Why an Instructional Designer Should Be Earth's Emissary to Aliens from Outer Space

We will discover signals from intelligent life within in the next 25 years.

That's the claim Seth Shostak is making. And influential people are listening, because Seth is the senior astronomer at the the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California. 

There are a number of reasons that give Seth confidence. Recent research, for example, suggests that the galaxy may have many more planets than we suspected. And the technology we use to detect signals from those other planets has advanced so significantly that current experiments are up to 100 trillion times more effective than those run in 1960.

For Shostak, the net is this: Scientific advances are shifting the debate from "where are they?" to "what happens when we get the call?"

Seth has an answer for that as well. Contact from other planets, he says, will be like "giving Julius Caesar English lessons and the key to the Library of Congress."

Seth is a SME, a subject matter expert, in his domain. And he's earned the mantle. His approach to contact with alien life is typical of the reaction of many SMEs when they encounter a problem or opportunity: every challenge calls for knowledge transfer so every solution looks like a codex.

And that's where we have to part ways with Seth. Because inheriting a big body of information may not be the simple boon it first appears to be.

Hold on a minute, you might be thinking, we're talking about contact with an intelligence likely far more advanced than we are. If ever there was a time to go to school, this is it.

But, in fact, it's not. Here's why.

It's not just that we're talking about an enormous amount of information, though we are. Let's take the Library of Congress as a starting point.

Maybe back in 1800, when it was established, the Library of Congress collection amounted to 740 books and three globes tucked into a back room in the Capitol building, but at the most recent reckoning (April 2012) there were more than 38 million books and printed materials, 70 million transcripts, 5.5 million maps, 14 million photos, and just under two million films. All told, you'd be looking at about three petabytes of information.

Put another way, give a researcher the key to the cache and it would take him about 6,000 years (roughly equivalent to all of human history since ancient Mesopotamia) to go through the information once.

That's a lot of information, but truth be told, the amount of information isn't our biggest hurdle. We can no doubt process it. As a point of comparison, Google's index, their database of processed web pages, currently holds 100 million gigabytes or the equivalent of 33 Libraries of Congress.

A tougher problem is figuring out what's worthwhile to know. How do you recognize, for example, when you're reading the Encyclopedia Andromeda, whether the entry for their equivalent of e=mc2 is more important than the one for, say, small pox—unless you know at the outset whether you're looking to reduce your dependence on fossil fuels or stop the most deadly and virulent disease in human history.

If you're wondering how we'll find our way through this maze of information, you'll be happy to see that we can make significant headway by recasting our central question. Rather than asking what our find will tell us, we can turn our attention to what our find will enable us to do.

If that seems like a worthwhile direction, then you've just put the call out for someone to help us turn knowledge into a way to perform at our peak—an instructional designer (ID).

The first move the ID would recommend you to make? Shift your focus from asking what we all need to know to asking what we must be able to do to reach our goal.

So, what goal should we ask aliens help us reach?

That may sound like a daunting task, figuring out the most important goal to pursue with advice from a more advanced civilization.

And, in fact, it's tough to find an authority with much of a vision for how we'd respond to alien contact beyond looking out in awe. You'd think that with a $2.5M per year price tag for searching for extraterrestrial life, SETI and NASA would have some well-formed ideas for a second step.

Paradoxically, their curiosity seems to be satisfied with the discovery itself, while at the same time, ultimately insatiable. SETI's stated end game is to determine whether intelligence is rare, and what place we hold in the biological scheme of things. Neil deGrasse Tyson, speaking on behalf of NASA, also holds out the hope of answering the question of where we fit in the universe.

Such broadly framed goals make Yuri Milner's cynicism about the fallout from first contact understandable.  Milner—the billionaire who just put up $100 million to endow Breakthrough Listen, the project to listen for intelligence in the universe—lamented to Time Magazine that "although it would be a fundamental discovery, life will not change a lot. He [Frank Drake, a scientist at SETI] will get work. I will make an investment. You will write something."

Where do we look then, if the find itself is the point for organizations like SETI and Breakthrough Listen, but we want more? Where do we find our practical goal that prepares us for that moment we shake off our reverie and begin to look for meaningful action?

If we're looking for a goal for the world, a good place to start is the United Nations and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The 2030 Agenda, or so-called Sustainable Development Goals, are a set of 17 goals with 169 associated targets that will stimulate action over the next 15 years in areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet.

The goals are represented in the graphic above and include examples like these (along with their attendant targets):

Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning
Goal 8: Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all
Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Goal 16: Promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies

The 2030 Agenda has what we want: the consensus of the nations of the world and their backing. The next thing our ID would tell us we need, if we want to save the world, is a set of plans.

What steps do we need help to take in order to save the world?

If we expect people to take action, we need to tell them what to do. And it helps to know just what's at stake (the budget and the expected pay off) so the project survives as leadership reconsiders priorities.

At this point, you might despair of finding plans for such broad goals. But your ID will tell you that to create actionable plans, you start by asking for specifics.

So, here's our specific question: Suppose you had $2.5 trillion (the UN development budget) and 15 years (the timeline to 2030) to spend it in the way that will achieve the most good for the world, what would you implement?

When you ask a question that specific, the answer leads to Bjorn Lomborg.

Lomborg is the founder of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank that researches the smartest solutions for the world's biggest problems. Since 2004, the Center has worked with 288 economists, six of whom are Nobel laureates, to narrow down the UN's 17 goals and 169 targets to find those projects that return the most "good for the planet" per dollar invested. The result is the Nobel Laureates Guide to Smarter Global Targets to 2030. 

Here's one example of how that works.

The UN sets a goal and target, say, for curbing communicable diseases.

Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

• By 2030, end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases and combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other communicable diseases

The Copenhagen Consensus researches programs working toward the UN targets and reveals specific places to invest and take action. (For purposes of comparison, the average UN target program returns $10 per dollar invested.)

• For malaria, reduce resistance to artemisinin —the primary drug treatment for malaria—by using combination therapies, while providing bed-nets to reduce infection. Each dollar invested returns $36 in benefits.
• For TB, intensify efforts to identify TB carriers, particularly among those co-infected with HIV, while scaling up treatment to both regular and drug-resistant strains of TB. Each dollar invested returns $43 in benefits.
• For HIV/AIDS, focus on hyper-endemic regions in Africa. Circumcise 90% of HIV-negative men to get $28 back on the dollar. Focus treatment on the most susceptible, to return $10 for every dollar spent.

That Smarter Global Targets mean three things to us. First, the recommendations are actionable. Second, they create measurable results, which many of the UN's projects don't. And third, they have demonstrated the greatest capacity to create good outcomes per dollar invested. Prioritizing support to these 19 targets instead of the UN’s 169, is "equivalent to doubling or quadrupling the foreign aid budget" without increasing spending.

That's a significant step forward. It gives us 19 sets of programmatic action we can take, each proven to be highly effective at saving (at least a piece of) the world. So, at last, we know just what to ask Yoda to help us to do if "save the world, we must".

But we can do better. There's a question we have yet to ask.

What could still stand in our way?

What could be the problem? After all, we've got our goal, our projects, and research that shows where our money and efforts are best spent.

But an instructional designer is going to ask you one more critical question. "This is clearly a good set of practices, so why aren't we already doing it (or doing more of it) now?"

The answer to that question is the little hinge that swings big doors on projects. It often tells you what remedy you most need and just where it most needs to be applied.

Usually, a project in any organization is sponsored by some group that wants some other group or individuals to perform differently than they currently are. We often assume that people are performing inefficiently because they don't know how to perform optimally. That's what we want the aliens to teach us, right, a better way to fight disease.

But look again at the research analyses delivered by the Copenhagen Consensus. None of the results say, "we can't achieve this because we don't know how." And that's often the case in organizations. Part of the intervention involves training staff on the central skills (like administering vaccines). But very often there are hidden obstacles. And for us to save the world, we need to ferret those out.

Enter the State of the Future report.

The State of the Future is "an overview of humanity's present situation, challenges and opportunities, potentials for the future, and actions and policies that could improve humanity's outlook." Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General for the United Nations, calls it "invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its Member States, and civil society."

The report is published by the Millennium Project, a group created through a three-year feasibility study funded by the U.S. EPA, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and UNESCO, with the participation of over 200 futurists and scholars from around the world.

In fact, they've published the report each year for the past 18 years. Each year they reviewed the projects and their progress against the goals. So, they know what works, and what doesn't, and why.

Here's what they say:

"After 18 years of producing the State of the Future reports, it is increasingly clear that humanity has the resources to address its global challenges, but it is not clear that an integrated set of global and local strategies will be implemented together and on the scale necessary to build a better future.

Our challenges are transnational in nature, requiring transnational strategies. Doing everything right to address climate change or counter organized crime in one country will not make enough of a difference if others do not act as well. We need coordinated transnational implementation."

So, a hidden obstacle emerges. And now that we see it, we can address it.

We've made remarkable progress in relatively short order. We started with an historic discovery that delivered a server farm full of information that we anticipated would take tremendous effort and millennia to assimilate.

After applying some rigor, we've arrived at a very specific set of highly-leveraged actions that we have confidence will deliver the best possible results towards a set of goals that make a real difference to our society. And we've surfaced issues that we need to resolve that are pivotal to our success.

It's still a big project, enormously ambitious. But finally, with the help of our instructional designer, we have the design point for our program. We know what we have in hand and what we need ET to ask when he phones home. Instead of asking the extraterrestrials to teach every one of us all that they know, we ask them to help us train key people in specific organizations to coordinate programs across national boundaries and around the globe.

That's why an ID could be your ideal emissary to aliens from outer space. Because even when projects seem beyond reach, they can help you identify goals and break them down into actions. And once you break it down, even a big project like saving the world becomes approachable.