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In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
- bovermyer 8y agoI will never understand people who are afraid of the unknown.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoI will never understand anyone who would randomly pick a mushroom from the forest floor and start nibbling on it.
- bovermyer 8y agoEating mushrooms in the wild is not even remotely similar to inviting contact from other sentient species.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoWas that what the parent comment said?!? I thought it was something about not understanding fear of the unknown. And then like I thought, hey is there a metaphor that might show how sometimes that it would be wise to have some little bit of wariness about the unknown at least? And then I said ah hah, there is and I wrote it down. I'm pretty sure it went something like that.
- bovermyer 8y agoYou can be cautious around something without being afraid of it.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agosure - and people might play semantic games about what words really mean but at some point these concepts blend into each other. hence https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/caution https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/caution Another word for caution noun Careful forethought to avoid harm or risk: calculation, care, carefulness, chariness, gingerliness, precaution, wariness. See fear I guess most people would admit a relation between the concepts, caution seems to me to be admitting there might be something to be afraid of. So to clarify my earlier metaphor with a concrete meaning: I will never understand anyone that acts like there can never anything to be afraid of in the unknown. And I mean the perfect lack of knowledge is impossible, yes if I definitely did not know anything about something I would not be afraid of possible problems with that thing - how could I? But we always know a bit even about the 'unknown' even if the thing we know is that there might be something in that unknown thing that would be dangerous to life, as many things in the Universe are like extreme heat, cold, releases of kinetic energy, too much water, or the presence of elements of one sort or another in more abundance than is healthy for us, or life that is similar to life on this planet since much of life on this planet is focused on killing other life on this planet for various reasons. I'm walking in an unknown environment on this planet I might still be afraid because I don't know what large carnivores it has, but I do know it might have large carnivores.
- bovermyer 8y agoI see where you're coming from. I maintain that caution and fear are different, even if they're related. My original post was probably too broad to be useful. This topic requires nuance that I didn't express.
- x220 8y agoThe unknown is the source of everything good and bad, useful and useless. It evokes fear and hope.
- krapp 8y agoFear of the unknown is what kept our smarter ancestors from getting eaten by bears without knowing what was in the cave first.
- SOMA_BOFH 8y agoI haven't seen any anti-METI argument which counters this: "Humans, Vakoch said, have been using radar, which can purportedly be detected 70 light-years away, since World War II. Television and radio signals would long ago have signaled our presence to malevolent space ruffians, he said."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- blueadept111 8y agoCounter argument: So if we've been using radar since WWII, and radar has been capable of signalling our presence to alien civilizations, then we don't need METI. Alternatively, if METI is proposing a signal that can reach alien civilizations in a way that TV and radio signals cannot, then the original objections to METI still stand, and the TV/radio signal argument is a red herring. But really, it's just common sense. Everything we know about the universe tells us that complex organisms exist at the expense of simpler organisms. As a nascent space-faring civilization, we are the minnows in the ocean, and signalling our presence to the bigger fish is the kind of mistake that a minnow only makes once. What exactly is the perceived positive outcome of making contact with a more advanced civilization?
- svachalek 8y agoThis, exactly. What METI is proposing, as I understand, is a stronger, more unmistakable signal of intelligence which carries higher risks. Also, this is 70 years of noise, a blip on the galactic timescale, getting weaker the farther it goes. We can't stop what's gone out already but that doesn't make us obligated to keep advertising our presence forever.
- SOMA_BOFH 8y agoIs there a proposal from METI more capable of reaching out than this 32MW transmitter with a 1.4° beamwidth which has been operating continuously for decades? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglin_AFB_Site_C-6#How_the_radar_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglin_AFB_Site_C-6#How_the_rad...
- coleifer 8y agoNot discussed by the article, but I wonder...Is it more terrible to find out that nobody's out there? Nobody's listening?
- holografix 8y agoNo. It’s much better that there’s no one out there than we being the colonised.
- zzzcpan 8y agoOr how about this: find out that somebody's out there, but not evolved enough to be listening? This I find likely. Fixes Fermi paradox too, since this doesn't assume high probability of random life on some planet evolving as far as we did in those billions of years.
- zokier 8y agoDoing exhaustive search of the universe is pretty big task; I don't think we can anytime soon determine that nobody is out there.
- evolvedcleaning 8y agoBeing enslaved by evil aliens is among the worst of fears. The risk isn’t death or annhilation; it’s being denied the mercy of a short (100 years) existence, in bondage and suffering. I fully support a careful approach to combing the cosmos. Edit: May I ask why this is being downvoted?
- fsloth 8y agoBondage, you say? Sounds like Rocky Horror Picture show. The point is not some specific fate, but that anything could happen. And anything includes loads of bad outcomes , most of which we are probably unable to imagine.
- blotter_paper 8y agoI didn't downvote you, but this seems extraordinarily unlikely to me. Why would our extraterrestrial overlords want to use us as slaves? They travelled a long way to get here, surely they should have robots or a genetically engineered underclass or something. We're in the process of making human labor obsolete ourselves. The only scenario I can imagine where this makes sense is one where the aliens have interstellar travel but lack decent genetic engineering, and they're interested in exploring/building/mining in places that are inhospitable to both their own biology and robotics but not our biology (like a planet whose gravity would crush them that also has an EM field that would fry circuits without exceptional shielding). This seems like a stretch to me. I feel like wiping out a potential future threat is a much more reasonable incentive, with exploitation/study of an already existent biosphere being a runner up. Most of the things they could want humans for would be more efficiently accomplished by phytoplankton and krill. You're right that nigh-perpetual enslavement is the most horrifying possibility, it just seems implausible.
- rvcdbn 8y agoWhat possible resource does Earth or human civilization possess that ETs advanced enough to pose an interstellar threat would be interested in?
- NickM 8y agoI sort of agree, but to be fair a nice habitable planet could be a really rare and valuable resource in and of itself, assuming there are any life forms out there with biology similar enough to our own to find Earth desirable.
- jandrese 8y agoAlso assumes there aren't a bunch of Earth-like worlds that are otherwise uninhabited that would be much easier to colonize than one with potentially hostile/poisonous natives.
- kyriakos 8y agoor that the potential alien invaders are not adapted to a completely different environment than earth's
- krapp 8y agoWe might be tasty.
- mcguire 8y agoNot me. All gristle and bone. I taste like your used glorkin.
- headcanon 8y agoEarth is a rich, temperate, naturally life-sustaining planet with a strong protective magnetic field. Regardless of what form of life an alien species would be, that may be of interest in and of itself based on mere rarity. Why bother terraforming if you don't have to? Besides that, our solar system is otherwise quite rich. Middle-life, medium-sized star has a lot of mileage left. Being a single-star system, the planetary orbits and climates are naturally stable. Mercury has an enormous core of iron. Venus has a tremendous amount of energy stored and is a prime terraforming target for a civilization with the right technology. We have 4 enormous gas giants, one of which forms a whole planetary system in and of itself, and could conceivably be collapsed into its own star. The moon Titan is a giant ocean of liquid hydrocarbons. This doesn't even get into the rich material wealth offered by the asteroid belt, Ceres, and Saturn's rings. I'm sure there are better systems than ours from this perspective, but we're far from the bottom of the barrel. I'd sure as hell move here. Another point is this, perhaps the potential of humans themselves presents a threat to another spacefaring civilization. What if they've seen species like ours rise up and conquer, and they'd prefer to nip it in the bud instead of waiting around for us to become more powerful?
- jkartchner 8y agoI figure it's all moot anyway. We are probably alone in the universe. Fermi's paradox is a thing.
- jandrese 8y agoI don't think we're alone. But I do think we're kind of trapped in our Solar System along with everybody else. Interstellar travel is so outrageously expensive that by the time you have the technology to do it you necessarily have the technology that makes it unnecessary. An interstellar journey means you need a ship that can survive indefinitely in deep space, where you don't get free energy from solar panels or have easy access to comets to mine for materials. An in-system habitat has to be a solved problem before you can even consider building one. But at that point you have effectively unlimited living space, energy, and materials so why bother? Even if your sun is turning into a red giant you can move your habitats to the optimal distance to sustain life. It's really hard to imagine a time when Humans have used up the entire mass of the other planets in the solar system and need to look outward for resources. You could build an almost unimaginable number of O'Neill cylinders using only the mass of Jupiter.
- sbuttgereit 8y agoI think the fears of some ET empire with Darth Vader (or similar) at the head is very misplaced. Just think of the economics... "let's go exploit that world 10 LY away from us that we don't fully understand and which will still takes us an insane amount of time to enslave and milk resources from!" What a scalable strategy given the size of space... one might even say it's astronomically large! The resource consumption alone would be a very speculative bet by any would-be invaders... unless they were already close at hand, but we're probably already too late to prevent that.... Naw... if there is any alien apocalypse to worry about it's that some advanced civilization saw a life friendly Earth through their telescopes, perhaps millions of years ago, and decided to seed the place with their own bio-material and without any regard to what life might be there. It won't be a marching army, but a "Terra forming" project that may well already be underway if its happening at all, I would expect.
- mrob 8y agoThe motivation isn't exploiting Earth resources, but killing us before we can kill them. Most humans don't believe non-human species have any right to life, so why would sapient aliens believe humans have any right to life? Humans have a non-zero probability of growing powerful enough to be an existential threat to the aliens, so the safest option is to preemptively eliminate them. And even if the aliens are convinced that humans are 100% alien-friendly, it would still make sense to kill us all because there's a chance we'll develop uncontrolled recursively self-improving AI ("intelligence explosion"), which would be a threat to the aliens without us intending it.
- sbuttgereit 8y ago"so why would sapient aliens believe humans have any right to life?" I'm suggesting that it doesn't matter and that there are other, more significant factors that render this concern moot. "Humans have a non-zero probability of growing powerful enough to be an existential threat to the aliens, so the safest option is to preemptively eliminate them." Non-zero, but near zero. The same sorts of constraints on resource coordination and how much one can likely play with the physics involved not only constrain our would be destroyers, but constrains us as well. Any aliens advanced enough to hear our signals and have the realistic ability to contemplate a move against us can probably do the math: the likely threat of any alien civilization is from a practical perspective, zero, to them or us. The costs are too high, the barriers are too high, the risks are too remote, the rewards are too low. But here's a different perspective. While hand-wringing about the risks, we completely ignore the possible rewards of actually making contact. Given that the benefits for all involved in knowledge transfer could well be non-zero and is much more likely to be accomplished. The only issue there is that it's likely to be very, very slow. So maybe they have knowledge about achieving commercial scale fusion energy production. Maybe they help us to understand the dangers of recursive AI (which I also think are overblown). Maybe they can help us understand how to colonize our own solar system (much more realistic than interstellar colonization). Maybe they can help us escape our tendency to indulge in distinctly emotional responses, especially when confronted with the unknown, and rely a little more on reason and rationality... If I were to gamble on this topic, I'd bet on the more possible, optimistic outcome than on the less likely doomsday scenario. And in the meantime, I'm going to hop into my car (and thereby taking a real risk) and pick up my son from school. Cheers!
- jandrese 8y agoThis is not something I'm worried about. Unless FTL travel is real, the amount of resources necessary to make the trip to kill off/enslave humans makes the entire effort unprofitable. Basically, if you have the ability to travel between star systems, you already have the technology to exist effectively forever in a self contained environment. You can mine asteroids/planets forever in your own solar system for effectively unlimited materials. Its like you are thirsty so you build an intercontinental jet plane from scratch using parts from around your house to fly to Japan to steal a single Coke from a 7-11.
- CharlesColeman 8y agoThat's assuming aliens prioritize profit. Perhaps they're technologically advanced and have everything they need, but have deeply internalized the logic of using preemptive strikes to protect themselves from potential future threats. Such a strike might not even be that expensive or need FTL technology: just send out a few one-way nuclear-armed suicide drones at 0.12 c [1], via a path that obscures their origin (e.g. via a gravitational slingshot or three). [1] Perhaps with a design like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus, https://www.damninteresting.com/the-daedalus-starship/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-daedalus-starship/, which is probably even within our technical capabilities. We also have weapon designs that could render the a planet uninhabitable (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salted_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salted_bomb).
- kmm 8y agoOr send a chunk of metal at near light speed. Things in space move very predictably for thousands of years, and as the projectile only barely trails the signal of its departure, it would come as a total surprise even for very advanced civilizations. Let's say an advanced civilization around Sirius wants to take us out. A chunk of metal (or anything really) of about 1000 metric tonnes would be completely invisible until it were very close. Travelling at 99.99% of the speed of light, it would impact with the energy of 13 times the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. The light of the projectile being "fired" would reach us in 10 years, and the projectile itself would arrive just 8 hours later. There is no foreseeable way to defend ourselves against that. An overly cautious civilization with that kind of technology might just decide to start sterilizing all the planets in its surroundings without having to leave their solar system, just in case.
- maxander 8y agoWe're already sending out a signal into the cosmos (and one more powerful than the radar signals others have mentioned)- the recent sharp upswing in CO2 over the last hundred or so years [0] would look markedly artificial, which combined with the presence of oxygen (which wouldn't stay in the atmosphere if it weren't continually renewed) strongly indicates at least a complex ecosystem, if not directly implicating an industrial civilization. Detecting light reflected from exoplanets is something we can already do, or nearly so, so we can count on this being detectable from large distances by alien civilizations with access to potentially megastructure-scale space telescopes. At that point, any reasonably curious or concerned ETs could send a probe to get a closer look. Earth, as far as we know, is an unusual planet, and obviously so. Either we're wrong, and there's Earths all over the place, or we're alone, or ET has been keeping an eye on us for a long time already; that we're "hidden" is hard to imagine. [0] https://www.co2.earth/co2-ice-core-data https://www.co2.earth/co2-ice-core-data
- kerbalspacepro 8y agoIf you saw a sharp change in the atmospheric composition of a planet in our solar system would you think "volcanoes" or "life"?
- zwaps 8y agobrb, hiding behind Jupiter
- Smithalicious 8y agoMost known cases of two formerly separated civilizations coming into contact have ended like the European invasion of the Americas. I think we'd do best to be cautious unless there is at least a slim hope we could ward of an invader.
- kyriakos 8y agoSounds like a lot of scientist have been reading the Three Body Problem. I think we should worry more about AI taking over rather than aliens. Its actually much closer to home. On the other hand the only alien intelligence which has the luxury of interstellar travel is the one which has no sense of time and that would be alien AI again.
- kerbalspacepro 8y agoThe Three Body Problem and ASI are two songs on the same instrument: value misalignment in cases of massive power differentials. In an indifferent universe, two optimizers optimizing different things will be in conflict. Can we build machines that optimize what we want to optimize? Can we align our optimization with aliens before it becomes optimal for one of us to annihilate the other?
- dfilppi 8y agoDumb statement: "Television and radio signals would long ago have signaled our presence to malevolent space ruffians, he said." There are only 11 known habitable exoplanets within 50 light years that we know of. Assume there are 1000 within 100 light years. The odds of a super predator in that small of a sample are virtually 0. Plus, even if they had their armada on standby, it takes at least 100 years to get here. Apparently there is little intelligent life on earth.
- Digit-Al 8y agoTo be honest I think we are vastly more likely to be destroyed by ourselves than by aliens. Maybe we'd be better off enslaved by aliens; we could be the green mans burden.
- rdiddly 8y ago"Any predatory civilization would probably have detected us by now simply by analyzing our atmosphere, they reason. Humans, Vakoch said, have been using radar, which can purportedly be detected 70 light-years away, since World War II. Television and radio signals would long ago have signaled our presence to malevolent space ruffians, he said." That's how he justifies the broadcasting of signals, but take the next logical step: It also indicates either that nobody is listening, or that they're unable or unwilling to contact us, or that they're already in the process of trying. In any case, it's hard to imagine the METI messages would change anything. By that same argument. And I mean why would the intentional/contrived message be any more persuasive than all our "honest" and un-self-conscious messages to each other over the years? Anybody who was curious could have learned everything by now. I also would like to call out the typical assumption of a "technically-advanced race of aliens" and whatnot. The aliens always seem to be technically advanced, don't they? In other words, like us, but more so. That's a mirror you're looking at, and it's how you recognize something man-made. Homo sapiens is the one with the fetish for techne. It seems the aliens we imagine are always either similar to us (which we like) but better, or else they're dissimilar, and predictably worse/more evil (and tend to look like combinations of creatures from THIS planet that we don't like... insects and reptiles figuring prominently). That's more a mirror of our dislikes, but still a mirror. Aliens are always created in our image, and that shows an embarrassing narcissism & lack of imagination. We're just projecting our hopes & fears. Keep your mind open. One more nitpick: "We won’t know for about 25 years, assuming the communique is sent at the speed of light." Pretty good assumption, given that it's not possible to send EM waves at any other speed!