Note: Most Thursdays, I take readers on a deep dive into a topic I hope you'll find interesting, important, or at least amusing. These essays are made possible by — and are exclusive to — our VIP supporters. If you'd like to join us, take advantage of our 60% off promotion.
"Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering." —Arthur C. Clarke
Back when virtual aquariums and flying toasters were all the screensaver rage, my computer screen was filled with real-time visualizations of the Fast Fourier Transform work my "idle" Pentium II CPU was crunching away at during my off hours. I was not and am not a scientist, and I'm not even completely sure what all the words in the previous sentence mean. But I felt like that screensaver was doing God's work for me, or at least Ellie Arroway's.
The heroine of Carl Sagan's Contact, Ellie, was a promising young astronomer determined to pretty much throw away her budding career in a field unsuited to "serious" scientists: SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. While Contact and Ellie are pure fiction, SETI is real — and starting in 1999, volunteers could download a screensaver to help SETI churn through data.
SETI uses radio telescopes to "listen" for possible alien radio signals out of the endless radio waves created by seemingly everything in the galaxy. The problem wasn't so much gathering the data, but sorting through it for patterns that might indicate a message like "We're here," or even just broadcast reruns of Cyborgs Love Lucy.
So the Berkeley SETI Research Center created SETI@Home, a screensaver that downloaded a daily SETI data dump, then "borrowed" your computer to see if there were any tentacled Ricky Ricardos somewhere out there.
The graphs were cool-looking, if ultimately meaningless. Berkeley shut down SETI@Home in 2020 — years and years after I'd given up my little home-based Ellie Arroway cosplay.
But it speaks to the human yearning to make First Contact that within a few months of its launch, there were over a million volunteer computers involved, when Berkeley had originally planned for just 50,000–100,000. All told, something like 5.2 million people participated, resulting in a Guinness Book entry for the world's largest computation in history at the time.
Ellie didn't have to wait more than a few years before hitting the alien jackpot, her team discovering a repeating pulse-signal consisting of the first 100 prime numbers — and an unmistakable and undeniable indication of alien intelligence. And not just intelligence, but a curiosity driving enough to signal "We're here" to anyone who, like Ellie, might be intelligent enough to listen.
Buried with the pulsing signal were instructions for building a faster-than-light (FTL) transportation device, presumably programmed to send a human envoy to go out there and make First Contact.
Sagan, however, created just one of several classic sci-fi tales about how we find them.
But before we turn that around, I'd feel like I cheated you if I didn't at least give you a quick look at perhaps the best and most famous example.
And Another Thing: Even my alien-obsessed self eventually got bored with SETI, and devoted my extra CPU cycles to something that seemed more promising: protein folding. Stanford released Folding@home in 2000, using those same spare CPU cycles to simulate how proteins fold (and misfold), in pursuit of cures to various diseases. Folding@home was my more practical volunteer effort, but it lacked magic.
In the late '60s, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke took an "acorn" of an idea, as Clarke put it, from his 1948 short story, The Sentinel, and nurtured it into 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The premise is that two million years ago, a passing alien intelligence took note of the primitive hominids here on Earth, and saw the potential — someday, maybe, if they weren't stuck in an evolutionary dead end — for intelligence to arise. Before continuing its exploration of the galaxy, the intelligence left a small monolith on Earth to study the hominids and give them a subtle evolutionary push before disappearing completely.
But it also left two more items for us to find... if only we would survive and evolve the intelligence to find them.
The first was a highly magnetic monolith buried in the Moon's Tycho Crater. Only a civilization advanced enough to colonize the Moon would be able to notice the Tycho magnetic anomaly (TMA) and dig it up to find out what the heck it was. Once exposed to sunlight for the first time, the TMA blasted a radio signal to Jupiter* where an even bigger prize awaited a civilization advanced enough for interplanetary travel.
Geeeeenius, as Wile E. Coyote would say.
*Saturn in the book, I know.
You could draw a straight line between 12-year-old me reading 2001 for the first time (and then quickly finding Kubrick's film version on Betamax), and 30-year-old me becoming a Day One adopter of SETI@Home.
Perhaps not quite as dramatically satisfying, but sometimes the aliens just show up. Star Trek lore has it that a conveniently close Vulcan trading vessel picked up the unmistakable signature of Zefram Cochrane's experimental warp drive firing up for the first time. In Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, aliens have been secretly visiting since at least World War II, collecting a few mysteriously chosen Earthlings for peaceful voyages to the stars. Then there's the 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, where an alien named Klaatu has the temerity to land in the middle of Washington D.C. to warn us that his people might destroy the Earth if we don't give up our warlike ways.
Sci-fi must have thousands of First Contact takes because it involves the most intriguing questions outside of theology that science can't answer with a bigger telescope or a more powerful particle accelerator.
Is anyone out there? What are they like? What will we do if we meet them? What will they do?
I don't expect those questions to be answered in my lifetime, if ever. It's impossible not to be intrigued by the Trump administration's release of more and more Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) videos, or UFOs as we used to call them. If aliens are among us already — or at least sharing our friendly skies from time to time — they're being even more coy about their presence than the "baby steps" bait-and-switch Ellie was treated to in Contact.
In each case, though, humanity has the more passive role. Aliens leave monoliths, aliens send blueprints, aliens steal our women.
While I can't think of any off the top of my head, there must be fiction where we take a more active role — but what if we're about to do so in real life?
And Another Thing: Used to call them UFOs? I still do. That's what they called them on Project Bluebook when I was a kid, so that's what I stick with. Also, Pluto is a planet. Fight me.
Radio signals aren't the only way we might find signs of those little green men. We could also look for their space-bound solar arrays. In fact, we do.
Six decades ago, physicist Freeman Dyson posited that the ever-increasing energy needs of a technologically advanced civilization would eventually outstrip its ability to generate it on-planet, and would eventually require nearly the entire energy output of its planet's star. In his 1960 paper, "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation," Dyson proposed the idea of what would become known as a Dyson sphere, but more properly understood as a swarm — a massive array of solar collectors. Except instead of orbiting an alien world, they would encompass the alien star, probably at orbits slightly greater than the planet's orbit around the sun.
Dyson proposed scanning the heavens for resulting infrared radiation that would accompany such a swarm.
So far, no luck. But we're still looking.
And Another Thing: There are variations on Dyson's idea of massive space structures detectable from light-years away. They include the above-mentioned Dyson sphere — a solid, perhaps habitable sphere completely surrounding (and presumably blocking out) a sun. Then there's Larry Niven's Ringworld, a habitable ring spinning around an alien star, gathering solar energy and creating a centripetal gravity effect.
If that seems impossible, look around you. We've only had "real" AI for three years, and we're already creeping into Dyson territory.
A nation's economic growth and wellbeing are inextricably linked to its ability to generate or purchase the energy required to move everything from comparatively primitive locomotives to the transistors in the most advanced AI hyperscale compute centers. Producing it yourself is the better way to get it for all kinds of reasons, all too obvious to bore you with here.
China understands this, and is all-in on the all-everything approach to power generation. Nuclear, coal, hydro, solar — Beijing doesn't care, so long as it generates power. Elon Musk looked at SpaceX's energy needs and basically said, "The stuff is free in orbit."
And as previously discussed, that's more or less how the idea for Starmind came about: a fleet of up to one million AI data center satellites, circling north-south around the Earth's day-night terminator line, collecting all the solar power they need, virtually uninterrupted.
Our view of the heavens, on the other hand, won't be.
Starting next year, SpaceX will begin launching Starmind test satellites, perhaps dozens at a time. Musk says Starmind could require up to a million satellites up there — and if demand growth doesn't change, he may well be right. Flying at a higher orbit than Starlink, the result will be a growing ring of shining twilight objects in the sky.
The International Space Station is the largest permanently occupied object in Earth orbit, but likely nothing will have presence like Starmind.
You've seen the rings of Saturn, at least in pictures. We're going to build our own ring. And while Starmind will be another nail in the coffin of amateur earthbound astronomy (and a damn shame), looking at the sky and seeing a manmade ring up there — to me, at least — will bring the same sense of wonder and awe as a caveman's first contact with modern life being the Chrysler Building.
I chose the Chrysler Building very much on purpose, because it's a glorious example of the most gorgeous era in American culture — not just in architecture, but design, music, film, and more. I've felt for years that perhaps we peaked with the Jazz Age and Art Deco.
But just the idea of a man-made ring with a virtual mind of its own, perhaps glittering enough to grab the attention of any alien life advanced enough to look for it and say...
...yeah, we're here.
Last Thursday: So Who's Winning the AI Arms Race?
