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Is SETI a Security Risk?
Dotnaught writes "Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, fears the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) may be putting the earth at risk. As reported in the Guardian, Carrigan frets that alien radio signals could pose a security risk. The report cites a 2003 paper entitled "Do potential Seti signals need to be decontaminated?" but Carrigan's website has more details. Basically, he's calling for isolation of SETI computers and additional security measures. He writes, "To paraphrase Cocconi and Morrison for the possibility of a malevolent SETI signal ...the probability of a contaminated SETI signal is difficult to estimate; but if we never consider it the chance of infection is not zero."" Frankly, I'm more worried about some phishing malcontent then I am about the Grays, but maybe that's just me.
A slightly different concern I have heard expressed in relation to efforts to contact ET relate to the possibility that some unfriendly species will see our signal, take a look at our planet, and decide to enslave us. I know that respected professors at the University of Reading's Cybernetics department, whose names escape me, have expressed such concerns.
Since SETI and other similar programmes are based on the not unreasonable belief that other technologically advanced civilizations exist on distant planets, is it sensible to contact them and alert them to the presence of our resource rich planet? Extremely remote risk, but is there any reason to think that aliens are friendly? If earth discovered life on another planet, and this planet also happened to possess some material which greatly enriched the lives of humans on earth, how would we react?
IANASFB (I am not a science fiction buff) but I presume this type of scenario has been discussed.
Very nice rebuttal. I was unclear in my original post. I wasn't really trying to defend this idiot that wants to shut off SETI. I guess I was merely trying to point out that if they want to get past our defenses and they are sufficiently advanced, they will do it no matter how hard we try to prevent it, probably using a vector that hasn't even occurred to us. SETI isn't really a security risk, because the only way to have true securtity from these "bad aliens" is to remain invisible to them, and we're currently sending enough radio waves into space to announce our presence to anyone who really wants to find us. If they can travel faster than the speed of light, there is really no way we can possibly resist them.
So I agree with the main point of your post. Why do we even care? If they have a need to conquer us and lack the ethical principles that wouild prevent them from doing so, then I, for one, want to be the first to praise our gracious alien overlords!
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Ivanova: How much time?
Corwin: Three minutes!
Ivanova: Standing by to transmit.
Sheridan [troubled]: Commander --- the message we got from the probe. What did it promise if we did give all the right answers?
Ivanova: Advanced tech, mainly. Medical information, cures for disease, new jumpgate technology.
Sheridan: But it never gave you the name of the race or where it's from?
Ivanova: I assume we get that information once we pass the test.
Corwin: Two minutes!
Ivanova: Okay, here we go!
Sheridan: No, wait! [Everyone turns to stare.] There's something about this that has been bothering me ever since they made contact! We have been operating under the assumption that whoever sent the probe is deciding whether or not a sentient race is fit to survive based on what they know at the moment of contact. But if that's true, why give them a leg up on more advanced technologies?
Ivanova: Maybe they were feeling generous!
Sheridan: No, if they were feeling generous, they wouldn't be wiping out inferior races based on lack of advancement. No, I don't like it!
Ivanova: Captain, we're down to one minute! I don't see any other options here!
Sheridan: What if it's a berserker --- a probe sent out to find life forms advanced enough to pose a threat to the race that created it? It sends a list of questions backed by a threat. If it gets the right answers back, that proves a certain level of technological advancement, then boom ! You wipe out a potential enemy without leaving any trace of where you came from!
Ivanova: Or it could be exactly what it said! Fifteen seconds, Captain! Send or no send?
Sheridan: No send!
Ivanova: Oh, boy!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
People are weird like that. As a locksmith, I tell people almost exactly the above when they ask for a SECOND deadbolt, or for an "unpickable" lock on their cheap, hollow core masonite door. They're trying to defeat movie and TV spies, which don't exist in real life. Real life burglars throw a rock through a rear window. And in fact, real life spies aren't even going to pick the lock, but rather throw a rock through the rear window so it looks like a burglary. But no, people have delusions that there are packs of secret agent type thieves with sophisticated alarm disabling blinkenlights tools and lockpick sets. People watch too much TV.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It's hard to predict the form that such a 'virus' might take. Just making up random stuff off the top of my head: they could leave us a story about such irrelevant subjects like the history of an ancient tribe lost in some desert for 40 years but as a result of reading this story the readers' beheviour might be irrevocably changed so that they are no longer capable of understanding basic biology. You simply wouldn't be able to tell merely by skimming the subject matter as the effect would be embedded within hidden triggers. By leaving enough of these subtle 'viruses' spread out through our culture they could bring our civilization to its knees without us even realizing that we've been the victim of alien attack.
Eliminating rivals in space sounds like a flimsy motive-- though of course you're right to examine it as aliens need not have motives that are by our standards rational.
I don't think that outright trickery is likely, but what about this:
OK so there's one scenario right off the bat. You don't have to assume malevolent aliens, only self-interested ones. Sure, FTL might not exist at all, or may work completely differently. Who cares? When I get a random email with detailed instructions for me to make BIG PROFITS, I don't piece together how exactly it might be scamming me, I just recognize that I have to treat these things with healthy scepticism.
Much as I respect Carl Sagan, his aliens were a little too idealized for my tastes. Then again, I also don't see our system of describing mathematics as a universal. To paraphrase B5 creator JMS: the only universals in the universe are matter, energy and enlightened self-interest.
The age when we say that any advanced civilization must be peaceful, noble and altruistic is thankfully over. Instead, if/when we encounter aliens, let's be reasonable, respectful, and aware that our self interests may not perfectly aligned.
This was actually done in the book 'Signal to Noise'.
Aliens contact a few humans by 'radio', trade us all sorts of tech in exchange for information about us.
One of the tech they trade us is a teleporter, for people, that uses the orbital velocity of the earth to power it, so the earth starts slowing down, rather catastrophically.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I can't believe along how many *different* vectors Mr Carrigans theories are whacked. There's the obvious problem of instruction sets--there are a near-infinite number of potential CPU architectures that are *possible*, even making assumptions about the probable degree of technological advancement of your target species. Then, worse, there are an infinite number of programs that could be the target of such an "attack". Clearly, there will be common themes, but only *after* you've figured out what the target architecture is, and the target "pool" of programs you're going to attack. Yes, the bad ET could send out a large number of random bit streams, hoping to, once in a while, hit a "jackpot". There are no "universal" programs--that is, programs that will execute correctly regardless of architecture. There are, I'll grant you, occasional curiosities in computer science of trivial programs that happen to do something useful across a small number architectures (2 or 3). But they have to be *explicitly crafted to do so*, taking into account the architectures on which you expect them to execute. Then there's Shannon. The goal of most SETI work is merely to *detect* a very narrowband signal coming from "out there". Such signals would be a hallmark of intelligent origin, since nature doesn't produce such signals. Link efficiency is also inversely proportional to bandwidth--in order for anyone to hear ET *at all*, they have to concentrate their signal power into a very narrow spectral corridor, or we'll never detect them. SETI research generally works on the assumption that signals will be on the order of 1Hz. Even then, such signals will be very far below the noise floor, which means long integration times (several minutes, at least), in order to "hear" them. Claude Shannon came up with some very interesting theorems about communications channels, and what to expect out of them. Here is the most relevant: C = B * log2(1+ S/N) Relates the channel capacity, in bits/sec, to the channel bandwidth, in Hz, and the signal-to-noise ratio. A signal to noise ratio of -30dB (generous assumption), with a channel bandwidth of 1Hz, yields a *maximum theoretically possible* bit rate of 0.001442 bits/second. Which means that you'd have to wait a long, long time before you'd have enough bits to constitute the W32.MegaSeti virus. The theoretical underpinnings of Shannons Law are very strong indeed. It's unlikely that an ET will have found a way around them. The whole thing is very bad science indeed. It's a shame when scientists come up with nonsense like this. It's always very dangerous to stray very far away from your field of expertise, and come to some unsupportable conclusions. Had this guy from Fermilab actually talked to some notables in CS, signal processing, security, and cryptography, he would never have come up with his nonsense. But because he *has*, and he works for Fermilab, I fear that he has some amount of credibility with the government. I can see this irrational fear spreading to the current U.S. administration, and having them outlaw SETI research as a result. Sad.
Actually, the "virus" part in such a SETI message might very well be a social engineering enterprise. As suggested in Contact, maybe they do "fax down these plans; we poor saps build the thing and blow ourselves to kingdom come."
That's a much more realistic scenario, and will easily "get out into the wild", no matter how isolated such computers (and personnel) are kept.
It's similar to building a perfect jail -- regardless of how physically secure it is, as long as the captive can talk to the jailer, there's an escape possibility.
Think Silence of the Lambs. Now multiply it by ten billion years of experience and testing.
Nah, this code-based virus is a chimera. It's the social engineering content of the message we have to worry about.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.