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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?"
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.
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(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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
Are trojan horses made to slow down our technical evolution and scientific recherches!
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You and other far more successful authors.
John Ringo covered this in Live Free or Die, the first book of the Troy Rising series. When the Glatun just give the President and several other heads of state a phone call because our systems are so weak even a poor tramp freighter has the ability to just stroll through our networks and security with ease.
Many others have done it as well in one way or another, that one's just fresh in my mind from my latest re-read of the series.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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...
Just don click on the attached .exe file on their message.
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.