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Scientists Say Space Aliens Could Hack Our Planet (nbcnews.com)
Scientists are worried that space aliens might send messages that worm their way into human society -- not to steal our passwords but to bring down our culture. "Astrophysicists Michael Hippke and John Learned argue in a recent paper that our telescopes might pick up hazardous messages sent our way -- a virus that shuts down our computers, for example, or something a bit like cosmic blackmail: 'Do this for us, or we'll make your sun go supernova and destroy Earth,'" reports NBC News. "Or perhaps the cosmic hackers could trick us into building self-replicating nanobots, and then arrange for them to be let loose to chew up our planet or its inhabitants." From the report: The astrophysicists also suggest that the extraterrestrials could show their displeasure (what did we do?) by launching a cyberattack. Maybe you've seen the 1996 film "Independence Day," in which odious aliens are vanquished by a computer virus uploaded into their machinery. That's about as realistic as sabotaging your neighbor's new laptop by feeding it programs written for the Commodore 64. In other words, aliens that could muster the transmitter power (not to mention the budget) to try wiping us out with code are going to have a real compatibility problem.
Yet there is a way that messages from space might be disruptive. Extraterrestrials could simply give us some advanced knowledge -- not as a trade, but as a gift. How could that possibly be a downer? Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, aliens weigh in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose. If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate. In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Yet there is a way that messages from space might be disruptive. Extraterrestrials could simply give us some advanced knowledge -- not as a trade, but as a gift. How could that possibly be a downer? Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, aliens weigh in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose. If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate. In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Whoever wrote this, should be ashamed of themselves. The paper is chicken-little trash of the highest order.
TL;DR Anything can happen, so be wary of space aliens.
Haha guys very funny. Hopefully it's a joke some astrophyscist played on whoever wrote this story. Got drunk with some friends and "Hey you know what I bet we could get some idiot to print?"
This type of Bradburyesque thought experiment jumps right out of mass media human expectations of what alien life would look like, care about, think in terms of, etc. This type of shit IS A BIT OF WHY we aren't a more advanced species!
They make the claim then refute its possibility further down the page....
No worries. We got Jeff Goldblum, Will Smith, and pre-Macbook Apple laptops.... ... for a few years more.
OK, start worrying.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
The best hack the aliens could possibly do is give us plans that LOOK like they'll create something we really want, like an interstellar warp drive, infinite clean energy or the like, but once turned on it actually blows up the planet.
I can imagine the equivalent of drunk frat boys doing that for the lulz.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
(Spoilers for 10 year old game)
In Star Ocean 4, the protagonist gives the secret of Antimatter reactors to an alternate-universe earlier Earth (IIRC). This is done in order to skip over nuclear power, and the problems of nuclear proliferation. The prototype reactor goes out of control, and blows up the entire planet.
I wonder if alien hackers will get us to destroy ourselves 'for the lulz', that's probably more plausible than a supposedly logical reason. However, as anyone who's seen Contact will point out, there will be MUCH skepticism about any device/tech that aliens send us.
Actually... you know whenever a cosmic ray flips a bit? Alien hackers. That's my explanation from now on.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Alternative 1:
Someone: Hey, I got this ant-hill that is really annoying.
Idiot: You shuld reverse-engineer the feromones that operate and direct them and device a new feromone that will make the ant-hill self-destruct.
Alternative 2:
Someone: Hey, I got this ant-hill that is really annoying.
Not idiot: Stick of dynamite will solve that problem in no time.
So it's the Aliens now, is it? The story gets more credible by the day...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Was the plural deliberate, i.e. more than one person thinks this? And you're sure they weren't actually the subject of scientific research, say into insanity or the like?
Well, not only about hacking. An invasion by hostile aliens only takes 3 days because of their superior electronic warfare capabilities. Shameless self-slashvertising for anyone who is interested and can read German (sorry, no English!): Invasion der Ausserirdischen in Berlin-Mitte.
We got applied nuclear fission (and fusion soon after) at almost exactly the same time we got long-range rocketry working. Coincidence? They made sure we didn't get controllable fusion so that we'd still have to fight over fossil fuels. Right now they're out there, fuming:. "Goddamn it! Would you knock it off with the fucking car already and just nuke yourselves?"
Speaking of that, maybe they're not monolithic and another faction is feeding Elon Musk tech now. Solar cells and Mars colonization.
It's where I put that thing that time.
We could be held ransom with 10 million square miles of something simple like mylar.
Is there any way to help them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
These ideas were quite thoroughly explored around 1960 by Fred Hoyle and others. Hoyle's novel "A for Andromeda" and the associated BBC series describe events following the reception of a coherent set of messages apparently from a distant alien species. The messages contain detailed information - including the complete recipe for creating an intelligent (apparently) human individual. Then the question arises: who is she really, where do her loyalties lie, and since she may be far cleverer than any human being, how can we trust her?
Hoyle had also presented similar ideas in a slightly less extreme format in his novel "Ossian's Ride", in which a mysterious entity called the Industrial Corporation of Eire (ICE) buys up and cordons off the whole south-west tip of Ireland, establishing a futuristic city with amazingly advanced technology. Where did the knowledge come from?
Of course such stories skate lightly over the practical difficulties of decoding complex alien messages, but the core dilemma is very real. It is similar to the problem posed in James P Hogan's "Two Faces of Tomorrow" - arguably essential reading for anyone interested in AI - which asks, "if a computer system is clever enough to solve problems human beings can't, could they afford to trust it?"
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Wow, it's pretty much the exact plot of Contact, only destructive. Which is how Rick and Morty played it a few years ago.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
"Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, aliens weigh in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose".
While this is a very plausible scenario, isn't it really an indictment of the stupid, irrational way we run our society? Any system that makes amazing new knowledge seem harmful is obviously a rotten system.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The 1995 movie Species (as bad as it was) had an interesting take on this.
In it, aliens broadcast a DNA recipe in the hope that a receiving civilization will cook that up in the flesh out of curiosity. The result then of course turns into a bloodthirsty monster ready to take over the planet. This seems like a clever solution to the difficulty of moving over interstellar distances. Why bother creating an entire fleet of Independence Day style spaceships to carry your civilization to new planets if a few megabytes of biological data could do the same.
look it up.
Like the Americans who see enemies everywhere, the more reasonable scientists now have to look elsewhere for greater enemies, and so we look to other solar systems and decide that the aliens may come to hurt and destroy us... for what?
Must have been a slow day when looking for submissions...
Little wonder they don't want to come anywhere near us.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Is this for real? Are these scientist bored, too old, or have read too much scifi?
I, and I speak for all red-blooded Trump supporters the world over, would welcome said these Aliens - and only these Aliens! - if anal probes are involved.
Oh FFS....
So basically, a Trojan, nothing new really, just from a difference source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
New things are always on the horizon
Some say this has already happened.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They Live was on last night...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
I'm no psychologist but... as a species we tend to delight in dividing into 'them' and 'us'. and then projecting onto the other one all of our own fears, failings and foibles. If there isn't a convenient bogeyman to blame, never mind we'll invent one; if the other side starts to appear reasonable, then it's a trick. Paranoia and propaganda is everywhere - and it serves the interests of the leaders(overt and hidden) to keep it stoked up [never mind truth or facts - broadcast the news we want people to want to hear].
Perhaps the threat of aliens (however ludicrous) is intended to make us collectively forget our petty squabbles and project the 'other' as a threat to humanity as a whole - ie get the whole world onto the side of 'us'.
I don't seriously think that this was the motive**, neither do I think it would work - but it's a nice theory.
**more likely to be "pay attention to me!!" narcissism
yup, NoSpaceAliens has been hacking the planet for years.
As opposed to what, sea aliens? Illegal aliens?
The space aliens gave us the ORANGE DUDE
This is a prison, why are there so many wacko stupid retards here, its a prison.
No one can get out easily.
Microsoft is their virus, its causes so much problems.
If there are aliens that have developed feasible interstellar travel, our planet probably will be as interesting to them as a culture of common bacteria is to us. If someone has FTL, they are likely to be able to find and visit countless intelligent lifeforms in the universe. One resolution to the fermi paradox is that life in the universe is sort of a banality. While FTL travel might be not, I doubt a civilisation advanced enough would be interested in teasing/torturing us. Some alien kids, like in Steven Kings "The Arena" maybe, but other than that we are about as interesting to them as a lost tribe in the amazon is to us. Probably even way less interesting.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
We don't need space aliens to send us computer viruses or to disrupt society with dangerous information. We know that human aliens are doing it. Maybe tihis is a Russian plot to deflect attention.
COE
Didnt you see her 60s photos of her in lesbian clothes smoking pot and taking russian orders?
LOL's for nerds, editors don't matter.
Then we will meet them with fire and fury.
In lieu of responding to this post I'll just point out that its author is someone who thinks an IQ test is pass/fail.
Really, a virus from a telescope???????
Slash, really?
Science fistion is awesome, but not on slashdot.
As far as we know there are no aliens. And we'vee been looking.
The amount of pulling shit out of thin air on this is comical.
Once the Great Wall of Trump is up the president should build you a roof.
Of course paid for by these aliens.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Pretty sure the Zuckerbergonians sent us the seeds of our doom back in 2004.
Ever since then, humanity appears to have been on an ever accelerating descent into imbecilic click-trollishness.
We are absolutely not in need of external help to fuck each other and ourselves up...
I always thought the MSM would be peddling the idea that the Rooskies would poison the precious veins of information flowing directly from the finance and arms industries to the plebejans.
Now I stand corrected - it is the "space aliens"; that nutty idea straight out of Hollywood without any real substance. But the plebs are so big time stupid they believe into the Hollywood claptrap by now.
Time for silly whitey to wake up and go for a walk in the forest. Too much TV weakens the brain.
This heinous bastard who does not comply with the demands of the war industry ! Down with him!
Oh it's not from "The Onion" sad!
Comprehension fail. He says that someone else claimed to have passed one, so it's that someone who thinks it.
Imagine I say that my science teacher told me had a bottle of phlogiston in the storeroom. It says nothing at all about my opinions on it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
These folks are nicely fed, housed, medicated and bored. So they dream up baseless theories.
Steven Hawking did the same a few months ago. These celebrities are attention-seekers.
Even more insidious: They could give use plans to something that actually works as advertised, as long as is is built with eight sigma accuracy. Anything worse, and it'll blow up the solar system.
In a few years, they'll know whether we are worthy as manufacturing contractors, or not.
While I don't doubt it could happen (just witness what Russia has been doing around the world), I think any alien race with the technology to do such a thing could easily be much more forceful and simply impose their will on us or destroy us.
Scientists are worried that space aliens might send messages that worm their way into human society -- not to steal our passwords but to bring down our culture.
Why is this written as if to imply that all scientists everywhere are worried about this? Just because a few people who are scientists have an idea doesn't make it wide spread or accepted. That's a really shady tactic used by journalists and politicians.
"Astrophysicists Michael Hippke and John Learned argue in a recent paper that our telescopes might pick up hazardous messages sent our way
So these two specific scientists have a theory. Why lead off with the idiotic implication that this idea is more widespread than it really is. It's the same tactic Trump uses when he says "people are saying..." when it's really one guy's drunken twitter post.
Build that wall, Mr Trump!
This is crack pot science. We have NO CLUE what alien life might look like. We're starting with anthropomorphizing it if it even exists which is stupid. I have an idea, why don't we let Project Starshot with Stephen Hawking and company answer the question: is there other life in the universe first? Then, if there is "alien life" elsewhere, we can decide whether it's something to be concerned about.
We'll make great pets
In the movie our computers were based on the technology stolen from the alien vessels in 40s. Thats why they were compatible!
Regards,
Will S.
Are trojan horses made to slow down our technical evolution and scientific recherches!
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Sounds like someone was watching "Species" again. Natasha Henstridge is HOT.
Buzzing the information Superhighway at Warp speed
Maybe you've seen the 1996 film "Independence Day," in which odious aliens are vanquished by a computer virus uploaded into their machinery. That's about as realistic as sabotaging your neighbor's new laptop by feeding it programs written for the Commodore 64.
One can crash a smartphone with an emoji. I'm sure dumb coders exists everywhere in the Universe.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
written by paranoiacs.
Léa Gris
It's like you never heard of error correction.
Or the simplest solution to all your problems: Transmit gene sequences constantly, for a century or so.
That way you are guaranteed to have enough duplicates for error correction, and can transmit all varieties of your gene. Or hell, let it transmit one genome, as errors will just be mutations, just like normal, automatically causing a diversity. Basically the receiver has the freedom to choose his strategy, retry, etc.
And in a 100 years, in a civilization capable of it, certainly somebody will notice a distinct repeating pattern coming from the skies!
Typical humans ... always assuming everybody is as stupid as they are.
Did russia planted the other idiot too? Because without her, the idiot that got elected would be crushed by literally everyone else.
> Scientists Say Space Aliens Could Hack Our Planet. Scientists are worried that space aliens might send messages that worm their way into human society -- not to steal our passwords but to bring down our culture.
Wasn't there an award-winning chinese sci-fi novel about this very topic, featuring a female astrophysicist antagonist, which story Obama has also read and mentioned or recommended in some TV interview?
"Do this for us or we'll make your star go supernova."
Let's see here. After 2 seconds of critical thinking, I'm going to conclude that there's absolutely nothing we possibly could do for a species with that level of technology. It's as if we (human beings) came up with a plan to blackmail chimpanzees. Even if they understood the concept of blackmail, what could they possibly do for us, and what could we possibly want from them?
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu has everything you posit.
- high efficiency solar power cells
- room temperature superconductors
- high energy density storage units
- cold fusion devices
Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, aliens weigh in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose. If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate. In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Suddenly, SPIES give you that whole atomic bomb thing on a silver platter. So much for your job and your sense of purpose.
Oh... wait... No... That's not how that happened.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Sounds like the perfect ET "virus" to me...maybe Piers Anthony was right - he only has to be right *once*!
With the fact that any alien on Earth would be captured by any country they visit immediately, forcing either them to be abandoned or some type of alien/earth conflict, no aliens would be showing up visibily.
However, with all the factions and the balances of power in play, it would be trivially simple for a group with advanced tech stealthily hand resources to one faction (maybe some guns to a separatist group, or get someone in power) in efforts to cause discord and a collapse, so it is trivial to waltz in and take what they want. With communications the way it is, coupled with the disinterest in security, that would be another medium. It wouldn't take much to push on the right fulcrums and cause civilization to collapse.
Of course, we have seen this in history. Two shiploads of Spaniards managed to collapse and loot two of the greatest empires the world has ever known in a few years (Incas, Aztecs.) Imagine what an outside force could do.
Many examples of this abound in various incarnations - Battlestar Galactica, The Killing Star, Species...
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
If you can't do science anymore, do science fiction. There are an infinite number of evolutionary paths and there is nothing in science or logic that I can see that indicates that it is possible to follow exactly our four billion year evolutionary path. No aliens, sorry, be bored.
E Proelio Veritas.
This type of Bradburyesque thought experiment jumps right out of mass media human expectations of what alien life would look like, care about, think in terms of, etc. This type of shit IS A BIT OF WHY we aren't a more advanced species!
The main reason why we're not a more advanced species: the majority of our efforts are put towards trying to control each other.
If half of that effort had been allocated to advancing technology we'd have colonized another galaxy by now. We're too busy worrying about hierarchies and politics for all of that, though.
Really an advanced yet somehow hostile species would conclude that their most effective move would be to leave us alone. Revealing themselves at all might have the unintended side effect that we view ourselves as Earthlings instead of black/white/catholic/muslim/nation-state-member.
After all, there could be any number of friendly alien species, but it only takes ONE malevolent species. We very likely don't get a do-over.
Yup, and every bit the same thing can be said about an AI Superintelligence.
While I look forward to both self-aware AI (I believe it will love us, after all, we love machines - how many of us have pictures of cars?) and intelligent alien life (which would have wiped us out by now if it wanted to), we're going to be dealing with similar consequences and societal upheaval.
Modified from the article:
Yet there is a way that messages from silicon might be disruptive. Computers could simply give us some advanced knowledge -- not as a trade, but as a gift. How could that possibly be a downer? Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, IBM Watson weighs in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose. If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate. In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Physicists getting replaced by technology as surely as cabbies will be replaced by autonomous cars? Why not?
Hey, nobody seems to be crying for all the IBM Selectric typewriter mechanics who lost their jobs in the 1980s. Does anyone really want to ditch their smartphones to keep that trade alive?
Same thing.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
In reality, aliens hacked the US election so that it will bring mankind's downfall while pinning it on the russians for extra style point.
Wait, what if, the russians are the aliens?
Suddenly it all make sense
They'd hack our minds.
The AI would hack our internet. Alien's only work on complex problems.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Being hacked by space aliens usually comes up right after deep discussions of whether God can create a burrito so hot that he couldn't handle it
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Stupid story of the day . . . .
-- Mean People Suck
Crushed by everyone else? Not exactly.
That's how 14 Republican candidates were rejected by US voters and the orange was nominated.
In statistics that's called type II error, fail to reject.
Imagine: You're a physicist... In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Who the hell is going to understand this alien "gift"? Who is going to figure out how these new equations relate to the physical world? Who is going to design materials and tools to use this new knowledge? Who is going to develop the next set of theories once we find the limits of this new science?
We might get answers to a lot of our outstanding questions, but we will not end up with fewer questions.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Even worse they get the science wrong. Stars the mass of the sun do not go supernova because they lack sufficient mass. Overcoming this would be a monumental task: you have to exhaust 5 billion years worth of hydrogen and then somehow hold the star together while it fuses all the way up to iron.
The result is that this paper reads more like the plot of a second-rate Hollywood science-fiction movie where they get the science horribly wrong.
Indeed. The least of which being that any alien species capable of destroying our sun, or even traveling to us, would be so uninterested in *anything* we could possibly offer them as to us not being worth their time.
...
This pseudo scientist, probably a cargo cultist, postulates a civilization powerful enough to make our sun go super nova, but petty enough to demand some things from us. What. could. they. possibly. want.? Unobtainium? Vibranium?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Is convince a group of people to kill and rape all who don't belong to the group because that's what god wants ... oh wait!
"If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate."
ha ha ha ha
Majority of students I've observed in a public school would welcome that deprivation.
During the Democratic Primary, polls were carried out on the general public asking them to rate their preferences on pairs of R vs D candidates. Clinton was the only one that was not seen as definitely better than Trump. Now, it's possible that another candidate might have slipped in the polls, but none of the others had such a poor starting performance. I suspect that if the ballots had said Trump, Not Clinton, Not Trump, Clinton, then the two most popular choices would have been Not Clinton and Not Trump.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When reverse engineering, although the end result is in a disassembled and de-compiled format of a language that we can understand. I believe along with math and assigning of variables and executing logic based upon them, will be universal as the usage of ssl pinning to get their encryption , that might be tough. But we all know as reverse engineers, nothing is impossible , no matter how improbable
This is a science fiction plot. It's been used more than once in a few fun story arcs.
I hope this wasn't a peer-reviewed paper. It would suck if we're sunk so low as to publish science fiction plot studies as peer-reviewed science.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Isn't this the normal alien commentary. Even more general really: aliens might do something bad, but maybe it'll be good. At least we have Voltron to defend us.. oh wait.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
I think this already happens to all of us when we use knowledge from all the smart *people* before us. Would it be good to isolate a group of people and see if they could rediscover math and science "for themselves"? I think not. If the aliens understand the universe in ways that we are not biologically capable of comprehending, then I guess that's new and different. We can't really measure progress in years. (1,000 years ahead doesn't mean anything if we're not capable of ever understanding.)
-Dave
Do this for us, or we'll make your sun go supernova and destroy Earth
I'm really not sure what we could possible do for a race that is technologically advanced enough to make a star go supernova. Other than to let them know that humans taste best when cooked medium rare with a side of barbecue sauce. To any race that can do that, we're about as technologically advanced as a colony of ants is to us.
i'm an alien, and i got a disruptive particle physics theory - no really! http://erm.lkcl.net/ - proving the point that you don't have to be an alien to be completely ignored for introducing disruptive theories of physics...
but seriously, much of this is covered in numerous sci-fi books. and also in star trek ("the prime directive"). ian banks "the culture" series was the most noteworthy set of books that explored the introduction (discovery or theft) of technology above the level / maturity of the species to cope with it. strict rules were put in place... one very interesting book explored "shell worlds"... well worth reading.
at least the author didn't mention anal probing [film Paul, "what IS it with you humans and the anal probing?? are we harvesting farts??"]
They already did it to slow progress and keep the trash out of the the yard - (called religion ;-) )
Oh, I see where this is going ... it was the aliens that bought a few ads on Facebook and ruined everything in 2016!!!
all they need to do is wait and we will destroy ourselves in short order.
This is basically the plot of The Tree-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
Mostly likely the message would just be:
Applicable greetings of the local stellar cycle to you! My name is Prince Xyzzy of the planet Grpwhvn in the Glubber system (known to you as Alpha Centauri). I have recently come into the possession of approximately 3.4x10^10 Qwatloos, and political necessity requires that I move them off-planet as soon as possible...
...and watching "Alf" and "Mork & Mindy" re-runs.
I don't see how this paper made it into print. "On the most basic level, a message might represent a statement like “We will make your sun go super- nova tomorrow”. True or not, it could cause wide-spread panic."
Only among people who failed to pay attention in middle school science class. In which case they deserve to "run in circles, scream and shout", it will keep them away from important things that they might break.
Why hack when some simple tricks like dropping a mountain sized piece of rock from orbit would likely end our civilization faster. Any alien race that has mastered Interstellar travel is already dealing with power levels that could blow our planet into dust if they really wanted to. If you really wanted to think this way how do we know that it wasn't aliens that dropped the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs off the planet and left mammals behind as a chance to reshape the planet!? Maybe we're the virus? The point is, it's not worth worrying about. Get the magical alien message first then worry about what to do with it, or not.
have to do is say "Hi."
They'll never forget us - our diseases will be our heritage
downvoting people who want to investigate the alien hacking attempts to influence our elec- I mean society. nice try klaatu
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
just because we have a cache of knowledge why would that put physicists out of work? The field of physics is a moving target, it changes and continues moving on as we learn more. we didn't stop when Newton came up with the theory of gravity, we didn't stop when Einstein came up with relativity. We didn't stop when we built the first particle accelerator, we pushed further and made them bigger and used that to learn even more, and apply that knowledge to push further yet.
if it is a significant breakthrough it would at minimum still take many years of study to decipher and determine how we can apply the knowledge. and there will still be people that want to probe the edges of it to test its accuracy and determine if there is anything missing. this wouldn't put physicists out of a job, it would employ even more.
now what might be suspicious is if they send us the plans for some exotic machine, maybe something like a dark matter accelerator which if turned on causes a planet to collapse into a black hole, which some thought cern would do.
Which is destroying us - by amping ultra unreasoning partisanship. Friend against friend, brother against brother - in my 60+ year life I've never seen it like this. It's like the shoe shop ray from Hitchhiker's guide, but for dirty politics. This sucks.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Way simpler than that...
"The attached message describes the method for total conversion of matter to energy, as well as the techniques necessary to limit the process to the small scales necessary for powering devices such as communications, computing, food synthesis, and transport. Simply decompress the attached message."
Human translation, "Whoever decompresses this message WINS. Get our guys in the bunker decompressing, and let the nukes fly to stop everyone else."
Aliens' secret, there is nothing in the compressed attachment, it's just a long stream from a very good random number generator. Who would be stupid enough to give a savage species like THEM any sort of advanced technology?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That's about as realistic as sabotaging your neighbor's new laptop by feeding it programs written for the Commodore 64.
Yeah, about that...
Right here is an alien causing destruction in the basics of our society:
https://youtu.be/zaFjLYWyetY?t=523
So maybe the plot of "Real Men" isn't as far-fetched as it appeared back in the eighties?
Serenity now, insanity later.
There are vital illustrations missing from this story, which I'm more than happy to provide for the benefit of all Slashdot readers. You're welcome! :-)
Just don click on the attached .exe file on their message.
We're merely running a Class 2 Perversion; it's not the fscking Blight, ok? Just relax, everyone.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
....this is WAY down the list.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Well yeah, after conquering the galaxy the next logical step is to go to the backwoods hick planet on the tip of the sprial arm you ignored eairlier, that is populated by monkeys that kill and rape eachother, and then waste resources committing genocide against a species already hell bent on killing itself off. Makes sense right?
Doesn't the job simply then change? I mean, just because the aliens understand all that knowledge, it doesn't mean mankind understands it. So the job changes from discovery to understanding.
This would piggyback on very robust authoring and publishing systems that science already uses. And uses every day.
Therefore the details of the job change but the overall effort, of understanding the universe, does not change. "Aliens understand it" is never going to be a satisfactory answer for the scientific community, nor for most individual scientists.
Have you actually looked at "world leaders" recently?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
To hack Earthlings!
"A complex message from space may require the use of computers to display, analyze and understand. Such a message cannot be decontaminated with certainty, and technical risks remain which can pose an existential threat. Complex messages would need to be destroyed in the risk averse case."
Have these scientists ever considered not opening this msg on their Microsoft Windows computers?
'Do this for us, or we'll make your sun go supernova and destroy Earth'"
Enough of this cyber bullshit?
Where the aliens do something similar. You're assuming our level of knowledge and capability...
Really?
Non-altruistic aliens would have wiped themselves out long before they had any capabilities to mess with us.
So *that's* where all this fake news has been coming from!
In a science fiction novel, it is fine to assume that aliens have magic technology which allows them to do things which we cannot do. However, when writing what purports to be a science paper invoking aliens with magic technology tends to be somewhat frowned on. Even then, though, this premise is flawed because 2010 needed "magic" alien technology to warm a planet for new life to evolve and flourish while current technology is sufficient to provide existential threats to humanity e.g. genetically engineered plague, nuclear bombardment etc. Inventing new, "magic" technology when none is needed is bad science fiction. In something claiming to be a scientific paper, it is appalling!
It's really really unlikely that aliens could or would hack our software. First, we don't spray network traffic out into space. Wifi and cell-phone signals are designed to be short-range-- low power and sharing just a few channels. From a few thousand miles away the signals are either below the noise level or are a jumble of overlapping mush. So it's very unlikely that they can overcome the first basic hurdle, even with the best technology. Then they'd have to somehow pick out a x86 or ARM tutorial out of the mush. Then somehow catch a full OS X or Android or Windows image download. Then they'd have to decide to hack the code instead of just pushing a red button. Not bloody likely.
In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, there's a mention of whole star systems being under attack by sapient Net packets.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Why would an alien civilization want to mess with us? (Assuming FTL is as completely impossible as our current knowledge of physics thinks it is...) Perhaps they might consider other civilizations to be potential threats for some reason. Maybe they're just paranoid and xenophobic, maybe they had an encounter with something that paranoid and xenophobic, perhaps from another planet in their own solar system. (War of the Worlds scenario.)
Depending on how close they are, they may be watching our TV and listening to our radio. (Plot element that's been done a lot.)
So what would they do? What could they do?
First, they've got to decode the signals and understand the languages. Analog TV images are probably the easiest to decode. Given the images, they could perhaps get enough clues to interpret the spoken language, and then decode the previously recorded audio.
What conclusions would they come to based on 1950s TV? There are videos of nuclear weapon tests.
Assuming they got those 40 years ago, and it took them 10 years to develop a response, it's going to be another 30-ish years before their response gets here.
How much has our civilization changed since the 1950s? What will it look like in the 2040s?
There have also been a bunch of stories about aliens getting blindsided by how fast human societies change.
I think the most effective attack would likely be something that looks indigenous, like "those other guys" did it. I'm not sure how they could do that from another star system, though.
It's actually ALIENS hacking the RUSSIANS to make them hack AMERICA
That was the main point of the novel: aliens show up, give us lots of advanced crap, then "Oh, BTW, we need help fighting these guys who almost killed us off and are coming for you too".
their trashing, trashing!! hack the planet!!
That is part of the plot of the novel "The Killing Star" by George Zebrowski.
I am not a coward.
Space aliens will have no need for water or gasoline. Basically they will show up and become country music fans and say things like "GREAT ZORB HAVE YOU TASTED THESE TOO-MAY-TOO THINGS?!"
Like the trade routes of old, forged simply to exchange spices and textiles, the only value humanity has is in what we create. Also, our testicles are a valued luxury item among the Mongbat people of Sirius V. They are called "Earth Glarks".
Shit article. Made my waste my time. I hope someone's kid gets run over by a car and gets tetraplegicafied.
Er...yes...I could write malware on a Commodore 64 that would ruin most laptops, assuming I could convince them to run it.
This is not journalism, science or IT.
To travel far, you need to travel at the speed of light. Radio waves. In which case you need someone else to receive them.
No magic technologies required. So hyper drives or other non existent physics.
Just software for computers. If such a code was received, would people execute it? Of course the would! Maybe on a computer isolated from the internet. Initially.
The idea is also old, explored in Hoyle's A for Andromeda in the 1960s. His aliens had to include instructions to build the computer, but we now have computers powerful enough.
There is a light bubble expanding around the earth starting about 1900 when 50/60hz signal started being sent. So now about 120 light years radius. Any other intelligence within that bubble would be aware we existed, and be able to send us a signal that we would receive in 120 years time.
Space is big. Really big. Much, much father then the walk to the local store. So if you want to cover those distances, you need to travel at the speed of light. Or radio waves. And then have someone at the other end to receive them.
The reason this is unlikely is that space is big. So there is unlikely to be any life within the current bubble. Maybe in 1000 years time, but by then we will have developed our own intelligent computers and have become extinct.
So I read recently that cyber crime costs $600 billion dollars a year. Imagine what we could accomplish with that money. Are we really going to put extraterrestrials on our list of low hanging fruit? Oy vey iz mir.
No, I know no magic technologies are required but the so-called scientific paper specifically mentions that they may threaten to "make the sun go supernova" and that would require "magic" technologies and new physics. This was my point: it is bad enough that someone has written a supposedly scientific paper about hypothetical alien threats but, not content with that, they go out of their way to include non-scientific threats when there is no need to do so.
Fascinating paper. As a proud Terran acting on behalf of Earth I will crunch some numbers.
Total value of asset, lets say 1 quadrillion dollars. That should be within an order of magnitude.
Total cost of mitigation: lets say 100 trillion dollars building a faraday cage around the planet.
Annual loss expectancy: 0, this event is completely unprecedented.
Recommended Budget for defending Earth from offworld hackers: $0.00
I've done my part to defend Earth. I Will now accept my medal. I'd like to thank Slashdot, news for nerds, stuff that matters.
Hacking voorked so vell vor dee Ruskies, Comrades
Aliens hacked my brain in to thinking none of my skills are useful because I can't be forces to reprogram your menial problems.
They're behind the Tide Pod fad, and reality TV, and all the other inexplicable things that are dooming our society!
WAKEUP SHEEPLE!!!!
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
> The famous novel "Macroscope" features a benevolent
> instruction that has been warped by a much later message,
> such that it appears the sort of SETI message that contains
> science, but in actuality destroys the brains of those who decipher it.
Even earthlings can create lethal messages https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Don't bother getting bogged down with semantics about operating system incompatibilities when you think about this claim. Any data set can be distilled to a number. That means these 'scientists' believe that there are certain numbers (presumably, very large ones) that are inherently evil throughout the universe and would cast civilizations exposed to them into disastrous chaos somehow. This is religious thinking, not scientific thinking. It's 666 for the digital age, that's all.