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?

Comments

Squids

[Geoffrey.landis]

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?

Re:Squids

[Anonymous Coward]

That assumption is that for communication, sharing intelligence is more important than sharing genetics.

Re:Squids

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It would indeed be difficult, and I suspect that the "communication" that would be possible would not really look much like the common use of the word. However, there are certain reasons for optimism:

Unless the laws of physics are a good deal weirder than we think, we already know a great deal about what math aliens would have to know to talk to us. We could also reasonably suspect some knowledge of physics, astronomy(adjusted for their location of course) and similar knowledge. It still would be far from easy; but if you are talking to somebody across interstellar space, you can make a decent number of assumptions about what they know, unlike the squid case.

I'm not expecting any heart-to-primary circulatory nodule chats with green babes, of course.

Re:Squids

[artor3]

Why assume that if they find us, they must have sci-fi movie technology? Isn't it more likely, that they'd find us through their equivalent of a SETI project, or perhaps by saying "Hey, that planet over there looks like it might have some water on it. Maybe there's life there."

In which case, we might find ourselves receiving a weak signal from them many years later, and perhaps an un-manned (un-aliened?) probe many years after that.

No matter who finds who, it's likely that it'll take many years just to let the other know they've been found. Distances measured in light-years suck like that.

Re:Squids

[vlm]

We could also reasonably suspect some knowledge of physics, astronomy(adjusted for their location of course) and similar knowledge

Physics gets pretty hard to discuss beyond F=ma without a common frame of technological reference and there are huge mathematical syntax issues.

Chemistry would work the best since there are so many obvious constants. ionization constant of pure water. All the orbitals of an iron atom. A benzene ring is ubiquitous. Curie temperatures. Melting and boiling points. "shelf stable" chemical propellants are pretty much constant across the universe, for a given temperature range. Permanent magnet technology. Even an old fashioned steam pressure/temp table (or other useful engineering liquids, like some hydrocarbons, or refrigerants) would be the same.

Now what would be fun would be figuring out the "new" stuff on each side. Just think of what has been developed here over the last couple decades... What is this 60 atom carbon molecule they find so entertaining? Why do they want us to stick this weird mostly rare earth ceramic in liquid nitrogen with wires hooked up to either side? WTF you claim you can polymerize fluorine? Then there's "helpful" advice, like don't accumulate too many atoms with a weight of 235 hydronium nuclei in one place or else!

Re:Squids

[h4rm0ny]

So it might have some nasty weapons but probably nothing we should really fear or that we could not destroy.

A little scientific knowledge doesn't occupy a lot of mass. For all we know, it might need nothing more than a captured human to extrapolate from, and then seed the planet from orbit with germ weapons.

But it might not need to resort to direct weapons. It would, in a knowledge-based economy, be staggeringly wealthy. And humans have demonstrated themselves woefully subject to greed and credulity. It could side with one faction on Earth and have willing allies. Or it could behave as in the film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" where the alien in disguise establishes some basic patents and proceeds to build a massive business empire from there simply through its superior intellect (I really like the scene where he is watching six televisions at once). If you want non-knowledge based wealth, it presumably has mobility within our solar system and some decent analysis tools if it got here and found us. There are whole asteroids up there which are practically great lumps of valuable minerals. It could work with us to provide that wealth and the next thing you know, hyper-rich alien again and we're right back to playing the human race against itself. But the knowlede is the thing. If the alien is smarter and more knowledgable than us, that's a powerful weapon in itself if it chooses. As the main character in Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks remarks: "everything is a weapon."

Re:Squids

[thasmudyan]

The only reason for hostility would be that they want something we have, and that could really only be the planet.

Two other categories come to mind: the alien equivalent of religious fanaticism and some form of paranoia causing them to consider a pre-emptive strike against us. There may be many more reasons we can't fathom just yet. However, I don't disagree with you. We're probably of little interest to anyone out there, as we and our world are likely not compatible enough in any significant way.

Re:Squids

[Requiem18th]

Assuming there are no caps to technology, if you assume technology has some limits then as the parent says they are unlikely to have sci-fi movie technology.

For instance everything seems to indicate that FTL travel an communications are really impossible, any alien visitor is likely to "leak" their presence in the form of TV broadcasting millions of years before we can actually contact them.

Another possible cap is that civilizations inevitably destroy themselves at certain technological levels so that any alien visitor is necessarily technologically crippled in someway or otherwise they wouldn't have made it here alive, etc.

There are also limits to the amount of energy that can be extracted from matter so it's unlikely that a single ship can take control of the entire earth (an army could but as what price?).

Humans of 2009 would be eaten alive by the Romans without support from institutions of 2009 providing them with weapons, rations and medicines.

In fact the more technologically advanced you are, the more dependent in your source civilization you are, an alien invasion fleet would not only be technologically advanced, but physically huge, which then forces you to consider the economics of an alien invasion, is the planet even worth the resources necessary to reach it and knock out the natives?

Obviously the first question is...

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

...do you actually have any green women in bikinis?

Our guns vs. theirs

[oneirophrenos]

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.

Re:Our guns vs. theirs

[RsG]

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.

^ What he said ^

Seriously, people. Whoever it was from TFA who suggested "we've got guns and know how to use them" as a response was clueless.

If an extraterrestrial species is remotely close to human beings technologically, then there is no way for them to reach us anymore than we can reach them. Interstellar space is a wonderfully effective buffer. If we're communicating with a neighbouring species via radio, with no chance of visitation, then we needn't worry about hostilities. Try to imagine fighting a war between North America and Australia without ships, missiles or aircraft. And that analogy vastly understates the distances involved.

If they can reach us, and we can't reach them, then threats or hostility is a non-starter. Any spacecraft capable of crossing the gulf between stars is very likely so far ahead of us that we'd be unable to scratch the finish. And any craft able to cross that distance at a significant fraction of the speed of light is, by definition, able to render this entire planet sterile by way of a RKV. Think muskets vs. nukes here.

Re:Our guns vs. theirs

[keraneuology]

Unless interstellar travel is nothing but a single "duh" moment away - maybe we're just missing something that will make everything simple and easy to understand. Like pipes or the wonderbra.

Re:Our guns vs. theirs

[glueball]

Perhaps the intention with saying "we have guns" is we could annihilate ourselves if we thought it was in our best interest. Game theory intergalactic style.

Game type #1:
So imagine you are an alien, all peaceful and loving and just wanting to love a new species. Everything would work out, right? These would be the aliens like ET or Cocoon. Sure, we'd be labeled the North Koreans on the galactic block but at least we have a new place to visit. Maybe they have an intergalactic Dr. Phil who can help establish some trust.

Game type #2
Now what if you were a not so peaceful alien. You want to live on earth, but wow. Those humans are bat-shit crazy enough to destroy the planet. We better treat them kindly because if we fuck with them, they'll torch the place. These would be the aliens from Predator or Transformers.

Game type #3
The third possibility is that they will annihilate us no matter what our response. If we can quickly convey that we are crazy and will salt the earth, at least we might have a dog in the fight. The weapons might be ineffective on the aliens but we know they'll work on earth itself. These would be the Independence Day aliens. Not everyone can place a virus into the mother ship, but there's a reason that the Independence Day aliens chose earth and not Mars.

Being nice will leave you only +1 to the peaceful aliens. Being crazy will leave you +2 or +3.

Re:Offer them a subscription?

[youn]

> 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?

Re:Welcome!

[TeamSPAM]

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.

Freeze and play dead?

[johannesg]

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...

Re:Freeze and play dead?

[rastilin]

I don't think that's a given. The only two things we're lacking in order to make a slow-boat colonization ship to another planet is: 1) Hibernation technology 2) The economic dedication required to do so

Well we're also lacking the technology to build a structure that can withstand the trip and take all the stuff it needs with it. Even if we had the technology, we'd still need to design and scale up smaller models till we got to a point where we can build it. But that isn't my point, my point is that we'd be hard pressed to build a colony ship even if we dedicated the planet's whole productive and economic capacity into it. Even if we optimized it with those "keep me awake for a week" drugs and 100 hour work weeks. That means that even a low tech STL ship that comes in to Earth implies a level of mass production several orders above ours. That is a scary thing. It means that if they actually wanted to fight us, they could out produce us in terms of Armor and Planes. If they have a high level of automation, they won't even need many personnel.

Re:Freeze and play dead?

[Daniel_Staal]

Doesn't matter: They would have to be at least equal to us in most technology, and they would have a massive tactical advantage: A ship capable of spending an indeterminate time in deep space, with full life-support. They also would have to have more experience with space tech, notably propulsion.

All they have to do to wipe us out is retreat to the asteroid belt, and lob a couple large ones this way. All of that would be easily within their demonstrated abilities. We have no weapons capable of attacking outside of low orbit, and no way of countering (much less actually stopping) an attack of that magnitude. Such an attack would almost certainly leave the biosphere intact, but would likely destroy all real industrial capacity and political stability on Earth. (And might even manage to wipe out humanity directly.)

The only real reason not to do such if they wanted a war would be because they wanted our tech.

Much better to be friendly, and see how well we can bargain. A planet-based civilization can't hold out against an attacker that holds the high orbitals.

Re:It really all depends on resources

[RsG]

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.

Re:It really all depends on resources

[TuaAmin13]

Maybe they're tired of breathing canned air?

Really so Advanced?

[hax0r_this]

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.

Re:There can be different kinds of intelligence

[sznupi]

Then most humans don't qualify also.

What if They Don't Consider it Hostility?

[Ken McE]

If a civilization is advanced enough to travel here, they're probably advanced enough to not have any good reason to be hostile.

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...