Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication
sought to understand the ideas and logic behind searching for extraterrestrial messages, deciphering any messages detected, and deriving useful information from these. This meant reading the scholarly literature on SETI, which at that time was sparse; attending SETI conferences; interviewing SETI scientists and technicians; listening to them discuss issues among themselves; and presenting papers at SETI symposia about my research. However, I did not take the antagonistic approach of so-called science studies as then practiced by a group of sociologists bent upon exposing what they considered to be the epistemological naïveté and dangerous hubris of scientists. If anything, I was biased in favor of SETI and those who were involved in what I regarded as a noble quest. Nonetheless, I did find some of the SETI scientists’ thinking questionable—especially when they employed analogies based primarily on Western experience to speculate about the nature of ET civilizations and behavior. For example, according to SETI advocates, many of the civilizations that might be contacted will be so many light-years away that the prospect of any meaningful conversations with distant ET interlocutors would be very dim. For the foreseeable future, we will therefore just listen. Furthermore, because of NASA’s vulnerability to public criticism, in the mid-1980s SETI researchers at Ames studiously avoided even talking about sending messages into the cosmos. They feared that any such transmissions would be perceived by the public as exposing Earth to potentially hostile aliens, and that citizens’ anxieties could, when expressed in letters to their representatives, bring the wrath of Congress down on NASA. (Of course, as Frank Drake pointed out, we were already giving our position away through powerful radar and television transmissions.) Accordingly, these scientists went out of their way to emphasize that they would attempt only to receive messages and not to transmit them. For those who asked how it would be possible to learn anything from listening to messages sent tens, hundreds, or thousands of years ago, they had an ingenious answer: “But we have already had the experience of learning from the ancient Greeks through one-way messages from the distant past.” They were referring to the transmission of classical Greek science and learning to Western Europe in late medieval and Renaissance times through the intermediary of Arab scholars and others who had studied and translated ancient Greek texts. As much as I was intrigued by this analogy, I could not help but think that the challenge faced by medieval Western Europeans learning at a distance from ancient Greeks was trivial compared to the task of deciphering and understanding interstellar messages. I thought that a more useful terrestrial analogy might be derived from the efforts to decipher ancient scripts of cultures far removed from the classical world I had a case in mind: the long struggle to translate the hieroglyphs carved on ancient Maya temples and vividly painted on pottery and pages of the few codices that survived Spanish colonization. While working 66