Talk with the Aliens: Robert Sawyer at SETI-Con

In Rollback, by award-winning science fiction writer Robert Sawyer, an alien civilization establishes a set of symbols for a counting system as a means of communicating with another advanced civilization -- i.e., the inhabitants of Earth -- about simple logical and moral concepts, to determine whether the two species are "ethically compatible" before further interaction is established.

This kind of alien cryptography pops up elsewhere in Sawyer's work, too, along with the real-life setting of the SETI Institute, which recently held a two-day celebration called SETI-Con in Santa Clara.

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Among the featured guests was Sawyer himself, who chatted with attendees about the real-world underlying math and science in his novels, and how he uses that to construct compelling sci-fi narratives that explore larger questions and themes, such as Illegal Alien, which depicts the murder trial of, well, an alien. Is the alien guilty as charged, or is this a cultural misunderstanding and a terrible mistake?

Communication difficulties are a common theme in Sawyer's novels, as they are for real-world alien hunters, like Frank Drake, the guest of honor at SETI-Con, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of his famed Drake equation. (At the banquet honoring Drake, the tables were set with wine glasses etched with the Drake equation.)

Drake conducted the first radio search for alien civilizations on April 8, 1960 ("Project Ozma"), but he also worked with Carl Sagan to devise humanity's first interstellar message in 1974, to mark the reopening of the Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico.

The encoded message -- an "interstellar hello" -- consisted of a string of 1679 binary digits (in the form of 1,679 on-off pulses) -- chosen because 1679 is the product of two prime numbers, as any reasonably numerate alien would know. And knowing that, certainly their first instinct would be to arrange that string of binary digits into 23 rows by 73 columns, thereby forming a mosaic image -- a "pictogram" that depicts the solar system, the double-helix structure of human DNA, plus the binary values for the atomic weights pertaining to basic terrestrial biochemistry. You know, the sort of information an alien civilization might be interested in knowing about us.

But can we assume such an alien civilization? What if we sent a message, and the aliens couldn't decipher it?

Cryptology is prone to all manner of misinterpretations and human error, after all, so why should the aliens be any different? Sawyer explored this prospect in his novel, Factoring Humanity, in which his version of a Drake-like pictogram -- known as the "Epsilon Eridani" signal -- is detected in the 1980s by a scientist named Josh Hunaker, who is so horrified by what he discovers when he decodes it that he commits suicide. But first he recorded the message on an encrypted floppy disk which is rediscovered in the 1990s. It looked like this:

Like any good writer specializing in "hard" science fiction, Sawyer lavishes much detailed attention on the  process of deciphering the encrypted message. There are numerous Websites and forums with all the gory details for curious folks (or you could just read the novel), but -- SPOILER ALERT! -- it ends up relating to the binary code for the numbers 6 and 14, which just happen to correspond to the atomic weights for carbon and silicon. And the plot develops from there. Let's just say that maybe we don't want to communicate with the aliens, after all.

Then again, maybe the whole thing is an exercise in futility: in an interview earlier this year with Australia's Cosmos magazine, Drake admitted that one challenge is figuring out the correct frequency range in which to search for a signal. "Also, the signals may be transient," he continued. "They may not be 'on' all the time, so we need to search tens of millions of stars for long periods of time on a wide band of frequencies, before we'll have a good chance of succeeding. And we haven't done that."

And then there's the Drake Equation itself. Plug the most optimistic numbers into the Drake Equation's variables, and you get an estimate that perhaps 1 in 10 million stars might emit a detectable signal from intelligent life. But Drake himself remains optimistic that there could be other civilizations out there, even if he never gets to meet an alien himself.

Back in 1961, Otto Struve, then-director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, marked the end of that seminal meeting with a toast, which was echoed 50 years later at the SETI-Con banquet: "To the value of L (the length of time that an alien civilization remains detectable -- the longer it's around, the greater the chance that we can detect such a signal). May it prove to be a very large number." And may Drake enjoy a large number of years ahead, perhaps sufficiently large for him to see his lifelong quest finally bear fruit.