he afraid?

I met up with Doug

at the Chabot Observatory,

home to the largest public refractor telescope

in the Western United States.

-[Douglas] So here we are. -[Michael] Wow.

[Douglas] Yeah.

This was one of the prime telescopes of a century ago.

This is really an antique.

[Michael] Jeez! I've seen so many observatories

and so many big telescopes in pictures.

Believe it or not, I've never been this close to one.

[Douglas] This is a huge instrument,

and yet it's balanced too exquisitely.

I'm like a super person. Oh!

[Douglas laughs]

It had quite a bit of momentum there.

I'm scared to look.

I'm telling you, I had no idea I would have this feeling,

-seeing a telescope this big. -[Douglas] Well, it is, it is.

Can I handle what I would see?

I think you can. I think you can.

You just take a look.

Ah-ha.

-Absolutely nothing. -[Douglas] Not tonight.

-Because of the fog. -Because of the fog.

[Michael] Just the fog coming in is pretty darn cool.

The universe has existed

longer than we have,

but we've only been actively listening for life out there

for the last half century.

In 1960, astronomer Frank Drake began the search

with a 85-foot radio telescope.

He scanned for interstellar radio waves,

but did not detect any recognizable signals.

Soon after, SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,

was formed to continue our search

for other life in the universe.

[Mission Control] Liftoff.

[Michael] Besides just listening,

we've also launched physical messages

like the Golden Records we put aboard

both Voyager spacecraft in 1977.

The records were recordings of images and sounds from Earth

that told a story of who we are as Earthlings,

as well as coded instructions on how to play them back.

Today, Doug and his team at METI

are on a mission to send new messages to the stars.

Thank you for taking some time to have a conversation with me.

My first question is simply this:

where is everyone?

Are we alone?

I don't think so.

You know, we've been looking

for over 60 years.

And so that leads some people to say we must be alone.

The reality is, though,

we have just begun the search.

I mean, we've looked at a few tens of thousands of stars,

and there are 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone.

Billions of galaxies in the universe.

So I think we just need to keep on looking.

When you put it that way,

it actually isn't that surprising, is it?

I mean, we are still discovering species on our own planet today.

At METI, we switch the process,

and instead of just listening for signals,

we send powerful, intentional signals to other stars

in the hope of getting a reply.

What do you say to people who go, "Hold on,

"we should not be alerting any life out there to our presence.

"It's just not worth the risk.

In fact, it's irresponsible."

I would say it is too late.

The horse is out of the barn.

We have been announcing our presence to the universe

since the beginning of radio and television.

Any civilization that has the ability

to travel between the stars

already picked up I Love Lucy.

So maybe the aliens have been observing us,

but they're waiting for us to break the silence.

So our goal isn't to let them know

we're here for the first time.

It's to really give an indication

that we want to make contact.

The one thing that's keeping me from being really excited

and comfortable about sending a message out

is that a lot of prominent people have said, "Don't."

There are some group of scientists who have said

you shouldn't be doing this.

Stephen Hawking.

But that's an example of someone very prominent

who said you shouldn't transmit,

because maybe the aliens will come to Earth.

To me it's notable that, after his death,

to commemorate his life, his family,

they transmitted his voice out into space.

Anyone and everyone can transmit to extraterrestrials.

So I think it's an incredible contradiction

for people involved in SETI to say we shouldn't transmit,

because the day they succeed, everyone will be transmitting.

Okay, so how do we craft a message for E.T.?

Well, it depends what we would want to do.

I would want to know something about that civilization.

And so then we try to figure out,

what is it that we have in common

with the extraterrestrials?

What do you think the aliens would know that we know?

I always go to math.

So that's the natural starting place.

But how can you communicate the idea of numbers?

Like this.

[both clap]

-Hey, look, we're communicating. -Okay, okay, great, great.

You could keep that up. You could use that

to count up to a million.

But that doesn't capture what it is to be human.

Right.

So you want to tell a little bit about yourself.

The goal, for me, is to learn about other civilizations

if, in fact, they're out there.

But I think even if they're not,

simply this process of reflecting on what stories

do we want to tell about ourselves,

how do we want to represent ourselves to the universe,

forces us to look at ourselves anew.

And I think that can only be good.

One of my favorite messages

that humans have ever sent for extraterrestrials

to some day receive was written in 1974

by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan.

They sent the message to a star cluster 25,000 light years away.

It contained 1,679 binary digits

that, when decoded,

created an image:

the famous Arecibo message.

This message is full of general information about us.

Up here in the white are numbers.

Now, since math is probably pretty universal,

I feel like it's fair to say

that aliens will understand that part.

But what about some of these other parts?

This is a human figure, but will aliens be able to tell

that that is supposed to be

the shape of the thing that made this?

Could an alien figure out what all these symbols mean?

For that matter, could a human even correctly figure out

what they all mean?

And I bet that if you were to ask two people

to guess what all this means,

you would get two different answers.

I want to give some humans a message,

and I want to see how quickly they come up with meanings

I didn't put in there, or conflicting interpretations,

because if that happens,

well it could spell trouble for our ability to say much more

than simple mathematical truths to whatever might be out there.

To help me answer this question,

I recruited Dr. Steve Vance.

Dr. Vance leads a habitability team

for JPL's Astrobiology group,

meaning it's his job to think about the possibility

of life on other planets.

I don't think it's crazy

that if the Arecibo message is received,

the alien civilization that gets it

will see all kinds of meanings in it.

They're going to see things through the lens

of how they experience their world.

And I think if we received a message from outer space,

we would think of the ones we've sent out,

and we would look for these pieces in it.

And maybe the message contains none of those things.

I'm really curious about this hypothesis

that they will find meaning where there isn't any.

There's only one way to find out.

-Yeah. Let's do it. -Let's do it.

[Michael] To find out how individuals' own backgrounds

would influence their approach to a message from space,

we sought out a veritable A-team

of critical thinkers and problem solvers

to put to the test.

I'm a sophomore engineer, and I have a PhD in physics.

I'm a game designer and programmer.

I am a professional poker player.

I'm a graphic artist and app coder.

I teach college courses in writing film and psychology.

This set of experts would be told

that the message they were receiving

was intercepted from outer space,

and would be asked to decode it

using a variety of office supplies

and computer software.

What they didn't know is that

although similar to the original Arecibo message,

our message is just noise.

Would our group of experts notice

that there was nothing to get,

or apply their own meanings to this indecipherable message?

It was time to find out.

We received a message

using a radio telescope from outer space.

Not the kind of thing that naturally happens.