The mission prompted “Saturday Night Live” to joke that aliens had intercepted the craft and transmitted a four-word reply to Earth: “Send more Chuck Berry.” In 1977, Voyager rocketed into space carrying recordings of animal noises, poetry readings and a library of music, from classical to Chuck Berry. Would sound work better, perhaps along the lines of the synthesizer tones used to communicate with extraterrestrials in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”? “Even the simplest of images will be misinterpreted,” he concludes in a paper on interstellar messages. Thus, attempts to communicate visually with space beings are bound to fail, Hoffman says.
As evidence, his website features optical illusions that demonstrate how the mind can misread and distort external input. Hoffman likens the images our brain “sees” of the world around us to desktop icons on a computer screen, which bear no physical resemblance to the electronics inside. And even the American’s perception isn’t an accurate reflection of reality, he says. To someone raised in a remote jungle, for instance, a mushroom cloud would mean something very different than it does to an average American.
Each picture was carefully chosen to be clearly and easily understood by other intelligent beings, he told the crowd.Īfter Drake spoke, Hoffman took the stage and “politely explained how every one of the images would be infinitely ambiguous to extraterrestrials,” he recalls.Įvolution and culture shape how a brain processes and interprets visual stimuli, Hoffman says. Drake showed the audience dozens of images that had been launched into space aboard NASA’s Voyager probes in the 1970s. Even if extraterrestrials somehow did develop human-style eyes, they wouldn’t interpret images the same way we do, he says.Ī few years ago, at a SETI Institute conference on interstellar communication, Hoffman appeared on the bill after a presentation by radio astronomer Frank Drake, who pioneered the search for alien civilizations in 1960. So it stands to reason that beings from other galaxies would evolve sight systems unlike anything on Earth, Hoffman says. For example, nearly one in five women is born with an extra photoreceptor gene and sees colors invisible to everyone else, according to research led by Kimberly Jameson of UCI’s Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. And honeybees navigate by detecting polarized light.ĭifferences in vision also occur within species. In reality, it’s extremely unlikely that extraterrestrials would see things as humans do, says Don Hoffman, professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine.Įven on our own planet, eyesight varies widely, he notes. The traditional assumption is that photos or other visual images are a universal language that any advanced life form could understand.
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The second quandary is how to communicate with creatures from another world. Should we risk announcing our location to real-life equivalents of Klingons or Stormtroopers? As physicist Stephen Hawking warned in 2010, “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.” Having failed to detect a single peep, some scientists want to turn the tables and begin broadcasting missives from Earth into deep space.įirst and foremost is the possibility of connecting with hostile civilizations. Until now, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – or SETI – has largely been limited to listening for radio signals from other galaxies. In recent years, a fierce debate has erupted over proposals to beam messages toward distant solar systems. Should humans try to contact creatures from other galaxies? Do we really want that force awakened? For scientists, these aren’t esoteric questions. While politicians quibble over how to deal with illegal immigration, an ominous group of foreigners goes unaddressed: space aliens.
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