7 ms·

What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

68 points by angli 9y ago

SCAQTony 9y ago
— “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.” — I am sure the Pentagon and NASA have a plan if a "moon-sized" object with a deliberate orbit suddenly appeared in the night sky or was detected by a space telescope or an amateur astronomer using Mars as a gravity boost. What would be more amusing if they were coming here to live underwater.
- jack9 9y ago
  > I am sure the Pentagon and NASA have a plan... The plan probably is about communication channels and who decides what, and what not to do, more than what to do. Regardless of the content, I'm very sure it's not going to be followed, even if it did exist.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    That plan better have an up-to-date phone number for Mr Freeman. Thinking about this, sending a celebrity rather than a politician/religious/military is probably a good idea.
    - SCAQTony 9y ago
      If they came with amazing techno/bio offerings would we look at them as an invasive species or accept their "blankets" and "firewater" as friendship gifts? I hope we choose to view them as invasive species.
- saluki 9y ago
  "The moon is an alien spaceship." - Hollow Moon Theory
jzl 9y ago
Me: I'm writing off this article if it doesn't mention 'Arrival'. Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year’s Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien’s messages. Ahh, there we go. Thank you. Long article. I didn't read all of it, but the parts I skimmed were good. I had no idea that China had its own answer to Arecibo. EDIT: not sure why this is getting downvoted. The title of the post is literally one of the biggest plot points of Arrival. It would have been somewhat tone-deaf to popular culture had the article come out with this title and not mentioned Arrival. And sure enough it did. That was my only point. I wouldn't have made this comment if the post were titled "China's Answer To Arecibo".
- sitkack 9y ago
  > China had its own answer to Arecibo Thank god, because we are treating ours like shit.
  - jimmcslim 9y ago
    No, not like 'shit', like 'white dielectric material'. http://nullbloggers.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/white-dielectric-material.html http://nullbloggers.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/white-dielectric...
- zeofig 9y ago
  As someone who found Arrival super irritating, I'm afraid I'm "writing off" your comment.
  - jzl 9y ago
    I actually found it really irritating too. I'm not endorsing Arrival. That said, the inter-country politics were by far the most interesting thing about it. And it's a major Hollywood film that literally addresses the question "What Happens If China Makes First Contact?"
cryoshon 9y ago
why is china so frightening to the west as a representative of humankind? they are imperfect, sure-- their abysmal human rights record will soon be matched by a collapsing xenophobic West. but they are evidence that humanity can produce contiguous government without overt destruction of rivals even when capable of doing so. they are evidence that humanity can persist in peaceful trade with other civilizations, even if troubled internally. china is no leader of "the free world" to be sure, but they are far from irresponsible recipients of first contact.... they have no interest in humankind's eradication, and they likely have plans for contact in the exceedingly unlikely chance that it occurs.
- i_am_nomad 9y ago
  I’m guessing you aren’t Filipino, Indian or Vietnamese.
  - user982 9y ago
    Three nations that have suffered immeasurably more at the hands of the West than of China?
    - whatshisface 9y ago
      Ah, the "greater crime" doctrine. The guilty are free to go, so long as they can prove that the victim had already suffered at someone else's hands. After all, in civil law, only the first transgression counts.
    - pdonis 9y ago
      How do you get "immeasurably more"? The West has been meddling in these countries for maybe a century. China has been doing it for millennia.
    - nitwit005 9y ago
      Even during the wars with the French and Americans, the Vietnamese were quite wary of China. They knew the westerners would leave, but China would always threaten them.
c_shu 9y ago
Is the octahedron on the picture supposed to be an alien spaceship? It reminds me of a creature in a certain animation I watched.
- ductionist 9y ago
  I thought the same – I actually liked the illustration so much I bought a print of it. This is the artist's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harriorrihar/ https://www.instagram.com/harriorrihar/
zamalek 9y ago
First contact is a species event, I really don't think it matters who makes it first. My reasoning is derived from a though experiment (happy to explain, but it should be obvious), which is all we have to go on this stuff. Long story short: it's highly probable that a species wouldn't care about our primitive political systems when engaging with us. It would most likely be a philanthropic event - which is a strong indicator of why nobody has engaged with us: we're not worth the time. As usual this article places to much emphasis on the human. We really aren't that important. Our political systems are irrelevant in the grander scheme.
- baddox 9y ago
  I don’t know how to guess at how first contact would actually go, but it’s interesting that government coverups of aliens is a common theme in fiction (x files, men in Black, etc.) and in conspiracy theories (Roswell, UFOs, etc.).
  - zamalek 9y ago
    Fiction is great because it's compelling. I see no reason for the actual first contact to be more sublime.
    - baddox 9y ago
      I agree. I think the more anthropomorphic (socially) the aliens are, the more it makes sense that they would go along with our own social constructs and thus make contact through governments. An alien species that’s extremely similar to humans would be expected to contact government leaders, in the same way that a group of humans would likely pursue diplomacy when contacting another group of humans. In popular fiction, we see that in stories like Men in Black or Transformers, where the aliens are apparently mostly complicit in the governments’ efforts to conceal their existence from the general public. Of course, it would also depend on the aliens’ goals and the circumstances of their arrival on Earth. If they just want the planet, they may as well show up with guns blazing, as in War of the Worlds or Attack the Block or Battle: Los Angeles or Skyline. If they’ve landed in distress, they also likely wouldn’t bother concealing themselves, as in District 9. Anyway, I’ve always been fascinated by imagining what would actually happen if some fairly anthropomorphic aliens really did show up tomorrow, on a diplomatic mission (not guns blazing). Portrayals in fiction are fascinating, where world religions try to explain it (or view it eschatologically), governments debate whether to preemptively attempt to annihilate them, etc. How would I react?
c_shu 9y ago
If the aliens are strong enough to land their spaceship on earth, investigating all countries is probably a piece of cake for them. There is no reason for them to tie themselves to a certain country or area. In another case, if they establish communication with a certain country/organization, but they cannot arrive, and somehow can only communicate with that certain country/organization, then it could be a different story.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  >>If the aliens are strong enough to land their spaceship on earth, investigating all countries is probably a piece of cake for them. What if it's just a scout/science vessel?
  - c_shu 9y ago
    It depends on how big the gap between the power of aliens and earthlings is. Some people believe that science advances should progress like explosion, and "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". In this case the possibility of aliens being at the similar level with us is small. But I think you have a point. Sometimes I doubt the speed of science advances. Maybe the aliens are not so far away from us and their astronautics is not much stronger than our level. They don't look like magicians. In this case things can be boring, may be just an age of discoveries for the aliens.
- remarkEon 9y ago
  These thought experiments are always a little strange to me. If an alien race has the technology for interstellar travel I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to assume they’d also be able to do whatever they want to observe us (i.e. stay hidden if they like). I think a much more interesting thought experiment is this: if an alien race chooses to make First Contact with us, what’s the likelihood we’re actually the first for them? Being a student of history, it’s a stretch for me to think they wouldn’t know these sorts of events trigger drastic changes in the native populations (usually resulting in death) when encountering a more developed civilization. So, I’m forced to conclude that if they do make First Contact with us we’re either the first for them and we’re doomed, or we’re not and they have some sufficient protocol for First Contact that’s “good enough” that they benefit in the exchange. Either way I don’t think Humanity makes out well unless we get lucky with some really benevolent explorers.
nasredin 9y ago
I think US would be the country for "first contact", then Russia. Most of our planet is water. US has the biggest/best Navy & intelligence systems. And also pretty aggressive spirit. Russia has 1/6 (IIRC) of our planet's land mass and also a very stubborn spirit. So my uneducated guess is ET is going to be chatting with either Trump or Putin. ...God help us...
- ema 9y ago
  I think Chile would be the first country for "first contact". Why? it's an elaborate pun in their alien language and the alien bureaucrat in charge of that decision really loves puns.
  - nasredin 9y ago
    If an alien civilization doesn't love puns, then I really don't want to meet them. The world is already a shitty place. Earth doesn't need to add more species that don't understand or love puns.
Johnny555 9y ago
If the aliens want us to know they are there, it won't be because we have a specialized radio dish to receive their transmissions -- it's unlikely that we'd be able to distinguish their regular communications from noise. In another 50-100 years, the earth will likely stop transmitting the kind of high power, trivially modulated signals that we're looking for, which leaves a very small window of opportunity to detect other alien species. It'd be like Marconi trying to decipher a modern spread-spectrum encrypted RF datastream.
- Animats 9y ago
  I pointed this out to some SETI people over a decade ago. They were focused on looking for "carriers", signals with a strong center frequency component. Analog TV, was AM video with 80% carrier, requiring huge transmitter power. UHF stations used to emit megawatts. Those signals are gone. More modern transmissions (DTV, cellular) look like white noise across a narrow chunk of spectrum. Those are much harder to pull out of the noise background. You can detect that a carrier is present even if you're missing most of the signal. That's not true of more modern modes. If a civilization wanted to be detected, they could easily send out clearly understandable signals - big carriers with slow modulation. Arecibo could in theory communicate with a similarly sized dish across the galaxy. An answer would be a long time coming, though.
neotek 9y ago
Given the vast distances involved, I've always thought first contact would be much closer to this short story by @qntm: https://qntm.org/retrospective https://qntm.org/retrospective It's a fantastic read, set aside a few minutes to go through it, you won't regret it.
- Svenstaro 9y ago
  Well, that was a depressingly realistic read.
0xBA5ED 9y ago
Do we really think they'll be using radio communication? We're already dabbling with quantum comm ourselves. And if they can travel the stars, they'd have been incentivized to develop something better long ago. One would think... Hell, maybe the whole galaxy has quantum wifi.
- learc83 9y ago
  What is quantum comm? Quantum entanglement doesn't allow for a conceivable way to transmit information. Is there something else you're thinking of other than entanglement?
  - 0xBA5ED 9y ago
    No, that's what I was thinking. Guess I don't understand it like I thought. There's an overwhelming plethora of misleading articles on this and so many things. More specifically, I was thinking of the recent experiment in China with "quantum teleportation". When I looked it up and kept seeing "transfer of information over long distances" over and over, I apparently drew the wrong conclusions.
- yorwba 9y ago
  "Quantum communication" still uses a conventional communication channel to exchange data, it's only the encryption key that is determined by exchanging single quanta. That's because single quanta are very susceptible to noise, which is very useful to detect eavesdropping but undesirable when you want to exchange large amounts of data. To reliably send a signal across large distances, it's much better to use a bright light source focused at the target. When you start with trillions of photons, it doesn't harm the signal quality very much if a few of them hit interstellar dust on the way.
  - dannyw 9y ago
    Your message is accurate, but I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's like looking for telegraphy systems when everyone else are using radio waves.
nitwit005 9y ago
Nothing? Even ignoring the fact that humans can't generate a powerful enough signal to respond, it's probably going to be several thousand years for them to get the response. They'll likely be far more interested in claiming the achievement of discovering the signal, than concocting a response.
0xFFFE 9y ago
What if we are the first/only intelligent beings in the universe and it is upon us to spread to other galaxies and stars? Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought.
- bnegreve 9y ago
  > Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought. How do you even measure that? If the number of coincidences required for life to emerge is large enough, the probability of observing life on a planet could very well be far bellow 1 over the number of planets in the universe. That would make us probably alone :(
  - glitch003 9y ago
    >How do you even measure that? Probably like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
    - bnegreve 9y ago
      The probability I was referring to is fl " in Drake's equation ("the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point"), and Drake isn't really helping us here. Quoting wikipedia: The last four parameters, fl, fi, fc, and L, are not known and are very difficult to estimate, with values ranging over many orders of magnitude
  - OscarCunningham 9y ago
    One point of evidence to the contrary is that life appeared on Earth nearly as soon as it could. So it seems that given the correct conditions on a planet abiogenis always occurs.
  - fit2rule 9y ago
    So far we know its true of the solar system, at least. Which means there's no really good reason we can't move our factories to space and turn Earth into a Life Haven.
viach 9y ago
The consequence would be they get first contract and a better deal for producing AlienPhones?
Animats 9y ago
A fundamental question, of course, is whether FTL is possible. Special relativity says it isn't, and worse, that it would violate causality. We're probably fundamentally limited to having very slow conversations with any civilization that's within tens of light years. If any. We might find out about some that are further away, but there's not going to be interaction.
- gmueckl 9y ago
  Well, this is our world view now. But we cannot predict future progress. Just as we laugh at the horribly wrong cosmological models of our ancestors from the middle ages now, our ancestors might do that with ours in a few centuries. The interesting thing about both theories of relativity is that they only add one or two rather small ideas to existing theories each (electrodynamics and Newtonian mwchanics) and derive sweeping fundamental facts about our spacetime from that. Most of the building blocks were already there, but were not recognized for what they really are. The theories have held up very well to all direct tests we could come up with so far. This makes chances that there are loopholes or omissions left right there rather slim (based on our current knowledge, of course). There are oddities like solutions to the field equations that allow time travel. But as far as I know, these are mathematical oddities and unphysical solutions. I have never understood how the destruction of quantum entanglement can avoid violating causality. Our professor confused us to no end at this point in the lecture and I have never tried to follow up on my own.
  - xelxebar 9y ago
    Entangle the spins of two electrons; put one on Pluto and keep the other on Earth. How do you propose to send your FTL single bit? The usual idea is that since "wave function collapse is instantaneous" we can measure the spin on Earth, collapse the superposition and then Pluto can "notice the collapse". However, there's no way to notice that entagled particles have decohered without looking at both of them side by side. Or said another way, the entire planet Earth could be entagled with some giant blob of matter in an alien lab in Andromeda, but we have no way of discovering this without comparing Earth matter with the alien lab matter. I've got my unreasonable hopes pinned on some incarnation of the Alcubierre Drive. Just gotta find that negative energy density first :)

68 points by angli 9y ago

— “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.” — I am sure the Pentagon and NASA have a plan if a "moon-sized" object with a deliberate orbit suddenly appeared in the night sky or was detected by a space telescope or an amateur astronomer using Mars as a gravity boost. What would be more amusing if they were coming here to live underwater.

jack9 9y ago
> I am sure the Pentagon and NASA have a plan... The plan probably is about communication channels and who decides what, and what not to do, more than what to do. Regardless of the content, I'm very sure it's not going to be followed, even if it did exist.
- nasredin 9y ago
  That plan better have an up-to-date phone number for Mr Freeman. Thinking about this, sending a celebrity rather than a politician/religious/military is probably a good idea.
  - SCAQTony 9y ago
    If they came with amazing techno/bio offerings would we look at them as an invasive species or accept their "blankets" and "firewater" as friendship gifts? I hope we choose to view them as invasive species.
saluki 9y ago
"The moon is an alien spaceship." - Hollow Moon Theory

jzl 9y ago

Me: I'm writing off this article if it doesn't mention 'Arrival'. Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year’s Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien’s messages. Ahh, there we go. Thank you. Long article. I didn't read all of it, but the parts I skimmed were good. I had no idea that China had its own answer to Arecibo. EDIT: not sure why this is getting downvoted. The title of the post is literally one of the biggest plot points of Arrival. It would have been somewhat tone-deaf to popular culture had the article come out with this title and not mentioned Arrival. And sure enough it did. That was my only point. I wouldn't have made this comment if the post were titled "China's Answer To Arecibo".

sitkack 9y ago
> China had its own answer to Arecibo Thank god, because we are treating ours like shit.
- jimmcslim 9y ago
  No, not like 'shit', like 'white dielectric material'. http://nullbloggers.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/white-dielectric-material.html http://nullbloggers.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/white-dielectric...
zeofig 9y ago
As someone who found Arrival super irritating, I'm afraid I'm "writing off" your comment.
- jzl 9y ago
  I actually found it really irritating too. I'm not endorsing Arrival. That said, the inter-country politics were by far the most interesting thing about it. And it's a major Hollywood film that literally addresses the question "What Happens If China Makes First Contact?"

cryoshon 9y ago

why is china so frightening to the west as a representative of humankind? they are imperfect, sure-- their abysmal human rights record will soon be matched by a collapsing xenophobic West. but they are evidence that humanity can produce contiguous government without overt destruction of rivals even when capable of doing so. they are evidence that humanity can persist in peaceful trade with other civilizations, even if troubled internally. china is no leader of "the free world" to be sure, but they are far from irresponsible recipients of first contact.... they have no interest in humankind's eradication, and they likely have plans for contact in the exceedingly unlikely chance that it occurs.

i_am_nomad 9y ago
I’m guessing you aren’t Filipino, Indian or Vietnamese.
- user982 9y ago
  Three nations that have suffered immeasurably more at the hands of the West than of China?
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    Ah, the "greater crime" doctrine. The guilty are free to go, so long as they can prove that the victim had already suffered at someone else's hands. After all, in civil law, only the first transgression counts.
  - pdonis 9y ago
    How do you get "immeasurably more"? The West has been meddling in these countries for maybe a century. China has been doing it for millennia.
  - nitwit005 9y ago
    Even during the wars with the French and Americans, the Vietnamese were quite wary of China. They knew the westerners would leave, but China would always threaten them.

c_shu 9y ago

Is the octahedron on the picture supposed to be an alien spaceship? It reminds me of a creature in a certain animation I watched.

ductionist 9y ago
I thought the same – I actually liked the illustration so much I bought a print of it. This is the artist's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harriorrihar/ https://www.instagram.com/harriorrihar/

zamalek 9y ago

First contact is a species event, I really don't think it matters who makes it first. My reasoning is derived from a though experiment (happy to explain, but it should be obvious), which is all we have to go on this stuff. Long story short: it's highly probable that a species wouldn't care about our primitive political systems when engaging with us. It would most likely be a philanthropic event - which is a strong indicator of why nobody has engaged with us: we're not worth the time. As usual this article places to much emphasis on the human. We really aren't that important. Our political systems are irrelevant in the grander scheme.

baddox 9y ago
I don’t know how to guess at how first contact would actually go, but it’s interesting that government coverups of aliens is a common theme in fiction (x files, men in Black, etc.) and in conspiracy theories (Roswell, UFOs, etc.).
- zamalek 9y ago
  Fiction is great because it's compelling. I see no reason for the actual first contact to be more sublime.
  - baddox 9y ago
    I agree. I think the more anthropomorphic (socially) the aliens are, the more it makes sense that they would go along with our own social constructs and thus make contact through governments. An alien species that’s extremely similar to humans would be expected to contact government leaders, in the same way that a group of humans would likely pursue diplomacy when contacting another group of humans. In popular fiction, we see that in stories like Men in Black or Transformers, where the aliens are apparently mostly complicit in the governments’ efforts to conceal their existence from the general public. Of course, it would also depend on the aliens’ goals and the circumstances of their arrival on Earth. If they just want the planet, they may as well show up with guns blazing, as in War of the Worlds or Attack the Block or Battle: Los Angeles or Skyline. If they’ve landed in distress, they also likely wouldn’t bother concealing themselves, as in District 9. Anyway, I’ve always been fascinated by imagining what would actually happen if some fairly anthropomorphic aliens really did show up tomorrow, on a diplomatic mission (not guns blazing). Portrayals in fiction are fascinating, where world religions try to explain it (or view it eschatologically), governments debate whether to preemptively attempt to annihilate them, etc. How would I react?

c_shu 9y ago

If the aliens are strong enough to land their spaceship on earth, investigating all countries is probably a piece of cake for them. There is no reason for them to tie themselves to a certain country or area. In another case, if they establish communication with a certain country/organization, but they cannot arrive, and somehow can only communicate with that certain country/organization, then it could be a different story.

enraged_camel 9y ago
>>If the aliens are strong enough to land their spaceship on earth, investigating all countries is probably a piece of cake for them. What if it's just a scout/science vessel?
- c_shu 9y ago
  It depends on how big the gap between the power of aliens and earthlings is. Some people believe that science advances should progress like explosion, and "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". In this case the possibility of aliens being at the similar level with us is small. But I think you have a point. Sometimes I doubt the speed of science advances. Maybe the aliens are not so far away from us and their astronautics is not much stronger than our level. They don't look like magicians. In this case things can be boring, may be just an age of discoveries for the aliens.
remarkEon 9y ago
These thought experiments are always a little strange to me. If an alien race has the technology for interstellar travel I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to assume they’d also be able to do whatever they want to observe us (i.e. stay hidden if they like). I think a much more interesting thought experiment is this: if an alien race chooses to make First Contact with us, what’s the likelihood we’re actually the first for them? Being a student of history, it’s a stretch for me to think they wouldn’t know these sorts of events trigger drastic changes in the native populations (usually resulting in death) when encountering a more developed civilization. So, I’m forced to conclude that if they do make First Contact with us we’re either the first for them and we’re doomed, or we’re not and they have some sufficient protocol for First Contact that’s “good enough” that they benefit in the exchange. Either way I don’t think Humanity makes out well unless we get lucky with some really benevolent explorers.

nasredin 9y ago

I think US would be the country for "first contact", then Russia. Most of our planet is water. US has the biggest/best Navy & intelligence systems. And also pretty aggressive spirit. Russia has 1/6 (IIRC) of our planet's land mass and also a very stubborn spirit. So my uneducated guess is ET is going to be chatting with either Trump or Putin. ...God help us...

ema 9y ago
I think Chile would be the first country for "first contact". Why? it's an elaborate pun in their alien language and the alien bureaucrat in charge of that decision really loves puns.
- nasredin 9y ago
  If an alien civilization doesn't love puns, then I really don't want to meet them. The world is already a shitty place. Earth doesn't need to add more species that don't understand or love puns.

Johnny555 9y ago

If the aliens want us to know they are there, it won't be because we have a specialized radio dish to receive their transmissions -- it's unlikely that we'd be able to distinguish their regular communications from noise. In another 50-100 years, the earth will likely stop transmitting the kind of high power, trivially modulated signals that we're looking for, which leaves a very small window of opportunity to detect other alien species. It'd be like Marconi trying to decipher a modern spread-spectrum encrypted RF datastream.

Animats 9y ago
I pointed this out to some SETI people over a decade ago. They were focused on looking for "carriers", signals with a strong center frequency component. Analog TV, was AM video with 80% carrier, requiring huge transmitter power. UHF stations used to emit megawatts. Those signals are gone. More modern transmissions (DTV, cellular) look like white noise across a narrow chunk of spectrum. Those are much harder to pull out of the noise background. You can detect that a carrier is present even if you're missing most of the signal. That's not true of more modern modes. If a civilization wanted to be detected, they could easily send out clearly understandable signals - big carriers with slow modulation. Arecibo could in theory communicate with a similarly sized dish across the galaxy. An answer would be a long time coming, though.

neotek 9y ago

Given the vast distances involved, I've always thought first contact would be much closer to this short story by @qntm: https://qntm.org/retrospective https://qntm.org/retrospective It's a fantastic read, set aside a few minutes to go through it, you won't regret it.

Svenstaro 9y ago
Well, that was a depressingly realistic read.

0xBA5ED 9y ago

Do we really think they'll be using radio communication? We're already dabbling with quantum comm ourselves. And if they can travel the stars, they'd have been incentivized to develop something better long ago. One would think... Hell, maybe the whole galaxy has quantum wifi.

learc83 9y ago
What is quantum comm? Quantum entanglement doesn't allow for a conceivable way to transmit information. Is there something else you're thinking of other than entanglement?
- 0xBA5ED 9y ago
  No, that's what I was thinking. Guess I don't understand it like I thought. There's an overwhelming plethora of misleading articles on this and so many things. More specifically, I was thinking of the recent experiment in China with "quantum teleportation". When I looked it up and kept seeing "transfer of information over long distances" over and over, I apparently drew the wrong conclusions.
yorwba 9y ago
"Quantum communication" still uses a conventional communication channel to exchange data, it's only the encryption key that is determined by exchanging single quanta. That's because single quanta are very susceptible to noise, which is very useful to detect eavesdropping but undesirable when you want to exchange large amounts of data. To reliably send a signal across large distances, it's much better to use a bright light source focused at the target. When you start with trillions of photons, it doesn't harm the signal quality very much if a few of them hit interstellar dust on the way.
- dannyw 9y ago
  Your message is accurate, but I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It's like looking for telegraphy systems when everyone else are using radio waves.

nitwit005 9y ago

Nothing? Even ignoring the fact that humans can't generate a powerful enough signal to respond, it's probably going to be several thousand years for them to get the response. They'll likely be far more interested in claiming the achievement of discovering the signal, than concocting a response.

0xFFFE 9y ago

What if we are the first/only intelligent beings in the universe and it is upon us to spread to other galaxies and stars? Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought.

bnegreve 9y ago
> Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought. How do you even measure that? If the number of coincidences required for life to emerge is large enough, the probability of observing life on a planet could very well be far bellow 1 over the number of planets in the universe. That would make us probably alone :(
- glitch003 9y ago
  >How do you even measure that? Probably like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
  - bnegreve 9y ago
    The probability I was referring to is fl " in Drake's equation ("the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point"), and Drake isn't really helping us here. Quoting wikipedia: The last four parameters, fl, fi, fc, and L, are not known and are very difficult to estimate, with values ranging over many orders of magnitude
- OscarCunningham 9y ago
  One point of evidence to the contrary is that life appeared on Earth nearly as soon as it could. So it seems that given the correct conditions on a planet abiogenis always occurs.
- fit2rule 9y ago
  So far we know its true of the solar system, at least. Which means there's no really good reason we can't move our factories to space and turn Earth into a Life Haven.

viach 9y ago

The consequence would be they get first contract and a better deal for producing AlienPhones?

Animats 9y ago

A fundamental question, of course, is whether FTL is possible. Special relativity says it isn't, and worse, that it would violate causality. We're probably fundamentally limited to having very slow conversations with any civilization that's within tens of light years. If any. We might find out about some that are further away, but there's not going to be interaction.

gmueckl 9y ago
Well, this is our world view now. But we cannot predict future progress. Just as we laugh at the horribly wrong cosmological models of our ancestors from the middle ages now, our ancestors might do that with ours in a few centuries. The interesting thing about both theories of relativity is that they only add one or two rather small ideas to existing theories each (electrodynamics and Newtonian mwchanics) and derive sweeping fundamental facts about our spacetime from that. Most of the building blocks were already there, but were not recognized for what they really are. The theories have held up very well to all direct tests we could come up with so far. This makes chances that there are loopholes or omissions left right there rather slim (based on our current knowledge, of course). There are oddities like solutions to the field equations that allow time travel. But as far as I know, these are mathematical oddities and unphysical solutions. I have never understood how the destruction of quantum entanglement can avoid violating causality. Our professor confused us to no end at this point in the lecture and I have never tried to follow up on my own.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  Entangle the spins of two electrons; put one on Pluto and keep the other on Earth. How do you propose to send your FTL single bit? The usual idea is that since "wave function collapse is instantaneous" we can measure the spin on Earth, collapse the superposition and then Pluto can "notice the collapse". However, there's no way to notice that entagled particles have decohered without looking at both of them side by side. Or said another way, the entire planet Earth could be entagled with some giant blob of matter in an alien lab in Andromeda, but we have no way of discovering this without comparing Earth matter with the alien lab matter. I've got my unreasonable hopes pinned on some incarnation of the Alcubierre Drive. Just gotta find that negative energy density first :)