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.

Comments

Re:Movie-plot threat

[Dun Malg]

A perfect example of what Schneier calls movie-plot security....But money spent on this is money better spent elsewhere, practically no matter where else you spend it

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.

It doesn't have to be a computer virus...

[Darius Jedburgh]

...it could be a virus for he human brain. An intelligent alien species could reverse engineer the human brain and try to figure out the right 'buttons' to push to make us engage in various types of behavior. Essentially they'd have to use the fact that the human brain isn't a perfect processing machine. For example there are optical illusions which make us see things that aren't really there at all. Similarly there might be thought illusions that arise the moment we are tricked into thinking about certain things. The 'virus' might look like the most innocuous thing but if it had the right triggers embedded in it then it might make humans perform certain prescribed actions that would look completely irrational to those uninfected.

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.

Re:Chicken and Egg.

[Wellspring]

Didn't L. Bob Rife use SETI to capture the metavirus, which was metaphorically floating around in space?

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:

1. Assume FTL transportation.
2. Assume that said FTL tech requires a transmitter and receiver. Not necessarily teleportation, merely some kind of equipment required at both the origin and destination.
3. Assume some motive for interstellar trade (materials, information, art, some reasons that aliens would have something you want).
4. Therefore, there's a motive for the Hong Kong effect: simply being the nexus of trade provides a massive economic benefit.
5. At first you can grow your market yourself-- ie building and shipping the infrastructure using STL tech, then using it to establish FTL trade. This is the equivalent of shipping AOL disks to random addresses, hoping that whoever gets the disk is able to add enough revenue to be worth all the disks that were dumped.
6. That's expensive. And it only works on an acceptable time frame in a local area. If you're trading art or information, furthermore, you need to determine if a system is worth bridging to in the first place.
7. However, once you're up and running, there's an easier alternative. Broadcast blueprints for your network all over space, designed to obfuscate the underlying technology and only connect to your FTL net. By the time the aliens are sophisticated enough to create a competitor to your network, they will be too deeply bought in to want to do that. Plus, any network they establish will be far smaller than yours-- you can use exclusivity to lock your customer civilizations in.
8. If you set the system up in a star topology, everything has to go through your civilization to get anywhere else. You'll have the advantage in relationships, cultural knowledge, etc. If the variability of alien psychologies is high enough, this alone could be a massive advantage. By seeing so many cultures, you get an idea of how to pigeonhole new ones and get a relationship going faster.
9. Now you have a much more lucrative system. You have a network whose nodes are paid for by the endpoint civilizations using their industrial resources and so your only bottleneck is the range of your transmissions (so why not purchase repeaters at the edge of your network), and the ability for alien cultures to receive, digest and implement your blueprints.
10. If viable trading partner civilizations are rare enough, far enough apart, and hard enough to discover, this could be the only workable way to implement interstellar trade.

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.