The events of the last couple of weeks are enough to give every space enthusiast an adrenaline rush that could last for months. Not something out of the blue, but in a surprise to all the ETI hunters, a team of scientists have sent an SOS to never open any extraterrestrial message, let alone establish a communication with the alien kind. Their warning: just one malicious message, which cannot be decontaminated, is enough to wipe out the human race.
In the age of communication, this sends a chill down the spine. On the face of this, we have yet another undesirable development where the spendthrift billionaire Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, had his chance to have the ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’ moment—more for mere thrill and adventure than any scientific and meaningful exploration—by sending his Major Tom, a mannequin stuffed in a space suit seated in a $100,000 Tesla Roadster, into deep space and leaving him hapless in the face of any inquisitive alien trying to build an offensive rapport with him.
I recall having seen a Hollywood sci-fi flick Arrival in which two protagonists, a linguist and a scientist, decode a knotty alien language. They, from an unknown planet, communicated with a language so profound and advanced making all languages spoken on Earth look, simply, naive. Watching such movies certainly makes an alien-lover like me want to be on the centre stage, to act as that essential interpreter that the world so hungrily desires. After all, it is not every day that you get to be the ‘friendly neighbourhood’ human.
Imagine the horror for such a person waking up to a flashing news with real scientists warning every SETI lover to never look for any message, never mind decoding it, for it may say, “We will make your sun go supernova tomorrow”, and god forbid if that happens. I remember taking a brisk walk with my father when we spotted a bright object in the sky, which did not seem to be at a great height. It kept moving for sometime in the very direction we walked and then stopped altogether, and then disappeared like it never was there in the first place.
For someone who was always drawn towards such topics, this incident was enthralling enough. The fear lingers: What if one fine day Musk finds back his Roadster parked right outside his SpaceX office or Major Tom couriers him an alien message, which he may never open out of fear? Then he sure will suffer from a Hamletian dilemma—to open or not to open.
Rishi Sabharwal
Email: writesrishi@gmail.com