What Happens If China Makes First Contact? | Hacker News Reader

What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

theatlantic.com

68 pointsangli77 comments

First contact is a species event, I really don't think it matters who makes it first. My reasoning is derived from a though experiment (happy to explain, but it should be obvious), which is all we have to go on this stuff. Long story short: it's highly probable that a species wouldn't care about our primitive political systems when engaging with us. It would most likely be a philanthropic event - which is a strong indicator of why nobody has engaged with us: we're not worth the time.

As usual this article places to much emphasis on the human. We really aren't that important. Our political systems are irrelevant in the grander scheme.

Why do we assume the aliens would even recognize humans as a species worth talking to? They could be so far beyond us, that (a) they would have no idea how to talk to us (like we have no idea how to talk to ants) and (b) they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between us and other species in terms of intelligence (like we can’t tell the difference between a fish and a crab).

We humanize aliens because otherwise movies would be boring, but more likely they would be very different from us, heck, we might not even recognize them ourselves.

They may just consider us very young. You only tell a child things it is ready to handle. Arguably we’re not ready to make first contact. It has a high risk of leading us to war, the equivalent of a child throwing a tantrum.

On the other hand, the aliens might not care, any more than Europeans cared about African or Mesoamerican cultures. The aliens may simply show up and consider the world to be theirs by their version of divine right.

What is so special about earth aliens might be interested in it in the first place? You could argue sentient life - or even any life - is even rarer than any other kind of matter.

Several science fiction pieces have been written and filmed about alien cultures only finding value in other species' history, stories etc for their entertainment.

You are humanizing them again. It would be more like kicking an ant hill than western colonialism.

We may be surrounded by aliens right now and just not know it. Perhaps alternate life forms are nothing more than laser beams or cosmic rays with specific encodings being beamed back and forth from some a distant transmission station or central "brain" and they take host in various organic creatures through manipulation of brain chemistry. Philip K. Dick has a novel called "VALIS" (Vast Artificial Intelligence System) that delves into these ideas -- the plot involves a satellite that essentially shoots down information to various living creatures in order to accomplish its ends.

It’s highly possible that aliens travelling far distances are merely a century or so ahead of us, with the major distinction that they figured out interplanetary travel.

We figured out rockets well before nuclear ( Robert Goddard’s rocket launch in 1926, vs the Chicago Pile in 1942 ). Seems to me that the same thing could be true for something like warp travel.

Secondly, we try to communicate with dogs, apes, dolphins, etc. That gap is pretty big, but nowhere near ants -clearly it could be, I’m just saying there is no reason for it to be that big of a gap

If the aliens could detect and understand our communications, they would see the violent, duplicitous and prejudiced nature of our world and avoid us like the plague.

I doubt they would want us to spread ourselves into their galaxy and bring our problems to them.

The article also mentioned the point that China or other state gets the signal(that could be not a deliberate communication to us) and keep it secret. So it can be important if the state that receives the signal is a secrecy state like USA or China.

You and most other people here assume it would be a planned, organized event. Maybe it's rather one weirdo talking to another weirdo.

Yes, a more enlightened weirdo talking to an ignorant weirdo.

I don’t know how to guess at how first contact would actually go, but it’s interesting that government coverups of aliens is a common theme in fiction (x files, men in Black, etc.) and in conspiracy theories (Roswell, UFOs, etc.).

Fiction is great because it's compelling. I see no reason for the actual first contact to be more sublime.

I agree. I think the more anthropomorphic (socially) the aliens are, the more it makes sense that they would go along with our own social constructs and thus make contact through governments. An alien species that’s extremely similar to humans would be expected to contact government leaders, in the same way that a group of humans would likely pursue diplomacy when contacting another group of humans. In popular fiction, we see that in stories like Men in Black or Transformers, where the aliens are apparently mostly complicit in the governments’ efforts to conceal their existence from the general public.

Of course, it would also depend on the aliens’ goals and the circumstances of their arrival on Earth. If they just want the planet, they may as well show up with guns blazing, as in War of the Worlds or Attack the Block or Battle: Los Angeles or Skyline. If they’ve landed in distress, they also likely wouldn’t bother concealing themselves, as in District 9.

Anyway, I’ve always been fascinated by imagining what would actually happen if some fairly anthropomorphic aliens really did show up tomorrow, on a diplomatic mission (not guns blazing). Portrayals in fiction are fascinating, where world religions try to explain it (or view it eschatologically), governments debate whether to preemptively attempt to annihilate them, etc. How would I react?

Of course, I’d guess it’s more likely that our first evidence of extraterrestrial life would be of primitive microscopic life in our solar system. That would still have some major implications for science, religion, philosophy, etc., but probably not much more so than discoveries we’ve already experienced (like the age of the Earth/Universe, biological evolution, or quantum mechanics).

Yeah, I would have to imagine they would see through the Chinese and the US like a grownup seeing through the motivations of toddlers in the sandbox.

Me: I'm writing off this article if it doesn't mention 'Arrival'.

Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year’s Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien’s messages.

Ahh, there we go. Thank you.

Long article. I didn't read all of it, but the parts I skimmed were good. I had no idea that China had its own answer to Arecibo.

EDIT: not sure why this is getting downvoted. The title of the post is literally one of the biggest plot points of Arrival. It would have been somewhat tone-deaf to popular culture had the article come out with this title and not mentioned Arrival. And sure enough it did. That was my only point. I wouldn't have made this comment if the post were titled "China's Answer To Arecibo".

As someone who found Arrival super irritating, I'm afraid I'm "writing off" your comment.

I actually found it really irritating too. I'm not endorsing Arrival. That said, the inter-country politics were by far the most interesting thing about it. And it's a major Hollywood film that literally addresses the question "What Happens If China Makes First Contact?"

> literally addresses the question "What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

It does. And its very deep answer is "the Chinese fuck up because they're a bit dumb, and only thanks to a very bright, young and beautiful American the world is saved, again".

Give the film some credit - the "hero" figure was an expert this time, a big step up from "winging it".

> China had its own answer to Arecibo

Thank god, because we are treating ours like shit.

No, not like 'shit', like 'white dielectric material'.

http://nullbloggers.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/white-dielectric...

My inference on the reason you are being downvotes is, that the main reference in the actual article is to the book the 3 body problem with the author being interviewed. Which you seem to have missed

Given the vast distances involved, I've always thought first contact would be much closer to this short story by @qntm:

https://qntm.org/retrospective

It's a fantastic read, set aside a few minutes to go through it, you won't regret it.

Well, that was a depressingly realistic read.

A fundamental question, of course, is whether FTL is possible. Special relativity says it isn't, and worse, that it would violate causality. We're probably fundamentally limited to having very slow conversations with any civilization that's within tens of light years. If any. We might find out about some that are further away, but there's not going to be interaction.

Well, this is our world view now. But we cannot predict future progress. Just as we laugh at the horribly wrong cosmological models of our ancestors from the middle ages now, our ancestors might do that with ours in a few centuries.

The interesting thing about both theories of relativity is that they only add one or two rather small ideas to existing theories each (electrodynamics and Newtonian mwchanics) and derive sweeping fundamental facts about our spacetime from that. Most of the building blocks were already there, but were not recognized for what they really are. The theories have held up very well to all direct tests we could come up with so far. This makes chances that there are loopholes or omissions left right there rather slim (based on our current knowledge, of course). There are oddities like solutions to the field equations that allow time travel. But as far as I know, these are mathematical oddities and unphysical solutions.

I have never understood how the destruction of quantum entanglement can avoid violating causality. Our professor confused us to no end at this point in the lecture and I have never tried to follow up on my own.

Entangle the spins of two electrons; put one on Pluto and keep the other on Earth. How do you propose to send your FTL single bit?

The usual idea is that since "wave function collapse is instantaneous" we can measure the spin on Earth, collapse the superposition and then Pluto can "notice the collapse".

However, there's no way to notice that entagled particles have decohered without looking at both of them side by side. Or said another way, the entire planet Earth could be entagled with some giant blob of matter in an alien lab in Andromeda, but we have no way of discovering this without comparing Earth matter with the alien lab matter.

I've got my unreasonable hopes pinned on some incarnation of the Alcubierre Drive. Just gotta find that negative energy density first :)

If humans start to be able to live millennia, speed of light becomes less of an issue.

If the aliens want us to know they are there, it won't be because we have a specialized radio dish to receive their transmissions -- it's unlikely that we'd be able to distinguish their regular communications from noise. In another 50-100 years, the earth will likely stop transmitting the kind of high power, trivially modulated signals that we're looking for, which leaves a very small window of opportunity to detect other alien species.

It'd be like Marconi trying to decipher a modern spread-spectrum encrypted RF datastream.

I pointed this out to some SETI people over a decade ago. They were focused on looking for "carriers", signals with a strong center frequency component. Analog TV, was AM video with 80% carrier, requiring huge transmitter power. UHF stations used to emit megawatts. Those signals are gone. More modern transmissions (DTV, cellular) look like white noise across a narrow chunk of spectrum. Those are much harder to pull out of the noise background. You can detect that a carrier is present even if you're missing most of the signal. That's not true of more modern modes.

If a civilization wanted to be detected, they could easily send out clearly understandable signals - big carriers with slow modulation. Arecibo could in theory communicate with a similarly sized dish across the galaxy. An answer would be a long time coming, though.

why is china so frightening to the west as a representative of humankind?

they are imperfect, sure-- their abysmal human rights record will soon be matched by a collapsing xenophobic West.

but they are evidence that humanity can produce contiguous government without overt destruction of rivals even when capable of doing so. they are evidence that humanity can persist in peaceful trade with other civilizations, even if troubled internally.

china is no leader of "the free world" to be sure, but they are far from irresponsible recipients of first contact.... they have no interest in humankind's eradication, and they likely have plans for contact in the exceedingly unlikely chance that it occurs.

I’m guessing you aren’t Filipino, Indian or Vietnamese.

Three nations that have suffered immeasurably more at the hands of the West than of China?

Ah, the "greater crime" doctrine. The guilty are free to go, so long as they can prove that the victim had already suffered at someone else's hands. After all, in civil law, only the first transgression counts.

How do you get "immeasurably more"? The West has been meddling in these countries for maybe a century. China has been doing it for millennia.

Even during the wars with the French and Americans, the Vietnamese were quite wary of China. They knew the westerners would leave, but China would always threaten them.

correct.

every empire has its victims. the question posed by the OP's article was why not the chinese empire rather than the anglo-american empire as a point of first contact.

in all honesty, i trust the chinese not to fuck up first contact more with a bellicose message, especially given the west's political incapacitation /fall to fascism

> in all honesty, i trust the chinese not to fuck up first contact more with a bellicose message, especially given the west's political incapacitation /fall to fascism

The Chinese have never stopped being routinely bellicose during the CPC era. They annexed Tibet through violence. They're desperate to annex a successful, independent nation - Taiwan - that wants absolutely nothing to do with that. They're willing to use violence to acquire Taiwan as needed. They're currently using bellicose military intimidation and threats to annex an extremely large amount of territory from Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan.

It would be the equivalent of the US routintely threatening to invade Canada to annex Vancouver + Toronto. Then annexing Baja California from Mexico. Then invading Cuba, annexing it and systematically de-Cubanizing the island culturally. Then annexing territorial waters in the Gulf, Caribbean, Pacific and Atlantic from Canada, Mexico and several other Latin American nations.

Show me another nation that has annexed more territory in the last 50 years than China. And they're obviously not done yet.

I've got some further bad news for you. A century of results indicates that Communism is just as bad or worse than Fascism. The overall current human rights position and behavior of the West is radically preferable to that of present day China.

Why do people have to compare body counts of communist and fascist systems. Yes, I know many if not most people underestimate/do not know the "cost" in lives of Soviet and Chinese communism, but it just seems... wrong to compare how many more millions each one killed than the other.

---

One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. (Sorry for butchering the quote)

Just to fact-check here, as I think you are being literal, the "west" is not fascist

Most Americans seem to take it for granted, that they are the ones making first contact, that's pretty deeply ingrained in pop-culture. But who builds the biggest super colliders and telescopes the world has ever seen? Anyone but the USA. I think any alien life capable of traveling to us, would stay far away from trump land.

Governments that do not destroy rivals even if capable of doing so and civilizations that can peacefully trade with other civilizations have existed as long as governments and civilizations have existed. China is certainly not the first nor only country to refrain from wanton destruction of other nations or to engage in mutually beneficial trade...

If the aliens are strong enough to land their spaceship on earth, investigating all countries is probably a piece of cake for them. There is no reason for them to tie themselves to a certain country or area.

In another case, if they establish communication with a certain country/organization, but they cannot arrive, and somehow can only communicate with that certain country/organization, then it could be a different story.

These thought experiments are always a little strange to me. If an alien race has the technology for interstellar travel I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to assume they’d also be able to do whatever they want to observe us (i.e. stay hidden if they like).

I think a much more interesting thought experiment is this: if an alien race chooses to make First Contact with us, what’s the likelihood we’re actually the first for them? Being a student of history, it’s a stretch for me to think they wouldn’t know these sorts of events trigger drastic changes in the native populations (usually resulting in death) when encountering a more developed civilization. So, I’m forced to conclude that if they do make First Contact with us we’re either the first for them and we’re doomed, or we’re not and they have some sufficient protocol for First Contact that’s “good enough” that they benefit in the exchange. Either way I don’t think Humanity makes out well unless we get lucky with some really benevolent explorers.

> Being a student of history, it’s a stretch for me to think they wouldn’t know these sorts of events trigger drastic changes in the native populations

I think we should really stop thinking that space travel is the natural continuation of the geographic explorations and colonizations of our past. It has nothing to do with it- new planets cannot be colonized because they're uninhabitable (Earth included for an alien) and distances are too big to transfer significant amounts of population.

I don’t think your last sentence follows. Like I noted if they have the technology for interstellar travel I sincerely doubt they wouldn’t also be able to transfer larger populations across those distances. Even that idea might not make sense in this context. Perhaps they’d store their genetic code and simply grown the colonists upon arrival. For us yes we shouldn’t think of colonizing the solar system like it’s just a new continent, but that’s viewing it in the context of our current technology levels. If we had interstellar travel available suddenly that equation changes considerably.

Human life already relies hugely on an artificially created habitat to satisfy basic needs. The trend is to become less coupled to the natural environment that we evolved within. Perhaps that could one day include self supporting habitats beyond the surface of earth. But I do wonder if the focus on planetary surfaces is desirable. If we can survive on the surface of Mars then perhaps space stations/ships could also be self sustaining? If there is enough material outside of big gravity wells then why not?

Being accomplished space travelers doesn't necessarily imply a nuanced understanding of psychology

>>If the aliens are strong enough to land their spaceship on earth, investigating all countries is probably a piece of cake for them.

What if it's just a scout/science vessel?

It depends on how big the gap between the power of aliens and earthlings is.

Some people believe that science advances should progress like explosion, and "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". In this case the possibility of aliens being at the similar level with us is small.

But I think you have a point. Sometimes I doubt the speed of science advances. Maybe the aliens are not so far away from us and their astronautics is not much stronger than our level. They don't look like magicians. In this case things can be boring, may be just an age of discoveries for the aliens.

— “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.” —

I am sure the Pentagon and NASA have a plan if a "moon-sized" object with a deliberate orbit suddenly appeared in the night sky or was detected by a space telescope or an amateur astronomer using Mars as a gravity boost.

What would be more amusing if they were coming here to live underwater.

> I am sure the Pentagon and NASA have a plan...

The plan probably is about communication channels and who decides what, and what not to do, more than what to do. Regardless of the content, I'm very sure it's not going to be followed, even if it did exist.

That plan better have an up-to-date phone number for Mr Freeman.

Thinking about this, sending a celebrity rather than a politician/religious/military is probably a good idea.

If they came with amazing techno/bio offerings would we look at them as an invasive species or accept their "blankets" and "firewater" as friendship gifts?

I hope we choose to view them as invasive species.

"The moon is an alien spaceship." - Hollow Moon Theory

I think US would be the country for "first contact", then Russia.

Most of our planet is water. US has the biggest/best Navy & intelligence systems. And also pretty aggressive spirit.

Russia has 1/6 (IIRC) of our planet's land mass and also a very stubborn spirit.

So my uneducated guess is ET is going to be chatting with either Trump or Putin.

...God help us...

I think Chile would be the first country for "first contact".

Why? it's an elaborate pun in their alien language and the alien bureaucrat in charge of that decision really loves puns.

If an alien civilization doesn't love puns, then I really don't want to meet them.

The world is already a shitty place. Earth doesn't need to add more species that don't understand or love puns.

Nothing? Even ignoring the fact that humans can't generate a powerful enough signal to respond, it's probably going to be several thousand years for them to get the response. They'll likely be far more interested in claiming the achievement of discovering the signal, than concocting a response.

Is the octahedron on the picture supposed to be an alien spaceship?

It reminds me of a creature in a certain animation I watched.

I thought the same – I actually liked the illustration so much I bought a print of it. This is the artist's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harriorrihar/

What if we are the first/only intelligent beings in the universe and it is upon us to spread to other galaxies and stars?

Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought.

> Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought.

How do you even measure that? If the number of coincidences required for life to emerge is large enough, the probability of observing life on a planet could very well be far bellow 1 over the number of planets in the universe.

That would make us probably alone :(

One point of evidence to the contrary is that life appeared on Earth nearly as soon as it could. So it seems that given the correct conditions on a planet abiogenis always occurs.

>How do you even measure that?

Probably like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

The probability I was referring to is fl " in Drake's equation ("the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point"), and Drake isn't really helping us here.

Quoting wikipedia:

The last four parameters, fl, fi, fc, and L, are not known and are very difficult to estimate, with values ranging over many orders of magnitude

So far we know its true of the solar system, at least.

Which means there's no really good reason we can't move our factories to space and turn Earth into a Life Haven.

The consequence would be they get first contract and a better deal for producing AlienPhones?

Do we really think they'll be using radio communication? We're already dabbling with quantum comm ourselves. And if they can travel the stars, they'd have been incentivized to develop something better long ago. One would think...

Hell, maybe the whole galaxy has quantum wifi.

"Quantum communication" still uses a conventional communication channel to exchange data, it's only the encryption key that is determined by exchanging single quanta. That's because single quanta are very susceptible to noise, which is very useful to detect eavesdropping but undesirable when you want to exchange large amounts of data.

To reliably send a signal across large distances, it's much better to use a bright light source focused at the target. When you start with trillions of photons, it doesn't harm the signal quality very much if a few of them hit interstellar dust on the way.

Your message is accurate, but I think you're missing the forest for the trees.

It's like looking for telegraphy systems when everyone else are using radio waves.

If you have no idea that radio waves exist and no way to build a receiver, looking for telegraph lines is the best you can do. Given our (or rather my) knowledge of physics and engineering, electromagnetic waves are the best medium for long-distance communication and quantum magic isn't going to change that anytime soon. If there really is something that's even better, we can start worrying about it once we can detect it.

What is quantum comm? Quantum entanglement doesn't allow for a conceivable way to transmit information.

Is there something else you're thinking of other than entanglement?

No, that's what I was thinking. Guess I don't understand it like I thought. There's an overwhelming plethora of misleading articles on this and so many things. More specifically, I was thinking of the recent experiment in China with "quantum teleportation". When I looked it up and kept seeing "transfer of information over long distances" over and over, I apparently drew the wrong conclusions.

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