What Stephen Hawking thinks about aliens made news this weekend, and Centauri Dreams readers will know from our past discussions more or less what Hawking has to say. Assuming we come into contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, it is widely assumed that one of two things will happen. Either an alien visit will be devastating, as has all too often happened when cultures with widely different technologies met, or a benign transfer of information will occur, in which case we benefit by our exposure to new science and revolutionary ideas.
A Threat to Humanity?
Hawking, who has been working on an upcoming program for the Discovery Channel, opts for the former, as this story in TimesOnline notes. Most life elsewhere in the universe, the physicist believes, will be relatively simple, microbial or primitive animals. But there will be exceptions:
…a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.
He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”
Historical analogies are inevitable:
[Hawking] concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
Ambiguity and Recognition
We’ve argued this point of view and its opposite many times in these pages. My own belief is that contact with an advanced culture would be something different than either of the above alternatives. Assume a wide enough disparity in our capabilities and the problem will be knowing when an encounter has actually taken place. Indeed, just as a civilization a million years in advance of our own (and we should ponder exactly what ‘in advance’ means) might have no real interest in us, we for our part might not even be able to recognize them.
One of many possible examples: Suppose our inability to find magnetic monopoles is actually a marker for intelligent activity. The problem with magnets is that they’re always dipoles, north pole at one end and south at the other. A magnetic monopole is an isolated ‘north’ or an isolated ‘south,’ and there’s precedent for this in the fact that electric charges come as monopoles. There’s a rather robust literature about magnetic monopoles but the problem is that nobody can find them, despite a false alarm back in the early 1980s.
We believe that magnetic monopoles should have been created in the early universe, and one notion about where they’ve gone is that a period of cosmic inflation spaced an abundant population of monopoles so widely that finding even one would be all but impossible. But maybe that theory is wrong. A sufficient number of ‘north’ monopoles encountering their ‘south’ monopole counterparts would create vast amounts of energy. So what if, as Paul Davies speculates in The Eerie Silence, the lack of monopoles tells us something:
Theoretical physicists are masters at predicting things that might exist, but don’t seem to be there. Exotic subatomic particles with whimsical names such as neutralinos, shadow matter and axions grace the theorists’ lexicon, but haven’t yet shown up in the lab. At the other end of the mass range are mini-black holes, quark stars and cosmic texture, to name but a few. Did ET make off with them? Clearly, extreme caution is needed before considering alien culpability.
Extreme caution indeed, and no one is seriously suggesting this is the case. In fact, even as Davies goes through a set of scenarios for viewing possible extraterrestrial activity — his point being to ask whether we would know it when we found it — he’s quick to add this:
Remember Bayes’ rule: the hypothesis that aliens are the correct explanation for the anomalous absence of something is only as good as the prior probability of an alien super-civilization in the first place. That may be very low. By contrast, the prior probability that Professor A’s theory of the so-and-so particle, or Dr B’s prediction of such-and-such an astronomical object, is simply wrong could be a lot higher.
But if we’re willing to go to this speculative extreme, it seems worth saying that a civilization that evolved aeons after a Kardashev Type II-scale engineering project had depleted local resources might not be able to tell that it was living among the debris of a neighborhood that had been effectively ‘mined out’ of materials that would have proven of use to the former super-civilization.
The Real Encyclopedia Galactica
My guess is that if there are other civilizations in the galaxy at the present time and if we at some point do encounter them, we’ll have a lot of trouble figuring out what they’re after, where they’re going, or what their motives are. Let’s hope such an encounter would be benign enough for us to learn, ponder and muse about the unfathomability of intelligence that has evolved elsewhere. Maybe we would be able to communicate enough to acquire deep knowledge, but I suspect the idea that there is an Encyclopedia Galactica out there to be studied is a chimera. The real Encyclopedia Galactica is more likely to be the one we build with science, one whose entries we refine with new observation and experiment.
A 2002 Roper poll taken in the US found that most Americans are ‘comfortable with and even excited about’ the discovery of an extraterrestrial culture. If the poll is accurate, Hawking’s ideas will probably strike most of its respondents as alarmist in tone, and reminiscent of a particular kind of bad science fiction movie. The problem is that we have only one example to work with, our own. We can see what has happened in the history of our species to cultures that have met superior technologies, but when it comes to encounters with entirely different beings, we have no template to fall back upon.
That leaves us guessing, a pleasurable human activity that is a long way from science. I think alien nomads in massive starships are a lot less likely than alien bacteria, but we press on with the search for both kinds of life and anything that may exist in between. Meanwhile, I’ll watch Hawking’s program with pleasure. The man is a titan. He has paid his dues and continues to expand the way we look at the universe, and the last thing I would do is take his views lightly.
Planet looters don’t make much sense, the only resources that are only found on planets are biologically produced ones and a species capable of interstellar travel should be able to synthesize those easily from raw elements.
“We’ve argued this point of view and its opposite many times in these pages. My own belief is that contact with an advanced culture would be something different than either of the above alternatives. Assume a wide enough disparity in our capabilities and the problem will be knowing when an encounter has actually taken place. Indeed, just as a civilization a million years in advance of our own (and we should ponder exactly what ‘in advance’ means) might have no real interest in us, we for our part might not even be able to recognize them.”
I completely agree (and I babble about it on the other side my link). And I thought it was interesting that he spent a chunk of the show talking about how strange aliens might be (living in stars, gas giants). A radically different species, in a radically different phase of evolution (exploring the galaxy) is going to value radically different things, and they may not be things we (or Earth) have. A space-faring gas giant species would think Earth was pretty boring, though they may invade Jupiter.
I really like the monopole discussion, I had not heard of it before. Thanks!
I wonder if aliens would even need to attack us directly. They could find a few nice sized kepler objects and redirect them to impact the Earth.
They might also just ignore us too by staying out in the outer reaches and not getting too deep in the gravity well. There’s plenty of resources out there and we’re too primitive to really bother them much.
Isn’t the elephant in the room here the fact that the more advanced a civilization is then the less their emissions will be? In fact, the type-I/II/III idea seems like it only makes sense in our current petrol/consumption driven economy. The most advanced civilizations may be better measured by how little resources they use to accomplish a standard task, not how much total they are capable of consuming. This notion of advanced civilizations consuming ever larger quantities of energy in proportion to their level advancement is as failingly human as some of the attributes our mainstay religions assign to whatever god they pray to.
We’ve already been around the race track with regards to potential alien contact. Lowell’s concept of an inhabited Mars was widely believed by large segments of society around 1900. There was discussion on how to contact the “Martians” and whether such contact would pose a threat to us. Belief in the existence of Martians declined slowly. Even as late as 1938, a time when Lowell’s theories had been discredited by professional astronomers, enough people still believed in Martians such that many New Yorkers were spooked when Orson Wells did his “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, which led to the famous panic.
The existence of alien intelligence is a notion that has been in the public consciousness for over a century. Most people expect us to make contact at some point in the future. So much so that I often get roundly criticized when I suggest that life may, in fact, be incredibly rare and that we are essentially alone (at least in the galaxy) here and in other blogs.
Hi Paul;
I have a view simmilar to yours regarding any potential contact with ETI. I do not necessarily see ETI with superior technology as being threatening although I can envision a possibility that some ETI races might be hostile or manipulative and some might be very benign and anywhere between these extremes. I used to be an avid reader of so psuedoscientific documentary books on subjects like these, however after determining that the literature as a whole had many self contractictions, and do to the sensational accounts within such books, I decided to just through the books in the trash about 30 years ago.
One thing that intrigues me is that regardless of whether one believes in a directly and immeadiately created soul, while no attempt is being made to promote faith based agendas here, I see no reason why some of any ETI persons cannot have bodies that are artificial machine types.
Given the enourmous complexity of say modern Petaflops class supercomputers, nuclear powered submarines, and the like highly evolved human technological systems, it is anyone’s guess as to how advanced, cognizant, or sentient future human robotic systems such as self autonomous systems could become.
I was just thinking about this topic as I was running errands yesterday, and although the concept seems a little freaky to me, nonetheless, I cannot dismiss the notion as nonesense.
There is something to keep in mind here, especially when taking Jim, MattC or kurt9’s comments into consideration; the Kardashev Scale itself could be a false paradigm and the most advanced cultures could be orbiting the cold edge of the galaxy thinking deep thoughts about their own Omega Points.
Perhaps a different yardstick could be invented?
Maybe we ought to be searching for pre-Singularity fossils? The missing monopoles is an excellent suggestion.
The authors of the novel “the killing star” also made some similar arguments. However, I just read it for fun and accepted it as an interesting idea.
I don’t buy into the idea aliens will always be nice, or that they wouldn’t be interested in the Earth because there will be other, easier to acquire resources.
Over long spans of time, space faring aliens (including robots) would diversify. They would evolve complex ecologies with many factions having diverse interests, subsistence strategies, motivations etc. Some may like to be quiet, others would probably hang out and “eat” comets in deep-space, but a few may want to eat terrestrial planets, or do something else totally strange, like go on a galaxy wide crusade / jihad. But all it takes is one faction of one society to start colonizing and start diversifying sometime in the distant past.
I’d much prefer solutions to the Fermi Paradox that work in light of expected diversity. Perhaps dynamic predator / prey relations somehow lead to a sparsely settled galaxy? Who knows!
One possibility Hawking didn’t mention is that “they” already did come to gobble up all available resources. One solution to the Fermi Paradox is that we’re just stuck in an alien simulation. Outside the simulation the whole galaxy is colonized and developed. Inside, we’re living an illusion that we’re alone in pristine space.
Oh well, this kind of thing gets beyond science. Fun to think about, but I can’t think of an experimental test to check if we’re in an alien super computer.
The ‘rules’ according to “The Killing Star” universe are:
1. Any species will place its own survival before that of a different species.
2. Any species that has made it to the top on its planet of origin will be intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
3. They will assume that the first two rules apply to us.
Therefore it is in your interest to kill every intelligent alien you detect before they kill you. Its also called paranoia but that’s another matter.
While I lean toward the view that human-like intelligence is probably unique to humans, if we do contact an alien intelligence, what happens to us may have little to do with their intentions.
Here in Hawaii the native population suffered an 80 to 90% drop after contact, even though (other than the Cook fiasco) interaction with Europeans and Asians was almost entirely peaceful. In North America the population loss for Native Americans was even worse, although in spite of a lot of fighting Europeans generally did not attempt a mass extermination. On the other hand, in Central and South America where there was overt conquest and enslavement the percentage of Native peoples in the population is generally much higher than it is in North America or Hawaii.
It’s entirely possible that even if an ETI is peaceful, with direct contact we might all die anyway as an unintended side effect of some routine activity of theirs.
The Columbus analogy is really unfortunate. Something like this could be a better analogy with human behaviour (if you want one). This is the famous hoaxer/sertanista José Carlos Meirelles who came to mind
“When we think we might have found an isolated tribe, a sertanista (tribe expert) like me walks in the forest for two or three years to gather evidence and we mark it in our (global positioning system)”
“We then map the territory the Indians occupy and we draw that protected territory without making contact with them. And finally we set up a small outpost where we can monitor their protection.”
Just observation is sensible. For the sertanista, if he could he would conduct all of his research just by observation and never make the slightest contact, but he doesn’t have that technology. ETIs who have that technology can learn everything by observation. Perhaps some form of contact is the last thing we should expect
NS has cut to the chase. I wonder, though, if it might not work in reverse, too. Haven’t seen it on Earth, but then the whole ebola thing could still wipe out most of the “advanced” world, leaving the Third World folks virtually untouched.
Food for thought, as it were.
The same 3 points apply also to any country right here on earth. So there should be abellum omium contra omnes here. Everyone trying to wipe out everyone else. Yet it is not the case.
The only thing that makes any difference is whether they come to us or we go to them. If they come to us, we’re the junior (and vulnerable) race. Think native Americans, Africans, Asians, etc, whenever they encountered more modern technology.
A couple of distinct thoughts:
1. We don’t even want to go back to the moon… we’ve already done it, what’s the point… it’s tooo difficult, it costs toooo much money.
-If life is common, we may just not be important or relevant to most of galactic society and the cost to come to our solar system isn’t worth the rewards. They would rather spend their resources feeding and clothing their society.
2. They are smart enough and benign enough not to interfere in our development.
-There’s an island, maybe two… off the coast of India. The population on that island has had NO, absolutely NO contact with any other people in modern/recorded history. Anyone comes close, they attack. Rather than forcing the issue, the rest of the world has said “let them be unto themselves” and we will be “unto ourselves”… I’m not sure if that is an actual quote, but it may be.
The historical parallels tend to ignore that fact that we are beginning to pull ourselves away from out worst excesses. Increasingly, whenever we come across a new species or lost tribe, people will try to do the right thing (not that it always works), and that even translates to our own space exploration where we are taking care to sterilize our Mars-bound landers to prevent possible contamination. (Yes, I know that’s also for our scientific benefit too.)
We can only speculate, but species that survive the type of period we are now going through (WMDs + religious/ethnic/national strife) must have learned to deploy some the better instincts, if nothing else, purely as a matter of self-preservation. And once you get to a period where resources are no longer fought over, then perhaps the lessons of the past are cemented and not often repeated.
I, for one, am optimistic. Hawking’s pessimism is misplaced in my view
“learn everything by observation” (only)
As far as I know, many scientists researching foreign cultures, including the pertinent tribe in the jungle, learned, that it is *not* possible to learn everything by observation only. We understand the intrinsic aspects of a foreign culture only by sharing ordinary life with the members of this culture, by having intimate social contact. And, again as far as I know, this is how sociologists, ethnologist, anthropologists, and such, usually work nowadays. This has been different in the past, when scientists of those branches had the opinion (some still have), that their science would and should work just like the — compared to their science — overwhelmingly successful paradigm of physics, where we have an observer completely separated from the observed object. And, as many of you will know, for contemporary physics this is not true any more in all cases.
When contacting an alien civilization, it will be just the same — for us and for them. The aliens will not understand us, if they *only* observe from a distance.
A solution is: “If the aliens are very advanced, then they will be able to” — insert your favorite capability here ;-)
Regarding places to look for ETI where they might hang out and in a sense special relativistically and general relativistic travel forward in time without traveling extreme distances through space such as to advance the cause of their civilizations/species and send representatives of their race into the future, I had the following muzings this evening.
Regarding the construction of such huge black holes, perhaps smaller super massive black holes could be constructed by utilizing chaotic processes to cause a compression of vast clouds of ordinary baryonic matter or perhaps even cold dark matter or CDM. Perhaps the extremely judicious altering of the paths of stars, or even the detonation of appropriately large thermonuclear devices, and I mean really huge thermonuclear devices, could be of benefit for the process of instigating highly controlled and planned collapse of intergalactic gas and dust clouds in such a manner that the end result would be the formation of super massive black holes. If chaotic dynamical processes can be appropriately applied so that the black holes travel in toward each other and merge, then perhaps the construction of huge super massive black holes can be undertaken, albeit on the time scales of billions to trillions or more years, and with relatively very small initial perturbative energy inputs. We might look for the signature of un-natural gas cloud compressions.
Now assuming we or more to the point ETI could assemble black holes over cosmic time periods with a mass of 10 EXP 18 to 10 EXP 21 solar masses, we or they may be able to effectively slow time down for stay at home civilization while relativistic star ships able to achieve arbitrarily high gamma factors can ply the depths of intergalactic space on cosmic spatial temporal journey scales.
For the stay at home civilizations as well as for highly relativistic exited space craft, the entire civilization could travel and exist as if superluminal inertial travel through space time was possible.
For instance, imagine that a civilization in orbit around such an ultramassive black hole could experience a combined special relativistic orbital motion and a gravity well based general relativistic motion time dilation factor of say 10 EXP 15 all the while exited space craft could accelerate to a special relativistic gamma factor of 10 EXP 15, then the space craft could travel a distance of 10 EXP 15 light years in one year ship time and one year civilization time and the space craft could travel at an apparent velocity of almost (10 EXP 15) C with respect to the stay at home civilization as well as with respect to the ship’s reference frame.
To the extent that such ultra-massive black hole based habitats could become ubiquitous and to the extent that extreme relativistic gamma factor capable ships could accelerate to terminal gamma factors with high levels of acceleration, e.g., with accelerations of 10 Gs to as great as 1,000 Gs or more, then to ETI and perhaps also our future descendents who might occupy such a local cosmic civilization, the notion of only light speed as the limit of signal propagation and mass energy transport through space as we observe such with our current schemata and heuristic paradigmatical frame works might seem counterintuitive to our future descendents. In other words, to the extent that special relativistic and general relativistic time dilation and special relativistic time dilation for the orbiting space habitats and exited space craft, respectively, can be made arbitrarily great, the effective speed limits for inertial travel through space time with respect to both elements of any ETI or future human cosmic infrastructure may effectively be arbitrarily greater than one multiples of C.
Since this scenario offers a meaningfull way to effectively travel much much faster than C, perhaps ETI have developed such systems, even if they would only use 10 billion solar mass range black hole, or perhaps the new theoretical taxonomic class of black holes such as the 13 billion to 60 billion solar mass ultramassive blackholes.
Such black holes might also make a good hidding place for rougue bands of ETs such as large scale ETI based piracy organizations.
ETI pirates! Now that is a great theme for a Sci-Fi movie.
Too bad the possibilities are so utterly wide open when it comes to when and how contact with another civilization will take place. I wonder if we will ever begin to constrain or quantify the possible outcomes, determining which are more or less probable and which are extremely unlikely contact scenarios. My guess is that no one will ever come here looking for resources, since the raw materials are very much dispersed throughout our (and presumably other) solar systems. Why not take what you need from the outer solar system instead of risking coming here where you can get bitten… The top reason I can think of for potential visitors to arrive some day: to study us.
@Dreamer
@Zen
@Duncan
Nice ideas, and may be applicable to some aliens. But not necessarily all. We should not assume that peaceful silence is a universal tendency for all intelligent creatures for all time.
Again, we should expect diversity. The galaxy is big and old. Life on Earth is not homogeneous. Even for our own species, there is lots of variation between and within human societies. If aliens exist, we should expect some sort of “selection” for a set of motivations and behaviors that favor them spreading through the galaxy. It’s just a simple matter of the ones that spread replicating more than those that decide to stay at home. In other words, if aliens exists, we’re more likely to run into the colonialists (whatever their motivation for colonization) than the isolationists.
So, I tend to side with Hawking.
Also note. Aliens are a wonderful place for us to project all of our fantasies. Many times, we wish WE were more peaceful, contemplative, and sustainable, so we naturally assume all older and wiser societies will inevitably evolve to those enlightened values. It’s almost as if we expect aliens to share the values of university faculty senate. Sagan was like this.
The “Eerie Silence” gets into these anthropocentric issues a bit. The hard part is to step back and consider that the space of all possible designs for minds and intellects may be truly vast, and that some intelligences may be wonderful to coexist with while others may be impossible to live with.
I tend to agree, and unless there is a serious risk that we could steal or reverse engineer their advanced technology from them (which would seem doubtful) then there is very little downside to their contacting us and setting up an exchange of information.
Despite all the weird and wonderful scenarios dreamed up by scifi authors, I suspect our first encounter with aliens (should it ever happen) will be extremely mundane and uneventful (though totally awesome nonetheless!).
There is still a chance that they would forgo contact in observance of some kind of prime directive—indeed that is one solution to the Fermi Paradox (I’m surprised that UFOlogists haven’t accused Gene Roddenberry of knowing too much). While it might make it much harder to learn about us, who’s to say what sort of time they are happy to take doing it? If they have indefinite lifespans, then maybe 1,000 years is not to long for them watch and learn from afar.
The meeting of technologically disparate human civilizations is the wrong metaphor. The appropriate metaphor is how we deal with animals that interfere with our interests.
Why try to hide it? I’m guessing they have better telescopes than us by a long shot. I mean if we’re worried they are THAT advanced they could wipe us out. So with our pathetic excuses for telescopes we can detect 2x Earth mass planets and sometimes we can detect atmospheres (oxygen, CFC’s etc.) More to come in the next few years. Any super advanced civilization that is nearby that could detect our METI signal, probably already know’s we’re here. Within a few years we’ll probably know if they are there even w/o SETI. We’ll be strangers walking down the street. We could just pass, we could say ‘hi’, or we could rob each other. We probably never had the option to hide, and soon they won’t either.
Dreamer – “The historical parallels tend to ignore that fact that we are beginning to pull ourselves away from out worst excesses. Increasingly, whenever we come across a new species or lost tribe, people will try to do the right thing (not that it always works), and that even translates to our own space exploration where we are taking care to sterilize our Mars-bound landers to prevent possible contamination. (Yes, I know that’s also for our scientific benefit too.)”
The problem with this line of thinking is many fold.
1. though we have moved on (debatable in my opinion), the ETs may not have.
2. Columbus did not go there with the intention to cause the upheaval that his visit resulted in, it happened none the less. One cannot predict the outcome of such encounters.
3. Also, though not every meeting between to entities results in the detriment of one of the entities, there is a probability, even if miniscule, that it does. Do I like those odds if we are likely to be on the receiving end? No, I don’t.
Maybe when we have colonised another star system or two, then maybe we will be ready to meet ETs (if they are any near enough for us to contact). However, not now and not when all our eggs are in one basket.
Of course They might already be here, monitoring us unobtrusively because ‘contact’ would spoil a naturalistic experiment in applied ethology, or whatever advanced ETIs might do for graduate student projects.
OTOH the ‘smallpox genocide’ scenario might apply. Aboriginal Australia was reduced by 80-90% due to smallpox – lack of resistance more specifically. Whatever culture remained was but a remnant of what survivors remembered. Similarly ETIs might approach us as nobly as the first Governor, Arthur Phillip, tried to treat the Aborigines, but the diseases of the First Fleet essentially wiped out the natives without any ill-will from the Whites. Technological plagues – nanotechnological versions of computer viruses – might find our ‘primitive’ defense systems wholly conducive to their replication and we’d never survive intact as a ‘Civilization’. We might be ‘rescued’ like the Aborigines, able to persist in a kind of cultural afterlife, but we’d always be in the shadow of the newcomers.
Stephen Baxter’s depiction of Earth after the Qax invasion in his Xeelee novels is one SF version of this concept. No doubt many others exist – I recommend Terry Dowling’s “Wormwood” for an imaginative ‘settling’ of Earth by multiple alien species.
How difficult it is to catapult oneself into a future mindset! Forgive me please for poorly restating Henry Ford’ comments about cars: that if he had asked what people wanted they would have easily replied: ‘faster horses’.
The point here is this: folks in those days were every bit as smart and forward thinking as we think of ourselves today, and yet were unable to make predict how we would move ourselves about without horses, Mr. Ford excepted, of course.
And that is the fun of it! I so appreciate the thoughtfulness of our host and of his commenters, none afraid to show Mr. Ford wrong!
I’ve believe Hawking’s is correct, it doesn’t matter how peaceful a more advanced civilization, when it comes into contact with a less advance civilization it will most likely cause it’s demise or rapid decline. I’ve said that for years. This is based on an example of the only intelligence we are aware of, ourselves. With what we know today, the energy requirements to send people to another star system within their lifetime is astronomical at very least and that’s for a one way journey, barring the simplified “Star trek” form of infinite easy energy, it will take a lot for any civilization to launch manned “exploratory” journeys to other star systems. So what would motivate a civilization to explore other star systems en-mass? Most likely survival, there wouldn’t be a good economic reason to do it, the risk is to high for any kind of return, simple curiosity? Robotic mission are cheaper if you just want to explore. No if they send their people out it’s for one good reason, Survival.
What Greg said — “the energy requirements to send people to another star system within their lifetime is astronomical” — reminded me of something: When, at the beginning of the era of discoveries, Portugal tried to go around Africa to India, after having tried over a long period of time, they first managed to arrive with very few ships and persons; the requirements to send people to India were enormous; and first they weren’t able to act like a local superpower, but they were forced to negotiate. There have been similar cases in history, think, e.g. of Japan.
I don’t buy the argument (as you may have realized), that an alien civilization being able to visit us, is also able to act like a superpower. Instead of that, I think, *if* they are able to make this journey at all, it may well be, that for *just* bridging the gap they have to invest so much resources, that they will not be able to do much more than just arriving and talking a little bit — first.
As Greg said: “Robotic mission are cheaper if you just want to explore.”
This I would expect: a tiny probe with densily packed nano-, pico-, or femto-machines.
Hawking isn’t saying anything that H. G. Wells didn’t already address
over one century ago with The War of the Worlds.
Dare I say, judging from his description of what he thinks ETI would do
to Earth and humanity, that he was “inspired” by the 1996 film
Independence Day. But because Hawking said it, the implication is
now that it must be true or at least really plausible.
Perhaps the Milky Way galaxy and maybe the Universe is a variation of
Star Trek, with most intelligent life forms being similar to Earth life in
appearance and behavior, both good and bad. Or perhaps Hawking’s
fears show the limits to our knowledge and imagination as to the kinds of
aliens that really exist out there.
I have stated in the past here and elsewhere that if an ETI wanted to get
humanity out of the way, be it to gain our planet or the galaxy, it would be
fairly easy for them to do so at our stage of existence. No fleets of ships
with troops of aliens holstering ray guns – just a few well-aimed planetoids
pushed with rocket engines or one ship moving at relativistic speeds
slammed into Earth. Whoever and whatever is left on our world after
such an assalt would be no match for whatever comes next. Why it has
not happened already can be attributed to these possibilities: No one
else is around to commit such an act, no one else would behave in such
a manner, or they just haven’t found us yet.
Hawking is also often asked his views on God, as if he somehow has a
deeper knowledge on the subject than the average person due to his
work in cosmology. I would say his thoughts on both areas are no
better and no worse than what a typically educated and intelligent
person would give, if the media ever thought to ask such people.
Not trying to be mean to Hawking, I just wish the media would do a
little more homework and also try to find some alternate views.
Of course here is the real reason Stephen Hawking’s views on aliens
have come up (again) – advance publicity for his new series:
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/stephen-hawking/
Interesting to note: In the clips shown in the Web site linked to above,
most of the discussions on alien life are not about its invasion tendencies.
Once again the media has picked up on the most sensationalistic aspects
of a story and ran with it. I wonder how common that is throughout
the Universe?
Duncan said “The aliens will not understand us, if they *only* observe from a distance.”
Excuse me, my analogy is poor! But, (unlike a small tribe in the amazon ) we put so much of ourselves into objects that are simply free to view and study, like literature, art, films, encyclopedias, internet forums and so on. . there’s so much to investigate, we even make objects explaining objects, and further objects to explain those objects. I understand Tolstoy (his fiction) meaningfully just by reading it, and if I want to know it better I can read all around it too (other works, criticism, histories, biographies, spiralling OCD theses, all kinds of interpretation) . . of course there are all kinds of precursors to reading Tolstoy that are available too ;)
another shaky analogy, but I can’t see how a ‘two-way conversation’ is needed for ETIs to learn about us, when our records speak for us, and puts us under a microscope, on every possible subject.
I should say that – while I don’t think we would be needed to help ETIs ‘decode ourselves’, of course there would be other reasons to contact us. But an ETI is likely to carefully investigate us in order to formulate a best approach to contact, if that’s what it wants to do, and if it wants to minimize the potential downside. And the best approach could be “to wait and see, 100 years” or whatever as has been discussed.
I read a very interesting article years ago (probably linked from here) about a motivation for a prime directive type of stance towards humans.
The author speculated that ETIs, who are very interested in problem solving, could be SO interested in our alien frame of reference (the author called it something like ‘the unique computational architecture’ of our psychological selves) that they would never wish to disturb us for fear of ‘infecting us’ in the slightest with their own assumptions, or frame of reference – in other words they want an alternate subjectivity to help them view and understand problems from a different angle (and they want the angle to be very different , so they have a stake in our ‘undisturbed’ development).
@A
Sorry, I did not want to criticize you.
Regarding “I can’t see how a ‘two-way conversation’ is needed for ETIs to learn about us, when our records speak for us”
The point is the following: When we and others from a different culture perform actions of everyday life together, much more happens than verbal communication. We take objects with our hands, do something with them, we point and look at objects and at people, we show different expressions in our faces, we touch people, we perform body language, we act together with people in a (saying it in a more abstract way) “social and biological context”. The latter context is important and relevant, because we have some of what we need “in our genes”. I hope you get the point.
With narratives alone most aspects are missing. This is the case even between human beings.
When we start to communicate with members of a very different culture — an example from the past: Europe and Japan — we have to start with mostly non-verbal actions, but even then we need several things in common. This is always possible here on earth because all participants are members of the homo sapiens species which always have a common biological and social foundation.
Starting to communicate with members of an alien civilization on a distant planet is more difficult. The biological context is missing — or, who knows, at least very small. The social context … hmm, well, even our human social structures are variable, and in parts do not depend on our material and biological base. I think, every situation from easy to difficult to impossible can appear when trying to communicate with distant aliens.
What can be done, if we can’t visit each other? We could send each other stories, movies, and sophisticated virtual realities. The latter would be most useful, I hope, because members of one civilization could quasi “live” inside the other civilization, and perform the actions I mentioned above. I think, for some alien civilizations this may work, but I would not exclude, that it may be impossible for others.
If we don’t create these stories, movies, and virtual realities just for the purpose of communicating to aliens, but, instead of that, the aliens only observe what is unsystematically just available, then it would be rather difficult for the aliens — for many even impossible — to understand what they see.
A is correct. And soon all of human knowledge will fit into a very small package, perhaps to be sent out on future space missions.
Dunno, A. Here in Hawaii there’s sometimes Korean etc. TV with no subtitles, and you’d be surprised how hard it can be to figure out what’s going on. And that’s made by and about human beings. Imagine a transmission by some creatures you’d never seen before that were completely unlike anything you HAD seen before. Even assuming you could perceive it like they do (similar senses and cognition) I’d guess it would be difficult or impossible to understand.
Many good points above. Observation more likely than intervention. More single-celled aliens than bi-laterally symetrical bipeds.
In terms of contact, though, two more points:
1) we have a history of anthropo-centric theories about the Universe. I’m not convinced we’re past that – when we encounter intelligent aliens with a similar bent, we’re more likely then to be on the unfortunate end of the relationship;
2) don’t dismiss our cultural history of spiritualism, mysticism, and religious interpretation of unexplained phenomena. What ever mysterious occurs, there will be strong inclination to think it spiritual, and of some new (or perhaps old) deity.
SF stories depicting a grim, paranoid galaxy includes Greg Bear’s “Anvil of Stars” and Gregory Benford’s “Galactic Center” stories. Both depict a rather unpleasant galaxy.
One reasons aliens might visit us is to convert us to their religion. David Brin suggested this credible possibility once in the late 80’s.
The thing you have to remember about aliens is that they are alien. Its hard to guess what their motivations will be.
@ Duncan, an interstellar civilization doesn’t have to be a superpower when it get’s here. They have access to plenty of power and resources outside a gravity well. They could literally do whatever they want to us from the safety of the asteroid belt, and we wouldn’t be able to do much against them, as we don’t have the resources or energy to monitor what is taking place at that distance nor would we have anything to travel there without taking years meaning years of for warning. This is much like the theory in military of the high ground vs. low ground assaults. In this case you have vastly lower energy requirements to mine asteroids in a low g environment. Anyone who could mine an asteroid could also make structures as large as they want, imagine reflector telescopes with kilometer wide mirrors. Making it very easy to keep an eye on Earth or any planet based civilization. I don’t believe they would be aggressive either, not ruling it out though, but I think just coming into contact with a much more advanced civilization could cause a lot of harm, as history has shown.
Let’s assume that most aliens are nice, I believe there is still a high probability that human specie might kill itself in similar cases like “The Black Sphere” written by Gustav Meyrink and Erik Simon’s “The Black Mirror”.
There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy across 100,000 light years.
Most of these suns probably have planets and moons and planetoids
and comets circling them. Meaning lots of reasources. Many of them may
have no life or at least nothing terribly sophisticated.
So with so many places to choose from for a spacefaring galaxy-colonizing
species, why would they mess with the Sol system and humanity? Even if we
are not a big threat to a species with interstellar travel capabilities, wouldn’t
there be plenty of much easier systems to utilize?
And even here I curse even a hint of anthrpomorphizing an alien species.
In summation, why pick Earth with so many other places to dig up and settle?
I’m probably a bit late with this thread but:
Hawking has clearly changed his mind from about 2 decades when i watched him amongst a group of scientists discussing not “life” in the universe but whether other stars might have planetary systems. Hawking was in the NO camp. Okay so we had yet to discover extra solar planets in the early 80s but i found it staggering that they thought the sun could be the only planatry system in the whole universe.
How ironic he now belatedly thinks the universe is full of life.
I remember the days when Hawking and others thought planets were rare. I was in L-5 at the time and thought it didn’t matter. As long as there was dust clouds, asteroid and comet belts, all of the resources are there to build habitats and that’s all that mattered. The discoveries of the late 70’s to mid 80’s was not encouraging of traditional SF scenarios. First, the Vikings failed to find life on Mars. Second, the announcement of the first real astronomical attempts to find extra solar planets came up negative. This was around ’78. Lastly, there was the guy, I forget his name, that came up with a computer model showing the habitable orbital zone around the sun to be quite narrow (+/- 1% or so).
Things have certainly changed since then.
Many binary systems consist of a young, hot star with a solar-type star hundreds of AU’s distant.
I wonder if it’s likely the solar-type star is older, with an intact planetary system.
Is it possible a younger, massive star could capture another star without disrupting the planetary system completely? Has anybody done simulations for this?
He assumes alien races behave like us. There is no data for that theory. Space is gigantic and the ressources on our planet are laughable and hard to extract.
And the extreme distances make sure that no alien race is going to consume gigantic amounts of energy to come in our solar system just to waste again energy for to destroy the rare ekosphere on a planet just to waste even more energy to extract the rare ressources out of the earths crust even though around them are more then all ressources combined on earth and way easier to access.
We know that in a radius of 50 Lightyears there are no civilizations which use radio communication. Civilizations are compared to the amount of stars rare. A civilication travelling over hundreds of lightyears. Has probably solved their energy and ressource problems millions of years ago.
Even for a very advanced civilication living in the space and traveling the distances is no easy task because of the natural laws.
War over in such scales would consume high amounts of energy and would be completly senseless. we can assume that a higher developed civilication has different motives then we have. They wont mark there terretory. And probably would have stopped long ago and wont perform senseless actions like war and killing other species. Senseless because HOW can a civilication be a threat to another space travelling civilication. They wont live on a planet anymore but travel across the universe because they wouldnt be dependent on their planet anymore. And can mine asteroids for ressources way more effectively then on a planet.
So what happens if two such gigantic ships try to fight against each other ? first you have to meet someone in the space. After hundreds of years you meet someone and then you start to fight. Do they have weapons on their ships even though they dont meet other lifeforms over thousends of years ?
then they accidentally meet another ship probably discover it lightyears ahead. So they just know they are going to fight ? And when the other ships starts to travel with full speed the other follows but wont reach it ever ?
Whats that with war in space the distances and time needed for traveling those distances and the completly idiocy of making war in the space about literally nothing. Tells me that there wont be an intelligent space traveling species which would even think about making war. Why fighting ? To achiev what ? And how can it practically be done ? How can you make war in the space ? Shooting some missiles ? Or try to nuke some solar systems ? Only possibility is if one of the species lives on a planet. And the other one is a bunch of idiots then yes.
How fast could they be at best ?
This scenario is only realistic imo if our milky way is crowded.
Then maybe there would be wars over ressources. If we assume 200 Billion Stars. And we assume 1 Billion Civilications we would have per civilization 200 Stars. Still a whole lot of space and ressources. We would have already recieved some radio signals from dozends or hundreds of old civilizations but we havent.
Civilizations are extremly rare I guess. I can imagine at best a handful. No other race which would be able to travel to our system would try to destroy us. And would it be useful to actually meet other species by person ? Our Universe is so gigantic that all our models on earth are inapplicable on space travelling species. They would have to focus for hundreds of years on the same task. And why killing other species ? I just dont get it ?
Earth is of value but not because of the ressources but because of its climatic system and that it allows the evolution of life. But this life could be a possible danger for all other biological lifeforms.
The ressources found on earth can be found in megatons in a whole lot of other solar systems.
I doubt that Space traveling ETs need earth itself because they probably will be able to emulate any kind of environment and live in it. They probably wont need anything else. Just energy and they can get that easily orbiting a red dwarf.
As the europeans came to america they had illnesses in their baggage. And the had gold in mind when entering the unknown territory. The territory was limited and it was the same race.
We still are not far enough to travel to other stars and it will take long time periods to achieve this. And I am sure that in the further evolution of technolgy and the evolution of the man himself we will overcome our animal urges and our decisions wont be driven by sex and food anymore.
a space travelling society has already learned their stuff.
I still have problems to believe that we humans will ever be able to travel through space in a broader scale.
To achieve this kind of level we need to work together in all areas no energy can be wasted for other things. We cant fight us during space travel. The whole society has to work together in all areas and with help of robots and AIs and we maybe will once travel through space.
Ofcourse all of this is just my opinion and I have no reason to believe its like that. But this makes sense to me way more then Stephen Hawkings way. The idea of the Independece Day Aliens is just so earth like it dont takes the massive distances and the huge number of Stars into account. Also species evolve and dont stay on our level.
maybe they will kill us but definetly not for the reason said above.
Also I think that life is rare Intelligence even rarer and Maybe we will be the first other civilization they meet.
Aliens in next to us (1000-5000 Lightyears away) would get our message in a couple of thousend years and if they travel to us we are thousend times more developed then as we sent the message. maybe even robots are walking the earth.
The “theory in military of the high ground vs. low ground assaults” is useful in non-military considerations, I think, and especially in our case here. But their are others we should take into account.
Take something like (I don’t know whether there is a canonical formulation): If you want to overpower infantry, you have to bring in infantry yourself. Applied here: If the aliens want — without committing genocide — things which are down here on earth, or if they want us (I do not mean things like in science-fiction-horror movies), then they have to get down here themselves, and then things get difficult for them too. There are certainly more theories, e.g. about being far away from a home base, and about the difficulties of operating in “real” three dimensions, over “real” long distances, with “real” time delays.
Could the aliens do whatever they want to us, because they have a very advanced technology, because they are safe out there, and because they have a lot of resources from which they can build production facilities and powerful equipment?
In order for the aliens to use their technology and the resources, and to build superior devices, they need a full featured more-than-modern industry including technicians, scientists, and organisators. Important: The more sophisticated science and technology are, the more you need to keep it running.
Travelling over the very long distance between the alien home system and our system needs an immense amount of resources, and will result in only something relatively small arriving having not much capacity. Yes, as far as I’m concerned, that aliens are able to visit us, does not imply that they are able to do other great things; it’s similarly plausible that alien visitors need our help.
Besides the above, would the aliens have sophisticated, automatic, self-replicating, artificially intelligent, maintenance-free, bootstrapping, name-any-sexy-capability, production plants, providing everything they need? Or would the aliens first send those legendary probes, you know what I mean?
As far as I can see, each of these assumptions is, according to our current scientific knowledge, still unfounded — I even would say idle wishes.
My bottom line: No real alien overlords out there — but it’s fun reading science fiction stories about them.
I dont think so: “I am sure that in the further evolution of technolgy and the evolution of the man himself we will overcome our animal urges and our decisions wont be driven by sex and food anymore.”
Would this imply no love and desire between man and woman anymore, and parents will not love their children unconditionally? As far as I’m concerned, this would be a complete — and boring — desaster.