Study: Earthlings Not Ready For Alien Encounters, Yet

astroengine (1577233) writes "The people of planet Earth would be wise to raise their cosmic consciousness prior to contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, a new study shows. 'The scientific community now accepts to some degree that this contact may occur in the next 50 to 100 years,' said Gabriel De la Torre, a clinical neuropsychologist and human factors specialist at the University of Cádiz in Spain. 'Consequently, we are becoming more concerned about this possibility and its aftermath Certainly the topic of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations raises a number of questions that are not easy to answer. We estimate that this type of event will have not only a social effect, but also on both consciousness and biology as well.' Although we may not have the necessary social skill set to deal with an encounter of the third kind, scientists or astronauts might make the best candidates for the first alien conversation."

Comments

next 50 to 100 years?

[rubycodez]

based on scanning we are doing of star systems out to thousands of light years? even if we find a sign of ET intelligent life, we have light-centuries to light-millennia of speed-of-light buffer time to protect ourselves after "they" discover our presence, before "contact" of any kind could be made

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[TheNarrator]

That assumes that we know as much physics as they do. They might be using some medium to communicate that we haven't even discovered yet.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[rmdingler]

Remotely near, harmless advanced alien life capable of interstellar travel would leave us alone for a few more centuries whilst we iron out this leftover primal aggression and god fallacy..

Remotely near, exploitative advanced alien life would have already arrived and , well, exploited us and our resources.

Depending on how far down along the great filter we find ourselves, we are quite plausibly the Universe's best hope for intergalactic explorer, settler, and exploiter. Deal with that.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stephen Hawking once said that if aliens visit us they will most likely not be friendly. Whether or not he is right is irrelevant because the aliens aren't coming. Ever.

The idea of aliens coming to earth has been the subject of countless novels, movies and televison shows, and even though those stories are entirely fictional, they have greatly influenced the way we think about the idea of encountering beings from other worlds. Unfortunately, our thinking on this subject is very small and limited. If we step back and think a little bigger, we will realize that any aliens with the ability to come visit us almost certainly would not care to.

Sci-fi stories can ignore the bits that aren't very interesting. Movie aliens rarely get sick or worry about eating. Sci-fi stories rarely mention gravity because, given our limited view, we expect gravity to just work and shooting a movie without it would be a pain. So, screw it, all movie aliens have invented artificial gravity. After all, warp-drive engines and pew-pew energy-blasters are much more fun to think about.

In the real world, however, science tends to advance in all directions, because advances in one field almost always results in advances in many others. For example, the invention of the computer accelerated all other fields of human science.

A race of aliens capable of reaching earth has, at a minimum, perfected faster-than-light travel (or perfected a way to travel for thousands of years at sub-light), conquered the long term biological effects of space radiation, and mastered extreme long distance space navigation, just so they can come to earth and . . . . . what? Steal our water? Study us?

So why *WOULD* aliens come to earth?

Do they really want our water (or minerals or whatever)? That implies an economic model in their decision. By definition, they need and value those resources and coming here to get them is their most economical choice. Getting them somewhere closer to home or manufacturing them must be more "expensive" (in some sense of the word) than the cost of traveling all the way here, gathering our resources and flying them home.

While not impossible, that seems unlikely - both technologically and economically. Even we have (expensively) already mastered alchemy. We have the tech to create matter from energy. Imagine that tech in a few hundred years, or whenever it is you think we'll be able to travel several light years for a mining expedition. What would be cheaper and better, making stuff at home or building a fleet of galactic warships and sending them (along with thousands of soldiers and miners) to some far off planet?

Currently, getting to Proxima Centauri (the closest star outside our solar system) in less than a few hundred years would require technolgy that is several orders of magnitude beyond what we have now. If getting humans to another star system is a 100 on some "technology ability scale", then we're currently at about 2, which is not far ahead of poodles who are probably at 1.

What about the idea that aliens might come to Earth to colonize the planet (and maybe vaporize us in the process)? You could argue that terraforming (or maybe aliens would call it xenoforming) could be a technology more advanced than FTL travel. With that assumption, you could imagine an alien race that can travel across the galaxy but not alter planets to suit their biological needs. Coming to colonize Earth could make sense. But this ignores the fact that several other requisite technologies would probably make their need to colonize obsolete.

Before they had FTL travel, they likely spent many decades traveling at less that light speed and so chances are their ships are quite comfortable. In fact probably more like sailing biodomes than ships - someplace they could live indefinitely. Assuming their other scientists were hard at work while their engineers were busy perfecting FTL, stuff like air and food have long been technologied away.

The only thing something like Ear

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[Charliemopps]

Well, I'd argue it like this: The only means of interstellar communication we know of so far is Electromagnetic waves. With the number of stars in the sky, it's pretty clear that the number of intelligent civilizations out there has to be infinite. Yet the sky is not saturated with their communications. So therefor those civilizations must be using some other technology. Now if they are communicating with entangled particles, we're kind of screwed. You can't eves drop on that. But all the science has so far lead us to believe that you can't actually communicate this way.

But now we're starting to find other fields we could use. Gravity wave detectors are getting better and better. There's the higgs field. Maybe we'll find some other new and interesting ways to relay information. But our tech is advancing at an almost exponential rate now, so I think it's entirely plausible that in the next 100 years we finally figure out how advanced life transmits information long distances. It's probably in some way encrypted so we may just hear noise, but at least we'll know it's there.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[NotSanguine]

That assumes that we know as much physics as they do. They might be using some medium to communicate that we haven't even discovered yet.

Certainly possible. But then, who of us could receive it?

Probably all of us would receive it.

After all, they would understand our limitations, by virtue of examining our transmissions, and adjust their transmissions accordingly.

You're assuming they would want to talk to us at all. Perhaps we are too backward to even bother saying hello to. Or perhaps they are preparing a sneak attack. Granted, we have little that could harm an advanced race, but why give us a couple of decades to prepare. If they've been watching us, they would certainly have figured out that humans are pretty good at finding creative ways of killing things when threatened.

Actually, they wouldn't need to be all that much more advanced than we are militarily. We sit at the bottom of a gravity well. As Heinlein suggested in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, they could just "throw rocks" at us.

Not very high tech, is it?

Getting here is a completely different story, but the thought that extraterrestrial intelligence would need to be enormously more technologically advanced than we are is just not true. We (in cosmological terms) aren't so far off from creating devices that can autonomously manufacture machines to mine the moon or asteroids for rocks that can be set on intersecting trajectories with the Earth. Presumably, any intelligence that can build an autonomous probe capable of reaching us, could include that sort of technology in the probe. Berserkers are an (albeit fictional) example.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[Jason Levine]

They don't even have to reveal themselves to us (and thus risk some sort of counterattack). If they are patient enough, they could park a ship in the asteroid belt and fire a few asteroids in our direction. A few years later, the asteroids would come crashing down on Earth. To us, it would look like a completely natural event, albeit one with disastrous consequences for our civilization. The last human alive could die without ever having known that alien life not only exists, but killed off humanity.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[RubberDogBone]

Greed about what? What would we, either as a race of creatures, or as a populated biosphere, or even as the raw planet itself, what would we have that an advanced race could not find somewhere else for less hassle?

This assumes advanced races couldn't just do "magic" with materials sciences and simply make whatever they needed. If they still need raw material, why come here?

Water? We know there's a LOT of it out there. Our own Oort cloud could be mined for water for close to forever and we wouldn't know about it or be able to do anything. They won't need our oceans.

Gold? Metals? Asteroids. Free. Nobody with spears guarding them. They don't need your dental fillings.

Food? Oh come on, advanced races surely have sorted out getting rid of biological needs like food and waste processing. So they won't need to eat us.

Reproduction? Laughable. Our reproductive process is ridiculous. And probably not compatible. We don't have horse-humans running around and our DNA is already close to the horse DNA. Alien DNA won't be that similar. It would have to be modified, tested, modified more, tested more, to get to a viable hybrid. Hmmm....

Toys? Now this is really the only reason for them to come here. A set of living toys. If all we are to aliens is a set of toys, then we have no hope. This is worse than if they wanted to come here to eat us and take our water. Being a toy means we're only here until somebody decides they want new toys.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[evilviper]

With the number of stars in the sky, it's pretty clear that the number of intelligent civilizations out there has to be infinite.

Nonsense. That's purely wishful thinking.

We have precisely ONE example of abiogenesis. That's statistically insignificant, so we have NO POSSIBLE WAY to extrapolate out how likely or unlikely it is to happen anywhere else.

We do not have any evidence that it happened a second time in the history of Earth, otherwise we'd see crazy branches in DNA trees. We have not made it happen in a lab, so that we'd have the faintest concept of how difficult it would be.

We similarly have only one example of higher life-forms developing from the lower life-forms... Again, no sign in the DNA tree that it happened, independently, twice, so that might be a pretty rare and difficult thing, itself.

And finally, we have just one example of those higher life-forms becoming sentient beings, in the form of humans. As smart as dolphins may be, they're not building radios or space ships. Same goes for millions of years of dinosaurs. Why don't we see left-over buildings constructed by smart, pre-human animals? Probably weren't any other sentiences on Earth.

So there you've got 3-in-a-row long-shots... If each is a billion-to-one shot, the combined odds would be a stretch of happening more than once, even with trillions of planets out there. But that's just as much of a wild-assed guess as yours...

It seems to be wishful thinking that people WANT to have, not just life, not just higher life-forms, and not just sentient life out there, but sentient life that's much more advanced than us. Creatures that are going to swoop in, give us advanced technology, and solve all our problems for us. No matter how little we know of the odds, many people will just keep assuming they're out there, because they WANT it to be true.

Meanwhile, nobody has solved the Drake Equation, to actually give us the correct odds of either extreme.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[Zebai]

I think I have to comment on this one. Say your right, there is 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of even micro organisms being on another planet, and another 1 in billion of it being intelligent. That would still leave chances of life to be in the BILLIONS and we can't even see all of it because the light takes so long to travel the birth of distant stars from billions of years ago hasn't even reached us yet. As long as the chance is not 0% which it is not because we are here then some where in the universe there are other intelligent life forms however our chance of ever being able find them are equally infinitesimal.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[amorsen]

Communications are likely to be point-to-point, and we only get to catch the signal if it randomly points at us for a moment.

We emit lots of radar, and we could be easily detected that way, but military radar is going spread-spectrum or passive and civilian radar is relying more and more on active transponders. If we fixed our light pollution as well, intelligent life on Earth would be quite well hidden.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[evilviper]

The Universe is NOT infinite. It is unimaginably, astronomically ginormous, but decidedly finite. If it was infinite, the Big Bang theory couldn't work.

And since the Universe is finite, it's absolutely possible for odds to be so long, that something (or a series of interdependant somethings) is unlikely to have happened more than once. Whether that's true of advanced life remains to be seen, but is entirely possible.

Re:next 50 to 100 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more than just the encryption, you also need to figure out the alphabet. Even if you figure out that 01000001 means "A" what does "A" mean?

It's the first letter of the alphabet, dipshit.

Study?

[Irate Engineer]

What was this based on? Did the PI rent Independence Day from Redbox last week and suddenly get an idea to spin a humanities degree into notoriety?

Stuff that *might* happen *might* lead to other stuff that *might* happen.

Slashdot makes me want to throw my laptop against the wall and punch people. Gahhh....

...what scientific community?

[Rinikusu]

And where are they getting their data?

Re:It will be a disaster.

[Lost Race]

The human race is incapable of being second fiddle to any other life form,

Nonsense. Look back at history and see the millions of humans who allowed themselves to be enslaved, subjugated, or otherwise oppressed. Humans are excellent at playing second fiddle.

And much of that oppression / subjugation / slavery was based on race or religion, so it doesn't particularly matter if the new overlords are some new kind of "alien", and it doesn't matter what our gods tell us about them. If they stomp their boots on our necks hard enough we will kneel before them.

Huh?

[cascadingstylesheet]

'The scientific community now accepts to some degree that this contact may occur in the next 50 to 100 years,'

Based on .... what, exactly? The complete, utter, absolute, comprehensive lack of any previous contact?

Re:Huh?

[Brett Buck]

Given that there is absolutely no evidence for aliens over last 4.8 billion years, I think we are due.

     

blinding me with science

[swell]

- The scientific community now accepts to some degree -
- a clinical neuropsychologist and human factors specialist -

While some may prefer citations
and some may prefer credentials that include some basic science skills,
others will be happy to forge ahead with imaginative fantasies.

Prepare to be filtered

[sinij]

We are not going to encounter any aliens until we are ourselves are past great filter. If we make it past great filtering, than social, evolutionary, and environmental factors imposing change on humanity over time-frames involved in below-speed-of-light space travel will produce plenty of "aliens". They will be our descendants but they will be nothing like us.

Bullshit New Agey Pseudoscience

[Ironlenny]

How can “The scientific community now accepts to some degree that this contact may occur in the next 50 to 100 years.” be true if we haven't even established that there is life outside of Earth!

Then you have this tripe: "'Further, by means of self-consciousness, man becomes capable of treating his own mental states as objects of consciousness. The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe,' De la Torre writes in a study published in the journal Acta Astronautica."

I am very disappointed in you Slashdot.

What SETI can pick up

[Doug Merritt]

Yet the sky is not saturated with their communications. So therefor those civilizations must be using some other technology.

That seems logical, but that turns out not to be the case. A SETI scientist said in a talk (and I've seen this in articles since) that our deployed SETI listening technology is still nowhere near sensitive enough to pick up signals even from as close as the nearest star (Proxima Centauri, 4 light years away), if a planet there was broadcasting RF at current Earth levels.

(That doesn't mean SETI to date is pointless, because there's always a chance of a highly directional signal beamed our way, or of just something unexpected, like signals far far brighter than Earth's.)

So no, we have no idea whether the sky is saturated with radio waves or not.

Alternatives; might take quadrillions of universes

[Paul Fernhout]

... in a multiverse to generate one Earth?

Just to add to the possibility of unlikelihood of other space civilizations, with quadrillions of totally empty universes...

Great analysis.

All that said, we just don't know the odds of alternatives within out universe. And we may be living in a computer simulation (like Minecraft?) with parameters set to generate either one or trillions of different space civilizations.

Although given how hardy bacteria are, it would not surprise me if our solar system had been inoculated by bacteria from far away.

A big irony of all this SETI stuff is that so many people act like finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe with a different culture or technology elsewhere would be a big deal, whereas we in the USA and also globally are so busy killing off whales, elephants, octopods, and people of different countries and religions for various short-term economic or xenophobic reasons... And our culture also have a history of ignoring great technologies like Smalltalk or QNX. Comments on SETI are often just some weird mix of irony, hypocrisy, and blindness... Not to say I have not been guilty of such myself sometimes...

Someone in another post talked about a popular fantasy that some alien technology would solve all our problems, but is that true? As Bucky Fuller said in the 1960s, and is only more true now, we have more than enough resources and technology to make life pleasant for everyone on Earth (well, except haters and greeders maybe). Eat more vegetables and fruits, get out in the sunshine and walk in nature, hang out with other people locally, sleep well, do good work, and so on are the basics for a healthy happy life (see "BlueZones"). People in the USA can see much happier and healthier people in Europe or Canada if they bothered to look, but US politics in general can't admit that. Can you imagine what the US political parties (either left or right) would say about some happier healthier more prosperous space civilization that was more communal? Or that had different sex roles? Or had different religious rituals? Or whatever?

Example of the kind of nonsense people in the USA would start spouting in talk-radio: "Yeah, those red-skinned aliens live 100,000 years each in perfect health traveling the universe if they want in FTL ships that can print anything they want in 3D, but it's an unhappy 10,000 years because they have high taxes and have a different notion of God/Universe and different rituals. We need to help these backward aliens come to know our loving God (by torture if need be) and how to vote correctly to give all their money to wealthy Earthlings who will create good jobs for all of them. Their medical care system sucks because they don't have private sick care insurance to deliver medicine by board-certified entrepreneurial MDs and the health care facilities and testing labs the MDs own and so the alien's million-year old political obviously will surely be insolvent soon. Anyone who explores or advocates their ways is an alien-sympathizer traitor, guilty of treason, and needs to be imprisoned or re-educated. Anyone who harbors an alien is guilty of aiding terrorists because these aliens want to destroy our way of life. For our citizens' own protection, we will not issue passports to anyone dumb enough to want to go visit them and anyone attempting to board an alien vessel will be shot out of our boundless compassion. The aliens are obviously here to corrupt our morality and sap the ardor of the hard-working minimum-wage-paid American to cause the USA to collapse. These aliens in their crappy ZPE-powered FTL ships obviously want to steal our fossil fuel coal, oil, and natural gas. We need to increase out military spending to counter this alien threat, and it is sensible to take simple precautions like a first-strike with nukes and plagues on the alien homeworld using stolen alien spaceships to keep this alien menace at bay. Better dead than Red."

For this playing out historically in North America centuries ago to "R