14 DAY TRIAL // One of the theories scientists proposed on Saturday at the SETIcon conference that extraterrestrial civilizations may be more interested in our art than our science.
The idea makes a lot of sense when considering that aliens would, most likely, be older and more advanced than we are.
This would mean that, in an encounter, we would have little to show them in terms of physical, chemical and mathematical equations.
The same would not hold true for art, investigators say, as music, painting and sculpting, among other art forms, are uniquely human, Space reports.
The Einstein's general theory of relativity and Newtons's laws of gravity could interest aliens to a lesser extent than the works of Chopin, Bach or Van Gogh.
Under this assumption, the human culture could indeed become interesting and appealing to an alien race, that would study our art for a long time before making sense of it.
“What would the other guys want to know about us? What in the world do we have to offer?” says the SETI director of interstellar message composition, Douglas Vakoch (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California.
“If they're so advanced, we probably can't teach them about science, but we can tell them what it's like to be at this precarious point where we don't know if we're going to continue as a species,” adds the expert, who is based at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, in Mountain View, California.
At the SETIcon meeting, which in 2010 marks the 50th anniversary of the first modern experiment aimed to search for intelligent life in the Universe, experts agreed that music and art would be the best starting points of a relationship between humans and another civilization.
“If we could ask only one question, I think maybe not 'Do you have religion?' but, 'Do you have music'?" would be more suitable, explains Seth Shostak, who is a senior astronomer at SETI.
“If anything I would think, yes, any civilization whatsoever would gather that this is extraordinarily beautiful,” says the author and creator of the classical music repository ClassicalArchives, Pierre Shwob.
“But we really don't have any idea what would be appreciated by an alien civilization,” he adds, speaking about composers such as Bach and Vivaldi.