Humans often times have trouble talking to each other.
Take for example a room of 20-somethings, at a party. At any
one time, half of them will be checking their text messages – and be totally
checked out from the “real” world of their fellow party-goers.
I was talking to an same-generation colleague the other day
and together we bemoaned the world of snapchat, text messages, tweets, wechat,
and all the other technology that young adults on Earth engage in. We wondered
about the impact of such “distance friendship” on how they interacted with
people here-and-now, talking about how things weren’t that way when we were
kids.
I paused then commented, “So, you never spent three hours on
the telephone talking to your boyfriend when you were sixteen?”
She looked at me and shook her head, “No, I never did that.”
I harrumphed and said, “Well I did. Uh…to my girlfriend…”
We laughed and she said, “Well, that was different. There
was another person at the other end of the telephone line, and we weren’t
sending...”
Our conversation ended, but it left me wondering. HOW was it
different? WAS it different? To my parents, who’d grown up in the era of swing
dancing and rock and roll, and were the very first generation for whom the “car”
was a serious adjunct to social interactions; talking for hours on a “telephone”
was a strange concept. Separating people and talking to an ephemeral voice
located in a person anywhere from next door to hundreds of miles away, was the
telephone of the 70s any different than the tweets of the TwentyTeens?
What does all this have to do with aliens?
All of the technology above was built to enable
communication. The space age was ushered in NOT because of some obscure need to
“explore”, rather it was ushered in by our very, very real need to TALK.
The first two satellites in 1957 were Sputnik 1 (we all know
THAT story!) and Sputnik 2 (carried the poor dog Laika, who died in space); the
third, Explorer 1 discovered the van Allen radiation belt around the Earth. The
fourth, on December 18, 1958, ushered in the REAL purpose of space “exploration”
– communication. The Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment (SCORE)
satellite’s recorded message from the president of the United States, relayed a
“Christmas greeting from President Dwight Eisenhower. ‘Peace on Earth, Goodwill
to Men.’”
After that, we were hooked. Satellites poured into space
until we had the spectre of a frightening end result. W e flocked to theaters to see a film that jumped off from that spectre – the movie
GRAVITY. (Nominated for 14 Golden Globe Awards, as well as receiving 66 other
awards and 69 more nominations – in four more days, we’ll know how many Academy
Awards it will be nominated for…)
Predicated on the fact that we’ve got so much space junk, a
Kessler Event has a good possibility of eventually happening. Most of that junk comes from our discarded
communications satellites and THAT has happened because we can’t get enough of
talking among ourselves. Did you know that “by 2014…there will be more in-use
cell phones than there are people on the planet right now.”
Above all things, the Human compulsion is to communicate.
The culmination of this compulsion happened in 1974 when
Humanity broadcast a message announcing ourselves to the entire UNIVERSE. With
the blaring of the Arecibo Message, we let the ENTIRE UNIVERSE know that “we
are here”. Sort of like the Dr. Seuss story, HORTON HEARS A WHO, in which the
Whoniverse gives a shout out to all of Horton’s friends – who are ready to
string him up because there is no way an entire universe could exist on a mote
of dust.
Some time after we sent the message – actually about seventy
years – some wisenheimers freaked out and panicked, loudly trumpeting that “We
Shouldn’t Have Done That!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cuz Them Aleens Might Git Us!”
(David Brin: http://www.davidbrin.com/shouldsetitransmit.html,
Stephen Hawking: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1004/30/lkl.01.html).
Of course their hero and even MORE popular physicist and
science fiction writer was diametrically opposed to them and participated in an event that sent a: “bunch of ones
and zeroes. This message originated in 1974, when it was broadcast from the
Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to commemorate the facility's
renovation. The authors of the message, Carl Sagan and SETI founder Frank
Drake, hoped that any aliens who happened to receive it might notice that 1,679
is the product of two prime numbers, 23 and 73, and if you arrange all the
zeroes and ones in a grid of 23 columns and 73 rows, you get a series of
simple, ASCII-like pictures, including a double helix and a crude image of a
person. Whether or not an alien civilization could crack the code, they would
at least notice something funny about these FM signals. They're 10 million
times stronger than the background noise from our sun.”
So whether Brin and Hawking like it or not, the message is
there. We asked ET to text us a long, long time ago – November 16, 1974 and for
exactly 3 minutes – though we haven’t gotten a message back.
The vast majority of Earth’s population neither knows about
nor cares about that text message, but you can expect some sort of ceremony
this year as we continue to wait for a text back...
Resources: http://www.sspi.org/?Static_Timeline,
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/mobile-phone-world-population-2014/
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