Slashdot Mirror
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?
got any new porn we haven't seen yet ???
...do you actually have any green women in bikinis?
I, for one, would welcome our new alien overlords.
Roll for initiative... :D
I need a new sig...
Citing that evidence suggests that they have been monitoring earth broadcasts, and that their planet is not within the distribution zone of the earth's intellectual property, and that royalties must be paid immediately for the past 50-100 years of received carrier wave based entertainment that they have received free of cost.
Further, a gag order is hereby issued forbidding the aliens to discuss either this suit or the entertainment materials (hereto fore "content") with any other audience, known or unknown to the residents of earth, until after trial or settlement has been concluded,
Yadda yadda yadda
Give us all your money,
Signed, the MPAA and RIAA industries.
> 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
That assumption is that for communication, sharing intelligence is more important than sharing genetics.
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...
If we are actually noticed, the problem with the "freeze and play dead" suggestion is that it if it works, we risk convincing them that we are mostly harmless, unintelligent creatures. Earth then begins to look like a habitable, unoccupied planet ripe for colonizing.
While a display of martial might would serve to make the earth look less available, it also risks making us appear savage and again, unintelligent. It might make them feel justified in subjugating us and colonizing earth.
Safest is probably a policy of partial isolation. We should greet others firmly, while revealing little of our own cultures and history. Be respectful, and allow visitors to see a strictly controlled show. Given time, this can be relaxed. If they do seem interested in colonization, prepare for war. Demand commitments to peace and respect for our territory that, if broken deliberately, will give us moral high-ground in counterattacking. But if this should occur, act quickly to establish laws of war--display an aura of civility and discipline. Conversely, if they are interested in an exchange of knowledge, be open and willing--say nothing of atrocities and wars, and let the borders be opened slowly. Control their perception of us, so that we may appear to be a mixture of cultures that they could ally themselves with, rather than merely subjugate.
What if they were to arrive in our solar system and not care about us? I mean, what if they didn't care about lifeforms? It's a huge assumption that they are looking for others like them. That's a drive that seems to be uniquely human. As far as I know, no animal on earth goes around comparing surrounding species to themselves. I use the earth animal example because we have no other species to compare in the vicinity of our solar system. But back to the point, What if they arrive and simply ignore us?
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
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.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
It works for marriage.
Rather than spoil the ending of the classic sci-fi short story Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper, I'll just post a link - it's a short read, like the label says. (A team of explorers on Mars find a dead civilization, complete with an utterly untranslatable library of books....)
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."
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Why assume that if they find us, they must have sci-fi movie technology?
Because statistically speaking, it's incredibly unlikely that an alien race would have developed technology at anything close to the same time that we did. So either they will be so far behind that they won't even have radio, or many thousands (if not millions) of years more advanced than us (technology-wise).
This is why the "warn them that we have guns and know how to use them" and "hide under the bed" options are ridiculous. Any alien race we are able to communicate with will almost certainly have the technology to easily wipe us out if they want to, as well as being able to detect the radio waves we've been throwing out into space since the early 20th century.
Imagine the humans of 1900 trying to pose a credible threat to or hide from the humans of 2009. Now imagine the same thing, but it's the Romans or Chinese or a few thousand years ago versus the humans of 2009. Then realize that even a few thousand years is nothing on cosmological scales, so even that vast gap of technology is an eyeblink compared to the differences in technology we would be likely to encounter with an alien race.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Of course, all this assumes that aliens would want to be hostile to us for some reason anyway. If a civilization is advanced enough to travel here, they're probably advanced enough to not have any good reason to be hostile. The only reason for hostility would be that they want something we have, and that could really only be the planet. But while this planet is basically a paradise to us (compared to the other planets out there that we can see), that's because we evolved on it, and are suited for living on it: it has temperatures/climates we like, it has food growing/living on it that we like, etc. As aliens would have evolved on another planet, this planet and the life on it probably wouldn't be something they value that much; it could even be poisonous to them. The only other reason they'd want this planet is for the mineral resources, but if they can travel to other star systems, it seems like it would be pretty trivial for them to get mineral resources from all kinds of other lifeless asteroids and planets instead of having to fight for this one.
Honestly, I can't imagine a decent reason why any alien visitors would be hostile to us. Some of their ways might seem hostile to some, but that would only be from insufficient communication I believe (like if they treated us as lab specimens to be experimented on for the purpose of science without attempting to communicate). I think the chances of aliens coming here to wipe us all out, like in Independence Day, are pretty much nil. If any aliens go to the effort of traveling here, they probably would be interested in either simply learning about us (without sending us all into panic), or communicating.
The barrier between us and the stars is not some insurmountable technology one, its a matter of money and willpower.
You sir, are confused.
The fastest man-made item http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/q0109c.shtml reached 150,000 mph (41.67 mi/sec). Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is going only 38,500 mph as it leaves our solar system. The closest star to our solar system is about 4 light years away (5,800,000,000,000,000 miles away).
That works out to about 3,941 years to travel there at 150,000 mi/hr.
We definitely do not have the technology to accomplish or even begin that goal. We'd need a multi-generational ship, capable of growing food without sunlight. It would need to survive longer than any culture or nation has by far.
So perhaps you understand why we aren't planning to visit other stars at all now?