Lost At Sea Part 17

Robbie nods. He says he knows that there is a chance it's all nonsense. "But even if it is all made up," he says, "it's better made-up stuff than what the tabloids are writing. It's more interesting. To me, anyway."

"And it isn't about you."

"Yes," Robbie says.

I leave him standing on his balcony with Ayda, and he does seem happy, gazing up at the sky, even if there's nothing paranormal up there.

"There's always this weird black circle," Ayda says. "You see that black patch over there? It's like dark fog."

"Yeah," Robbie says, "but that might be something as easily explained as light pollution." He pauses. "Right now I'm, 'You crazy American b.i.t.c.h! That's just light pollution!' But if we didn't have company, I'd be going, 'Let's stare at it for an hour and a half. Materialize! Materialize!' We'd be doing our materialize dance. But let's not do that while Jon's here. He'll think I'm weird." They carry on looking at the night sky.

"No," Robbie says, finally, "I don't think there's anything up there tonight."

First Contact

If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I'm having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he's chair of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Science and Technology Task-group. They're a group of distinguished scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet's alien welcome committee. His is an awesome responsibility, and one he doesn't take lightly.

"Imagine a civilization that's way in advance of us wants to communicate with us and a.s.sist us in our development," Paul says. He pushes his mackerel across his plate. "The information we provide to them must reflect our highest aspirations and ideals, and not just be some crazy person's bizarre politics or religion."

This is why, Paul says, he very much hopes that our opening communication with the aliens will be drafted by him. "All the attempts to send messages up so far have been very cra.s.s," he says. "If you're going to leave it up to the mob to decide what's important, it'll be this really cool video game. Or some sporting event. Or some rock group."

"Do you have any idea of what you might say to the aliens?" I ask.

There is a short silence. "I do," he says.

"Will you reveal it to me?" I ask.

Paul thinks for a second. And then he clears his throat.

Who is Paul Davies? How have events transpired to put him on the front line of extraterrestrial relations? And what will his message to the aliens be?

THE STORY BEGINS fifty years ago, in April 1960, when a young astronomer named Frank Drake decided to cut through the forest of unscientific UFO believers, the abductees, the searchers for mutilated cattle, and so on, and treat the subject with some rigor. He formulated an equation, the Drake Equation, which attempted to determine mathematically how many intelligent civilizations exist in our galaxy. His conclusion: ten thousand. a.s.suming some of these extraterrestrials must surely be bombarding us with radio messages, he borrowed the twenty-six-meter dish at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, pointed it at a distant star called Tau Ceti, turned it on, and-nothing. Just a static hiss.

"No signals have been detected," he noted.

Despite this setback, SETI was born. Drake managed to score some U.S. government funding and created an inst.i.tute in California. For much of the sixties, as Paul Davies writes in his new book, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, a "major preoccupation among SETI researchers was to decide which particular frequency ET might choose, given that there are billions of possibilities ... the hope was that the aliens would customize their signals for Earth-like planets."

But the aliens didn't customize their signals for us. After a decade or so, a schism formed within SETI. Some contended that surely the aliens-being far advanced-would use lasers to communicate, not radio. And so optical SETI was born.

Optical SETI didn't detect any signals, either.

The day before my lunch with Paul, Frank Drake was in London to update the Royal Society on the latest. The good news is that, with the help of wealthy private benefactors such as Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, SETI is now better equipped than ever. Allen has provided them with an array of new dishes called, in fact, the Allen Telescope Array. They're situated in a field 290 miles north of San Francisco. The bad news is that no signals have been detected.

"Fifty years of nothing," I say to Paul now. "Do SETI people just go into work every morning, spend all day hearing nothing, and then go home again?"

"Your question is very similar to 'How does a computer scientist spend their days?'" Paul replies. "Sending e-mails and raising finance and teaching students and thinking about strategy."

"Doesn't it get depressing?"

"The SETI people are very calm, very determined. There is a hypothesis to test and SETI are testing it." He pauses. "If the eerie silence goes on for five hundred years and not fifty years, it might become hard to recruit the young scientists."

SETI scientists also fill the void by putting protocols in place for what to do on the day a bleep is definitively heard. It is extremely likely they will be the ones to hear it: They're the ones with the dishes. Should the protocols be followed, they'll know not to call the media or some government figure. They'll call the chair of the Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup. Which is Paul.

Paul is a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist at Arizona State University. He lives his life at an incredibly high level of amazingness. He lectures at the Vatican, at the Smithsonian, in Davos, and at the UN. He has an asteroid named after him-the Pauldavies. He's a pa.s.sionate scientific communicator and a grumpy man of enormous intellect. A telephone near us keeps letting off a loud and unexpected ring, and whenever it does, Paul looks extremely cross and says, "This is terribly annoying." I can't help thinking that if the aliens do make contact, his automatic response will be to screw up his face in irritation and yell: "WHAT?"

I've been following Paul for a few days now. I watched him speak twice yesterday at the Royal Society (it has been hosting a SETI conference). The queue to get into his evening talk snaked around the block. He encouraged the audience, which filled the main hall and an overflow room, not to be depressed. It's quite possible the aliens do know we're here, but because they're a thousand light-years away and are consequently seeing us as we were a thousand years ago-rudimentary and agricultural-they're going to hold off beaming a signal to us until they know we've developed radio technology.

During the question-and-answer session, a man with dark gla.s.ses stood up and animatedly announced: "To see the future, one must look at the fringe, at the freaks, the visionaries, the artists. Why does SETI ignore what's right in front of us? The six thousand abductions! The ten thousand cattle mutilations ... !"

One or two people nodded in agreement. Paul tried to look kindly, but his annoyance was obvious. "To expect alien technology to be just a few decades ahead of ours," he replied, "is too incredible to be taken seriously."

His inference was: You can tell the abductees are lying or delusional because their descriptions of the aliens and their craft are always so unimaginative. As he writes in The Eerie Silence, the giveaway is the "ba.n.a.lity of the aliens' putative agenda, which seems to consist of grubbing around in fields or meadows, chasing cows or cars like bored teenagers, and abducting humans for n.a.z.i-style experiments."

"At least flaky UFO nuts believe they've met aliens," I say to Paul now. "They believe they've been abducted and probed. You lot have rationalized yourselves into a fifty-year void of nothingness." I pause and add: "I realize what I just said is quite stupid, but will you respond to it anyway?"

"For me, science is already fantastical enough," he says. "Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance."

Paul says he doesn't trust people. But he does have great faith in aliens. His face lights up when he imagines them. My guess is that, since he's spent so much of his life meeting people who aren't as clever as him, the aliens are-intellect-wise-his last-chance saloon.

The Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup has been in existence since 1996. It comprises thirty SETI-friendly scientists, writers, and engineers. Paul was invited to become chair in 2008 but has so far convened only one meeting. He hopes to hold a second later this year in Prague so they can update their declaration of principles.

"So what's the first thing that'll happen when a signal is detected?" I ask.

"We'll have it independently verified. That's really important."

"And once it's verified?"

"My strenuous advice," Paul says, "will be that the coordinates of the transmitting ent.i.ty should be kept confidential until the world community has had a chance to evaluate what it's dealing with. We don't want anybody just turning a radio telescope on the sky and sending their own messages to the source."

"So you'll tell the world that extraterrestrials are beaming signals to us, but you'll refuse to say from where?"

"Exactly," Paul says.

"They'll kill you. They'll grab you and torture the information out of you."

"But what's the alternative? Imagine we go to the United Nations: 'There's an alien community over there and everyone has to think about what our response might be, so we're turning it over to you, the United Nations, who are so adept at finding harmonious solutions to the world's problems.' Well, of course it would be a complete shambles. And which are the agencies that can truly represent humanity? You wouldn't go to the Catholic Church, would you? Or the U.S. Army."

This is why, he says, the most prudent course of action will be to create some sort of science parliament-a bit like the one set up to oversee the scientific exploration of Antarctica-and present to them the draft of a message that will be written by him later this year in Prague.

I am, I'm proud to say, the person who gave him the idea to draft the message this far in advance.

"If you don't trust anyone else to come up with a decent message, you should do it yourself!" I say. "You don't want to be caught on the hop. Do it in Prague and just put it in a drawer somewhere until the time comes."