Slashdot Mirror
Stephen Hawking Thinks Aliens Likely
OMNIpotusCOM writes "Noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking thinks that alien life is likely, albeit primitive, according to a lecture delivered at George Washington University in honor of NASA's 50th anniversary. It begs the question of if we need to consider a Prime Directive before exploring or sending signals too far into the depths of space."
firstly many Scientists have came to that conclusion, Many mathematically proven that even if you call life rare, the sheer number of stars with the possibility of planets in a habitable zone means there is a crapload of civilizations out there.
Hawking has said this before earlier as well. Just because he makes the same statement again instantly makes this news??
Come on the Drake Equation has been around for a long time now guys.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We, as a species, haven't managed to solve the problem of destroying primitive cultures *here* or a thousand other problems that suggest not corrupting alien cultures is something we shouldn't worry too much about.
I mean seriously -- if we think our technology and culture is okay for the entire planet, why should we stop here?
"Aliens being likely" does not mean that it's likely we will ever meet one (or be successful in either sending or receiving any communication).
That's the popular usage of "begging the question". As in: "that invites the question...".
1: I too believe there's alien life. In fact, I have no doubt that there is.
2: I suspect there's no other intelligent/space faring life in our galaxy, but probably there is in other galaxies. (Fermi paradox and Tipler-Barrow arguments both are pretty convincing to me).
For me, #1 means that we should be careful to make sure our spaceships are bug free so we don't contaminate places we land on with life that could wipe out any indigenous life.
For #2, it means that it's impossible for us to ever have a meaningful conversation with other life (assuming I'm right that there's no other intelligent/spacefaring civilizations in our galaxy).
So, I don't think we need to be too concerned with sending out signals. By the time they reach any other life, we'll either be gone, or we will have colonized the entire galaxy, which means we'd likely be safe from extermination. I suspect those are the only 2 realistic probabilities.
Furthermore, for the second question, how willing would you be to share your knowledge with someone you just met off the street 5 mintues ago? Some information, you might share such as the location of your favorite [insert food-type] restauraunt. Other information, like, say, your secret plans for world domination, you wouldn't be so likely to share.
My blog
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I always thought that's why it's the "prime" directive - because it's the first one to go out the window when inconvenient.
Will they simply laugh at us earthlings; or shake their heads in frustration, wondering "when will we ever learn"?
What makes you think life forms entirely alien to earth will even have heads? Starfish have no heads, jellyfish have no heads.
I think it's a bit early to worry about TFS's "Star Trek Prime Directive". Sure, there is probably life alien to earth but face it, guys - we haven't found any. Not yet.
There are folks who think an advanced civilization from some other star has already come here to study us (Roswell), but if in fact those are aliens come to visit us, I think it more likely that it is a species descended from us come back in time to do some archaeology rather than visiting from Betelguise to work on a Wikipedia entry on us..
Travelling faster than the speed of light is, after all, just as impossible as time travel. Humans have been human for less than a million years, what will we be like in another ten million? Will we have found that time travel is as impossible as air travel was 1000 years ago?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
There's a reason why linguists don't go anal over these things. The point of language is to communicate and be understood by the other side. So long as that happens, it doesn't really matter what happens with the language itself. If a change makes it harder to communicate, then it won't catch on. Popular misinterpretation of phrases often comes from the interpretation making more sense than the original usage. Here: to beg for a question is to invite it. Meanwhile, where in premise-assuming is the question?
Honestly, the Prime Directive was the dumbest shit in the show. Any captain worth watching gave it the finger every three episodes. Programs of organized uplift would make much more sense. I mean we'd only hope for the same if somebody better ever finds us. Golden Rule and all that.
I would presume any such Prime Directive would ultimately be abused/ignored like it has been on Star Trek. International Law is only arbitrarily enforced. Let's first get a grip on how we treat our own people and the other species which inhabit our planet, then maybe we could think about how we would treat extra-terrestrial life forms (if in fact there are any). The only downside to idealism is reality.
Keep banging that head against the wall.
Not only does the old usage hardly exist anymore, but when you try to use it people have no idea what you are talking about.
Language changes.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Then it's just a matter of settling on WHICH photons to look for. Some don't work well for communications (like the visible spectrum). Some won't travel very far. We are capable of producing photons at just about any desired wavelength, and yet we've settled on a narrow range for communications.
You could argue that we don't understand the natural world completely yet, and so there could be other means of communication. This is absolutely true, but how would we look for something that we don't know about? Electromagnetic waves are so easy to detect and discover that any technologically advanced culture is bound to use them eventually.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Now a couple of reasons why Hawking may be totally wrong.
- 1. We have no evidence that we as a species will ever be able to deploy enough energy or resources to move beyond this solar system. We can already foresee the end of cheap energy, and it is all we can do to lift a few tonnes to low earth orbit. It is quite possible that the Universe is so arranged that almost every possible life form is trapped in its own solar system.
- 2. The period in which we have emitted significant radio waves into space is barely 100 years, and more and more we are moving to very short range low power transmitters. It's quite possible that every civilisation does that and so, except for a narrow window of a hundred years or so, is effectively radio silent. You might pick up a primitive 50s and 60s AM transmitter (think Voice of America and megawatts on a narrow frequency band) but not all those Bluetooth devices.
If both of these are correct, the chance that we will detect another civilisation is extraordinarily small even if they are extremely common. In fact, the growing knowledge of carbon chemistry - graphenes and so on - and clays suggest that there are many opportunities for substrates to arise that might hold together primitive organics long enough for life to get a start. It's a subject which is getting increasingly interesting; if you take enough surface area and spread enough small molecules over it for long enough under enough variations of conditions, something is more or less bound to happen. Recent research also seems to suggest that there could be planets around smaller and so longer-lived stars which might have conditions suitable for the formation of life for much longer than the Earth will. Our own planet may be a lot less than optimal. In which case life is likely to be very common indeed, but the low energy environments in which it evolves may make it quite unsuitable for expanding from one star to another.And why should it? The belief that there is something special about the human race which justifies its long term existence is as "religious" as any theistic religion, and no more defensible.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Absolutely not. There's a line, albeit fuzzy, between the formerly incorrect but now accepted uses of words, and the uses that are incorrect and unacceptable. This "begs the question" nonsense belongs to the second category. One day it will move to the first, no doubt about it, since after all, that's what American English is: an exercise in well-established illiteracy. But it is not there yet.
Consider the stability that would be established upon a society when great, great,etc, grandparents were still active and in fact dominant in that society and the excessive demands of youth were effectively restrained.
So you get rapid development as a society evolves and technological advancements occur until there is a significant change in life expectancy and then development is slowed, and high risk advancements are constrained. Risking a ten thousand year life span on typical youthful (extended out to the first hundred years or so) misadventures would be considered extremely foolhardy and as would threatening an environment required for survival, it is no longer the next generations problem, as those from many, many generations previous, would still have to deal with it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Not even the birds would have dreamed men could take bits of the earth and cause them to soar through the air like we have. At supersonic speeds, no less.
No, the GP post was right, and the analogy is sound.
The view that language is good enough as long as it is fairly likely to get the point across is - even putting aside that it is usually harder to parse incorrect, intelligible writing than correct prose - antithetical to the "standards" culture espoused on Slashdot. It is the permissive, lackadaisical Internet Explorer approach to HTML. And it is born, I fear, of the average nerd's mediocre ability in his own language, and his desire to change the rules to suit his own lack of interest in a discipline at least as complex, and millennia older, than his own - that of effective communication. Put down the Knuth, pick up the Fowler, and learn to express yourself as elegantly to your fellow man as you might to your computer.
Anyway, I've met no reasonably educated man who does not know the correct usage of "beg the question". A few minutes ago I was reading a book published in the last decade which employed it correctly. Had the author wished to indicate that a particular question was "raised", he would have done so. While I'm here:
Here endeth the rant.
Well, the method of action for most bacteria and viruses is not to 'eat' our DNA. Instead, they take control of the cellular machinery and processes within our cells to reproduce.
These organelles and biochemical pathways are dictated, largely, vis a vis our DNA. Therefore, alien bacteria, fungi and viruses (if such ecological analogues exist) have to be attuned to our DNA.
For alien symbiotes to reproduce within our bodies, they need to be able to utilize our mitochondria, nuclei, and membrane proteins. How can an alien species possibly be expected to make use of a complex set of machinery that they were never exposed to?
It's like me sitting in the space shuttle and expecting to blast into orbit. I'd be lucky if I'd find the right series of buttons to blow it up, let alone fly the thing.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
However, because alien life might not have DNA like us, Hawking warned: "Watch out if you would meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease with which you have no resistance.
I am surprised by this quote, and maybe a bit elevated that Hawking is not perfect and doesn't know everything.
It is unlikely that any truly alien life can infect or even eat us. Viruses work because they evolved to work on earth-bound DNA structures. Few viruses can infect multiple species. Chimps are 98%~99% exactly the same as human and few viruses can infect both. A truly alien virus infecting us would be like one of our viruses infecting gasoline or some other organic compound. (Assuming aliens are organic)
Similarly, the "chain of life" where compatible proteins and compounds are consumed by predators (yes we prey on plants, they just don't defend themselves all that often.) is more narrow than you would think as many plants and parts of animals are poisonous. The notion that an alien biology would have any sort of compatibility is, on the surface, absurd.
All that being said, if an alien species was able to eat us or vice versa, or infect us, it would probably support the notion that life on earth was caused by cosmic panspermia.
Those things are very species specific already here on earth. I don't find it very plausible that alien cooties would be very fond of us.
Parasites and diseases which are common in household animals seldom accept human as a host. Furthermore, I have never been infected by a tree fungus. I guess they don't find me favorable for symbiosis.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Rather than a "non-interference" decree, we should be broadcasting MAYDAY in all directions. Odds are disturbingly high that within the 1000 years it would take for such a message to reach an space-faring civilization, and for that civilization to in turn visit us, the human race will have managed to permanently trap itself in Earth's gravity well by destroying its industrial infrastructure, irradiating the majority of the food supply, and/or salinating its most productive croplands. Not 100%, but say... 40%. There are some kinds of Dark Ages that you don't build your way back out of. Our industrial capacity is currently built on MILLENIA of stored energy reserves left over from the Big Bang and prehistory. If we had only solar energy to rely on, we'd have a pathetically feeble spacefaring ability.
So which intelligent species is more likely to survive: one that has a "prime directive" and doesn't interfere with other civilizations or one that views other planets as ripe for the taking.
Federation Man: "Our Prime Directive instructs us not to interfere with the development of your culture."
Alien: "Good because, our culture is adequately developed already and our Prime Directive says we can assimilate you and take all of your resources.
Guess who wins. If its not obvious think about the history of Native Americans.
Actually, without going too much into details, some things make so much and evolved independently so many times on Earth, that they make sense when you think of it.
Or even better explained: they make sense when you
A) want an alien at least evolved enough to hold a conversation with. Bacteria are exciting for biologists, but an alien you can actually make contact with, has damn good reasons to indeed look kinda like us.
B) take evolution and RL constraints into consideration. It's easy to imagine giant amoeba creatures, or sacs of gas floating on Jupiter, but those tend to either (I) have blatant disadvantages that natural selection would discriminate against, or (II) they're bloody impossible. E.g., a cell is really just a drop of sea water in a lipid membrane, and evolved from some aminoacid chains which originally started replicating in plain sea water without a membrane. And from there it's been baby steps towards any complex organisms. It was first just bacterial films, then some "worms" which were just a toroidal bacterial film and "sponges" which were just a bacterial colony with holes in it, and so on. Most fantasy extraterestrial forms proposed, like those giant gas sacks, it's not clear how they'd evolve in the first place.
But anyway, that in mind, I'll say that, for example:
- to start with the easy part, any creature of any complexity above "bacterial colony" will have specialized cells for specialized tasks. Simply because it's a huge advantage to. Cells on your skin need to largely insulate you from the uncontrolled outside world, while cells inside need to allow a freer flow of nutrients, for example. As an added bonus, specialization also means that each cell only needs a smaller set of proteins and reactions to do its job, which reduces its energy and nutrient needs and also the number of things that can go wrong.
So basically this rules out any ideas some may have about sentient amorphous blobs.
- almost any creature has either bilateral or radial symmetry, simply because it saves on DNA. Your left side is largely a mirrored copy of your right side. It also has advantages like that it's easier to swim or walk when your left and right legs/fins/tentacles are the same length. And having redundant organs is an advantage by itself too.
- any complex creature will have _some_ sensory organs, because again it's a great advantage to. Even some of the most primitive cells can detect changes in the environment, and react to them in one way or another. Some unicelular organisms already have light sensors. Over time some stuff will remain rather distributed, but high-bandwidth stuff like eyes, it makes sense to have a small number and complex/high-res, rather than photosensitivity all over your body. Other stuff tends to work _because_ it's a single structure instead of a widely distributed array, e.g., hearing. Etc. Basically given enough time and evolution, see the previous stuff about specialization: a lot of things will get concentrated and specialized.
- almost any complex creature will have a mouth at one end and an arse at the other end, simply because it all evolved out of some ultra-primitive worms which were just a thin tube that pushed water from one end to the other. And evolution works in baby steps, small changes to what already existed. Even the exceptions tend to be actually really built the same way. E.g., gasteropods have a funkier configuration, but start as the above described tube anyway: later a diagonal muscle twists them into an different configuration.
- neurons (or whatever the alien equivalent is), are inherently slow, compared to transistors. They're chemical things, just because they evolved out of other cells, and that's how cells work. They don't have to just transmit the signal, they actually have to produce chemicals to excite the next neuron's receptors, and then neutralize those so the next one doesn't keep firing for ever. Again, _because_ they evolved from other cells, which are just a complex chemistry run
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And liberation? Whose fault is it that the people of the world suffer tyrants and murderers ruling them, really? If all the people go together we could overthrow them without too much difficulty. But then, we'd have to overthrow the new tyrants who led the last revolution, and so on.
I'll have you know that I, as an enlightened being, have been liberating lesser beings for years. I have personally liberated hundreds if not thousands of civilizations of ants. I've also liberated civilizations of bees, wasps and hornets. I'll tell you... the totalitarianism they were subjected to would make a civilized person weep.
They must have been captives, because once I slew their rulers and set them free, they all left and I never saw them again. But I'm sure they were singing my praises, whatever happened to them.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It's worse than that. The Prime Directive is a false elitism, built on a fairy-tale version of one's place in the world. It is akin to extreme environmentalist outlooks, and many religiously-based viewpoints, that see humans as separate from nature, and human tampering with nature as "unnatural" or even dangerous. So the Prime Directive asks humans to regard less technologically advanced aliens as something akin to wild animals, that should be left in their natural state - "natural" meaning merely without human contact.
Somehow, the idea that humans should not have any influence over the universe in which we live seems a little, well, self-defeating.
Edith Keeler Must Die
More importantly, once it's reached, they can reach you. Before that they are stuck in their shithole planet, so you can ignore them, since they can't follow you home.
...And attack you.
A fallacious argument. Five year olds lack the physical capacity to handle a loaded gun in a safe way. Their brains simply aren't working well enough yet.
Which is, you know, the point of my argument. The rationale is that until they've hit a certain level of technology, their "brains" (that is, culture) aren't working well enough yet.
On the other hand, an adult of any culture is perfectly capable of handling the gun safely, assuming of course that he has been shown and explained to how it works and what the safety requirements are.
And you call my argument fallacious. Were that true, deaths from guns would be a bare fraction of what they are today.
Unless, of course, by "safely" you mean "without self injury" rather than "without endangering others".
Besides, if you try to treat said adult like a five-year old, the chances are you get either a scatching reply or said gun pointed at you - and deservedly so.
Thus proving the point. Heck, look at how angry people get about driver's licenses, despite a non-trivial chunk of them being incapable of safely operating a bicycle.
Yours is simply a new version of white man's burden [wikipedia.org], or perhaps the Noble Savage horsehit: [...]
It's nothing of the sort. If anything, it's the complete opposite (the "White Man's Burden" is about the "White Man" having to nurture and guide other culters - the "Prime Directive" is about leaving them alone).
There's also suggestions throughout Trek that the Prime Directive is as much about avoiding problems on the Federation side of the equation (eg: someone lobbing into a primitive culture with modern technology and setting themselves up as dictator). From memory, several episodes talk about earlier, failed attempts to do what you suggest.
[...] the pre-starfaring people are childlike and naive, and can't be expected to live up to civilized standards, so we better watch them from afar, even as they die by millions from diseases and starvation our advanced technology could easily fix, all for their own good of course - we wouldn't want to corrupt their "natural development".
"Advanced technology" like guns, chemical weapons and the like sure has been a runaway success in the third world, hasn't it ?
Cultures are not analogous to persons. A primitive culture doesn't mean that it's members are stupid.
Who said anything about stupidity ? This is about ignorance and immaturity.
It simply means that they have less accumulated knowledge than members of a more advanced culture.
And less accumulated wisdom, which is far, far more important.
Given this, the moral thing to do is to give them the option to learn - not forcefeeding, not witholding information. Anything else is condescending.
Yeah. For example, we should give all the religious nutters (to pick a contemporary example) full access to all the information and resources they need to make nukes. Should end just peachy.