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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?"
Hiding will never work :)
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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.
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.
That would make a really good science fiction movie....oh, wait.
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.
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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.
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.
I, for one, welcome our new aliens-in-massive-ships overlord.
"Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror." --Ming the Merciless
There are pleanty of other resources out there, why come all they way here to get them?
It would be like filling your car full of fuel, driving to the airport (past several orchards, forests, landfills, and supermarkets), filling up a 767, flying to Tahiti in it, then raiding a village for its produce.
It just wouldn't be worth it. Not saying they wouldn't be interested, just that the expense and effort to take our stuff would not even be close to break even.
The only reason I could see for them to actually come here are for biologicals. Perhaps petroleum which is also biological actually. Basically us, the plants, all of the bugs, the germs. And that is only useful to them if the biomass is is similar and compatible to theirs.
Quite frankly they could probably produce their own Earth sized biomass with less energy than it would take for them to to transport such infrastructure here.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I've got my towel.
Jeez, come on the technology for defeating them came out in 1997! Didn't any of you see Independence Day? We already know from this fine documentary that all we need is a Wall Street G3 and we can easily penetrate their puny firewalls. Sure they have intergalactic travel capabilities, and ships that can hover over entire cities (without char-broiling them with hover-exhaust, mind you...) but WE have 14.4 modems, Mac OS and the Fresh Prince of BelAir.
What's to worry about?
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Ummm.. if they have intergalactic travel capability, they would be able to get any resource they needed from a much nearer source. After all, every resource we use here on earth is available in vastly larger quantities elsewhere in the Universe than on our tiny little rock. Every resource here came from somewhere else, remember?
The argument that they would come here looking for resources is simply asinine.
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
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.
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.
That sounds like a great way to get "sterilized" yourself by:
a) your own probes turned against you by the civilizations that you intended to "sterilize" OR by a computer glitch,
b) by a civilization or civilizations that you have not yet met but who have already heard about your reputation,
c) by a civilization that is way more developed than yours - as nobody likes living next door to a psycho,
d) getting your civilization torn from inside by your own people or their psychoses due to the fact that not everyone is a heartless bastard willing to condone to a xenocide or two or dozen.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Meh, it's habitable because we grew up here. Anyone else might not like it so much.
Sort of like Jersey.
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Reference to The Forge of God, for those unfamiliar with it. Postulates a universe with three types of civilizations; Sterilizers, in the phraseology used above, naive civilizations that reveal themselves to the sterilizers and are annihilated, and then a very loose consortium of non-Sterilizers who band together for mutual defense. This third category hides from its own members, effectively using anonymous communication to coordinate defense and response to the sterilizers. The later group is actually revealed in his follow-on novel, Anvil of Stars.