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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?"
I think he's saying this to generate debate and thought about aliens. It's too late to hide. The radio waves are already on their way. But if he's saying this on a TV show he's trying to generate buzz for it and get people thinking about it. It also leads to the conclusion we need to build SDF-1, thereby getting humans into space.
Hawking isn't called a genius for no reason. There is another subtle arguement there that we need to get of this planet to start looking for those resources too.
Etc etc.
The enormity of the effort they would have to mount given the physics of space travel would be rather significant, and at great cost to themselves. The time it would take would depend on how close to the speed of light they can reach. And the physics of THAT means they would have to have the technology to convert matter into energy somehow. Or, it would take them many thousands of years to get here. Either way, it's NOT going to be a friendly housecall, no matter how you shake it.
The public has in its collective imagination all these SF stories that assumes some way has been found to avert the realities of the physics that we now understand. But I am not confident at all that a way can be found to make interstellar space travel "cheap and affordable", per se. Wormholes, if they even exist, require energies way beyond our imagination, way beyond any civilization would be able to harness, energies at galactic scales or worse, and even at that there is no clear understanding if they would actually be useful for travel.
We indeed understand a lot today about physics and cosmology, and nothing I've seen to this time would even hint at the merest possibility of anything that could possibly make interstellar travel "cheap and affordable" my mere civilizations throughout the cosmos
So, I deem it extremely unlikely that Humanity's fantasies about space travel will ever likely be true.
And thus, on that basis, I would firmly agree with Hawking.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
In the unlikely event that it turns out that sentient life is far more probable on planets with the conditions that also support human life (rather than there being a wide variety of conditions, mostly incompatible with human life), then the aliens have found a habitable world, pre-terraformed.
On the other hand, if our needs are orthogonal to their needs, maybe we're a masterfully convenient technologically backward slave race, intelligent enough to do their dangerous harvesting tasks without consuming any resources that they themselves need.
Or maybe the aliens are just pricks.
Why assume that they either have a concept of ethics, that their ethics might apply to us, or that taking resources would be unethical in their view?
They don't need a "concept of ethics." But there's the basic problem that if they have no problem with taking resources from another civilization, what problem do they have with taking resources from each other? Unless they are invincible they will almost certainly begin by taking resources from each other. If both you and I need a resource and one of us becomes short on it, we engage in conflict unless there is a sense of "ethics" or some basic moral guidelines. They can call it whatever they want but it's just a basic beginning to conflict ... in the wrong places of our world, you can get yourself killed for an iPhone or wallet. Those are resources.
They may simply be looking for more resources to exploit.
So tell me, when you're "simply looking for more resources to exploit" where do you start? Looking at those around you who have the resources you need or building a spaceship capable of intergalactic travel and also locating out of the universe a planet that might have the same resources you need? If you find it hard answering that question, read up on resource consumption and distribution in ancient Rome.
And what makes Earth so automatically special about our resources? I mean, for carbon based life, maybe. But you have to assume if they've been going for that long then they are probably capable of turning worthless planets into gold. A lot of sci-fi novels posit that stars and black holes are going to be the harvested resource for "the down streamers" or any advanced alien race looking for resources to exploit.
My work here is dung.
I dunno. Others have speculated recently (and I happen to agree with them) that the likely space-faring races won't be biological, but mechanical/electrical. An AI that can manufacture it's own replacement parts & direct robots to repair itself could become effectively immortal...which makes the time for the trip between stars less of an issue.
So, there might only be one...and it might need resources. (In this case, though, it'd likely be more interested in the asteroid belt than us.)
That was the conclusion of a Playboy interview concerning aliens years ago (I don't remember who they were interviewing). The analogy was, if I remember correctly, to the Piraha people of South America, who did just that to the Spanish invaders. As a consequence the Piraha were left alone for another hundred years, while all other triebes who allowed the Spanish in were devastated.
I come to the same conclusion as Hawking - that we should try to be a quiet civilization - but not for the same reasons.
The fact that we haven't detected advanced life in all of our SETI searching, and the fact that our solar system has not been visited by an alien probe (see Fermi Paradox) is some evidence that our galaxy has a "sterilizer civilization" - which is a pretty straightforward concept.
If two civilizations begin interstellar colonization in our galaxy, their spheres of expansion are bound to intersect in the future. As they will largely be competing for the same resources (sources of energy differential), some sort of conflict is inevitable. But a conflict at this scale would be so horrible that any reasonable civilization would want to avoid it at all costs. This reasoning makes me think that any suitably advanced, reasonable civilization will be a sterilizer civilization: For the moral purpose of preventing great suffering, they will sterilize any technological civilization before they begin their interstellar colonization. Being rational, they will do this in the most efficient way possible: They will send a robotic probe which will duplicate itself in our solar system, and this autonomous army will wipe out all technological life and monitor our system to make sure that none re-emerges. Since sending even a small payload at great interstellar distances requires great energy, the rational sterilizer civilization will choose a speed for the probe that will bring it to its target safely before their interstellar colonization phase begins, but not much earlier. It is quite possible that such a probe is on its way to us right now, but won't arrive for another thousand years.
On the very unlikely scenario that we are somehow the first technological civilization in our galaxy, I think that we have an ethical obligation to become a sterilizer civilization ourselves. Everyone now wishes that somebody killed Hitler when he was a baby. It would have prevented great suffering. Like Hawking, I think it's inevitable that if contact is allowed to occur between two colonizing civilizations, the result will be catastrophic on a scale that will make the casualty count of a nuclear war seem like a rounding error. So of course there are ethical downsides of sterilizing a budding, intelligent civilization, just like there are downsides to killing the still-innocent baby Hitler. But I think the refusal to do this would be far more monstrous. The costs could be mitigated by meticulously recording all information about the culture and biology of the extinguished life, or perhaps even saving some specimens who will be safely contained in some sort of a galactic zoo.
So how should we react if there is a sterilizing probe on its way to get us? We have to begin our interstellar colonization before the probe gets here. I don't think it makes much sense to try to raise up a defense, because we can't even guess at the mechanism of such a probe. One thing it might do is to create a tiny black hole and drop it into the sun. (Or perhaps the probe just is a small black hole set to collide with the sun in a thousand years or so.) At this point, we are still a very vulnerable civilization, and will remain so until we have covered a substantial part of the galaxy. Also, we should be working hard on the technology for an effective sterilizer probe, just in case SETI does eventually reveal an alien civilization. I know it's "no fun" to kill aliens before we ever meet them, but I think the ethical costs of not doing so are unacceptable.
Stephen Hawking's assumption is that we should be thinking carefully about advertising our presence in the universe because any Alien visitors might be like Columbus discovering the America's in 1492. I think he most certainly has a point, but what about another viewpoint, where Aliens take a look at us and what we have done in our history of contact with new civilisations, realise what the implications for them would be if we were to meet them, and decide that a pre-emptive attack to exterminate all of humanity is probably their safest course of action?
There is a particularly depressing science fiction book called The Killing Star, which describes exactly such a premise. The story is depressing because only a tiny group of people actually survive the devastation to flee in utter silence from the solar system. The method used to exterminate humanity is absurdly simple. No huge ray-guns, no huge bombs, or poison or any such thing, just objects accelerated to 99% the speed of light, so-called relativistic kill-vehicles. Almost impossible to stop because even if you do detect them coming, they're so close behind their own light signal that there wouldn't be much time to do anything about it.
This is the assumption that would worry me the most, I think. any alien civilisation intelligent enough to understand what we are would be intelligent enough to understand how dangerous we could be to them.
If they can get here from other stars I think it's a safe bet they have weapons of MASSIVE destruction. They would have to be far enough more advanced than us that we probably can't even imagine their capabilities (or understand them if we see them). Of course all they really need to do is tug a few astroids along and drop rocks on us, right?
A more insidious possibility is that they have weapons of mass control. Enslavement or genocide? There is also the "tasty treat" possiblility. Most likely is the "we don't really understand what they are doing" option.
The only way for them to be even close to our level of technology would be if they travel at speeds we could potentially travel at, right? In other words waaaay below lightspeed (discounting naturally occurring wormholes that happen to be conveniently placed - or the whole "ancients" idea of an earlier higher level civilization that left behind a transit system). In that case they would have ships we could see coming, possibly for years. Either they would have life-spans far, far longer than ours, they would be traveling in generation ships, or even possibly be cyborgs. If we don't see them coming, I'd say we can assume a level of technology we have zero chance of defending against. If we see them coming we might have a fighting chance.
Or, they just set up a big sun-powered phased array in their home system and bathe us in laser light for a year or two. Their generational ships eventually arrive to find a nice planet conveniently pre-sterilized.
We get to see it coming, not much we can do about it, though.
It seems like an alien race with "sufficient technological capability" that evolved on a terrestrial planet would probably prefer to build swarms of O'Neill cylinders rather than nuking and terraforming terrestrial planets. Consider that:
Not necessarily.
If C turns out to be a hard limit, a race that reached that ability 50,000 years ago could still have a 25,000 year journey ahead of them, before they stumble upon Earth. The universe is fucking huge. If they reached that ability a million years ago, they could have waltzed past Earth before we were barely even Homo anything, decided that Earth doesn't fit their needs (maybe too much water or oxygen or they didn't like the microbiology) and moved on.
Hell, they could have reached that ability a billion years ago, and we'd have no possible way of knowing it.
Mmmmm.....I am not so sure about that.
Remember, we have been using a model of reality for the last say 200 years that well, because it can build planes, rockets and air conditioners and nuclear weapons: The Standard Model that says it is impossible to go to the stars.
The Standard Model SAYS its very hard to traverse the distances.
I don't believe that for a minute because this very same model failed to predict 98% of reality in the Universe we live in.
So I think if we were to scrap the Standard Model and start over, and build it with the express intention of colonizing the stars, we COULD do so.
The funny thing about systems of knowledge like the standard model, is that they create almost a kind of group think of indoctrinization.
I mean, you are prevented from thinking about solving problems in a variety of ways because the model says its impossible. I think this is the next step in science.
If I told you in 1980 that there are different forms of matter and energy (forces) that make up 98% of the universe you would have called me a crack pot because your PhD says its impossible.
Which is my point. People have too much invested in their fields (time/money) to DARE think differently.
Is it REALLY a coincidence, that ALL of the revolutionary thinking about reality in the past 100 years came from people totally outside of classical academics and research?
I mean, really, a patent clerk decides he doesn't like reality so he makes a new description of it for example.
Newton was the same way, the guy didn't like people, he didn't like academics, was a average (very mediocre to bad) student at Cambridge (didn't talk to anyone) and if Halley didn't happen to stop by (his probably one and true friend he had) Newton probably would have went to his grave with the secrets of Calculus.
I see this all day long at UW Madison with the people I see. You are threatened you are scared to think differently. You could lose your grant funding, your tenure. You tow the group think line or your out.
I would not be surprised if a fry cook invents warp drive.
History I think will prove me right. :-)
-Hack
PS: String Theory is a crock.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Carl Sagan also said that marijuana would be legalized before 1980. As much as I admire then man, he suffered from an over-optimism that is characteristic of habitual marijuana users of his era.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?