Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking
timesonline.co.uk
timesonline.co.uk
It's not very likely they would like to touch the Earth when there is so much water, carbon and miscellaneous metals on the Oort cloud for the cost of towing them into your processing facility. It also spares them the need to enter lower orbits around the Sun. We don't see it as a gravity well because we are at its bottom, but if a deep spacer could choose, he would probably not enter it.
Hopefully, any spacefaring nation smart enough to develop sufficiently powerful propulsion is also smart enough not to casually commit xenocide with it. Given our own track record, though, that's a pretty freaking big "hopefully."
In all seriousness, the possibility of harmful alien contact is quite real and should be taken into consideration by the scientific community. That said, I think it's much more important (and hopefully covered in the new documentary series) to concern ourselves with our behavior as we venture out into the Universe and seek new territory and resources. I mean knowledge.
Other starfaring intlligences may well decide to do unto us before we do unto them.
You could do it with 1960s computers and whatever Sci-fi Magic propulsion system your probe needs to get from system to system. Find a big asteroid. Accelerate it into the orbit of the planet at, oh, .01c should be plenty. What is the planet going to do, roll a natural twenty to dodge?
An asteroid with a diameter of 2 km and a density of 1 ton/m^3 weighs ~410^9 kg. Travelling at 0.01c, it has a kinetic energy of ~410^22 J, or ~100 times the current worldwide energy production per year.
Of course deflecting it doesn't require you to fully stop it, but it's closing in fast and you need a strong sideways push to accelerate it fast enough to end up with enough speed to miss the planet. If we ever see an reasonably sized asteroid with reasonable speed on a collision course, we're as doomed as if we hadn't seen it.
Besides that impending death is an excellent motivator.
.01 * the speed of light = 2,997,924.58 m / s
1kg traveling at 2,997,924.58 m / s = 6,706,166.29 mph. At that speed it has the same kinetic energy as ~10,000,000,000 kg traveling 67mph.
Since the projectiles are relativistic, there is no warning.
At any rate one would think that aliens would at least understand the concept of mutually assured destruction and realize that we would not destroy them if they were capable of retaliating in kind...
No warning + no survivors = no retaliation = no MAD.
Also, the historical evidence is that we've been dangerously close to nuclear war on too many occasions for comfort.
What about killing for their own survival, after all respect for the lives of one's own race doesn't translate to respect for lives of others. This may be true, but with their intelligence I'd think they're smart and reasonable enough to explore other possibilities. I don't think aliens in soon-to-be-out-of-resources ships desperately flying around the universe for energy is a scenario advanced intelligent life forms planned for. It's more likely that they accept a peaceful conclusion to their existence.
Of course, it's very possible that we're all wrong since we're projecting our own primitive reasoning on species that are a lot more evolved.
"Of course, it's very possible that we're all wrong since we're projecting our own primitive reasoning on species that are a lot more evolved."
I completely agree with this though - you can't reasonably guess the consequences of future intelligence until you actually have it. Also, who said intelligence is on a single scale? There could be multiple types of advanced intelligence, each with their own chain of development.
(just a side note: my belief is that not only humans are cognitive beings, so my respect applies to all life, but that's a bit offtopic, altough might be present in aliens as well)
War is idiotic. Bringing war through incommensurably immense voids is nonsense. The only reason we can't see it is that we're used to rationalize the sad fact that we are too primitive to stop it.
After all, it might be that there are many more variations of evolutionary paths than the inverse of the probability of one getting this far... and who knows what a different evolutionary path for an ecosystem looks like? There is no reason our imaginations could be even remotely suited for such a task.
On the other hand, should we encounter sentient life, it certainly is not difficult to imagine hostility or callous indifference -- from either party. Particularly if said encounter is not on our terms.
And as profoundly exciting as the prospect of meeting alien life would be, I'd much rather it occur sometime after we've grown up a bit, ourselves.
Just because we can imagine something doesn't make it at all possible. We're speculating the probability of something having seen it occur once...
But now your also scared of storms :)
I certainly agree that our dataset, re: "life as we know it", is horribly limited. Likely to the point of uselessness. But hypotheses are the foundation of any science, after all, and what little we do have to go on suggests that competition/predation, rather than cooperation/symbiosis, may be a more reasonable expectation.
But perhaps not. In which case, we'd be very lucky to encounter such an enlightened species.
The idea of cities on other planets seems nice, and seems natural given where humanity is at now. I don't imagine it will be that way for civilizations that develop much more than our own.
If the aliens are still living in cities and orbital structures, then they'll want to wipe out a star faring human race. Any species capable of star travel can also accelerate and target enough low albedo impactors (perhaps relativistic) to wipe out a planetary or even system-wide civilization. There would be no warning, so there would be no possible deterrent. The only logical way to avoid genocide would be to strike first.
If the aliens have uploaded their consciousnesses and have all become spacecraft themselves, then we would be safer when encountering them. Wiping out such a civilization would be too difficult, so there would be a deterrent factor working on their behalf. There would be no need for them to act first to avoid genocide, and there would be no options in our case.
The rest of what you say I think I agree with (though I have no idea what a low albedo impactor is).
Note that they only have to be friendly to themselves to survive to get into space. What if the mechanisms that ensure their peaceful cooperation just don't apply to naked apes? Just one example: we say that a smile is "universal" but that's just because it's wired into our species. An alien species would've been subject to an entirely different evolutionary context. A smile would be meaningless to them. We still don't know everything about how altruism works in our own species. I posit that we have not a clue about how it would work with aliens, or even if it would exist at all towards us.
(Another example: when was the last time you felt pity or forbearance in response to a reptilian submission signal?)
I have no idea what a low albedo impactor is
It's a kinetic projectile that doesn't reflect a lot of light.
But plenty of logistics and game theoretic ones.
Logistics: An expansive starfaring culture can garrison every rock in the galaxy within a few million years. The fact that they haven't means that either (1) no such cultures exist or will exist in our vulnerable window, in which case we are unconditionally safe, (2) the galaxy is already garrisoned and they are tolerant, in which case we are conditionally safe as long as we don't piss them off, or (3) we currently live in the special 0.1% of the galaxy's life when a hostile culture is expanding but has not reached us yet, in which case we survive mostly by random luck. The likelihood is that we are in scenario #1 or #2, but cannot know which.
Game theory: A group is deterred by internal risk analysis, not external threat. A clever expansionary culture will run the logistics analysis above and decide that hostility has a horrific risk of backfiring. (For a fictional example, see Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars.)
Hit earth for resources? If an alien civilization has capability of interstellar travel at galactic scales then it surely has the abilities to harvest necessary resources from uninhabited planets that are much more common in universe.
Alien civilization might be interested in life itself though. Life is a evolutionary solution of a very complex nonlinear problem. Designing proper life for given sets of conditions might be hard even for very advanced civilization so they might be interested in every instance of naturally existing solutions such as place where life evolved spontaneously.
Organisms composed of genes that were the most successful at replication are undoubtedly dangerous. However, in order for them to come up with technology, they must have developed some semblance of cooperation. It's unlikely for star travel to be developed and kept by only one long-lived individual (although possible)
The question is how far does their cooperation extend? Even in humans, we're only really good at cooperating with close relatives or mates, and the same is even more true for other animals.
So I think the point is valid.
Except that I'd definitely be willing to sacrifice the entire Earth for 10 minutes of interaction with an alien being :)
A darker, more games-theoretic take on first contact.
quoth this link:
They won't come to get our resources or our knowledge or our women or even because they're just mean and want power over us. They'll come to destroy us to insure their survival, even if we're no apparent threat, because species death is just too much to risk, however remote the risk...
Umm, if they can travel to earth and gather resources (at a cost less than the fuel, time, etc), why wouldn't they just raid an uninhabited planet? there are plenty, and they have resources too. this makes no sense.
Why go to the store to buy bottled water when you can get clean fresh water from your tap at home?
We have enough of a challenge explaining human motivations, we can't know any potential alien motives. We don't have any context. So far science has taught us that reality consistently overturns our preconceive notions and it indeed far stranger than what we've anticipated. Just one example: We knew that light was propagated by the luminiferous aether until the Michelson Morley experiment blew that assumption out of the water.
You make it sound as if there'd be no reason at all. There's always a reason, and it's generally comprehensible even to us. We can understand the motivations or behaviors of non-human life just fine so far, and we have examples of our continued understanding all around, ranging from simple single-celled life forms to complex plants, animals, etc. . Why should life be incomprehensibly different "out there"? It can be modeled, motivations examined. Basic evolution will most likely still apply. They want to survive, and this is a basic logical tenet that weaves the fabric of the psychology of any lifeform.
Axioms are not things that exist just floating in space, but neither are they things that only exist to a human mind. Logical implications can be defined, and inferred, in a useful way that applies to systems that don't understand logic at all! Even if aliens thought in a way entirely, well, "alien" to us, they could still be described by logic, even if they themselves found the idea patently ridiculous, because even their formation followed physical laws, and their development followed biological laws.
Perhaps not laws that we are familiar with. Perhaps the life we hypothetically encounter is just one monolithic life-form that developed in solitude on a planet, and self-developed. Normal rules of evolution do not apply when there is only one creature. But, that's not to say that there were no rules. For to survive, it still must have done something right. And in a universe with some known laws, what is right to survive can be surmised quickly: it obviously didn't jump into its sun right away and perish. Suicide cannot coexist with life. So already we can figure out one thing: this singular life-form that "evolved" in such a strange manner does not commit suicide. Other aspects might be harder to find. Is it peaceful? There's no way of knowing. Whether it's peaceful or not has nothing to do with whether it survived and developed to get here, because it developed entirely in solitude. But, is it very sociable? Almost certainly not. A thing that has never before seen other life won't even comprehend what it is to be social. It's just like us examining quantum physics. What on earth is going on? We can't understand things totally outside of our experience except by analogy and coincidence, and here there is almost definitely no analogy, only a freak coincidence of mental structure.
So you see, we can reason about things logically, even if they are alien. We've reasoned about quantum mechanics, despite never seeing it, and despite never even understanding it. We've reasoned about single-celled organisms, things that are incapable of even thinking. We have reasoned about automata and machines, about chemical and nuclear reactions on a scale so far beyond the realm of our comprehension that we can never hope to appreciate it on anything more than a dumb, primitive level. We do it even if we don't understand, because the tools of logic are universal. Not by virtue of some belief or god, but simply because things have patterns. Even alien things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic
Because, to use your analogy, that would be like the aliens living in New York, but doing all their shopping at a local grocery store located in London.
The distances to these far of galaxies are measured in the hundreds of millions of light years, if not further.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies
For that matter, some of the "life is everywhere" theories assume many space-faring civilizations within our own Milky Way galaxy, which is only(!) about 100,000 light years across.
But lets assume these aliens are in fact our neighbours and live just a million light years away.
If they are planning to pop over for a visit, it's going to take them a very long time to get here.
Unless of course Einstein is wrong and in reality it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light.
In reference to several commentators WRT to the energy you need to command to get to another star system, as I recall Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation posited this approach:
Use lasers pumped by your sun to accelerate a solar sail probe to a good fraction of c. Once that's done, the probe reassembles itself into a linear accelerator. As it flashes through the target system, the accelerator deaccelerates tiny probes, which make their way to planets. Those probes of course have nanotech which they use to assemble ... stuff (maybe even copies of the aliens).
Any one of a number of science fiction stories continue the plot from there.
Note that this approach will result in a signature the target system can see, as described in Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye.
Ooops, too late.
If there are aliens out there, they would have to have evolved technology at a rate within a few hundred years of our own on a scale measured in billions for this discussion to even be relevant. It seems to me that the odds of aliens existing and evolving at a rate so precisely aligned with our own are pretty slim, compared to the odds of aliens evolving somewhere at some time.
If the aliens are more than a few hundred years behind us technologically, it's not likely to matter all that much what they think of us. And if they are more than a few hundred years ahead and they really do turn up on some huge nomadic spaceship that has been travelling across open space for millenia, what exactly do Hawking et al think we're going to do if they are hostile and decide they want to take over our planet? They could squash our entire civilisation as easily as we would control aggressive garden pests, and with about as much concern.
What I find saddest is the assumption of hostility. If, as Hawking suggests, we look at the development of our own species, we find that where communities have formed and their members have collaborated for mutual benefit, they have typically done better in the long run than any aggressive group. You can take stuff and destroy things by force, but you advance by building new things, and sooner or later you usually advance to the point where taking the other things is no longer relevant anyway. In our case, we haven't cracked the secret to eternal life or worked out how to solve planetary overcrowding and resource shortages, but just about anything else is on the cards as technology improves. Why, then, would we assume that an alien race that has advanced sufficiently to allow serious space travel and has sufficient power to pose a threat to us if it wished would actually be hostile?
They'd probably only observe us for scientific purposes. We have nothing else they could be interested in.
They probably can transform matter into energy and vice-versa, they don't need "water", "iron" or anything we might have.
We'd be no more a threat to them than ants are a threat to us.
Consider the cases where we hide:
"If aliens exist and are very nasty, I'm sure glad I didn't broadcast our existence to them"
"If aliens exist and are super peaceful and awesome, well, nothing bad happened because we didn't broadcast our existence to them".
Consider the opposite cases:
"Aliens are nasty and we told them we existed - now we are all dead"
"Aliens are super awesome, we told them about us and they didn't wipe us out, possibly doing something good for us".
No matter how good the potential benefits from "nice aliens" you are a fool to stake the future of the entire human race on what is essentially a gamble when you don't have to.
But earth itself is a closed ecosystem and it's not in harmony - for peace, it must also be open within.
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it. - sadly, past tense
BTW: I didn't fully get the cute headline at first: a literal meaning of alien is stranger http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alien
Any if you are going to play with the words just use the extraterrestrial one.
But if they are traveling around, our own history suggests they're (probably) not peaceful. Then again, we have travelers who are traders, who are migrating, who are explorers, who are tourists etc. To travel doesn't necessarily mean you're expansionist; it's just that whenever you think of conquers, they were travelers - of course. You can't stay at home and conquer.
There's an interesting idea that to be conquered doesn't necessarily mean that your civic organization and culture is conquered. If your government etc works well, conquerers have often adopted it (ie they are conquered), and the rulers rotate, coup d'état. Military superiority doesn't necessarily imply civic superiority.
BTW: Headlines with puns or allusions are usually deliberate.
Just look at ourselves - wars in iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Palestina, etc. And these are peaceful times. As a species we are extremely vicious and aggressive and there's no reason to believe that evolutionary successful aliens would be any different.
There are many other examples from similarly closed systems, such as New Zealand birds, before man (since we opened them).
I would argue that the world formerly comprised many isolated ecosystems, which have began to open over our recent history. Although the world has shrunk towards a global-village - becoming more open within - I would say most is still too isolated. It also probably takes a long time for even a fully open ecosystem to settle down, possibly on an evolutionary timescale of millions of years. But once a closed system happens to come to a stable state, it stays there (til disturbed.)
OTOH, maybe constant warfare is another point of stable equilibria?
One thing I was wrong about was that the stable equilibria doesn't exist indefinitely; eventually a mutation might arise that does jump out. I was also assuming that a closed ecosystem was also closed to change in general. The latter seems more common; that equilibria is upset by an outside event that alters the utility of the phenotype - such as an open system closing, or some non-biological change in the environment (eg climate), and not by a change in the genotypes within the closed system.
It is possible that aliens are in one of these stable configurations at the time that we encounter them, which seems more likely in closed ecosystems. Closed ecosystems can be created by internal barriers being removed (which intelligent life, or at least we, seem to be doing). Of course, it's harder to eliminate change altogether (!), so that source of alteration in the utility function would remain. Yet, we certainly have motivation to eliminate environmental change that affects us adversely, so perhaps intelligent life is likely to be at equilibrium, in the long term.
If you disagree, I request that you indicate with which part. ;-)
Evolution is neither. It does not have any such personality traits, and there are plenty of examples of symbiotic behavior in nature.
We just fill the gaps. If there's a niche to be filled, and an extraterrestrial species can fill it at our expense, then so be it.
This also goes for infighting among our own species - one tribe continually tries to gain an advantage over others. Just look at global politics to see that this isn't about being fair only about expanding your own territory and power. If you look at what historically happens when a less civilised tribe meets a more civilised (and better armed) tribe it's pretty obvious. The Mayans, aboriginals, eskimos and native American indians have all been exterminated or marginalized in the most vicious ways.
Of course. I'd prefer "efficient" to "aggressive", though. True, the literal definition of aggressive does fit, but seems to imply intent (or even malice) in common usage, neither of which are possible attributes of evolution.
"Just look at global politics to see that this isn't about being fair only about expanding your own territory and power"
This returns to my point. I'm not a politician, and using the behavior of politicians or generals to predict my behavior is specious. Yes, we are a competitive species -- I made comments to this effect further down the page. I don't think we fundamentally disagree. I only object to the characterization of the "wars in iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Palestina, etc" as somehow indicative of the fundamental nature of life in the universe. As I and others have commented, we don't have much to go on in that arena.
edit:terminology/drunkenness.
HN seems to accept the '?' in the url as part of the unique URL.
At the same time, the Earth is releasing enough signals (think lights and satellite TV) and artificial objects (satellites) to be noticed by anyone bothered looking.
"oh no we lost a chance to perform sociological research."
I'm not a Lord nor an astronomer, but I had this figured out just by watching the second season of X-Files
...poor monkeys.
How about a nearby civilization, about our age? Charles Stross has done an analysis of the economics of star flight and came to the conclusion that interstellar travel makes no sense at all. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the-high... It may not be possible at all.
I think that the idea that another civilization would want us for out resources is silly, for economics alone. If they wanted to leave their star because it was about to collapse into a white dwarf, there are better places to go. Any nearby M class star would have the resources to rebuild a civilization. The comet an asteroid belts can supply the materials without the problems of a deep gravity well like the earth.
From the article you linked to: "This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary."