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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?"
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.
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.
It's where I put that thing that time.
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.
Must have been a slow day when looking for submissions...
We got applied nuclear fission (and fusion soon after) at almost exactly the same time we got long-range rocketry working. Coincidence?
I enjoy this kind of conspiracy theory, but unfortunately it doesn't really stand up. Getting a working nuclear bomb requires high explosives (in shaped charges) to achieve the critical mass at a density that maintains a chain reaction for long enough. This is basically the same sort of chemistry that you need for rocket propellants. Nuclear fission reactors require materials science able to build the containment vessels, which are very similar to rocket exhaust jets in requirements.
Rockets are very old, it's only the advances in materials sciences that made large human-carrying ones possible. There's a long chain of discoveries going back to the 19th century the led to the discovery of fission, which is easy to achieve (though not to very useful degrees) once you can refine uranium. Refining uranium requires centrifuges that, again, depend on the materials technology to be able to build rapidly spinning things that don't fly apart.
Without the advances in alloys during the first world war, we probably wouldn't have had either rockets or fission in the second world war. As to fusion, once you discover fission is possible then fusion is pretty obvious and a Farnsworth Fusor is fairly easy to build (though building one that's energy positive is, so far, not possible).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Little wonder they don't want to come anywhere near us.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
That depends a little bit on the relative energy costs. Imagine that you have a machine that can send matter anywhere in the galaxy, but the energy costs of doing so are huge and proportional to the amount of mass that you send. If you wanted to destroy a planet then the simplest way of doing so would be to drop a few large rocks where they'd fall towards the start and intersect the planet's orbit. Those rocks would have to be pretty huge though, so the energy costs would be very large. Alternatively, you could send a small machine to the planet's orbit, where it would intercept satellite communications, learn how to reproduce them, then start reverse engineering attacks on the information infrastructure and psychology of the planet's inhabitants. The second approach would take a few orders of magnitude less energy. Depending on your mechanism, you might not send anything physical - if you can open a wormhole and send photons through it rather than sending any matter, then that may be even cheaper.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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
LOL's for nerds, editors don't matter.
Found the "moron of the day". Think of me when you realize (very late, doubtlessly) what you voted for.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Really, a virus from a telescope???????
So it's the Aliens now, is it? The story gets more credible by the day...
It's Russians *and* Aliens. He still denies the Russians, of course, yet he did acknowledge that the Aliens voted for Hillary.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
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.
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."
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
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.
So goatse.cx was a honey trap for alien hackers then...?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
"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?
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
Umm, no. It's not. Rocket propellants BURN, they don't explode.
Umm, no. For one thing, rocket exhaust jets have to be lightweight. Unlike nuclear reactors, which can be 15cm of steel. And never mind regenerative cooling, which works really well in rockets, but is irrelevant to nuclear power plants (or bombs).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's more likely that this is case of bored geeks than paranoia.
The two astrophysicists who wrote the paper probably started with a half-drunk discussion of the virus scene in Independence Day which mutated into a discussion of whether aliens could do the same to us. Being geeks, the logical thing was to write it up as a humorous paper positing an alien AI bent on the destruction of humanity and use some hand-wavy math to make it sound possible.
Unfortunately, there are stupid people who don't recognize humor if there's no laugh track, so some people are taking is as a serious paper.
I'm not sure you have the history of isotopic separation quite right. The Manhattan Project used cyclotronic separation (calutrons) and gaseous diffusion separation (uranium hexafluoride). According to Wikipedia, centrifugal separation was tried for the Manhattan Project but wasn't successful at the time. The maraging steels that are used for gas centrifuges weren't developed until the 1950s.
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.
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.
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
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!
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??"]
Oh, I see where this is going ... it was the aliens that bought a few ads on Facebook and ruined everything in 2016!!!
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...
Speaking of that, maybe they're not monolithic and another faction is feeding Elon Musk tech now. Solar cells and Mars colonization.
Perhaps it's a board game and we are the pieces. Perhaps our species was planted here and then populations or environment were guided in subtle ways by different players.
I wonder what "winning" would look like.
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.
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
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...
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
>Umm, no. It's not. Rocket propellants BURN, they don't explode.
Semantics; an explosion is just faster burning contained in a pressure-vessel, whereas thrust is simply controlling the burn rate and directing the pressure.
Wrong. An explosion is a sound. An angry one that drives people away.
It's from ex and plaudere. To clap at someone angrily to get them to fucking leave. It's literally the opposite of applause.
Have you actually looked at "world leaders" recently?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well, there were a few SF authors during the 1940's that suggested that rather than a prison we were an insane asylum.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Obligatory Futurama: President Nixon proposes building a Dyson Fence around the southern border of the Solar System.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Rocket propellants BURN, they don't explode.
Solid rockets are made using the same SORT of chemical reaction that is used in explosives. If you provide a release for the pressure then the burn rate is controllable. If you don't, then the higher pressure results in faster burn rate.
A burn rate that is slower than the pressure can be released is a rocket. A burn rate that is faster than the pressure can be released is a bomb.
"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?
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!
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.
they aren't very competent astrophysicists if they think our sun is capable of a nova or supernova under any conditions. In short, they're blathering idiots.
Real physicists would welcome theory of our universe a thousand years in advance of ours. It would not end their jobs, by the way, though many *might* make move to practical application rather than theory. Theorists in any event would test and verify to see if there are any hints of a 1000 + x year model.
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".
The paper is an obvious, albeit very nerdy, joke. What made you think it should be taken seriously and used to determine the competency of the people who wrote 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.
Hacking voorked so vell vor dee Ruskies, Comrades
The thing is they are thinking that they advanced. We're STILL stuck using an X86 architecture, from the 1970s. 40 frickin years and we've had better. Yet we can't get rid of X86. So why do we think they would be able to get around their idiot managers?
Pointy haired bosses of the cosmos.
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