Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: The Geopolitics of a Successful SETI Detection

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

What would nation-states do in response to a signal from an alien intelligence? Would they compete for status and control of the message, or hope to gain some technological advantage from its contents? Or would the world shrug its shoulders and move on? Professor Jason Wright, Director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, joins the show to discuss a new paper proposing a more nuanced and positive view of world behavior given a potential SETI detection, and how the most likely message we receive may be more ambiguous than we imagine. Discover more here: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/geopolitical-seti-jason-wrightSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, everyone, to the October 2022 Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I am Matt Kaplan, the host of the weekly show, joined, as always the chief advocate and senior space policy advisor to the Planetary Society and my senior partner in the space policy edition. That's Casey Dreyer. Casey, welcome and happy continuing resolution season. Yes, Ed. Happy fiscal new year to all those who celebrate. October 1st is now the fiscal 2023 started. And like it's been as long as I've been doing this, we do not have congressional appropriations yet. We have a continuing resolution. We've extended fiscal year 2022 through December 16th.

It will cover, obviously, the period upcoming with the U.S. midterm elections, the congressional elections. And they will reconvene right before Christmas to hopefully wrap up that legislation before the new Congress begins on January 3rd. There is so much more that we could say about this. And we will maybe next month when we know more. Right. Well, next month, I believe our show comes out before the midterm elections. It's always the second Tuesday of November.

Our show comes out on the first Friday. And so we will precede that. We will take a look at some of the close races at the time. As usual, space is not a big defining topic for most elections coming up in the U.S. Congress. But we will highlight a couple of competitive races and try to see what consequences they may or may not have for Congress next year. And of course, which party controls Congress

will make an impact as well. And apologies, that's what I meant to refer to for next month's show. It'll be our election preview. Is there anything you want to say though now about how things are shaping up? I'm thinking in particular of the bills that were passed by Congress and the Biden administration, which did have some impact for NASA and space exploration and science at large. Well, the biggest bill was the NASA authorization

bill that passed within chips and science bill, this very large industrial science policy. And we've talked a bit about that. We'll dive into that on a future Space Policy Edition episode. But just really, in general, good things for planetary defense. I should acknowledge, since we recorded our last episode, we saw, all of us, hopefully, who's listening to this, the first demonstration of a planetary defense mission, where DART successfully, I think the only spacecraft, well, I don't think so, actually, one of the few spacecraft designed to smash into something on purpose. That was the known end of the mission and succeeded in smashing itself into

that small moonlet of an asteroid Dimorphos. The opportunity to talk about planetary defense was great because it really raised the issue of what's next. And of course, what's next is NeoSurveyor, this deep space infrared planetary defense telescope that is suffering from some pretty significant budget cut proposals in this 2023 fiscal year budget. The two congressional bills that we have seen, one in the House, one in the Senate, that have been proposed but not yet signed into law, this is what was just delayed, both of them restore some funding to Neosurveyor. The Senate restores more. It's on the order of $90 million. The House restores less. It's on the order of 40 million, again, off of a baseline of what we expected and needed for the project of 170. So there's progress in both of those. And the Senate has the better number and overall the better number for planetary science.

But of course, this all needs to be worked out yet and passed into law and melded together by December. And of course, that's far from certain, considering that the post lame duck session, you know, the post session of the elections really will depend on what the future politics is going to be to see whether or not it makes sense to drive consensus or to have one party or another try to slow things down to wait until a perceived advantage in January when the new Congress convenes. So lots of uncertainty still, unfortunately, for this great mission. One that the Planetary Society has been throwing its support behind right from the start. And everybody that we ever talk to on this program recognizes the vital importance of having an infrared telescope in space to help us with this search.

In fact, it will do wonders for this search for these objects that threaten us, of course. I do want to mention, you know, DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, that great success. Congratulations again to the DART team. And, of course, I had on last week's show as we speak, Nancy Schaubo came on right after the impact, hours afterward, to help us celebrate that tremendous success. And I hope people have seen some of the truly incredible. They're not incredible. They're almost incredible images taken by ground-based telescopes and by Licea Cube, that little Italian CubeSat that was following along and really got some spectacular images um we have not mentioned yet your terrific guest and the topic for this week and it is one

that i it's one of the reasons i became a member of the planetary society many many many years ago it's uh seti the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Before you tell us about that guest and introduce him and the work that he has just been part of completing, I'm a member. I know you're a member, Casey. Planetary.org slash join is the place to go. If you want to continue to hear this kind of reporting, Planetary Radio and the Space Policy Edition and everything else that we do at the Society, particularly all the advocacy work that Casey leads for us in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across the world. It all is made possible by our members. So again, we hope you'll check it out at

planetary.org slash join. Tell us about this fascinating guest and a fascinating paper that he has led the creation of. Our guest is Jason Wright. He's a professor at Penn State, astrophysicist and astronomer, and also the director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, right? So really has a lot of interesting focus on SETI. The paper was released just this week. It's called The Geopolitical Implications of a Successful SETI Program. And he's the lead author, along with Chelser Jaramillo and Gabriel Swiney. What really struck me about this paper was that it takes, it's an actual reaction to another paper, and we'll talk about that in the course of the interview. But it tries to take a somewhat thoughtful approach to

what the geopolitical consequences of, you know, what it would be like to detect a SETI signal. And we're really used to thinking about this in a cultural sense. We've seen that in the movie Contact and other things where it's like, what does the culture do when presented with a new intelligence speaking to us? But the real question is, I think, in terms of policy and the subject of this show, is what would nation states do? What would the consequences be? And would there be, in this case, a drive to monopolize information and contact information about the message? Or is there alternative pathways? How would these states react to the potential or perceived advantage of maintaining a monopoly in this?

And so it's a really interesting, broad question. They have a really nice, thoughtful response. There's a broad range of input here, and we'll really get into it on the idea of how we react as a globe to a potential SETI contact. So we're actually recording this opening for the show just before Casey's conversation with his guest. So I cannot wait to hear this.

Like I said, it is a topic that has always fascinated me. And the paper also addresses not just SETI, the search, but METI, the active messaging of an extraterrestrial intelligence. That's also addressed. Right now, I'm reading David Grinspoon's 2016 book, Earth and Human Hands. active messaging of an extraterrestrial intelligence. That's also addressed. Right now, I'm reading David Grinspoon's 2016 book, Earth and Human Hands. And he approaches this also from the cultural standpoint, for the most part. So yeah, this looking at it from the viewpoint of states, I mean, you know, after all, if let's say that, oh, the country of Cameroon

was the first to establish contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence and was given the secret to warp drive. Casey, I can't wait to hear this. And of course, you and I will be back on the other side to close this month's Space Policy Edition. Dr. Wright, thank you for joining us today on the Space Policy Edition. It's my pleasure. You and two co-authors just published a paper that I'm quite fond of, which is why I invited you on the show today. It's called The Geopolitical Implications of a Successful SETI Program. And your co-authors were Chelsea Jaramillo and Gabriel Swinney. It's a response paper, which I think is itself an interesting example of the scientific process or the policy process working as it should, but it takes a

relatively nuanced and detailed assessment of various proposals of how nation states might react to a SETI signal being received. But before we really go into your paper, I'd like you to characterize the paper you're responding to, which was called originally, and we'll link to this in our show notes, called The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a Realpolitik Consideration by Ken Wiesian and John Trafagan. So what's the proposal in that paper and what caused you and your co-authors to write this one in response? Yeah, Wiesian is a military officer, a retired military officer, and John Trafagan is a philosopher who thinks a lot about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And they put this paper together to put on people's radars

a potential for real problems when Asseti's program succeeds. And we always want a plan for success. Your plan has to be more than just where you keep the champagne. It needs to be what you're going to do next. And that has to include how people are going to react. And they proposed that people who work in this field were not ready for the potential big negative fallout geopolitically from nation state level actors getting involved. It's not surprising that they wanted to highlight this particular potential fallout. It kind of tracks the plots of movies like Contact or Arrival, where as soon as contact is made, the military shows up. And there are armed guards in contact literally right there in the control room at the very

large array. And they're concerned about national security and whether there needs to be military intervention to deal with this whole thing. You know, we understand why they had that. And so what they're concerned about is that there will be some information when we make contact in the message that we can decode, that there will be something about how physics works or something. And that whoever sent the signal will almost certainly have been around with technology much longer than humanity. And so there might be morsels of physics or engineering in that signal that would potentially give one nation state a huge military advantage, maybe something like you could build a weapon. And so this was one of the big concerns of contact,

for instance. And so they were concerned that one nation state using a big radio telescope would monopolize conversations with the aliens and be able to control what they think they know about us, control the information flow, get that information, and then turn it into a strategic advantage globally. Importantly, they didn't say this is likely going to happen. They said that the possibility that it could happen means that we need to prepare for that. We need to be ready so that when a signal does come down and nation states potentially do that, our telescope facilities are sort of hardened with their security and SETI researchers involved have personal security so that bad things don't happen to them in the telescopes. When I read their paper, it actually struck me as

plausible, right, upon my first reading of it, right, this idea. And I think it's playing upon historical analogy, right, and the idea that there's a competitive, and I mean, their whole definition of realpolitik is, they admit, is somewhat vague, as I think most people acknowledge it is. But roughly, I mean, the exercise of power as the transcendent motive for state actions over morality or anything else. Right. Right. At the top level, if you just ignore the details, that nation states basically pursue power, they act in the interest of their own power, and that they only respect other nation states' power, ultimately. And so if these signals give whoever is in communication power, military power, then that would be something to compete over. And then you would have espionage and you would have competition over that. And SETI practitioners and radio telescopes would be stuck in the middle. The key point, I think, what I liked in their paper was that they admit it's not even that it would necessarily actually confer a competitive advantage, that there was just be a perception.

That's all it takes. That's the key thing. So it's regardless of what the signal in this case would actually be. What did you find incorrect with that assessment? And you and your co-authors, I should say to you, like, this is not just you. Off the bat, I felt like it misunderstood how radio astronomy and SETI work. I had a few technical, you know, I thought that the nature of contact that they were imagining was actually impossible, like even optimistically. And I thought that the nature of contact that they were imagining was actually impossible, like even optimistically. And I thought that their solutions, the things they thought nation states would do, go get the radio telescopes wouldn't work.

And so it wouldn't be something you'd want to do. And I thought that their solution was counterproductive. And so I thought their paper would have been better if they had talked to or had as a co-author a SETI person, a radio astronomer, who could have corrected some of those misconceptions. But I didn't want to just come back and write as a radio astronomer with no background in geopolitics, right? No connection to the military, no background in philosophy and argue with these people who are experts in those fields about things I don't know much about. And so that's why I went and I got some co-authors. people who are experts in those fields about things I don't know much about. And so that's why I went and I got some co-authors. One of my co-authors, Chelsea Jaramillo, is a philosopher

who specializes in the ethics of astrobiology, especially SETI. And Gabriel Swinney was at the State Department for a long time doing space law and was an architect of the Artemis Accords. And so really understands how nation states actually handle sensitive topics with potential military applications like going to space and things like that. So the three of us crafted a response, pointing out the problems with their paper, but then also suggested, you know, what we think we should do, because, you know, we agree that nation states misunderstanding SETI might overreact in silly ways that are irrational. And we should think about that,

but we don't think that the right solution is to act like it's foregone and start hardening security and giving ourselves, preparing for that. I mean, that might actually imply that we found something or implied that that reaction is appropriate from nation states, you know, if we go first. And so we don't think we should start that arms race now. Another reason is that if you were to try and treat radio telescopes the way we treat nuclear facilities, for instance, you know, which have a lot of security for good reason, it just wouldn't

work. Radio astronomy, as we know it, would not survive that sort of treatment. These radio facilities are open to the whole world. It's very transparent. It would make astronomy much less efficient and much more expensive to do that. And so you need a good reason. And we don't think this is a good enough reason to do that. I'd like to unpack some of the technical issues first, because I think it's actually really fascinating for me. So, I mean, I will I'll just say, a generalist understanding of SETI versus the advancements that really been made in analysis and thinking about the potential topic and what a signal might even be. What really struck me, I'd like to talk about just a couple of the critiques that you make about what a signal might actually look like and the assumptions being

made, I think, not just by these authors, but actually, I'd say most people, when they think about a signal, it's going to be really defined by popular narratives of what we've seen in contact or arrival or any number of things. And I think it's a function of our brains really seeding or latching onto the idea of an event, like a discrete event where something happens. And it's really clear, and it's a message that wants to be decoded. So first, I'll start with this critique that you talk about how the scenario presented is very unlikely, given the range of possible scenarios. And one of those is the idea that there will be a single message that is meant to be decoded being received that's very, very obvious. And you talk about this idea that the actual process of detecting or even confirming a signal could actually be an ongoing

and continuous process. That's right. So I mean, so I mean, step back and let's explain what type signal in terms of likelihood in the SETI community now, what are we actually expecting to find or what would even be argued as most likely scenario that we would face? And how do we then make the decisions based on that in terms of policy preparation? Yeah, I mean, the view, people's view of what SETI is and how it works really goes back to the beginning, to the Frank Drake and Project Osmo at Green Bank Observatory. to the Frank Drake and Project Osmo at Green Bank Observatory. And back in the 60s, when radio said he started, it was only just barely possible for humanity to be able to send a signal that humanity might be able to detect at interstellar distances. And so when they talked about what kind of signal you'd have to detect, it would have to be something really powerful and probably almost certainly directed at Earth specifically. Anything else would be too weak. So they would have loved, they wrote in their

early papers, they would love to try and eavesdrop on their equivalent of cell phone transmissions on their planet. But over interstellar distances, those are just so weak, you have no hope of detecting them. So what they were looking for were powerful radio transmissions deliberately pointed at Earth to get our attention, because those were the only signals that the telescopes at the time were sensitive enough, could detect given their sensitivity. And so if you're thinking, oh, they're sending us a powerful signal, then you've already ascribed all these different motivations to them, that they want our attention they're going to do something that we can understand in the film contact they sent it back using our modulation techniques so that they knew that we would quickly be able to decode it if they've already received

our radio transmissions then you know they might know the languages we use they might know our mathematics and so it was possible that there'd be this strong signal that we would immediately decode and would have all sorts of useful information in it, which is what happens in contact. But aliens don't have to be doing that. At the time, that was the only thing you could look for. And so the stories were, if we find it, it'll be amazing. But if aliens are out there just doing their thing, sending out radio waves, maybe they're weaker signals, they're talking to each other, not to us, and we pick that up, there's no reason to think we could decode it. I mean,

you know, if it's a totally alien modulation scheme, and they're talking in their own computer language, it might be impossible to figure out what's going on there, especially if it's encrypted, right? At that point, you're done. The road to discovery has sort of changed as we've gotten more sensitive and thought about these other ways to find things. We also don't only look for radio waves now. We might look for the waste heat of alien industry on another planet, or we might be looking for laser signals, or we might be looking for probes in the solar system or something. And so that scenario that's in contact that Project Osmo is imagining is now just one possibility in a big, wide range of things that

we might find. Now that said, their argument wasn't that that is what we'd find. It's that it's what we might find. And it's in contact. It is something we talk about as a possibility. And so it's not unreasonable to prepare for that outcome. That, after all, is the most exciting possible outcome of a SETI search. But yeah, I think the more likely thing is we'll find something weird. We'll wonder if it's aliens. We'll kind of argue about it. We'll slowly settle in. Yeah, that really can't be natural. We really think we keep seeing radio waves there. And then it's like, okay, there's an alien civilization there, but you know, it's not like we're, we're in contact with them. You're talking, this is the essence of a techno signature in the sense that we have a biosignature

doesn't mean we found a little organism zipping around that we can study. We've seen a hint of something theoretically, right? Jill Tarter, who's one of the founders of the field of SETI, Radio SETI, coined the term technosignature to make the analogy to biosignatures explicit and to remind us of the huge range of ways we might detect technology. And so that beacon that we were

talking about, that loud signal that has the information, that would be an example of a technosignature. But we're looking for a much broader range of technosignatures than just that. Only in that situation, that's like step one of a lot of things that have to happen for their concerns to be valid. Right. And thinking about this and just the range of techno signatures are so much broader than a directed intentional signal, then you're just kind of reasoning by statistics that there's probably many more ways in which we'll find. There's more techno signatures than there are directed signals, probably. I mean, I don't know what the probabilities are. If they were writing this paper in 1965, then yeah, that might be the only thing you could discover. But right, there's many more

options now and success has a lot of different faces now. Do you think the SETI field internally has kind of moved beyond the intentional signal as the driving force of discussion at this point? Or is it still because I was thinking, as you were describing this from the historical, and it's not just I wonder if the historical sense of what's what was detectable, but it certainly seems like I wrote about the 25th anniversary of contact just the other month. And I was really struck revisiting the book and the movie about this kind of pseudo-religious projection that's being placed into that whole context of wanting something external to come down and save us from ourselves

and represent this utopia that is so far denied to us, right? And it's kind of a projection of faith that we would look out and it's a place that it's a signal that wants to be detected, that wants to help us, that has all this possibility. But it really, again, seems like a projection of different desires, right? Sagan's pretty explicit about the religious nature of that. It's an explicit theme. And that's so seductive and desirable to think about, it kind of dominates the conversation. So do you think, is that a productive aspect to keep focusing on? Or like in this paper, you almost see it as a misstep that they focus solely on that scenario, based on these broader range of things? Yeah, I mean, I can only speculate on

this. I haven't studied this stuff from a social sciences perspective, but I imagine that one of Carl Sagan's purposes in writing it that way was sort of a corrective to a lot of science fiction where the aliens want to eat us, right? Ever since War of the Worlds, contact in science fiction has involved often evil aliens coming to get us. And there's, you know, there's some good ones. There's close encounters of the third kind, there's ET, and those are nice. But for the most parts, you know,

those soldiers come with guns and we try and shoot down the UFOs. And so emphasizing that we don't know what contact will happen. And, you know, you might worry it'll be bad, but it might also be incredibly good. It might be the best thing that ever happened to humanity. And you might worry it'll be bad, but it might also be incredibly good. It might be the best thing that ever happened to humanity. And we just don't know. You can't rationally make a decision when you just have no idea what's going to happen. But we also wanted to emphasize that it doesn't have to be dramatic. The more likely outcome is that we'll just know they're there. Physical contact means that

they're here in the solar system. That's one kind of study that people kind of do. But for the most part, the stars we're targeting are hundreds or thousands of light years away. And so even if it is a communicative signal, even if that signal is intended for us to decode, we can't respond. I mean, we can send the signal back. But I mean, if the thing is 200 light years away, then, you know, we say, oh, great, we got your message, tell us about XYZ. And 400 years later, we get the answer. So this is not going to be the sustained contact where we ask questions, how do your laser beams work? How do we put them on our tanks? Like that's, that's not going to happen. And that's, I think, one of the misunderstandings they had in the lesion and trap pig and paper.

Another thing you identify is the idea of monopolizing. So I kind of want to put communication off to the side just for a minute, because that's a kind of a whole other aspect of this. But even in terms of receiving, they make this argument that radio telescope observatories, they're big, they're expensive. There's a handful of them around the world capable of detecting a signal like this. Right. But you point out that that's, I like what you said, like once a signal is received, the requirements to detect it shrink considerably. So how is it, is it ever possible to have a monopoly on the reception of such a signal? You know, again, giving you this range of

what a signal would look like. But in terms of just radio astronomy a signal, you know, again, giving you this range of what a signal would look like. But in terms of just radio astronomy in general, you're receiving a signal, it's kind of used as an analogy here. Why can't that work? That's right. So the radio waves from space are hitting the whole planet. They're not going to be targeted at a specific observatory. That's just physics. They're going to hit the whole planet at once. And so the question is who can receive it? So when we build these giant radio telescopes for radio astronomy, you have to understand there's not just one frequency we look at. Those observatories have over a factor of a hundred in frequency that they can search at often. And they have a lot of different kinds of spectrographs and other things on them to do different kinds of radio astronomy.

And so they're general purpose instruments. They have many, many backends, many, many receivers. And so they're really expensive because they can look anywhere in the sky and they can do like any kind of radio astronomy. But once you know it's at this frequency coming from this place and this is the bandwidth of the signal, then it's easy.

Then you just need one instrument to do that and it doesn't have to be general purpose. So the analogy I use is that our modern observatories are like toolboxes that you know, you can build a house with. But once you know all you have to do is turn a screw, then you just need the screwdriver and that's a lot cheaper than a toolbox. Our point is that once the information and where it is and what frequency it's at is out, then you don't need those general giant observatories. Now there is one case where you could do it, and that's if it's a very weak signal. So there's this narrow range of strengths where it's weak enough that only the largest telescopes in the world can decode it. But it's strong enough that you the largest telescopes in the world can decode it.

But it's strong enough that you can still decode it with those telescopes, because detecting it is much easier than decoding it. I suppose that could happen. That's a very specific signal strength that seems unlikely to me. But also, you can combine radio telescopes together. And by radio telescopes, I mean like satellite dishes. And so any information monopoly you could establish by controlling the radio observatory that's looking at it

would be pretty short-lived because someone's just going to rig all their satellite dishes up together and get the same collecting area. And now they've got it too. Yeah. They do that in the Deep Space Network all the time. They use their 34 meters, phase them together to help augment or replace the 70 meter. Although in this case, you don't even need to phase them up. You could just do an incoherence and add it up. Yeah, it's a pretty straightforward task, I think. This is what I think is so interesting combined with your argument about this time domain aspect, where even if you are able to communicate, I mean, you could build a new facility in 10 years if you wanted, or faster probably if you wanted to.

And so, yeah, any advantage, any competitive advantage a nation would have from its existing infrastructure, as you point out, would last a very short amount of time. Very short. Right. I mean, think about how many radio dishes there are on Earth, all those satellite dishes. And how do you know which ones are doing that and which ones are just doing life? So, yeah, it doesn't seem feasible. Is there any opportunity then for a monopoly? which ones are just doing life. So yeah, it doesn't seem feasible. Is there any opportunity then for a monopoly? I guess it's physically, it sounds like no, just in terms of how the physical world works for something like this,

beyond what you just identified as this really weak, but strong enough signal. But even then, you know, there's still like the fast, you know, China has these big telescopes. They have their own telescopes, right. And we can link them together. And so the only way is if somehow the signal were detected and no one knew where it was or what frequency it was at, and they had to find it themselves. Now, knowing it's out there,

you're going to put a lot of effort into finding it. And so that might be short-lived anyway. But the SETI community is extremely transparent about what stars they're going to be looking at and posting their data out for everyone to see. And the protocols that we have are that you let everyone know the frequency and position as soon as you're sure it's real. And so the only hope you have of a monopoly is right when it's detected, no one talks. And that's just not how we work. no one talks and that's just not how we work. Or, I mean, I suppose to, to, to give credence to this real politic attitude, if it was this perceived advantage,

even if it wasn't wrong that you could, you could gain a monopoly by if you detect it, if your nation detects it first, and then you to the point of the, this original paper, you can sabotage other large astronomy uh facilities right away and just to but all that does is delay and obviously that puts you in a pretty that's a pretty provocative action right to take globally right it depends like how much perceived advantage is conferred there but that's a i mean to your argument this entire paper a relatively extreme

scenario probably not the most likely thing you mentioned the SETI, it's not code of conduct, it's the protocols. Those exist. That's important to acknowledge that those are out there. What do they roughly say? What generally do the SETI protocols say? For decades, the International Academy of Astronautics has had a committee, a permanent committee on SETI. And this is where astronomers working in the field from all over the world get together to talk about these issues, in particular post detection protocols, which is what do you do after a discovery? In 1989, they put forth the Declaration of Principles on how to do SETI. And they tell us how we're supposed to act.

And so the first thing you're supposed to do is confirm it's real. We don't want false alarms. And that's proved a little impractical. We're so transparent about this stuff, it tends to leak out that we found something cool. I remember the Proxima signal and Tabby's Star and the recent FAST signal.

And we always check. We never say we found it until for sure, but it leaks out. And so that one feels maybe not like it works very well. So you have to check and make sure it's real and get it confirmed by another group with different equipment at a different site. Because what you're really worried about is that you've actually just detected local radio transmitters, or even it could be spoofed, which would be bad. So once another group has independently confirmed it, then you tell everybody. You tell the United Nations, you tell your governments, you tell other scientists,

you put it out on the astronomer's telegram, so it'll go out within an hour. And you don't respond is the last one. You let the world figure out how it's going to respond to the signal. Rapid and open sharing and then no action taken. Well, no response taken. No response taken before some consensus, global consensus can be met. I mean, that's an important point that they mean, this has been considered and thought about for decades. And the conclusion was kind of the opposite of hunkering down and monopolizing the idea.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, keep in mind, this is 1989. And so, you know, Carl Sagan and others are thinking about this. And I think these heavily influenced things like contact, you know, that once the cat's out of the bag, there's not very much the government can actually do to even try an information monopoly, even if it were possible. It's one of those things, I think, where I was thinking an analogy. This is very similar to how we've set up early detection of potentially threatening asteroids through the neo detection networks. There's no you can almost make a similar reasoning analogy to the monopoly of knowing that an asteroid is going to come our way and having that that could confer some power. But the problem I mean, the problem is, is that all this stuff is open and immediately shared.

It's very all this data is published raw to these centralized databases as soon as they find them. There's no attempt. It's actually the opposite. There's an attempt to openly share this as much as possible to remove that distrust created by monopolizing information. So I thought that was an interesting comparison that this is a, the trend in terms of actual implementation in these scientific fields has been open transparency, not the opposite. Do you find that that applies globally or is that generally a... In general, yeah. In general, it's pretty open.

I mean, like with the asteroids, the point is the raw data go out before you know you have found something interesting. And so anybody looking at the data could come to the same conclusion. It's already gone. Once it's out there, you can't bring it back. The protocols are pretty widely well known in the SETI community. We should point out they have no legal force. This is not a treaty. There's no call on governments to force SETI practitioners to abide by them. It's completely voluntary. State Department's not involved. It's just this document that we know about. And so, you know, we don't have to do it, but we all know about it and they all make

sense. And more importantly, we all have buy-in because the ongoing conversation for the post-detection protocols are happening alongside all the other work. We just had a symposium here where we were talking about all the new study things. And right in the middle of the symposium, we have this really nice long, days-long session about the post-detection protocols and what you should do if you find something. And a lot of those are actually mostly concerned with how is humanity going to react, not just at the nation-state level, but just in general. You know, will there be apocalyptic cults? Like, are you going to, you know, be getting harassed online and in real life?

And what's going to happen afterwards. And so that's where the Vision and Trap Hagen paper is interesting because it's really interesting in the nation state. More SETI and even some METI when Casey and his guest Jason Wright return in one minute. Hello, I'm George Takei. And as you know, I'm very proud of my association with Star Trek. Star Trek was a show that looked to the future with optimism, boldly going where no one had gone before. I want you to know about a very special organization called the Planetary Society.

They are working to make the future that Star Trek represents a reality. When you become a member of the Planetary Society, you join their mission to increase discoveries in our solar system, to elevate the search for light outside our planet, and decrease the risk of Earth being hit by an asteroid. risk of Earth being hit by an asteroid. Co-founded by Carl Sagan and led today by CEO Bill Nye, the Planetary Society exists for those who believe in space exploration to take action together. So join the Planetary Society and boldly go together to build our future. There's one more thing I just want to mention, and then really moving on to the political analysis here, which is something, again, that is obvious in retrospect, but something we take for granted, I think, this idea that you would get a technological benefit

from communication with a... Yeah, we really dug into this. Yeah, and I loved loved that i thought that was a really just excellent point so i mean summarize again why should we not expect to be given some encyclopedia galactica or why or even having it be relevant so let's all right so let's grant all their premise it's a it's a beacon it's meant for us we immediately decode it it can only be you know gotten by one telescope which your soldiers are in control of, and you're getting this stuff. And yeah, you can't respond, but they just sent you everything you wanted out. They're just like, right, here's the Encyclopedia Galactica, go to town. And then all of a sudden, we imagine it's like, you know, one of these time travel movies or

something, right? Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court. Suddenly, we've got 27th century technology, and out of the observatory come all these, you know, laser tanks and hovercrafts that perfectly cloak or whatever. And you've got a super army. I mean, technology just doesn't work that way. And so the example we gave is, you know, let's say we gave a textbook on, on nuclear warhead design and delivery engineering and physics to European medieval scholars and translated it for them. It'd be totally useless to them. There's nothing they could do with this. First invent electricity, right? Or invent calculus. Understand that there are atoms.

Understand how to separate plutoniumium the amount of time it would take you to cat i mean to hurry things up a little bit you'd have the book you wouldn't have to just figure it out but the amount of and so much of science and technology it's it's it's non-linear and it's cumulative and it's networked it's like you need to under you need to do this thing before you can do this thing and they all come together together. And until everything's working, you can't make that next step. It assumes that to concede the idea that you can get some technological advantage right away from an alien signal would be that their technology is just right above. Not that it's, if it's seven centuries above, it's useless, right? It's got to be something

that you're on the threshold of that you can understand and go, ah, okay, we can build that. And that's the next step. And our point is, if you're that close, that just one little morsel or nudge pushes you over, everyone's pretty close. This is not this enormous advantage. This is something everyone's working on. And them seeing you do it, they're going to go, oh, that's possible. And that's going to nudge them as well. And so even if there were some morsel that were super useful militarily, it's something that we're close to working on anyway. And the advantage is going to be short-lived. Again, there are probably edge cases. There are probably edge cases. Maybe there is just that one light bulb idea, suddenly we get our laser tanks. But I mean, I like what even you said that even if it say it does grant, you can say, oh, that shaves off 500 years of development, it's still maybe 500 years into the future, right? Maybe just out of, we were originally going to do it in a thousand years. Now we do it in 500. It has no immediate impact. And it really, I mean, again, what I like about this discussion that you had in the paper and even the paper that predicated this is it really

illuminates I think how fallible our brains are in terms of like presentism and like centrism where we really are seeing everything through the immediate existence like all of this is predicated on something being immediately relevant through the political dynamics we have roughly right now and and only through our kind of cultural lens and it's and again it's humbling when you start to think about even if you did have a directed signal it still may be completely likely to be completely meaningless because of the insane range of possibilities that we just ignore because we're so hopelessly steeped and stewing in our own kind of a human centric and cultural more. Yeah. I mean, the way that they got around this in contact is that it was our signals that went out that were the template of, of what came back.

And then, you know, at the end it's her memories and her consciousness that they're using as the interface to talk to us, or it's all completely relevant. But that they're using as the interface to talk to her. So it's all completely relevant. But again, that's really contrived. Yeah. Well, I mean, and to your point, like for this scenario to happen the way it was outlaid to really have this real politic competition scenario. or your analysis here was that it's one unlikely thing piled onto another unlikely thing, and then unlikely, unlikely, unlikely that you're getting a directed signal

meant to be decoded, has relevant technology, just a power of one, and so forth. Yeah, and so it seems just, it's an unlikely scenario. And so again, I might just flip this around and say, before we even move on to the political stuff, do you think, just a gut, and obviously we're all speculating, but you can speculate as an expert in this field, what would be the most likely SETI scenario in your personal opinion that we would have? And then we can build off of that

just as a thought experiment. I can make an educated guess, but again, I don't know what likelihoods are. Sure. I think we can all be fair. I really didn't want to be very agnostic about whether there's anything to find or what it might be like. But my guess is that it'll look a lot like biosignature life detection, that we're going to see something odd. Someone's going to say, hey, maybe that's what we've been looking for, but it's not going to be obvious. And people will come up with very clever natural scenarios that would have produced that. And it'll be a long road of excluding everything else until aliens are the only thing left.

And then, okay, we know they're there. And so this is something Milena Cherkovich calls bare contact. Bare contact is just, we know they're there. They're over there. They do something weird with radio. That's it. And there's not much contact there.

And I think most people will end up being very bored with that. It'll be this gee whiz thing, you know, the New York Times will be very excited and everybody go, gosh, they're out there. They're really out there. Wow. Okay, cool. And life goes on.

Maybe like in the sense that we know quasars are out there, right? Like they're kind of an amazing thing when you think about it, but it's so remote and distant. thing when you think about it, but it's so remote and distant. I mean, it'll have a big impact on the intellectual history of Earth, right? It'll be a watershed moment, but it won't change day-to-day life. Now, I need to be mindful that social scientist colleagues that work on these post-detection protocol issues have repeatedly reminded us that these sorts of ideas of whether we're alone in the universe, they matter to a lot of people in a lot of ways.

And it's not really clear how a lot of different groups will respond. I mean, people have thought about, oh, what will the Catholic Church think about there being other aliens? Do they have souls? And it turns out the Catholic Church is cool with that. It doesn't really matter. But there are a lot of other people that might react badly to that sort of thing. And there's going to be repercussions for such a big idea. The scientists themselves will also become the focus of a lot of stuff, irrational stuff. They'll probably be targeted for harassment and who knows. And so even if it's not state level actors that we have to be afraid of, we do have to be cognizant of the world we live in when you do something really big that

people really care about. And so we try to work a lot with them to understand that and be more cognizant of the things that will happen when we succeed. That's a really good point. I think, obviously, COVID was probably a really good example of the range of responses possible given a really unambiguous signal, right? So considering an ambiguous signal of that magnitude could really have a broad swath of things too, including, yeah, I think that's a really good point, consequences for individuals as part of this. I'd like to move on to some of the political critiques in particular, and we'll hit on just a few of these because I think they're just a good counterpoint. And I'd like to bring up some of the stuff that's been happening broadly and how you integrate this with your paper.

But one of the political critiques is that realpolitik is not a correct way to really think about the motivations and interactions between modern nation states. And I think as an alternative was really given prestige and influence seeking as a co-equal, if not more powerful. And you point out in your paper and your colleagues that receiving a steady signal would be the highest prestige, one of the highest prestige events you could think of as a state. You would sing that to the rooftops. You wouldn't hide it. You would use it to show off how great your technology is or scientific capability is. Do you see that as kind of the, is that really the core of the political response and that this is a more likely scenario than a real politic one? We do make that argument, but it doesn't go, phrase that way, it's not exactly rebuttal because Wieschen and Traphagen aren't saying that the real politic analysis is correct, but they're saying that it is sufficiently plausible

that that somewhat discredited worldview of how geopolitics works, you know, it still has some explanatory power. And if it has any that comes into play there, then you need to worry about it, that it's a low probability event, but it's a sufficiently severe one that you have to protect against it. We do point out that that's probably not a good description of what will happen. We do point out that, just as you say, far from trying to keep it a secret, nation states will want to monopolize the press they get for it. And as you say, sing it from the rooftops. And that there are many more likely scenarios. The point we make, though, is that given there are all those other scenarios, some of which point in exactly the opposite direction, the question is, which one

of those should be action guiding? You can look at one bad thing that might happen and defend against it, but you can't do that to the exclusion of every other thing that could happen. What they failed to argue is that all other responses should be pushed to the side for that one. And given that these other responses also have tremendous benefits to states and that there are so many other things that can happen, we think that that's not the right response to just go and even precipitate that and just take it as a foregone conclusion and defend against it now is the wrong step to take. I think that's a really good point to make that really it's not that they're completely flat out wrong. It's what drives our policy going forward. And this is where I think you really push back against this idea of hardening

radio facilities and SETI facilities, which you argue could precipitate the exact reaction they're afraid of happening, right? If you take a preemptive paranoid approach to it, you may instigate the type of behavior you're paranoid about happening. Right. I mean, if the US government suddenly hardens down the radio telescopes, whenever city people are there, and I have all these put all this personal security, I mean, any rational person is going to think we found something. And it's really important. And immediately the espionage starts, right? And you've just it's become a self fulfilling prophecy. We argue that instead of taking it as foregone, we should prevent it in the first place. Because after all, it's going to be based on misunderstanding. And so let's make better understanding instead. Yeah. I mean, I think you have really interesting comparative analogies between a lot of the

unidentified aerial phenomenon studies that are happening in the Pentagon, which are secret and therefore gain so much more attention for being secret and protective that people just assume that there's something there. Whereas if it was more open, it probably wouldn't. Right. I mean, those stories just drive me nuts, right? I mean, we know that the military is really secretive. That's not a secret. They'll be the first to tell you that. And it's very, very reasonable that they study the things in their airspace. Like I hope they do. That's like their job, right? And so when this big government report comes out that secretly studying unknown things in our airspace, it's like, duh, like there should be

a lot of these. But instead it's aliens are real. It's a cover up of aliens. Oh my God. Yeah, it hasn't been a productive example. It's kind of to the point. It's not a productive approach to these. You can't suppress. Suppressing information is really hard. And you even mentioned that in the paper, that information itself is just leaks. It's a leaky thing. It's worse than molecular hydrogen when filling in a rocket. It just goes everywhere. Well, and that's something that we say that, you know, the analogy, which you're in traffic and want is that hardened security, like you do at a nuclear facility. Well, at a nuclear facility, you have physical material that can't get out.

That's what you're hardening it against. At the observatory, it's the coordinates of the target. You can't protect that with guns. This all changes a bit when we're looking at medi, like messaging or an active SETI scenario. And I can see that being more. So there you have a potentially monopolistic situation of who is sending the message or you just send a bunch of messages, right? Theoretically, if you're going through even a global coalition, what about the nation states that don't agree with the outcome of that? And you have a functional monopoly through the coalition decision. And so I guess I could see it. You kind of put that to the side. And obviously, this becomes a very unlikely scenario based on a lot of the conversation we've just had. But do you see a messaging scenario

as to be a more likely competitive or antagonistic situation than just a passive setting? Yeah, I think so. There's a lot to unpack with many and sending signals out, but it depends a lot on what we're sending signals to, right? If this thing is a thousand light years away, there's going to be a lot

of messages said in that in a light travel time but you know this presumes that we know how to communicate back it presumes that the signal we get tells us how to respond and that that response will be interesting so the the sort of worst case scenario for metis for me is we find something in the solar system communicating with us. Because suddenly you can actually have communication and handshakes and maybe actually, I mean, electronic handshakes and like actually exchange information meaningfully. In that situation, I think it does become important who sends what. If you need an extremely powerful transmission to be heard,

like it's at the nearest star or something, then there really are only a few facilities that can do that. You can't do that with satellite dishes. You need a big megawatt transmitter on the back of an enormous telescope. And so that really could be monopolized. I agree with you that sending those signals, that is a case where you're talking about nation states making decisions and potentially monopolizing things. On the other hand, anyone can send the signal and the length of the monopoly could be short lived. Radio telescopes, once you know what you're doing with them, they don't have to be that expensive to build, you know, millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars. And so there's a lot of actors that could do that. But at least then, in principle, yeah, you can compete. This is kind of bringing my last topic here, which was, has this paper I felt was kind

of mostly written probably before the war in Ukraine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's right. That's totally right. I was really thinking about some of the arguments in terms of motivations of nation states and monopolizing information or even perceived advantage, given what we've seen in Russia has been kind of an anti-influential or anti-prestige action, you know, kind of a function. You know, they've lost so much global prestige. They've removed themselves from global cooperation as a consequence of that.

And it hasn't mattered because it was a function of, and you even have a discussion of this in your paper, kind of the meaning of a collective interest of a nation state and who they represent. But at the end of the day, the cadre that controls the nation state takes the action, right? And it almost was turning back to almost more of a real politic type of interpretation based on what we've seen recently. And so that was really fascinating to me to think about what, you know, and I mean, that maybe real politic is not the right term for this, but I can see a problem with autocratic states in a situation like this, where the perception may not be based in reality, but based in like Putin resentment or delusion or puffed up ideas of national destiny, or even a domestic audience that they want to retain influence and power over, it kind of goes back to this idea of

do you almost like trust? So if there's an open sharing and open presentation of data that's being received from a potential signal, you still have to have the trust that all that data is actually being put out there. And if there are motivated autocratic nations that want to define themselves against kind of that collaborative global order, I could see that breaking down. So this, you're hearing my perspective, but I guess I was curious, like, has anything challenged your approach to this, based on what we've seen in Russia, and also to some degree in China, just in the last year, in terms of how the behaviors of

those states are impacting the globe? Hmm, I mean, I guess, just to riff first on our paper, one of the critiques we have about realpolitik is, you know, how do you define the nation state? As you say, it's typically a small cadre of people making those decisions. And it's really those people that control all of the power. You're not talking about the collective nation. You're talking about the small number of people in power. You know, we also ask, why is the nation state the right collective to point to? Why not giant corporations? Why not the planet as a whole? Just philosophically, how do you draw that line and why as a critique of realpolitik overall? As for, you know, what we've learned from the war in Ukraine, I'm just so out of my wheelhouse on this one. I think I'm not, you know, do my armchair amateur political analysis on all of that. But I think it's a good point. I do appreciate how you point out that Russia has kind of destroyed its international prestige and that that's not the only motivation.

I can also imagine, you know, if we make contact, there are going to be, you know, states that put themselves on the map by decoding the message or sending a message. You can imagine, you know, rogue signals from North Korea or, you know, Australia, you know, launches this huge program to be the premier detector of these signals or something like that. Or corporations, Elon Musk, right, becomes the big player. Who knows? It's all about who has the resources and power to do something. And this is where I think the messaging aspect, to me really resonates more with the original kind of competitive monopolistic fear or worried scenario, which again, we should emphasize seems more unlikely, you kind of laid out probably a more likely SETI scenario. But

again, yeah, and I don't really have an answer either. Right. And so I was just it was interesting to me again, reading this paper in the context of the war in Ukraine, and thinking about motivations of states. And, you know, at the end of the day, I don't think Putin cares whether he represents all of the Russian people, he deigns to do it, and therefore acts in it. And so it's almost, regardless of whether that's true or not, he has the power in that scenario, which goes back again, unfortunately, to this real kind of structure of interpreting actions. I could see a scenario in whether various nations refuse to accept the good intentions of a Western alliance scientific, dominated scientific system, releasing information, whether they trust that or decide to trust it or not. Or what you said

about North Korea is a really interesting scenario as well. And how do you gain a Jockey 4 influence through there? So to me, the story has become a bit more complicated, actually, unfortunately, frankly, right? This is all an unfortunate development. But really fascinating, again, to read this paper in that context. And maybe it could be an interesting area of future discussion.

Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about these post-detection papers is that they really are focusing after a detection has been made. And the big point we make at the end of our paper is until we detect it, we don't really know what we're doing. The nature of the signal, how far away it is, whether we can respond, whether we can decode it, those are all huge decision points that totally change the reactions of governments and people on earth.

And we just don't know. And so for now, questions of like, should we transmit just seems so hypothetical that no one cares. I mean, people get upset about it, but like governments don't care. People will sometimes ask us, you know, does the government like, you know, follow what you're doing in case you find anything so they can send the troops in. And Jill Tarter likes to joke, we wish the government paid that much attention to us because then maybe they'd give us some money. But the fact is no one cares.

And until there's a detection, it's just not going to rise to the level that the government should even bother spending any resources worrying about it. bother spending any resources worrying about it. And so what we have are small, privately funded groups that occasionally make a big show of sending a message out. But they're not targeting anyone we know of. They're just, here's a nearby star. And for 30 minutes, we sent a bunch of bits with a pretty weak transmission. If they just happened to have a giant telescope pointed at Earth right then at the right frequency, they'd get a bunch of bits and do they already know we're here do they care that we sent the bits why were they losing it just it seems so unlikely to matter that yeah nobody nobody with any authority cares but that all changes as soon as we have a real signal right to some degree this is the modern angels dancing on the head of a pin debate at that

level. Right. Let's get to the first detection. But again, I think what's valuable about your paper, and again, what I really did draw from it, and I think the real benefit here is regardless of all these potentials, the least bad option going forward is the openness aspect. Given what little we know, the least destructive thing we can do is to just default to open sharing and then deal with it versus preemptive paranoia or consolidation

or it's it's really leading into that openness and i did take that away as a really strong argument from the piece from the paper itself right because i mean i i would hate for the scenario they outlined to actually happen that would be. And if we were if we aren't thinking about it, if they hadn't brought it up, and no one ever worried about that, I guess it could happen. So now that, you know, we've thought about it, and we've worried about it. I think we Yeah, we lean harder into transparency, and more important, educating people like the generals need to understand what SETI is. So they don't have this reaction when it happens. They need to go, oh, you know,

it's not going to be anything that we can turn into a weapon. Don't worry about it. It's not a national security threat, whatever it is. Or at least they'll stop and listen before sending in the troops. Yeah, I'll direct them to write at all 2022 to help guide that thinking at the time. Jason, thank you so much for joining

us today. This is a really interesting discussion. Thanks for you and your colleagues for publishing this really interesting paper. I wanted to give our audience, if they wanted to find out more about you or read your blog, what's a great way for them to find your writings? Yeah, I'm astrowrite on Twitter. There's an underscore in between. And I have a blog at Penn State, which you can easily find. Jason Wright, Penn State will probably get you there. We also have the PSETI Center, which is the Penn State Center for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, where we do a lot of thinking about this stuff. And if you're interested in how you can support it, because the government doesn't support this stuff generally, or you just want to follow along our research that we do there, you can go to pseti.psu.edu. Wonderful. Thank you again. Thanks, Casey. Planetary Society Chief Advocate Casey Dreyer talking to his guest, Penn State Professor Jason Wright. Casey, fascinating as expected. I look forward to talking again when we have yet another terrific conversation next month, just prior to the midterm elections here in the United States on the Space Policy Edition.

Thankfully, the geopolitical consequences of our conversations are less fraught than the ones we just were talking about. So it's something to look forward to unambiguously with optimism and opportunity. And if, and if you look forward to things with optimism, well join a whole bunch of other optimists by becoming part of the planetary society,

planetary.org slash join. I think optimism is one of the primary adjectives that could be used to describe our, our merry band. And we would love to have you on board with us. We have been talking, of course, with the chief advocate for the Planetary Society, our senior space policy advisor, Casey Dreyer. Casey, I will look forward to having another long conversation with you next month

and hope to run into you before then as well. Thanks again. Always happy to be here, Matt.