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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.