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How Do You Greet an Extraterrestrial?
The LA Times is running a story about Earth Speaks, a companion project to SETI, which focuses on how we would communicate with intelligent extraterrestrial life, should we happen to discover it. Far more effort has been devoted to searching for signals or a means to communicate than the question of what we might say once contact is established, and the folks at SETI have set up a website to gather opinions on what the best questions and statements are. "So far, the messages break down into a few distinct categories. Some people want to throw a block party to welcome the aliens to the neighborhood. Others, less trusting, would warn the aliens that we've got guns and know how to use them. Another group, possibly influenced by having seen too many movies, would have us hide under the bed until they go away. 'If we discover intelligent life beyond Earth, we should not reply — we should freeze and play dead,' wrote one contributor." What would you say first to an alien?
We can't even communicate in any meaningful way with squids, which are genetically far more closely related to us than any possible extraterestrials. What in the world makes us think that it would be any easier to communicate with extraterrestrials?
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...do you actually have any green women in bikinis?
So we've got guns. I wonder how intimidated a civilization that has the technology to traverse light-years through space would be of our bullets and bombs. If they wished to annihilate us, I wager they'd be able to do it without even giving us a chance to react. If an alien race should contact Earth, I think our best bet would be to at least assume that they have peaceful intentions.
> We should definitely show them that we are rational, well behaved lifeforms, with broad interests and predictable interaction
You think we should lie to them, right off the bat?
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
This is probably one of the few threads where this meme is on topic. To put this in perspective we are probably the native american indians greeting the european explorers. And we know how well that turned out for them.
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Freeze and play dead? Someone really should have thought of that _before_ we started broadcasting radio and TV and a planet-wide basis. Those waves really don't stop when they hit the outer atmosphere you know... By now we should be fairly well-known in our galactic neighbourhood.
As for talking about our guns, whoever shows up here has already demonstrated massively superior technology to ours (we are not showing up on _their_ doorstep are we?) so antagonizing them might not be such a great idea either.
So yeah, by all means let's throw a party and hope it isn't us that ends up on the barbecue...
They would be advanced enough to hear us like we hear them... We emit lots of noise without trying. We would have to face them head on and with as little fear as we can, which means each nation would try to oneup each other in favor, and then war would ensue...
We would need to find intelligent life on this planet before we can find it anywhere else!
Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.
It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds.
Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body.
How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!"
What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out.
There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe.
There is no policeman.
There is no way out.
And the night never ends.
What makes them think aliens even have anything in common with us? Read some Stanislav Lem for how that might not be true in the slightest.
If we encounter a civilization of vastly superior technology, the idea that we would possess any capacity to negotiate is more or less absurd. Hiding doesn't work either. Assuming it's them discovering us and not vice versa, the encounter cannot possibly be far from our highly-immobile civilization, and even if we immediately turned off all the power plants and went dark, it's not like there is such an abundance of life-supporting planets nearby that earth could hope to slip through the cracks. It may not even be wise to try and be all buddy-buddy with them, as who knows what sort of culture and religion they follow. ("you dare bow to us? we will surely annihilate you for the insult of that most obscene gesture!")
The simplest and wisest thing to do is let them call all the shots. Speak when spoken to; otherwise, be silent. Look for opportunities to reciprocate any kindness. Any technology they can be convinced to offer is guaranteed to exceed the value of any riches we bring as tribute (which should have value by virtue of uniqueness even if their culture does not experience the same rarity of materials).
If our visitors are demanding and unreasonable human being will almost certainly have to postpone any major rebellion until they are in a position to acquire some of their oppressors' technological resources.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
You're assuming that exploiting natural resources and fighting with each other is only a human issue.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Wandering slightly offtopic...
What would an alien civilization able to travel to earth consider a "resource"?
For our purposes, we'd count fossil fuels, electricity, metals, arable land, industrial and commercial infrastructure, livestock, water, building materials, manufactured items, people... All things which are finite and useful.
If a species has the tech to cross a few dozen light years, they won't need some of the above. Water, for example, is easy to come by even in our own star system. Electrical generating capacity would be far in advance of our own, given the amount of energy needed to move a spacecraft over such distances. Fossil fuels and uranium would very likely be useless to a species far ahead of us technologically.
On the other hand, things we don't consider to be resources might be valuable to aliens. For example, we don't yet need He3 for anything, but we might want it some day as fuel. There are likely isotopes of elements we don't yet know the uses for, but an alien might.
The point I'm getting at is that we don't know what an alien civilization considers a "resource", or what scarcity they'd have.
However, I strongly suspect that there's no profit in travelling interstellar distances to get resources. The energy requirements for such a trip are too large; that same technology could almost certainly be put to use to acquire or synthesize resources much more easily.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
"Eight forms of human language remain uncracked by modern linguists. Surely trying to speak Ventaxian and understand their communication will be nigh impossible. Heck I don't think their characters have been encoded into unicode."
I would disagree. Eight forms of writing remain uncracked. Were we to have a speaker of that language magically placed in front of those linguists, they'd crack it in about a day.
"Language" must have context in order for it to be understood properly - writing is simply the 2 dimensional representation of a many-dimensional activity.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Suppose there are aliens, with a unified intelligence, in strangely wider dimensions. Suppose they 'send' us cautious messages about ethics, say every 1000 earth/sun orbits. Then - all we do is write them down wrong, worship the misunderstandings generated, and fight the societies who corrupted the last version. "Greetings, Thor?", "Hail Xenu"? Douglas Adams could have told us.
Maybe they're tired of breathing canned air?
I keep seeing people posting about how much more advanced than us a species would have to be to reach earth. I simply don't see why thats true. To my knowledge we have at least general knowledge of every major technology we would need to travel between stars, and thats with NASA never having had a budget over about $34B 2007 dollars, and currently closer to half of that. If we spent less time and money on killing each other and bailing each other out, and maybe cared about something other than our own social problems, there's no reason we couldn't have people on other planets as we speak.
Consider this:
For about $135B 2005 dollars we effectively went from flying propeller planes to repeatedly placing men on the moon.
Since 2001 we have spent about $865B in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since Fall of 2008 we have committed about $12.2 Trillion Dollars to "Economic Recovery" plans
The barrier between us and the stars is not some insurmountable technology one, its a matter of money and willpower. The only hope I see is that private interests (including SpaceX and other companies) will pursue these technologies (considering that hundreds of companies have higher revenue than NASA) otherwise I'm afraid we may never get off this miserable rock before we kill ourselves off. You wouldn't bet the uptime of a moderately important website on a single webserver, yet we continue to bet the survival of our species on a single rock floating in space.
Freeze and play dead? Someone really should have thought of that _before_ we started broadcasting radio and TV and a planet-wide basis. Those waves really don't stop when they hit the outer atmosphere you know... By now we should be fairly well-known in our galactic neighbourhood.
TV and radio braodcast are not detectable after a few dozen AU, at msot 1 light year (nearest solar system is 4 LY and galaxy width is measured in tens of thousand of LY to give you an idea). The reason for that is that the signal are not directional, and thus the strength of the signal goes weaker as you increase the sphere from which it diffuse to. At a distance we are speaking of, it is virtually undetectable. More or less you would have to make a powerful directional and very narrow signal toward another system to be detected at a few LY distance. Which is why SETI can only detect another specy which WANT to be detected for the same reason.
As for being well known , we would be well known only in a very very small corner of our galaxy EVEN if the signal could travel such a distance... At most 100 LY if you count the first radio broadcast (and be VERY very very generous).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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And note that simply having been around longer doesn't denote higher intelligence- 21st century technology knocks Ancient Greek tech into a cocked hat, but I'm not about to claim that we're all far more intelligent than Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.
Once we get implants and augmented intelligence to play around with, the average Joe will easily outsmart Plato & Co, not to mention the potential DNA modifications that will likely be used to produce "faster" brains, with better analytical capabilities, thus making people "wiser" overall.
If aliens have had millions of years to perfect themselves, it's not hard to imagine them leaving their early forms behind, and having merged with space itself.
Humanity is still very young, and 8000+ years of semi-known history is but an instant.
Then most humans don't qualify also.
One that hath name thou can not otter
If I decide to build a vacation house in the Everglades it might get a little rough for any alligators that happen to live on "my" lot. I'm not going to care if they've been there since sometime in the Mesozoic. I'm aware that alligators have some kind of intelligence, however I'm not that interested in it. They will never understand where I came from or how I got there, or what the hell I'm doing inside that big glass box my contractor put up on their best feeding ground. Any that get in my way will be dealt with, it doesn't matter how well they plan their defense. About all they can do is hope that I'm not a predator...
And how much do you think it will cost to invest in the technologies for us to get to that point.
You have completely missed his point, which is spot on.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.