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.

Comments

This is dumb.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This... is a joke right?

[locater16]

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?"

Re:This... is a joke right?

[TheRaven64]

Physicists often have no idea how malware actually works. Arthur C. Clarke's 3001 had a plot line that involved throwing a logic bomb at the monolith to break it and described a vault on the moon where samples of the most dangerous malware were contained for future study. It made no sense. All malware is similar to biological viruses in one respect: it is highly specific to the host organism and the host organism adapts via intelligent design, not evolution. Some of the most successful malware spreads with the aid of human interaction, because it's much harder to patch the users than the system.

The problem for an alien trying to write malware is that they would also need examples of our technology to study to find the vulnerabilities. Imagine trying to write macOS malware if you have only a Windows machine (and not even a Mac VM). You might be able to guess some similarities from the way that system calls work on x86, but it would be really hard and you'd probably need a lot of tries before you got something that even vaguely worked (and with no feedback until you got one that worked then you'd be sending out a load of code before you got anything working). This example is a bit easier, because you might try targeting something like WebAssembly or JavaScript to explore the target system. Aliens wouldn't have this option. If they needed human intervention, then they'd need to understand human psychology, which is about as difficult to learn remotely as human technology.

There's also the problem of latency. If they're sending out signals that we can detect with existing telescopes, then they're limited by the speed of light. If they're trying to do this from home, then at best they're looking at 8-10 year round trip times. One or two attempts gets you from DOS to Windows 7. Trying to develop malware with that kind of moving target is insanely difficult. Alternatively, if they're close enough that the latency isn't an issue then we probably don't have to worry about information attacks: if they are able to sit above our planet and control enough energy to reach here from another star, then 'do what we say or we will drop large rocks on you until you're all dead' would work fine as a threat. Sure, it lacks subtlety, but then it's far less likely to be mistranslated...

Re:This... is a joke right?

[sysrammer]

Too complex. Let's use Occam's razor...

The first test virus was called "MySpace".
The first production virus was called "FaceBook".
We're up to version 2.2 or so, with the latest being "SnapChat".

Nothing New Here Anyway

[Archtech]

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?"

Interstellar travel through DNA hacking

[athmanb]

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.