I was watching the movie “Contact” the other day. It was my first time watching it, I guess I never got around to it. In it, a scientist finds irrefutable proof of an extraterrestrial message to Earth; the remainder of the film is spent figuring out what that message contains, and also the impact such a monumental discovery has on global society and our place in the universe.
“Contact” is already in some ways a historical document. The Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico, where some of the movie takes place, has been torn down. The Arecibo Telescope was most famous for the Arecibo Message, a communication we once sent out in the search for extraterrestrial life, that could be decoded to show a pictogram with everything from the location of the earth in the solar system, to the foundational structure of our DNA, to the shape of the telescope sending the message itself.
When I was six, I remembered reading some children’s books from the Space Race era of my parents which discussed moonbases and orbital cities in the far flung future of the 1980’s, the exact moment of when I was reading them (talk about a raw deal!) I’m sure they could be forgiven for overwhelming optimism on how such a future would play out. The same living memory when those books were written, mankind had progressed from horse-drawn carriages to orbital satellites.
“Contact” was written by the astronomer Carl Sagan. One of things Sagan was known for popularizing was the Cosmic Calendar, a way of reframing the timescale of the Earth to help humans grasp the yawing depth of deep time, the kind of time that is the measurement of billions of years in which stars die and planets are formed. As humans, our brains are really good at understanding a year, a few years, decades; anything longer seems to fall into REALLY LONG TIME, a sort of big bucket to which anything from the date of your great-grandparents’ marriage to the age of the rock you’re holding might fall into.
The timescale on which we have been listening for extraterrestrials would be a bat of an eyelash on this same timeframe. Critics point out that not having received a message means we aren’t going to receive one -- no one else is out there. The reality is our sample size is really, really small, and space is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BIG, the same kind of distances our human mind is so bad at with when we try to grasp time.
There is a reason why modern discovery often follows the course of first mathematics, then physics, then more practical applications such as chemistry, engineering, medical science. Mathematics is a language that can be used to describe the fabric of everything around us from measuring mountains without a tape measure (trigonometry) to understanding and predicting weather patterns (calculus.) It’s no wonder ancient mathematicians like Pythagoras held new theorems with a mystical reverence, it must have been like having a direct line with God in describing the firmament of the universe.
These fields represent objective truth, discoveries can be readily confirmed and repeated; the course of confirming (or rejecting them outright) is the basis of scientific progress. Notions of objectivity, rather than subjectivity, are important to move forward and improve society. Critics of science and reason complain that because scientific understanding is imperfect, the whole thing must be flawed. Scientists will tell you themselves that often there are mistakes, misperceptions, and unavoidable consequences. Even the Arecibo message which was painstakingly and carefully put together to be read by another species has a second alternate interpretation that would visually be indecipherable. They put as many mathematical cues as they could think of to make the message seem deliberate but another form of life might still be scratching their cranial cylinder with their proboscis at the intergalactic postcard they just got.
The reality is our understanding, the map we draw of the knowledge we already know, improves like a distant summit coming over a horizon. People used to believe bad air caused diseases until statistical analysis, mathematics, pointed to evidence water tainted with microorganisms was the source of cholera. In my own lifetime, we used to think RNA nucleotides were sort of a thoughtless worker bee for DNA, instead we’re discovering it’s critical in many more biological roles than we’d previously assumed, and that change is a key to unlocking whole new fields of medicine.
If the eulogy on humankind is we stepped foot on the Moon and then proceeded to very deliberately and systematically tear ourselves apart, wouldn’t that be a waste? Going back to those books I read as a kid, if looking out at current events seems like it’s on a downhill slope from that absurd trajectory, why is that? “Contact” is of course science fiction, scientists have retired and telescopes decommissioned since the actual search for extraterrestrial life started. But maybe the problem is we have stopped looking altogether. When some of our best scientific minds are being recruited into an arms race of new and ever more contorted means of currency speculation and refining algorithms that force people to spend ever more time on their phones, that’s a huge misallocation of resources.
When people get excited about billionaires who dream about pneumatic tunnels or discovering artificial superintelligence, I get the enthusiasm. But the follow-through to see those ideas to the finish line and accurately hit the mark in terms of their human cost and the cost to the world around us is equally important. The people who quietly sit down and do the tedious work of scientific discovery might never have anything to show for their efforts but they are absolutely necessary to the fabric of our collective human comprehension. It might not be the message from another world, the message that changes everything, but it’s a part of our message.