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Stephen Hawking Wants To Find Aliens Before They Find Us (cnet.com)
Stephen Hawking is again reminding people that perhaps shouting about our existence to aliens is not the right way to go about it, especially if those aliens are more technologically advanced. In his new half-hour program dubbed, Stephen Hawking's Favorite Places, the theoretical physicist and cosmologist said (via CNET):"If intelligent life has evolved (on Gliese 832c), we should be able to hear it," he says while hovering over the exoplanet in the animated "U.S.S. Hawking." "One day we might receive a signal from a planet like this, but we should be wary of answering back. Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn't turn out so well." Hawking manages to be both worried about exposing our civilization to aliens and excited about finding them. He supports not only Breakthrough: Listen, but also Breakthrough: Starshot, another initiative that aims to send tiny nanocraft to our closest neighboring star system, which was recently found to have an Earth-like planet.
It makes sense to guess that the dominant species on other worlds got to the top of the food chain because they're also the most skillful killers. It's wishful thinking to suppose that a more technically advanced civilization would be more peaceful and tolerant. Just like it was wishful thinking for the Aztecs to give the Spanish gold and hope they'd go away.
He's right. We should be careful about broadcasting our presence around the 'verse.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I don't think its possible to predict what a more advanced civilization might want. Are we squirrels? Are we rats to be exterminated? Are we dogs to be bred for cuteness? Is the relationship something we are not capable of comprehending?
I actually started my analysis of the Fermi Paradox from the other side. What if some civilization wanted to be noticed? Turns out to be a relatively minor problem, which strongly indicates that no one wants to be noticed. Alternatively, they tried it and got shut up quickly. Bottom line is that no one is trying right now (where now includes the 100,000 years it would take to span our galaxy--still an extremely small value of "now" on the galactic scale).
My position has evolved over the years, but I'm basically standing on the position that the synthetic intelligences (ASIs) that replace the naturally evolved intelligences like us are amused. They are watching and probably gambling quatloos on whether we create ASI successors before exterminating ourselves. Longer version at:
https://ello.co/shanen0/post/v...
Again hoping for "funny" or "insightful" comments at Slashdot, but it's a young article, soon to become an obsolete article...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It is also impossible for us to hide from them. It requires an immense leap of faith to think that an advanced alien civilization would require us to send an intentional radio signal for them to detect, rather than being detectable from the (much stronger) signal that is the change in the Earth's atmosphere over the last 200 years. If they are even a few centuries (cosmically, a blink of an eye) ahead of us technologically, they will have imaged the Earth and seen our atmospheric nuclear tests in the last century. All it takes is a space telescope at a scale that we can already design (a mirror a few miles in diameter), and enough curiosity to catalogue and observe planets with life on them (again, detectable from atmospheric composition with near-future technology).