One of the moments that sticks in my memory from graduate school is putting the SETI @ Home screen saver on a bunch of computers that weren’t mine.
The small room at the end of the hallway in the speech communication (now Rhetorical Studies) department in Sims Hall at Syracuse University had a few old computers in it for the use of graduate students. At the time I was obsessed with the SETI @ Home program, and wanted to crunch even more data than my little Mac laptop could handle. After about an hour, I saw all the screens in there lighting up with the distinctive red and yellow bars of potential alien signals.
Alien communication. Seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to have the computers research while nobody else was using them. I spent a long time looking at the screen as it did it’s work. On nearly every page the source of the potential alien chatter was listed: Arecibo Radio Observatory.
The loss of Arecibo Radio Observatory is nothing short of acute ear trauma for the human race. We have been listening carefully to deep space for decades. Now, the ability to listen has been destroyed. We are now alone again, surrounded by potential noise but unable to know it.
The communication breakdown is a symbolic marker of the global communication breakdown we’ve all experienced over these past few years as we all decided to ignore our capacity to hear, and instead try to broadcast our signals over the signals of others. Sabotage, not accident, has been the watchword when it comes to political communication, everyone forgetting that at some point they did not believe what they think now; someone had to persuade them that their view is right.
Arecibo was a powerful symbol for those of us who believe communication to be the most vital part of the human experience. Our ability to craft meaning for one another, and do it with a particular purpose in mind, makes us part of a large family of creatures on Earth. What separates our ability to do this is we can craft symbols that are unrelated to any material thing or extant property around us: We can send signals that only refer to other signals, those signals sent so long ago we don’t remember making them.
The symbolic power of the observatory was simple: We are listening. We want to hear you. We want to get what you are saying. The intensity of our concentrated listening to the heavens produced so much data that SETI created the screensaver software to take advantage of the resting CPU power that sat idle across the planet. We had listened so intensely that the information collected would take the best computers on Earth a generation to carefully consider what we had heard. Space that around a bunch of PCs and laptops idling away across the world, and you exponentially cut that time.
SETI @ Home and Arecibo combined in a way to symbolically present us at our best to ourselves. We are eager to hear whatever you might be saying out there. We are trying our best to hear you, and we are trying to understand it as best we can. We’re even questioning the silences as meaning something. It doesn’t get more generous than this in terms of communicative responsibility.
And yet, millions of us are capable of spending the time and money on such a project, and equally capable of mourning the loss of such a project. At the same time though, we are incredibly incapable of listening – really listening – to the variety of viewpoints that fellow human beings may hold.
The contradiction would be staggering if we weren’t familiar with human beings. Even when we are certain we learned a ton from listening carefully, we find it to be impossible to do with one another. Even more ironic: We all think we are doing it extremely well when what we are most likely doing is tuning one another out.
The collapse of Arecibo is a tragedy and horrible loss for human scientific knowledge, but perhaps we can take a moment to reflect on the symbolic collapse of our ability to listen to the most foreign, most alien creatures. They are, after all, moments to practice this all around us.