Hacker News Reader

Comment by techwiz137 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that thinks it's not a good idea? I mean the signal hasnt traveled very far, but yeah these announcements "hey, we're here" aren't very nice.

View on HN

I personally believe METI practitioners are extremely arrogant ideologues. They've decided that they speak for the entire world, the entire human race, and that they can risk all life on this planet. They think they know better than everyone else, they think they're smart enough, when in reality they truly know nothing about what else is lurking out there in the universe, just like the rest of us.

The only rational, safe, approach is silent observation of the universe for now, at least the best we can, until we have more data, but they give the rest of us the finger and just start blasting signals into the void. It's borderline evil. There's numerous groups, not individuals, who actively plan on blasting out really powerful signals in the near future and they don't care what the rest of us think.

Reminds me of the people with “Welcome to Earth” placards standing on rooftops in Independence Day (1996).

It seems to me you're projecting our own human nature over all possible intelligent life.

But with a bit of imagination the potential space of intelligent life is much larger than just "displaying human-like agressive traits".

The loss of not making contact with friendly aliens is probably not very high. Attracting aliens whose presence would have negative impact for us would be catastrophic. The aliens would not even have to be that aggressive - there's plenty of different ways that civilizations can harm each other, even if it might not be intentional.

Sound reasoning when applied to the alien civilizations themselves. However, the dark forest problem (which is what the original commenter I think is talking about) extends beyond the idea that aliens may or may not have agressive traits, if you believe that there are thousands of alien races out there, you only need one to be technologically advanced and decide that humans are too "agressive" to be left alone.

Upate: Other people in the thread have mentioned 3 Body Problem, I would recommend taking a look, it completely changed how I think about this.

When you say "it", do you mean this one individual with his one radio transmitter, or do you mean the collective practice of humanity in its billions using radio transmissions?

I used to think I was the only one, but now it seems we are two at least. In fact the main reason we haven't discovered advanced civilizations on other planets is likely that they learned not to disclose it - the hard way...

You’re certainly not the only two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

This is the plot of the very good sci-fi book The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels. It popularized the dark forest theory a sibling commenter linked to.

That is: if you’re in a forest that’s dead silent, and you’re wondering where all the animals are, it might not be a good idea to start shouting.

Agreed. Horrible idea to broadcast our position like this. But hella exciting

Bit late for that mate.

Not really sure why this was killed, but it's absolutely true. From the moment we started making radio signals, we've been broadcasting our location. Every single time we communicate with our deep space probes, we're sending out very specific signals that we're here. To that end, that's the entire point of the opening scene in the movie Contact. It's just that the time frame we've been broadcasting is just a drop in the ocean of cosmological time, and the signals really haven't gone very far in comparison.

Our signals are so weak that they will probably fade and get drowned out by the electromagnetic noise of interstellar space. We can communicate with our probes only because we use directional signals and we pretty much know what to look for on the receiving end. If aliens manage to pick those up, then their probes would already be like < 1ly away, and they would have noticed us long ago by different means.

The intentional signals are a different story though.

They can probably just watch co2 spectral lines and count how many of us there are.

Just as many as on Mars, but hardly any compared to Venus.

I think music is the perfect solution.

Until we find out that rap/hip-hop is interpreted as an aggressive war challenge, or you can find out that yodeling country music is an effective weapon.

Have you read the three body problem?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com