Celestia Forums

I read somewhere on the internet that there was a tv special about space aliens and the possibility of meeting space aliens. What intrigues me is that Steven Hawking said, at the end, that meeting space aliens "would be a disaster."

My question is, how or why would it be a disaster? what was his reasoning behind it?

Think about what happened to the native American Indians when they met Europeans. Think about the tribes of New Guinea.
Whenever two different cultures merge, there are always problems of one sort or another. If aliens are more technologically
advance, and they happen to think that God is a Black Hole in space, how would they view the various religions on Earth?
Would they try to convert us to Black Holiness?

A quick example only, but surely you get the idea?

And what would happen at our end? Would we try to steal as much of the new technologies as we could? I'm positive that
this would be the case. How would we use what we learn? Would we be able to create another kind of destructive force?

Seems that destruction is one of the things that we humans do very well.

BobHegwood wrote:A quick example only, but surely you get the idea?

And then there is this...
Where Are They? Why I hope that the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing (pdf, Nick Bostrom)
(short introduction (web page) here)

... Rather chilling. I?m looking for holes in it

- rthorvald

rthorvald wrote:... Rather chilling. I?m looking for holes in it

Well, after reading the article referenced here, it seems to me as if the author has purposely neglected the "Aliens Hiding" scenario for lack of better terminology. This has simply been completely ignored. Why is this not possible? It seems to me that different kinds of other life (or even similar kinds) on other planets simply has to have occurred. Even if our own existence was brought about by a 1 in 100 billion random chance effect, then the universe is so large that the existence of other intelligent life simply has to be statistically possible.

So? If this other life has already advanced well beyond our own, maybe they know something that we don't. Perhaps they have learned (over time) to remain hidden until there is some reason NOT to remain hidden. Also, are we not looking for signs of other life based on our own use of technology? Why would other forms of life have to use the same forms of communications that we do? How do we know that other life forms cannot use different sensory organs (and technologies) about which we know nothing? Since we have no idea how other life might evolve elsewhere in the universe, how do we even know what to look for?

Even on our own tiny home planet, we have seen that life in the past, has been nothing like life in the present. Comparison of the dinosaurs to today's intelligent man show that you can not possibly relate these two events to each other, except in terms of the environment in which we live in.

Again too, there seems to be ample reason for NOT communicating with primitive life forms if aliens are indeed more advanced than we are. They would know that deleterious effects might result from such contact, and may simply be waiting until they deem us worthy of joining Federation of United Planets.

Now I know that this all sounds like pure fiction, but you cannot prove a negative. As Doctor Schrempp once said, it is usually the unforeseen (or unexpected) data which provides us with major breakthroughs in knowledge. Just my 1/2 cents worth here. Doesn't chill me at all. What would chill me is finding out that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. Now this has some really scary consequences as far as I'm concerned.

BobHegwood wrote:Well, after reading the article referenced here, it seems to me as if the author has purposely neglected the "Aliens Hiding" scenario for lack of better terminology. This has simply been completely ignored. Why is this not possible? It seems to me that different kinds of other life (or even similar kinds) on other planets simply has to have occurred.

I am afraid you are answering yourself here... While "Aliens hiding" is a possibility, it becomes unlikely when you take this into account:

Even if our own existence was brought about by a 1 in 100 billion random chance effect, then the universe is so large that the existence of other intelligent life simply has to be statistically possible.

... The reasoning is that even if life is very rare, the universe is so huge that lots of civilisations can emerge, and not all of them will want to hide. Some cultures will be different, or want something different, and it only takes one to make this argument fall apart.

So, that is not the loophole.
So far, the only thing i can think of is that perhaps when a culture evolves the capability of going interstellar, some (inherently natural) thing causes it to lose interest. A post-singularity condition, if you will.

- rthorvald

rthorvald wrote:So far, the only thing i can think of is that perhaps when a culture evolves the capability of going interstellar, some (inherently natural) thing causes it to lose interest. A post-singularity condition, if you will.

Maybe they simply go to another universe... Still, this is very interesting. I hadn't heard of the paradox before, so thanks for the reading material. Good stuff.

Some more food for thought here...
From the Marconi Wiki page we get the following:

Heinrich Hertz, who, beginning in 1888, demonstrated that one could produce and detect electromagnetic radiation—now generally known as "radio waves", at the time more commonly called "Hertzian waves" or "aetheric waves.

Now let's think about that statement for a minute.

If, at that time, we had started globally radiating detectable radio waves simultaneously, and in all directions at once, these signals have still not gotten any further into our very own galaxy than 120 light years. If if a civilization elsewhere in our own galaxy had heard, understood, and even responded to these signals immediately, that still means that we have only covered out to a distance of 60 light years if we are awaiting an immediate reply.

Now, this assumes that we are uniformly radiating radio waves globally in all directions, along with TV signals, and other kinds of transmissions, and it assumes that aliens have heard, understood, and really want to reply to us. In this light, I see no paradox. Surely 60 light-years is a great distance, but given all of the assumptions (which describe the very best possible of outcomes as described,) how can we really think that no one else is out there?

This I simply do not understand...
More thoughts, Runar? I really am interested in this topic, so anything you have to say here is much appreciated.

Thanks, Bob

BobHegwood wrote:this assumes that we are uniformly radiating radio waves globally in all directions, along with TV signals, and other kinds of transmissions, and it assumes that aliens have heard, understood, and really want to reply to us. In this light, I see no paradox. Surely 55 light-years is a great distance, but given all of the assumptions (which describe the very best possible of outcomes as described,) how can we really think that no one else is out there?

Well, the issue is not as much whether someone is trying to contact us as it is why nobody is communicating with each other. If technological civs are common, the sky should be saturated with communication. And, even if it is rare, it is sufficient that only one culture develops interstellar communication earlier than us for them to be noticeable (for example, One Von Neumann machine originating in our galaxy a few million years ago should have multiplied to have reached everywhere by now).

So, if technology and intelligence is common, we would already know. If it is rare, we would also know, as long as *anyone*, anywhere, evolved earlier than us (at least *some* other cultures should already be old)). If this is the case, it is telling that they haven?t colonized the galaxy already...

Perhaps intelligence and technology in combination is extremely unlikely. Maybe there are factors - natural boundaries we still do not know anything about - that prohibited this combination until the universe was old enough (like now). Or maybe the first civilisation to evolve happens to be "wolves" and radio silence is an universal survival strategy.

Maybe something happens when technology matures. Like developments or discoveries that makes interstellar travel/comm completely irrelevant...

- rthorvald

Yeah, I think I see what you are getting at, but something within me still says that there just has to be other life (intelligent or otherwise) in this universe.

Please note that I had my simple math screwed up in my original post, so I was off by about ten light-years. My normal Brain-Dead state is to blame here.

Again, I simply find that if we turn out to be the only intelligent life in the universe, this thought is much more chilling to me personally than is the alternative of losing civilizations due to the progression of that intelligence to a pre-determined point.

Like someone else once said, "If we are all there is in the universe, then it is an awful waste of space."

Thanks, Bob

Maybe alien civilizations are using neutrinos or gravitational waves instead of electromagnetic waves to communicate. That would explain, why we haven't received any signal from them.

Paul

SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) wrote:Maybe alien civilizations are using neutrinos or gravitational waves instead of electromagnetic waves to communicate. That would explain, why we haven't received any signal from them.

But if there is one more, there should me many. And if so, it would be too far-fetched to believe we are the only ones to use radio.

Solutions like this are unsatisfactory since they postulate that we cannot see the others by being uniquely different from everybody. There must be more fundamental reasons why we cannot see others (either there aren?t anybody else, or they do not communicate because of some as yet unknown, universal consequence of technological / cultural maturity).

- rthorvald

BobHegwood wrote:Like someone else once said, "If we are all there is in the universe, then it is an awful waste of space."

A waste in our eyes, possibly, but that sentiment is ethnocentric. It is obviously not a waste for the universe. And possibly not for our descendants, a billion years down...

- rthorvald

Perhaps "life" could exist if it is beyond our actual knowledge... (and so unreachable by any concept we can develop...)

Now all those efforts in thinking in such topics should perhaps be used to fix one of the many problems we do have, us human being...

rthorvald wrote:

SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) wrote:Maybe alien civilizations are using neutrinos or gravitational waves instead of electromagnetic waves to communicate. That would explain, why we haven't received any signal from them.

But if there is one more, there should me many. And if so, it would be too far-fetched to believe we are the only ones to use radio.

It doesn't seem so far-fetched to believe that radio communication is only used for some short period during the lifetime of a technological civilization. If neutrino or gravitational wave communication is superior to radio waves for signaling across interstellar distances, then it is reasonable to assume that such techniques are adopted by every advanced civilization.

Solutions like this are unsatisfactory since they postulate that we cannot see the others by being uniquely different from everybody. There must be more fundamental reasons why we cannot see others (either there aren?t anybody else, or they do not communicate because of some as yet unknown, universal consequence of technological / cultural maturity).

As a civilization, we have not yet created a high power radio beacon to announce our presence to the rest of the universe. And conventional communication signals would be undetectable at a distance of over a light year by an Arecibo-like receiver. So the current radio frequency searches assume that civilizations are broadcasting high power radio signals--something we have yet to do in any focused manner. A relatively quick transition to novel (to present-day humans) means of interstellar communication seems to me plausible and also consistent with the negative results from low-sensitivity radio SETI.

--Chris

I was watching a History Chanel episode of "The Universe" that brought some of what has been said here into perspective. Everyone is thinking that all our radio waves are traveling out from Earth in this bubble and that it is not being impacted. The simple fact is that all the background radiation and noise out there in the universe is swamping any of our radio waves. So if we could travel at warp speed to the edge of were we would expect to hear our own broadcasts there would be nothing. Wait a while and there would still be nothing. It would all have merged with all the other noise out there. This is also why we may not be hearing any other intelligent life. At least from there home planet. There signals are simply not strong enough to break through the noise veil and is mixing with all the other noise out there an we simply can't discern it. There could be millions of planets with aliens at the same level of technology as we are and because of this we would never know they are there.

Here is another point. If you take into consideration our own ort cloud and all that dust and and small objects out there each one of them is creating a small wall that blocks off signal from Earth. Of course not all of are signals are blocked, but again its enough to probably impact the amount going out. So that again limits our signals are being diffused by our own solar system. So if its happening here its most likely happening elsewhere. This is of course going to make finding and listening in to alien signals difficult to impossible.

So here is yet another issue with listening for alien signals

Don. Edwards

chris wrote:If neutrino or gravitational wave communication is superior to radio waves for signaling across interstellar distances, then it is reasonable to assume that such techniques are adopted by every advanced civilization
...
As a civilization, we have not yet created a high power radio beacon to announce our presence to the rest of the universe. And conventional communication signals would be undetectable at a distance of over a light year by an Arecibo-like receiver

So, we can?t hear young civilisations because they are too faint, and can?t hear older ones because they may have switched to means we do not have access to yet.

That may work. It is certainly more appealing than a galaxy full of ruins. But it would also mean that self-replicating probes is "unfashionable"... However, as i wrote before, it only takes one culture that uses observable means, and we haven?t found it.

- rthorvald

rthorvald wrote:

chris wrote:If neutrino or gravitational wave communication is superior to radio waves for signaling across interstellar distances, then it is reasonable to assume that such techniques are adopted by every advanced civilization
...
As a civilization, we have not yet created a high power radio beacon to announce our presence to the rest of the universe. And conventional communication signals would be undetectable at a distance of over a light year by an Arecibo-like receiver

So, we can?t hear young civilisations because they are too faint, and can?t hear older ones because they may have switched to means we do not have access to yet.

That may work. It is certainly more appealing than a galaxy full of ruins. But it would also mean that self-replicating probes is "unfashionable"... However, as i wrote before, it only takes one culture that uses observable means, and we haven?t found it.

It's not clear to me why self-replicating probes should necessarily be detectable by us. They don't need to that small in order for us to overlook them. And there's one very big motivation for making a problem as small as possible: a small probe requires less energy to accelerate than a larger problem.

There may be a way around the 'it only takes one civilization...' style arguments used by Bostrom. Perhaps the very first civilization capable of interstellar travel would be able to leverage its technological advantage to "set the rules" for the rest of the universe. These rules may include things like enforcing a policy of non-intervention in the early development of other technological civilizations (i.e. the "zoo hypothesis") or simply exterminating any civilization that advanced past a certain threshold (let's hope not.)

I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here--a "Great Filter" in either the past or present seems quite plausible to me. The long delay before the development of eukaryotes strikes me as a good candidate.

--Chris