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Don't Talk To Aliens, Warns Stephen Hawking
Megaport writes "Promoting his new series on the Discovery channel, Stephen Hawking has given an interview to the Times in which 'he has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all that it can to avoid any contact.' He says, 'I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. ... If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.' Personally, I've always thought that the indigenous people of the world really had no chance to avoid contact here on such a small planet, but is hiding under our collective bed an option for humanity in the wider galaxy?"
Interesting that I should wake up to find this article when I finished reading Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice last night before going to bed. It's one of the earliest books I've read that deals seriously with communications from space. I won't get into the details fo the book but instead pose equally speculative assumptions about advanced life that contradict Hawking (a man much respected in my eyes).
As humans have "advanced" over the past two thousand years, it is apparent that killing each other is simply not productive. Well, this is apparent to me anyway. And I would argue that although the numbers have probably gone up for homicide on a world wide scale, there is far less nationalistic or religious conflict on the Earth today and the percentages of death related to that have dropped drastically since World War II. Were it not for this movement towards sanity and science, a lot of our technological advances would have been inhibited by 1) the effort it takes to exterminate your neighbor and 2) being killed by your neighbor. While military research brings advancements in other fields, the primary goal is stopping the enemy. Had scientists that invented napalm at Dow Chemical been given the same amount of resources to invent more efficient fuels and engines, I've no doubt they could have.
Simply put: why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced? Those two categories are not mutually exclusive and I would argue that any alien race not ethically advanced before becoming militarily advanced will simply continue to focus on killing each other. I will also posit that intergalactic travel is near impossible without the ability to understand anthropology. Using this logic, I would wager that the nomadic roving death squads are no more likely than the aliens in Asimov's Childhood's End that show up and help us technologically as well as ethically (we've still got quite a ways to go in some areas more than others).
It's hard to agree with Hawking's assumption of aliens as it's more apparent they would simply die out from lack of resources before ever finding their first victims. I suppose all I have to offer is science fiction references since that's all that's being discussed here.
My work here is dung.
Given how large the universe is, we don't even have to hide. As it seems hard to travel faster than light, we should be pretty safe :-)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
I think we vastly overestimate how important we are.
An alien race isn't going to travel light-years to have a cup of tea any more than we would travel to a remote corner of the earth to make peace with the native bacteria.
ALL security is effectively through obscurity. Because it's impossible to prove any security method to be secure, any and all security measures are put in place with the hope that any adversary doesn't know how to defeat those measures.
Not true. Take the game of chess, for example. Everything in chess is right out in the open. There may be some misdirection involved, but nothing is actually hidden from the adversary. Yet you still have security measures in place.
You don't put armed guards outside a military outpost in the hope that the enemy won't know HOW to defeat them; you just hope they won't try, because it's too difficult or costly. And if they do try, you will defeat them mostly with brute force, not with anything hidden or secretive.
Our species, up to and including our most advanced thinkers*, is too wedded to unexamined assumptions and too fond of creating self-referential aphorisms and/or ironic maxims to realistically model first contact with non-human species.
*-apparently.
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
We are humans. As RAH said, we are probably the most warlike and violent race that has reached rudimentary intelligence in the universe. If there were other intelligent races, far advance of us, but with our innate bloodthirstiness and violent tendencies, we would dead. Look at the hostility the vast majority of humans have towards each other based on skin color or religion or where they live. Do you actually think humanity as a whole would welcome intelligent beings from another planet, especially if they were as different as us as we are from a fish? Pssh. If you do, you have more faith in humanity than all the religious folks have in their god(s) since the beginning of time.
Perhaps, but I highly doubt it. I think you underestimate just how advanced another civilisation would likely be, considering the galactic scale of travel they'd have to undertake to get here, and the galactic timescales over which they might have evolved. Most likely, the culture shock would be AT LEAST as jarring for us as that which native americans faced when presented with horses, rifles, whiskey, christianity, ocean-going ships, wagons, steam trains, buffalo hunters, miners, etc. Chances are it would be MUCH worse -- probably not even conceivable to our backwater, unevolved minds.
Well, that highly depends on their timeframe. Hiroshima was bombed 60 years ago, but they rebuilt the city and according to wikipedia there's more than a million living there today. I'm not sure if it's exactly over ground zero but certainly not that far as it's still in the same bay. Spending some hundred years taking out all major forms of life and terraforming it to spec hardly seems impossible or unreasonable for an alien race of sufficient technological capability.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Everyone now wishes that somebody killed Hitler when he was a baby.
No, they really don't. The common question which you've heard, "if you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?" is meant to generate ethical debate, and the answer is not meant to be obvious. In fact, with the same fervor that you would use in answering "yes" to that question, I would answer "no." Killing someone for crimes they have not yet committed is simply unacceptable in my world view, and life itself isn't as important to me as holding to such moral guidelines.
In other words, I'd more than willing to accept the extinction of the human race over condoning the brutal "sterilization" of other sentient species. A species such as the one you describe isn't worth protecting.
Interstellar spacecraft are weapons of mass destruction.
Above a significant fraction of the speed of light, any normal matter has an energy density greater than a nuclear weapon.
Above a larger fraction of the speed of light, any normal matter has an energy density greater than an anti-matter reaction involving the same rest mass.
Why work so hard...
If they have spaceships, then they can go out to the asteriod belt and hurl an endless supply of ammunition at us that would decimate us and pose no risk at all to the attackers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The whole concept is one of paranoia. Considering the age of the galaxy, advanced species could be of immense ages. Any new interstellar aggressor species would find itself confronted by a whole range of progressively more advanced species each in turn more capable of deploying more advanced and often more subtle forms of social stabilisation. The simplest method by which to judge species and what measures may be required to control threats implied by them, is the way in which they interact with less advanced species.
Much the same way a species upon it's own planet would be judged by the way they interact with each other, with suppositions of racial differences where none exist, of artificial regional divides, specifically demonstrated where a species one region preys upon and exploits the same species in another region, with claims of racial differences to hide, degenerative social diseases, like psychopathy and narcissism.
So any threatening species would be dealt with, likely well before they became destructive upon an interstellar basis. The greater the gap in advancement the less likely communication will occur, as there will always be more similarly advanced species to fill that interaction and monitoring gap, who in turn would be monitored by next nearest level of advancement.
Besides planets in reality are pretty crappy resources for any interstellar species, nebula and dust clouds have stupendously huge quantities of material available, sufficient to make thousands even millions of suns, already in affect mined, granulated to a fine powder and just requiring filtering to extract the desired elements.
Humanity has to be far more concerned with how they interact with each other and how that interaction could be interpreted from an external viewpoint and whether it could be considered as potentially threatening and what actions are required to nip the threat in the bud. Whether it be social modification and, or culling of specific socially destructive elements.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
But seriously, if there are alien life forms, we don't even know that we'd be on the same scales as them.
They could be a hundred meters tall or they could be microscopic. And they could perceive time in an extremely delayed manner(with our seconds feeling like hours to them) or an extremely accelerated manner(with our hours feeling like seconds to them).
We don't know that the things on our earth that we consider natural resources are the same things that an alien civilization would consider natural resources. Humanity's waste products might be the things the aliens most precious needs, or their waste products might be things we could eat as food. Maybe they could eat dirt.
I think that hiding makes sense until we have the capability for travel between solar systems, specifically because there is a possibility that aliens encountered would pose a danger to us, but to naturally assume that whichever ones we encountered would want to do things that would harm us seems a little too paranoid.
Any group that is capable of such travel is likely to get their energy from somewhere, but even in our own solar system, is earth the biggest source of energy? Jupiter alone would likely provide millions of times the amount of power that could be obtained from Earth, and wouldn't have the danger of infection from Earth's bacteria and viruses. And the sun provides unmeasurable amounts of power compared to Earth. And even the sun isn't a large star.
Compared to many others, our solar system would be like a crumb to any civilization searching for resources.
And one last thing I wonder about: Is humanity's fear of extraterrestrial intelligence based on humanity's own instinct of survival of the fittest? And if so, is it reasonable to guess that other forms of intelligence would have such instinct? And would they even perceive us as competition? Or would they have out-evolved that need?
It makes sense to be cautious and to attempt to not be found, but it's also good to have some perspective. We have no idea about the motivations of any intelligence that would contact us or come here.
Do you actually think humanity as a whole would welcome intelligent beings from another planet, especially if they were as different as us as we are from a fish?
And fish would probably be like our first cousins compared to whatever species might arrive on an alien FTL spaceship.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Given the complexity and inherent risk of these things, it seems considerably more reasonable to just create artificial life that doesn't need an atmosphere, water, day cycles, and all that organic nonsense.
I'm always perplexed when people make this leap that the human species is war-like and surely no other sufficiently developed species could possibly be warlike. We are what we are because of a competitive evolutionary process. Survival of the fittest involves being warlike and fucking aggressive. Why you assume that any other advanced species evolved in any other way is beyond me.
Say that our society went out and discovered that Mars was an earth-like, habitable planet with primitive life upon it. How would we interact with them?
Chances are, we would see them long before we could actually get there en-masse. Maybe in the 1700's, we would have sensitive enough instruments to see the earth-like surface of the planet. Fast forward 300 years to the year 2K, we can expend a tremendous amount of resources and send a single scouting party over. For 20 or 30 years, the scouting party lives on Mars, gathering data and learning to live on the local climate / floura and fauna. They discover a particular plant that secretes a specific chemical very similar to a highly-expensive cancer drug currently in production on the Earth. A few production ships arrive to harvest the plant and launch the chemical back. A small private science team piggybacks, and finds moe financially rewarding chemicals on the planet. Humanity spreads its fingers, and native life is simply pushed back to the margins. A small shack becomes a 1 mile settlement, becomes a country of it's own. The native plants and animals go from being the dominant form of life on the planet, to living in an ever-shrinking reserve.
And the more sentient animals might wonder why we didn't just make giant tin cans in the sky and live in those. The fact is, though, that making giant tin-cans in the sky is more expensive than finding viable hunks of rock with usable resourses already present. And if those sentient animals fought back, we'd probably just stop them as easily as we'd stop a groundhog invasion of New York City. Technological superiority doesn't mean winning a fight, it means sweeping unwanted elements off of a table. The natives only win in movies.
It really all comes down to value. The value of a cylinder, more or less, is just habitable space. The value of a planet includes large volumes of otherwise rare elements or chemicals, biological materials, etc... all conveniently sitting there for the taking, and all of which would be needed to make cylinders anyway.
The ______ Agenda