What Should We Do If Extraterrestrials Show Up?
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
If we’re talking about advanced aliens showing up in person, then we probably just acquiesce to whatever they want, or die resisting.
Or they may be reluctant to get involved but sympathetic enough to offer a select few technological advances, if we want them.
There are a lot of possibilities which don't result in full surrender or a fight to the death.
They can do that at home with all the resources available to them. Beside, why the heck would you transform an entire planet when you can build your own custom made space habitats?
Anyway, we're looking for habitable planets not to colonize them but to find signs of life elsewhere in the universe.
Lastly, the idea we aren’t looking for habitable planets with in the back of our minds colonies is silly, of course we actually are, we can make all the excuses we want to try and justify our real intentions.
We are on exactly the path I suggest they are likely on. Find planets, send probes, sample lifeforms if found. Send seeds. It’s the universal life force that makes us do it. It’s what life does, expand, replicate, grow, spread.
That's our assumption using technology we are already familiar with.
Who knows what trouble we may cause them in the future, or rare resources that we might currently not even know exist we might steal.
The time to place place mouse traps is long before there's an entire family of them living in your shed.
It'll be either extermination, or - best case scenario - capture/trap and possibly study. Any characteristics or capabilities we humans poses that they find interesting/funny/useful will be catalogued and copied. No need to keep us around.
The final decision was to move the probe far enough from the station, broadcast the data, and watch as it predictably self-destructed in an explosion that would have taken out the station itself and all surrounding ships.
In USENET, the showrunner said that he based this idea on a US Military recommendation that if aliens try to contact us we should ignore them, basically play dumb so we don't seem advanced enough to bother with, just in case they ARE seeking potentially dangerous civilizations to destroy before they get too far...
We won’t be important, and certainly won’t be making any appreciable difference good or bad to their civilazation as whole.
Worst case scenario that I think is plausible is that they are so decentralized that one of their warlords would come over and set up an empire on top of us for a few hundred years before the central authority realizes anything.
But yes, slightly biased. No real reference material to speak of though :P
I don't get this, our history indicates this but at the same vein as we have grown in empathy. Why wouldn't an advanced civilisation also not grow in empathy? They'd have already solved the energy problem so their needs should be about understanding different perspectives.
Lets freak out in cable news networks and social media until we reach a fever pitch of cultural overheating where all rationality collapses and we lose our ability to function as a civilization.
The discipline that has the most predictive power about their intentions is likely economics. Maybe they want to use us as an expendable species of space-apes for further colonization of new planets. It's an upgrade the same way being a research chimp is an upgrade.
However, given the time/distance they've traveled they'd be adapted for space faring, and not planet dwelling, so in terms of their deficits, muscles developed under gravity aren't their specialty. Their bodies would be the absolute minimum necessary to contain and sustain their minds, reproduce, and operate their tech, to where what we encounter or perceive would likely be exoskeletons. What minerals are unique to a planet like ours (other than life) that can't be found with less hassle than getting here, elsewere in the universe?
What should we do? Listen. Learn. Then negotiate. They need us for something, and anything less than the fairest possible terms is going to be very bad for our species.
I think this is the main focus of this opinion piece. I don't know who the author is, but I wouldn't be surprised that he would be someone writing grant proposals to get a piece of these funds.
Aka the guy that proposed that the ʻOumuamua is a solar sail.
(IIRC he is a good astrophysicist, but he is pushing the idea of the alien solar sail too hard.)
Then, of course, they'd be weak from the journey, and we'd kill them and find a reason to ignore the obvious lesson.
Are there any examples from human history where explorers have arrived on “new” land and have then been defeated by those already inhabiting it? It seems like those arriving tend to have more advanced technology and even when they’re starving and weak manage to conquer. For humans, at least, I suspect “victory” goes to the visitors far more often.
But if, by some miracle, the humans prevailed I think you’re unfortunately correct about us conveniently ignoring the lesson.
Europeans in North America. For a long time any colony that was founded only survived if the natives allowed it. Yes, the Europeans had guns vs. bows and arrows, but the guns at the time sucked. Bows and arrows were faster to fire, faster to reload, and had better accuracy.
It wasn't until some tribes that were not doing well in wars with other tribes made alliances with the Europeans that Europeans really started to get established.
Later the diseases that came with the Europeans tore through the whole continent, rapidly reducing the native population by over 90% and then Europeans could pretty much take over anything they wanted to.
The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove
(It's a great, short sci-fi story for anyone that may be interested. It should be pretty easy to find the PDF.)
If we define life as an entity that strives to perpetuate itself, then the fact that we are separate individuals is just a hack to make us evolve and survive in a harsh environment. After some level of technological advancement, a futurist civilization might simply converge into a sole being, an unified intelligence.
I'll wait for the science fiction experts to point me to some books exploring this idea :)
How does the collective work?
They’re all jacked into the boards constantly meme-ing each other.
That’s how the whole thing got started in the first place too. You had a weird cult like Qanon get memed into existence and then they got Neuralink. Then the cult became a malignant superintelligence that set about conquering the universe to exterminate the Satanic pedophiles.
“We are Borg! Resistance is futile! Where we go one we go all!”
Something like that... very easy to imagine. We are close.
Seriously though... take an online cult and add Neuralink and something like the Borg could actually happen.
I can't think of any where a civilization coalesces or evolves into one being and that gets explored in depth; only where it happens briefly "and then they uploaded/transcended/melded with the God-entity, the end" style. I suspect it would be hard to imagine being in a single superintelligence, I can only think of them seen from outside by ordinary humans. There are a few I can think of which have one-mind/hive-mind ideas on the small scale:
Starship Troopers, the enemy bugs are insect-style intelligences where only the queen is really sentient and the rest are worker-drones.
Joe Haldeman's Forever War ends with a reveal of the enemy being a hive mind of some kind, and it was all a mistake. Seen from the human side with no exploration of the enemy except that they exist.
Peter F. Hamilton has this idea in a couple of his books; one is Morning-Light-Mountain[1] which is an alien hive-intelligence which outcompeted all others in its solar system. The other is a trans-human faction starting to go the same way, "multiple-people" who clone themselves and have brain implants to sync their brain state into one mind shared between all their clones. Only on the small scale of a few dozen bodies, not a competitive intelligence. They're smaller plot parts in large space operas.
John Windham's Midwitch Cuckoos, the alien children are believed to be a hive mind, as teaching something to one of them turns into something all of them can do. Also seen from the outside, we never find out about their origins or the adult aliens.
(In the film Avatar, the aliens have a tree where they can tap into the wisdom of their ancestors, it turns out to be a kind of hive-mind of the dead).
[1] https://peterfhamilton.fandom.com/wiki/Morning-Light-Mountai...
[2] https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2019/03/01/rogue-farm-b...
For a universe that is infinite and provided there are no aggressive alien races within our inmediate stellar neighborhood, it would break the rules of economics for humans to be attacked, whether for resources or for sport.
This is because for any alien to actually visit us, they would need FTL travel tech. If they do have FTL, then such tech would dramatically reduce the cost of travel to nil. This would make any point in the galaxy reachable inmediately at almost no cost.
Therefore, at that point, any valuable resource of earth... would also be reachable at the same cost at another earth-like planet. Except the latter would be without pesky humans on it.
Or, if you had infinite kit Kat bars in front of you, you would always pick the one without any ants on it.
Similarly, any aggressive alien race with FTL would not exterminate humans for sport. They may kill some similar to how you handle a roach, but any species unrestrained by resource limits (again, FTL) the tendencies for conflict will have naturally died out of the gene pool.
Also, even if space was infinite, that doesn't mean that low-entropy energy/matter (to extract energy/work from) is also infinite.
A word i like for that is exergy. Energy you can extract.
- a society (really ? Do they also have city halls and a bi-party congress?) - unrestrained by resource limits (that you understand, because I can tell you that when you swallow suns you possibly have a limit eventually you wouldn't want to run out of) - lost its tendency for conflict - front the gene pool (that's very optimistic to think they would have genes, working like ours, in a context of natural selection similar to ours: with a bit of luck, we could have had 2 intelligent, non-sexually compatible, species of hominids, and I suspect things would have been very different in term of what sport-killing means).
Me I can absolutely imagine a species of metallic robots created by a far away biologic equivalent who are so absolutely bored that reducing biological life to ashes became a way to escape, to feel something. They can switch off time perceptions, travel everywhere at whatever speed, reproduce programmatically and don't suffer from maternal instinct or mirror neuron empathy. Their vast intelligence does generates curiosity, which in turn generates boredom when there's nothing new to do or see. We became their latest weekend sport event, and they'll move on as fast as they've exterminated us, on to the next surprise of life.
Resource limits: If the universe is infitine there are infinite suns to use. And energy doesnt disappear. It just transforms.
Genes: i think you are caught up in semantics. Any alien race will follow the same building blocks of the universe. They may not be carbon, they may not be bipeds, they may not have sexes, but they cant skip evolution. Every planet every sun every organism follows an interative pattern. Thats a basic block of the universe we reside. You start from something, creator or not. And your race then is to survive period. Those are the 2 rules. If your survival is guaranteed because you have access to infinite resources and infinite escape routes, then over time, your race reflects that condition.
You can imagine killer robots. But everything comes from something. For creators to "escape", that implies they are trapped somwhere. And if they are trapped, that means they dont really have the means to move about freely. Perhaps the killer robots do exist, but they are just as constrained as we are by our tech.
But considering out failure to chemically get anything other than carbon to form the long chains of double bonds that carbon does, along with the fact that carbon is common unlike most of the other proposed choices (that seem like they should work but don't) they probably will be. Same applies to needing water. Other chemicals could substitute, but water is common unlike the rest.
Is there an error in this sentence or is the popular understanding (that it passed through briefly, for some definition of brief) incorrect?
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud
> The outer limit of the Oort cloud defines the cosmographic boundary of the Solar System
> The Oort cloud...is a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals proposed to surround the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 au (0.03 to 3.2 light-years).
What if man is like a virus to the universe and the answer to fermi paradox is that other life forms are intentionally distancing from us?
I mean, just look at us.
We are non-aware and so we take limits lightly and act like there won't be consequences.
Also I don't hate us. I just think we can do a lot better :)
And hopefully we will.
you can say human beings or men, it's okay
spoilers = we cant handle (arent ready for) the truth
The speed of light is far too slow. If they exist (might or might not, either way is extraordinary), they are probably too far away to even know we are here (100 lightyears at the most, and probably less considering how fast radio weakens ), and then even longer to get here.
In short they can't get here in anyone's lifetime.
Solar system escape velocity is about 5.5% of c according to a quick web search. So ca. 3000 years for 100 ly, allowing for acceleration and deceleration. The aliens would be fanatics to still be interested after that time.
But in order to come to rest here, they'll have got around the laws of thermodynamics and the momentum-kinetic energy relation to produce engines with impossibly high specific impulse, thrust and efficiency.
What we'd do is watch them whizz past.
Have you taken into account the relativity of time? If i've understood it correctly, time stops at the speed of light. For an alien travelling at that velocity, moving from one end of the universe to the other will take no time at all! No fanaticism required. How will they have time to stop? Also, does anyone know if an object with mass even move at the speed of light?
What the hell, Scientific American.
Then we die from their space smallpox.
This is a mischaracterization of their position. What those people probably meant is that given an unexplained phenomena, the chances that an alien involved is small, therefore we should look for more benign and more likely explanations. It doesn't mean that if an unambiguously alien ship showed up on earth that they'll deny its existence.
Unlikely we will die from their version of smallpox, because they aren't likely to share human DNA.
Remember, we are literally surrounded by viruses. We eat them all the time. The vast majority are completely harmless anyway. They have their specific targets.
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
Unless earth has something they want or need I doubt they would bother with us.
If we did have something they needed a warlike, or non-peaceful race of aliens would come down and declare themselves as our God and creator, and after some advanced science demonstrations, all of the religious people of the world would fall in line.
A peaceful or benevolent race of aliens would still probably avoid us unless it was absolutely necessary to contact us, and then I’m still not sure we’d be smart enough to understand everything that was happening.
With Friends Like These
https://archive.org/details/withfriendsliket00fost
Another great story from that collection inspired the board game "Car Wars".
If I were to to do the same I'd be saying that there are no religious people around anymore and the church's only exist to interfere in politics, the people involved only having "faith" in as far as it justifies there actions.
If we had a large and verifiable alien encounter, there would be three types of reaction.
Denial - it's a fake, Panic - Run for the hills, Acceptance - Ok, it's what it is, how do we move forward with it.
There would be of course be people from each of these groups trying to profit from the event in whatever manner is possible.
I think the reaction to the pandemic shows how communities react to uncomfortable events, and I think the difference in reactions from different communities/countries give a pretty good indication on how they would react to an alien encounter. Some countries would react well, others would just dissolve into chaos.
You realize that anything that a human believes to be true is rooted, fundamentally, in a faith-based assumption, right? science is faith in the human ability to percieve; religion is when this faith is based on the ineffible.
Science is good for practical matters. Religion is good for moral matters.
They are not at odds. The human connection to the logical and their connection to the spiritual have walked hand in hand throughout history. Our spirituality has guided our science, and vice versa. To lose our religiousness would be to lose a full half of our capability for reasoning.
Why is it that many highly innovative and prolific scientists throughout history have been deeply religious?
Furthermore, EVEN IF religion was complete fiction, which I believe it is not, it is so very obviously a useful and deeply insightful fiction. It allows us to interrogate the inner workings of the human psyche, the natural moral law, gives us a sense of purpose, motivates charity and kindness, creates community and social trust. Abd you cab miss me with that Sam Harris, "but we can do all that without religion, cause ultimately religion also causes problems of bigotry" - Bo, we cannot, it is precisely the illogucal nature of religion that makes it useful for moral reasoning. Logical deduction about morality leads to highly undesirable consequences. And yes, sone religions propogate bigotry : not all, though. For example, Christianity does not promote any sort of judgement of others. While there are christians who do so, they do it in spite of the word of the bible, not because of it.
Okay, hopping off my soapbox now, but really guys, you ought to be more sympathetic to the religious among us, you might learn something and become a better person in the process.
I like to see the flip side of this, and look at the amazing achievements that the species have achieved in a little under 100000 years.
We've gone from intelligent animals living lives a little different from any of the other intelligent animals to creating a civilisation that has a rich culture. We've created art that expands upon our physical experience, have developed science that is asking (and answering) questions that delve into the intimate workings of the universe, have perused and created challenging answers that address "why we are here" and are on the cusp of becoming a multi planetary species. All the while we have battled our animal natures and so far, seem to be doing a pretty good job of surviving the worst we can create. Not perfect by any measure, but we're doing a damn good job for a bunch of naked apes that on cosmic timescales just crawled out of the sludge.
So lets challenge ourselves, when asked how we would react to an encounter with alien civilisations, instead of putting up the "danger, stay away" sign, how about we roll out the best our species has achieved and take some pride in what so far has been an amazing ride.
What would happen? We will have sent our automated probes to their planet, programmed to find moving objects, large/small and observe them. We will measure all aspects of their habitat.
Then what? We will sit down for tea and compare our feelings of pride? We will attempt to teach them something they don’t know?
I don’t get it. It seems super binary to me, alien life will either be so advanced they are tourists or scientists observing us on our “nature preserve” ... or they will have eyes on our real estate. I don’t see romantic in-betweens as remotely realistic and never have.