While most of us are concerned with earthly matters, a few boffins are having a heated debate about matters more external to our planet. You see, a few scientists are worried about the fact that intelligent extraterrestrial life maybe not be cute and friendly ET like but sort of nasty and vicious Dalek like.
We are a little too late in trying to hide our presence. Ever since radio broadcasts started, we have been sending signals into space. And while it is possible that an alien civilization may stumble across radio and TV broadcasts, the signals are weak and do decay. A better idea would be to send a strong signal with encoded messages. This was done in 1974 from the Arecibo radio telescope. Now scientists and even commercial groups are or will be sending deliberate signals into space in the hope of first contact.
But some scientists are concerned.
The fact is, and this should have been obvious to all, that we do not know what any extraterrestrials might be like – and hoping that they might be friendly, evolved enough to be wise and beyond violence, is an assumption upon which we could be betting our entire existence. When I was a young scientist 20 years ago at Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire, England, I asked Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Jodrell Bank and pioneering radio astronomer, about it. He had thought about it often, he said, and replied: “It’s an assumption that they will be friendly – a dangerous assumption.”
Lovell’s opinion is echoed today by the leading scientists. Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. “It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses,” he says. “We must be prepared for either possibility.”
Nobel Prize-winning American biologist George Wald agrees: he could think of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a superior technology in outer space. The late Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who died a decade ago, also worried about so-called “first contact”. He recommended that we, the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos, should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes. He said there was no chance that two galactic civilisations would interact at the same level. In any confrontation, one would always dominate.
Humans’ fascination with the idea of alien life has tended to mirror our own hopes and concerns. The UFO craze was very much borne of Cold War paranoia. The alien abduction hysteria of the 80s and 90s was also very much a manifestation of anxieties present in society. I haven’t followed the UFO crowd for a number of years but I’d bet that current narratives re UFOs and alien abductions would contain elements that reflect post 911 anxieties.
Back to the concerned speculation of scientists, there is an amount of justified, judicious caution. It may be wiser so sit around and try and work our what is our there rather than go “Hey, we are over here” and attract some nasty extraterrestrial types.
However it is unlikely that the aliens would announce themselves in fleets of spaceships hovering over our major cities. A major stumbling block to interstellar travel is the speed of light barrier. While some bleeding edge ideas exist as a way to circumvent this pesky limitation of physics, it seems a pretty tough ask. This limitation may in fact protect us and first contact could indeed be via an intercepted communication.
That depends if the aliens exist at all. The Fermi Paradox is a pessimistic view of whether we have company in the universe. The Wiki article does a grand job of summarizing the arguments for and against and does stimulate the speculating type neurons.
Musing on the intent of alien life does have an element of whimsy but underlying it are many serious and interesting questions about not just our place in the universe but ourselves. The danger is not only in what the aliens have intended for us but how will we react and the potential, destructive impact on our societal institutions if we are not alone?
uhhh … maybe this is the explanation for Dick Cheney? That hostile alien forces are already amongst us?
Ha. The Firm “Serious Fun” was the first LP I ever bought.
This website is the first LP I never bought.
… thank you, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be here all night.
I think David Bowie was onto something when he wrote:
If friendly, wise and awesomely powerful, knowledgeable and rational extraterrestrials made overt contact with us they would inevitably jar the deeply held prejudices of just about everybody one way or the other, and simply by their presence and their example would be seriously destabilising to human cultures which would be most likely to respond either with an attempt at emulation which we wouldn’t be ready for, a kind of interstellar cargo cultism, or xenophobic reaction (just imagine if they all look like Mohammed Haneef!).
Social institutions? Hey, we’ve been Cargo Culting the latest economic fad for how long.
Then again, maybe the climate-denying lobby groups and their paid servants in parliaments are actually the nasty aliens (and their dupes who always get eaten/fried/transmogrified) trying to take over the planet and make it hot like their own one. If they have faster than light travel, they’ve had around a hundred years since Marconi, and could have created their midwich cuckoos years ago…..
Well, if there are a whole lot of technologically advanced ET’s running around out there, they’ve already treated us better than we’ve treated less technologically advanced cultures on our own planet: They’ve left us alone.
Our history repeatedly shows that no technologically inferior culture ever does well out of any sort of contact with a technologically more advanced one.
Even on those rare occasions when that contact was made with benign intent, it inevitably led to social disintegration, disease and economic and cultural dependency. And all this, with the best of intentions.
So, if you are out there Guys, keep-up the good work.
Stay away.
If Teh Scary Alienz can travel faster than light, then their basic science (as distinct from technology) has progressed immensely beyond our own.
In such circumstances, it would seem reasonable to guess that their telescopes – or whatever their equivalent are – have also progressed way beyond our own relatively puny capabilities. They’ll be able to spot us whether we deliberately transmit messages into the great beyond or not.
If their understanding of basic physics is roughly like our own, any trip to visit, or indeed radio conversation, will likely take place over many generations. There will be plenty of time for society to get used to the implications.
I’d also be worried for the peaceful or less developed ETs that accidentally contact
usToo right, Cliff. They’ve probably posted signs on the edge of the system about what dangerous wild animals we are and how tourists should never feed us no matter how cute we look at the time.
Cliff: we’ve been marginally capable of detecting interstellar signals for 50 years, and won’t be capable of crewed interstellar travel for at least a century or two (though I hope to live to see the first interstellar probe launched). Anybody that comes to say hello will have technologies far, far beyond our own capabilities. So even if they didn’t have weapons to hand, they should be able to bolt something together fairly quickly.
Imagine if New Zealand got word the Spanish Armada was coming to invade. The Kiwis may not have much of an armed force to speak of right now, but give them a couple of months and I’m sure that they could whip up something that could deal with them adequately.
Personally,I do not consider the plausibility of advanced technologies as either a help or hindrance to relationships with unknowns.But, the bigger question of hostility or not,remains a biological connumdrum* seeing human relationships at a microscopic level do not seem automatically peaceful.Scaling from the microcosm to the macrocosm must indicate some truths that need rehearsals rather than the enumeration of the digit ,a finger, that has had at least 67 centuries to get to this level of measurement as frequency etc. involved in Universe searching.We can look at our finger nails and what maybe happening on the edge of their material existence and ask is there repeated cosmic scale example similar? Some like to think that dance and movement connected us to all that could be connected to.Yet, my world wariness tells me,however, people claim the wonders of the spiritual in music and dance,like all the languages and similarities within such,mean spirited people reduce it to fine calculations..there is even a site I found for scientific choreography,sounds good,but, there are always powers that are ,or want to be waiting for those who cannot see others may have already danced the steps,and await the exumberant as sacrifice. *Denotes spelling problem only.
There’s a lot of this stuff about on the toobs, with some pretty convincing photos (for a change).
My take is that the powers have realised most of us know about the terrorism ruse and the gradual dismantling of our rights, so the new threat will be a malevolent version of ET. “Duck and cover!! Phone home”…
If physics and logic makes it all implausible – then they must be amoung us!
I though our designation was ‘mostly harmless’?
mark, I’m sure the photos are of streetlights.
Shouldn’t that be the motto of every Western “humanitarian intervention” force since ‘BlackHawk Down’?
Then again, if the ETs come in force to remove our property rights, ban us from drinking alcohol, micro-manage how we spend our family tax benefits and other welfare payments and abolish our right to decide who comes into our country and the terms on which they come, all on the grounds of eliminating the massive incidence of child sexual abuse, domestic violence and sexual assault in human societies which our legal systems have been unable to curtail, we wouldn’t exactly be in a strong position morally to object.
Interstellar travel doesnt break the laws of physics, but manned travel may allways be technologically impractical. Current rockets would take 10,000 years or more to even return from Alpha Centauri – that does raise certain difficulties. Even if near-light speed technology is ever available, manned travel is likely to be too expensive. Unmanned probes are some sort of possibility.
They are “out there” – but they will never arrive.
There was an interesting story on Catalyst last week on an Aussie design for a plasma thruster. It is faster than current rocket based technology. For example it should cut down a trip to Mars to about 3 months. Of course, still pretty slow for interstellar travel but an improvement none the less.
Thank you Paul Norton – but don’t forget we MUST BE GRATEFUL for such interventions.
Bill, there are a number of technologies with known physics that could accelerate a spaceship to substantial fractions of the speed of light.
As a base case with known technology, Project Orion.
Tigtog:
You say "Dangerous wild animals"
Less dangerous than we used to be (apart from to ourselves).
I thought we were labelled "Mostly harmless" which is pretty correct since we’re not even able to
(1) get anything of any decent size out of earth orbit anymore
(2) deflect a dumb incoming asteroid or comet (we probably wouldn’t even know a city-flattener was on its way if it came from the below the ecliptic),
(3) let alone a vogon constructor fleet.
So, as long as the aliens stay outside the moon’s orbit and various Lagrange points about the solar system, they’ve nothing to fear from us (apart from brain damage if they watch political broadcasts, Fox News Neighbours and Reality TV)
Come to think of it, such pollution of the EM spectrum probably gives ET just cause to use a planetbuster.