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Hey, smart people, Joe here.

Imagine you're in a dark, dark forest.

It's cold, it's lonely.

You wonder who or what is out there, but you're afraid to call out or turn on a light because maybe whatever's out there might actually want to eat you.

So you sit quietly alone to some, this is what it feels like to look up at the stars from Earth.

There are hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy.

Scientists now think hundreds of millions of them have conditions where life could arise.

When you look at it like that, it would be pretty remarkable if Earth was the only planet with intelligent life, and yet we haven't heard a peep from any intelligent species beyond Earth.

Why?

Maybe they are out there just waiting in that dark forest, uncertain for someone else to call out.

Maybe it's gonna be up to us to say hello first.

But communicating with an alien intelligence that maybe nothing like us comes with untold challenges.

How could we do that?

This is how to send a message to extra terrestrials.

Yo, we should absolutely not do that.

What?

That's like screaming, Hey, here we are.

Come take all our resources and squash us like bugs and smart people agree with me, If aliens were to visit us.

I think the outcome would be when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.

- Okay?

But when Hawking first said that we didn't even know that earth-like planets were common across the galaxy.

I mean, why would ETS go to the trouble of traveling vast distances to conquer and pillage when there's probably other options much closer By, I mean, resource-wise, earth's not that special.

Also, a civilization that can zoom across the galaxy is probably way older and wiser than we are.

They probably just wanna study us like a bunch of intergalactic nerds.

Yeah, well that's just like your opinion, man.

Well, actually we of smart people agree with me.

- I think sometimes we have almost a, a cosmic inferiority complex.

When we think about reaching out, it's like, oh, what do we have to offer?

We're so young.

We haven't been at this very long, but I, I think that's actually the point.

So I think we could hold a mirror up to another civilization and remind them something about their distant past.

- Okay.

But if they're so old and advanced, they definitely have a death star.

They might look at us like we look at ants.

I mean, would you feel bad about squishing an ant?

Furthermore, what gives you or any one person the right to decide for the whole planet to paint a giant target on our backs?

A physicist named Mark Buchanan made a really good point.

Without oversight, even one person with access to powerful transmitting technology could take actions affecting the future of the entire planet.

Well, sorry to break it to you, but at this point, the choice isn't between reaching out or just staying quiet.

It's in between sending smart messages or dumb messages.

We've already been broadcasting radio and TV signals out into space for over a century.

And during the Cold War, high-powered military radar leaked out into space, and it's already passed by thousands of star systems.

Not to mention over the past 50 years, we've sent out several intentional radio messages to our nearest star systems.

- So any civilization that has the ability to travel between the stars already knows we're here.

So it does no good to try to hide.

If they're on their way, it's a much better strategy to let them know that we make good conversational partners.

- Excuse me.

What You don't understand ancient Egyptian, it means your mind is like an empty room.

Look, my point is, if you can't understand a message from your own species, from your own planet just a few thousand years ago, how can you expect an alien with totally different biology on a totally different planet to understand us?

Even if you make contact with aliens, you're never gonna understand each other.

Well, we actually do have a common language.

Think about it.

If they do receive our radio signal, the one thing we can be sure of is that we both know how to build radio transmitters and receivers.

So they must know a lot of math and physics.

We have no reason to think that math and physics operate differently elsewhere in the universe.

So we can use math and physics principles as a kind of universal language to communicate.

Well, if you think it's so easy, did you just send me a voice message from four feet away?

Yeah.

- One - Zero.

This is just ones and zeros.

- 0 0 1, 1 0 1.

- I see what you're trying to do.

A lot of really smart people have already thought through how to decode and encode this exact kind of message.

It reminds me of the very first radio message that was beamed out into space that was specifically meant for aliens.

The Arecebo message in 1974, the actual radio signal of that message was made up of a string of binary digits, zeros, and ones sent as higher and lower frequency blips to make sense of the Arecebo message, aliens would've to figure out that the total number of binary digits 1,679 is a semi prime number.

That means it's the product of two prime numbers in this case, 23 and 73.

So just convert the message into a grid of that size and bingo, you know, some alien mathematician figure that out.

They'd be rewarded with information about the genetic basis of our DNA, the chemistry of life, a human figure, even a diagram of our solar system.

And in 2003, scientists used this same binary grid coating method to send a basic encyclopedia of human knowledge.

It was 150 times longer than the Arecebo message.

This one contained various mathematical expressions, geometry, images of our biology, even maps of our planets and the solar system.

So using that method, this one shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

- 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 0 0 1 1.

- Well, there's 2,537 total digits in this message.

That's a semi prime number.

And you can only get it by multiplying 59 and 43 prime numbers.

So if I choose the zeros to be white and the ones to be black and laid out enough, 43 by 59 grid, we get very funny.

Got you.

But seriously, those messages you mentioned are all images.

What if aliens can't see?

What if they have all done a hazy planet around a dimm star, or they're like alien cave octopuses or something.

Well, we could also try sending sound-based messages like we've already done to Voyager Spacecraft launched in 1977, carry golden Records with Sounds from our Planet.

- Hello from the Children of Planet Earth.

- In - 2017, Doug Vaco and others beamed encoded musical messages to a planet orbiting a nearby red dwarf for a project called Sonar calling.

- So instead of just sending them a bunch of music and greetings, as the Voyager recording did, we sent them a tutorial of how to listen to music, how to listen to the human voice.

- I mean, we honestly don't know how aliens might sense the universe.

So maybe the best strategy is to send both visual and audio messages and hope at least one works.

So if you're watching this video on Glar five, If there really are intelligent aliens out there, then why haven't we heard from them yet?

We've been listening for decades and nothing, obviously we're alone.

Look, this article from physicist Frank Tipler is literally called a Waste of Time.

You remember how I was talking about the Dark Forest hypothesis?

Well, maybe they are out there and maybe they're too scared to be the first ones to reach out.

But there are other possibilities that explain why we haven't made contact yet.

Jill Tarter, she's a researcher with the Seti Institute.

She points out that if the universe were all of the oceans on earth, we've only searched about a bathtub's worth of radio signals.

I mean to say that earth is the only intelligent needle in the haystack of the universe, but we literally have to examine every single bit of straw.

The search for intelligent life and space might take a long time.

So I guess I kind of agree with you.

We may never find that proof.

Aha.

See, but, but maybe it doesn't really matter.

Maybe there's an even better reason to try.

- I think the big fear that we have to face is that we're gonna fail.

So what happens?

What happens if we listen and listen and all we get is this cosmic silence?

You know, I, I think our, our natural reaction first is going to be this was such a waste.

You know, we put so much into this, but then I think it's gonna hit us differently.

'cause we're gonna realize what we've been trying to do all this time is to make contact with a stable, long lived civilization that can teach us something.

But by virtue of the fact that we have done this project, we have committed generation after generation, we have taken it on and we have seen it through to the end that in fact, we've become the long-lived civilization we've been looking for out there all along.

I think that will be an accomplishment, just as great as finding any other life out there.

- Wow.

When you put it like that, I mean, sorry, I Rick rolled you.

It's okay.

Bring it in.

Come - Here, come here, come here.

- Yeah, I know that was pretty emotional there at the end, wasn't it?

Universe is big, big place.

Let it out.

Let - It out.

It's okay.

It's okay.

- Stay curious, but it's - Okay.

- Thank you.

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We really appreciate it.

So should we be messaging extra terrestrials or should we stay quiet?

Or does it not really matter?

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See you in the next video.

Play it out.

Okay.

Be theatrical.

- Don't let my performance influence your future - Performance.

Oh, got it.

That is gonna be so dumb.

I'm sorry.

That thing we just did.