Videos

How Would We Communicate with Alien Life? – with Carl Sagan



The Royal Institution

If life exists elsewhere in the Universe, would we be able to communicate with it? In this clip from the 1977 CHRISTMAS LECTURES “The planets”, Carl Sagan demonstrates how we could send a signal that would make sense to intelligent beings that have evolved independently from us.
Subscribe for regular science videos: http://bit.ly/RiSubscRibe

This video is from our 2017 advent calendar. Watch the full series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbnrZHfNEDZyvS5Cx-aRTX-Y8IBJCNmYm

Or watch the full lecture here: http://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/watch/1977/the-planets/planetary-systems-beyond-our-sun?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=2017_advent&utm_content=description

The Royal Institution 2017 advent calendar ‘Transmissions Through Time’ looks through the lens of CHRISTMAS LECTURES past to share the best demonstrations around the science of communication. From Attenborough and Sagan to Woollard and Fong, we revisit old favourites and find new gems to bring you a little gift of science every day in the lead up to Christmas. http://bit.ly/RiAdvent17

The Ri is on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ri_science
and Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/royalinstitution
and Tumblr: http://ri-science.tumblr.com/
Our editorial policy: http://www.rigb.org/home/editorial-policy
Subscribe for the latest science videos: http://bit.ly/RiNewsletter

Source

Similar Posts

48 thoughts on “How Would We Communicate with Alien Life? – with Carl Sagan
  1. amazing! tnx alot, (but maybe the best part of the this lectures — is lacture number 5 "mras after vikink" – the part of amazing cutest ever: the end of this lecture with 2 british kids drinking a cup of T on "mars" with carl
    (T with milk ?)

  2. There is a logical flaw in the idea that a signal is artificial just because you find meaning in it, because in an almost infinite universe bizarre coincidences are possible and it is only a two way interaction with a signal source that allows you to determine if it is more likely to be an intelligently created artifact and not the output of a random process. This is why SETI cannot on its own prove anything definitively and if they do find a candidate that is a significant distance from Earth the time delays will mean that such an "interaction test" is not feasible.

  3. thats a puzzle not communication. Our consciousness is probably closer to dogs and cats and the like than it is to aliens so we should first figure out how to communicate with them.

  4. Everyone comments they want the full versions that these snippets come from. If you do any of them at full length do this one. I really wish I could have met the man and smoked a few with him.

  5. What if the aliens on the other end have the intelligence, idk, say, of Donald Trump? That's pretty much game over trying to communicate with them using these complex messages, isn't it.

  6. Hadn't seen this before. Clever message but wouldn't they be scanning all frequencies for transmission anyway? It seems like the message in the movie Contact was better formulated.

  7. How about we make conversation with oh say another species on this planet before we try talking to the cosmos. We have life all over this planet. Can't sit and have coffee and morning conversation. But lets go ahead and work on thinks can't see or reach even if we tried. So again how you gonna doo this. I'm steal having hard time explaining to my dog what you just said. He laughed at me.. Lol

  8. 'Mother Nature (a pale blue dot)'… I spent 2016 writing, arranging and recording this as a tribute, dedicated to the great Carl Sagan…..https://youtu.be/oCdR4E0m7RU It's aimed at climate change deniers, religious indoctrination, etc, and what one could call 'Trumpism'! (It's not monetised, it's a protest song to share and shout out about)

  9. The fact is that we may very well be at the intelligence level of an ant when compared to an alien – There may have been a more sophisticated ant who thought that it was far smarter and could communicate with one of us humans using a pattern of tapping with its antennae to show its hive is next to a tree, but no humans seem to notice or care that day. Now it might be possible that in a few months after, there will be a little boy who happens to see the ant. However, it wasn't because he understood the ant, instead he happened to have a fire cracker in his pocket and due to sheer luck he also found that tree with the ants' hive hanging off of one of the branches. So he decided for no other reason other than for fun to blow it up and that's that.

  10. At 2:40 in, when you see the grad student at the head of the table, it's the Mitch Taylor character from the 1985 movie, Real Genius, that you're thinking of. Played by Gabe Jarret. You're welcome. I know it was bugging you too.

  11. To LEARN how to COMMUNICATE with ALIENS, google GARY PARKER MIDNIGHT in the DESERT and FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS. It WORKS, but u must be BRAVE!!

  12. We are simply not evolved enough to deal with the complexities of communicating with an advanced civilisation.

    Our brains use filtering techniques and guesswork to solve problems, this means that we rarely take in all the facts and make poor judgement (evident throughout human history). To control our limitations we have to have a culture and laws that influences thought and how we rationalise and make judgements. These 2 facts make for an extremely primitive civilisation. An advanced civilisation would not need to be governed by laws or influenced by culture.

    It's going to take us centuries to develop the technology that will enable us to upgrade our brains and open up pure rational thought with advanced levels of perception. Only then once we've reached this level of enlightenment should we head for the stars. By that point we will have overcome all of the technical issues of space flight and communication.

    It's unlikely that hostile lifeforms would reach a level of advancement that facilitates interstellar travel. It's possible that there is a galactic community of civilisations who use suitably advanced technology to shield their existence from worlds that are not ready. The universe has "evolved" too perfectly for this not to be the case.

  13. this is all great, but one thought I rarely see taken care of is-what if alien life is not carbon based-what if ghosts are aliens or let's say, aliens are Atlantis where Atlantis is in a propan-butan(C4H10) sea

  14. Fantastic. If these geniuses were allowed to govern, the United States would be a much better country. Instead, we have chosen to worship ignorance (to our peril).

  15. But he is not counting with is that success or failure could be measured only within hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Depending on how distant the alien civilization is, establishing contact could take a very long time.

  16. A student tracked this down for me – I was one of the graduate students. What this video doesn't show is that we had 48 hours to decode the message (or fail), and be recorded after the fact by the BBC, whatever the outcome. Failure was not an option, but success wasn't guaranteed – what was fun was that each grad student made a separate contribution (although I confess that I'm not sure that my insights were that profound, or that if we reassembled now we'd be able to do it again!

  17. This really made me realize how much technology helps in teaching. Its hard to see without a comparison to the past. I bet visualization in 3D was extremely hard in the past and is now something we take for granted. What other things might become easy to visualize in the future? (thus leading to more people being able to understand it and become interested in it)

  18. 0101001010100101101010010101011010110000101010010101011010101001010110Blew01010100101011010010101my01010100101010101mind1010101101010101001011010110???????

  19. It's now Jan. 2019. The Nimitz "Tic-Tac" object has since been discussed for less than two years on the web. My thinking is that the writer's of the first movie "The day the Earth Stood Still" from the early 1950s had it correct. The theory suggests that If aliens are already here, they know our languages and how to communicate with us.
    When the character, Klatuu, an ambassador from another world who came to Earth to warn us that our present path using nuclear weapons would result in our own destruction he gave us an ultimatum. He said we must change our ways, or "we will turn your planet into a burned-out cinder" He continued, "I assure you, such power exists".
    This movie was made shortly after WWII ended and the U.S. and the USSR were in the midst of a new "cold war". In the movie, the President's secretary asked Klatuu how he knew our languages the alien responded by saying, "we've been listing to your radio stations".
    Logic dictates that any intelligent species that has the knowledge to come from another star system to visit Earth would also have the computer power to listen to our radio stations and TV sets and learn our languages. If there are such alien spacecraft like the "tic tac" as witnessed by eight pilots from Cmdr. David Fravor's crew from the Nimitz in 2004, such "intelligent beings" should have the computer power to learn and decode our languages and replicate our languages through computer technology.
    My personal belief is that if these craft we see are real and if indeed from somewhere else, they already know how to communicate with us. Even if they don't have vocal cords as we do, they can create voice replicating devices that can communicate with us. The question is why have we not yet been there and done that? Can our government really hide this type of discovery?
    Well, we did a pretty good job of it during the Manhatten Project, but for Fuchs, the Soviet spy. What's amazing is the Stalin knew about the atomic bomb before vice president Truman did.
    When President Roosevelt died, Vice President Truman had no knowledge of the Manhatten project. Source: Command and Control", by Eric Schlosser.
    As Carl Sagan co-wrote in is awesome book which Jodi Foster starred in, "Contact", the wealthy billionaire Hadden asked Foster's character, "do you want to know a secret"?
    He also discovered the "primer" (pronounced primmmm er, not prime er. Even Wordbook got it wrong). So it seems that sufficiently intelligent aliens would have the capacity to communicate with us in a more advanced way that we teach chimps how to use hand signals. But this is all JMHO, after all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SbKE_U4b7U

Comments are closed.

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com