How Do You Greet an Extraterrestrial? 803
The LA Times is running a story about Earth Speaks, a companion project to SETI, which focuses on how we would communicate with intelligent extraterrestrial life, should we happen to discover it. Far more effort has been devoted to searching for signals or a means to communicate than the question of what we might say once contact is established, and the folks at SETI have set up a website to gather opinions on what the best questions and statements are. "So far, the messages break down into a few distinct categories. Some people want to throw a block party to welcome the aliens to the neighborhood. Others, less trusting, would warn the aliens that we've got guns and know how to use them. Another group, possibly influenced by having seen too many movies, would have us hide under the bed until they go away. 'If we discover intelligent life beyond Earth, we should not reply — we should freeze and play dead,' wrote one contributor." What would you say first to an alien?
Re:Obviously the first question is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr!
Don't play dead (Score:5, Interesting)
If we are actually noticed, the problem with the "freeze and play dead" suggestion is that it if it works, we risk convincing them that we are mostly harmless, unintelligent creatures. Earth then begins to look like a habitable, unoccupied planet ripe for colonizing.
While a display of martial might would serve to make the earth look less available, it also risks making us appear savage and again, unintelligent. It might make them feel justified in subjugating us and colonizing earth.
Safest is probably a policy of partial isolation. We should greet others firmly, while revealing little of our own cultures and history. Be respectful, and allow visitors to see a strictly controlled show. Given time, this can be relaxed. If they do seem interested in colonization, prepare for war. Demand commitments to peace and respect for our territory that, if broken deliberately, will give us moral high-ground in counterattacking. But if this should occur, act quickly to establish laws of war--display an aura of civility and discipline. Conversely, if they are interested in an exchange of knowledge, be open and willing--say nothing of atrocities and wars, and let the borders be opened slowly. Control their perception of us, so that we may appear to be a mixture of cultures that they could ally themselves with, rather than merely subjugate.
Re:Squids (Score:3, Interesting)
stupid thought experiment (Score:3, Interesting)
Eight forms of human language remain uncracked by modern linguists [newscientist.com]. Surely trying to speak Ventaxian and understand their communication will be nigh impossible. Heck I don't think their characters have been encoded into unicode.
Let alone knowing how their transmissions are encoded or even if they have a concept of DRM. If we don't know their codecs then those broadcasts will simply fall into the cosmic background radiation and remain lost to us until these aliens do something as gross as landing on the White House lawn and actually share their technology via their universal translator.
Who's to say they're even going to be interested in humanity at all. They may decide that ants have a far older and more interesting worldwide civilization which fits their xenothropic principle rather than appealing to our hubris that nigh-hairless primates are the pinnacle of culture and society upon this ball of mud.
On the bright side this guy says it'd be easy to figure out the grammar of a living alien language [telegraph.co.uk] but there's still the problem of idiom which would only serve the muddy the waters of communication and possibly precipitate conflict.
Re:Squids (Score:4, Interesting)
That assumption is that for communication, sharing intelligence is more important than sharing genetics.
One thing that all these discussions presume is that we would be able to quickly reach a way to communicate. More likely it would take a decade. But misunderstandings like say a the chimp biting your hand making someone angry would occur many times before that.
On the otherhand if an aliaen did show up on our doorstep then it would be one of two cases:
1) it was the first visit
2) or it was the first open visit after many many other visits.
in the first case the ship that arrived would likely be both of a technology far beyiond our own and at the same time extremely fragile it being at the limits of it's tenuous exitence after a long space journey.
So it might have some nasty weapons but probably nothing we should really fear or that we could not destroy.
Basically the vistitor would be here as our guest and at our mercy.
in the second case, it would be the visitors setting the agenda,
No one seems to have mentioned this....... (Score:5, Interesting)
No pre-determined message (Score:4, Interesting)
All that being said, I don't think the human race is anywhere near the point where we SHOULD make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization AT ALL. We're still just slightly smarter animals at heart, once you strip away the thin veneer of technology and what we laughingly call "civilization". We can't even get along with OURSELVES and our own differences let alone a race that didn't evolve here. We're bigoted, racist, and sexist: We can't decide, AS A RACE, whether we owe our existence to one supernatural being or another, or did we evolve? We make war on our neighbors over resources and things that matter even less than that. We treat people differently, sometimes even ATTACKING them, because their skin is a different color. We treat our females as second-class citizens. Furthermore we mistreat and mismanage the biosphere we live in, poisoning it with our industrial wastes, destroying parts of it out of ignorance or greed, or because it suits us to do so, and damn the consequences.
Never mind US contacting THEM! I say that if they're out there, they're AVOIDING and IGNORING us, because we're not worth knowing yet! Can't blame them if that's the case.
Oh, and go ahead and mod me down to "-1, Troll"; I'll understand because there is no "-1, Uncomfortable Truth" button to use.
Math. (Score:5, Interesting)
It'll be the one thing we have in common, no matter what. However they conceptualize it, unless our first contact is some kind of space manatee that communicates in radio waves, whatever we make contact with will have to have developed transmission/reception capability. Language would be a big puzzle to crack, and probably a really frustrating one... but 2+2=4 everywhere you go.
Re:Our guns vs. theirs (Score:3, Interesting)
>If they wished to annihilate us, I wager they'd be able to do it without even giving us a chance to react.
It would be trivial. ET is not a signatory on any of our international laws and treaties. They could concoct a biological weapon that doesnt require any more advanced science than we already know. They could bombard the planet with these weapons, kill only humans, and keep the planet for themselves. I think the hawks need to realize how delicate human life is and the weaponry to destroy all human life has been even in our hands for the last 50 years.
Re:No one seems to have mentioned this....... (Score:2, Interesting)
I assume _any_ intelligent lifeform, given enough time, will eventually either be curious enough to study us, or will want to fight for having a house in the beach.
Re:Freeze and play dead? (Score:4, Interesting)
It really all depends on resources (Score:3, Interesting)
If resources are plentiful then there isn't much of a problem.
Re:Freeze and play dead? (Score:1, Interesting)
Why would they even need hibernation technology? Maybe they are quite capable on their own of living for hundreds or even thousands of years at an entirely natural low-metabolism state.
So all they would need is: the economic dedication.
Re:Read FootFall (Score:2, Interesting)
You beat me to it.
Also, playing dead seems like it could be a good idea (although we should have thought of that 50 years ago) since the galaxy might not be a friendly place.
In The Forge of God the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that we have not observed/heard from any alien races because all the loud ones (like us) are easy prey, and killed off quickly by Von Neumann probes sent out by other races for various reasons..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God [wikipedia.org]
Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is probably one of the few threads where this meme is on topic. To put this in perspective we are probably the native american indians greeting the european explorers. And we know how well that turned out for them.
That's assuming they're more advanced than us. But if they're more advanced then us, than in all likelyhood it wouldn't be like indians meeting europeans at all! If we're exceptionally lucky it'd be like our present day society meeting the cro-magnum.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke made a famous observation about space explorers discovering aliens. If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is "we will find apes or angels, but not men."
Why? Consider the history of Planet Earth. Let the height of the Empire State building represent the 5 billion year life of Terra. The height of a one-foot ruler perched on top would represent the million years of Man's existence. The thickness of a dime will represent the ten thousand years of Man's civilization. And the thickness of a postage stamp will represent the 300 years of Man's technological civilization. An unknown portion above represents "pre-Singularity Man", the period up to the point where mankind hits the Singularity/evolves into a higher form/turns into angels. Say another dime. Above that would be another Empire State building, representing the latter 5 billion years of Terra's lifespan.
If you picked a millimeter of this tower at random, what would you most likely hit? One of the Empire State buildings, of course.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aa.html#apesorangels [projectrho.com]
There can be different kinds of intelligence (Score:5, Interesting)
But this assumption, that intelligence should be enough, relies on another - that those will be similar kinds of intelligence. Which might not be true.
Look at the example with squid. Is it intelligent? Definitely. Does it help us humans in communicating with it? Not really.
Notice that I've said "us humans". The burden of finding a viable channel for communication will almost certainly lie on the more intelligent species - simply because its modes of reasoning are totally out of grasp for "lesser" one. In case of squidshumans we, as a "higher" species, didn't really manage to figure out ways of communication. And it works for vast majority of species on Earth, except those which are very simple or those which are very similar to us (and it's still far from great in this case). And no, domesticated animals don't count - we bred proper responses into them.
The intelligence we might get into contact with will be almost certainly quite different from ours - not necessarilly because of different modes of operation (hive mind for example), but also because it, most probably, had a different timescale to evolve, refine itself.
Overall, it is likely it will be more intelligent than us. And somehow I doubt it will be very close to us, diminishing even further the chance of "close enough to find common ground". At the same time we're already quite advanced, so not exactly falling into "primitive enough".
PS. As a personal sidenote: I think that, eventually, intelligence of our type, one that is well on its way to harness power over genes, is quite short, quite transitory stage towards intelligence that is fully aware, harnesses and embraces...memes. How it would think then? Here's the point - I am unable to comprehend. But we would look to it similarly like animals look to us - totally under influence of genes, not even realising next step.
Re:Chemistry (Score:5, Interesting)
Rather than spoil the ending of the classic sci-fi short story Omnilingual [gutenberg.org] by H. Beam Piper, I'll just post a link - it's a short read, like the label says. (A team of explorers on Mars find a dead civilization, complete with an utterly untranslatable library of books....)
Re:Squids (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure, but we are capable of communicating with squids just as good as squids are communicating with each other. It would just take time until we learn how to speak to them. Communication with other animals at the same level, however, has been achieved. Or so it seems. So if the extraterrestrials can communicate with us almost as good as we communicate with each other, it wouldn't matter much to us. Probably they would be a little frustrated, as much as some people would get if they had to "talk" with a monkey. Unless our means of communication are different in a radical way. But eventually we'll learn how even then.
However, I think that both are false. Even if they have radically different ways of communication, or they are far more intelligent and comunicating at higher level than we do, their language would still fit in some of our notions for language, so there will be means for two-way translation that will be just as good as from English to Chinese, and we'll be understand everything they can say in their language. They might have better parsing abilities, though, so it might be a difficult task. But achievable. Don't underestimate us. Nor the extraterrestrials.
Re:Squids (Score:3, Interesting)
What in the world makes us think that it would be any easier to communicate with extraterrestrials?
Squids are intelligent tool-users with a high-order language capable of expressing abstract thoughts like "we shouldn't eat all those fish now; doing so will leave us more for tomorrow."?
I doubt we'll be mating with the squids, but most intelligent minds I've met don't need to fuck someone to communicate. (Hell, fucking tends to diminish communication...)
Re:Read FootFall (Score:3, Interesting)
As quoted from the book, The Killing Star assumes the following about alien behavior: 1. THEIR SURVIVAL WILL BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR SURVIVAL. If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self-sacrificing. 2. WIMPS DON'T BECOME TOP DOGS. No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary. 3. THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THE FIRST TWO LAWS APPLY TO US.
A very Kzin take on the Universe.
Re:There can be different kinds of intelligence (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't answer your last question for sure (of course), but I have long thought it likely that any extraterrestial intelligence we encounter / have encountered will not attempt to communicate with anyone per se, but with our culture or our species. The sheep dog doesn't care for the thought processes of a single sheep, it cares about the behaviour of the whole. Why lower yourself to talking to some "president" when you can talk to a culture through the introduction of new memes?
Re:There can be different kinds of intelligence (Score:3, Interesting)
Overall, it is likely it will be more intelligent than us.
Says who?
Not saying they wouldn't be, but what evidence makes it "likely"?
So far, in all of humanity's history, the most intelligent and capable animal we've ever discovered has been humans. There are billions of species, and there have been billions of years of history on this planet, but so far the only evidence of anything like "advanced" intelligence has been from homo sapiens and its close relatives.
Bearing in mind that TFA is talking about making contact with aliens by broadcast over very long distance (say, spotting signs of life on a distant planet and beaming a response their way), there is no good reason to assume that the creatures on the other end are automatically more intelligent, higher beings. They might be, but that's just guessing. And note that simply having been around longer doesn't denote higher intelligence- 21st century technology knocks Ancient Greek tech into a cocked hat, but I'm not about to claim that we're all far more intelligent than Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.
I still don't buy the squid analogy. Squid haven't proved themselves intelligent enough to, say, build and operate an interstellar radio transmitter, nor the will to do much else other than eat fish and swim about. If we accept that the only aliens we'll ever be talking to are those that have figured out wireless communication and space telescopes, that gives us at least some common ground which they'll be sharing with us.
Re:Squids (Score:5, Interesting)
Why assume that if they find us, they must have sci-fi movie technology?
Because statistically speaking, it's incredibly unlikely that an alien race would have developed technology at anything close to the same time that we did. So either they will be so far behind that they won't even have radio, or many thousands (if not millions) of years more advanced than us (technology-wise).
This is why the "warn them that we have guns and know how to use them" and "hide under the bed" options are ridiculous. Any alien race we are able to communicate with will almost certainly have the technology to easily wipe us out if they want to, as well as being able to detect the radio waves we've been throwing out into space since the early 20th century.
Imagine the humans of 1900 trying to pose a credible threat to or hide from the humans of 2009. Now imagine the same thing, but it's the Romans or Chinese or a few thousand years ago versus the humans of 2009. Then realize that even a few thousand years is nothing on cosmological scales, so even that vast gap of technology is an eyeblink compared to the differences in technology we would be likely to encounter with an alien race.
Re:Squids (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, all this assumes that aliens would want to be hostile to us for some reason anyway. If a civilization is advanced enough to travel here, they're probably advanced enough to not have any good reason to be hostile. The only reason for hostility would be that they want something we have, and that could really only be the planet. But while this planet is basically a paradise to us (compared to the other planets out there that we can see), that's because we evolved on it, and are suited for living on it: it has temperatures/climates we like, it has food growing/living on it that we like, etc. As aliens would have evolved on another planet, this planet and the life on it probably wouldn't be something they value that much; it could even be poisonous to them. The only other reason they'd want this planet is for the mineral resources, but if they can travel to other star systems, it seems like it would be pretty trivial for them to get mineral resources from all kinds of other lifeless asteroids and planets instead of having to fight for this one.
Honestly, I can't imagine a decent reason why any alien visitors would be hostile to us. Some of their ways might seem hostile to some, but that would only be from insufficient communication I believe (like if they treated us as lab specimens to be experimented on for the purpose of science without attempting to communicate). I think the chances of aliens coming here to wipe us all out, like in Independence Day, are pretty much nil. If any aliens go to the effort of traveling here, they probably would be interested in either simply learning about us (without sending us all into panic), or communicating.
Aliens might be REALLY alien (Score:3, Interesting)
Intelligence doesn't have to be measured in physical inventions (but I likely think it would manifest that way). Maybe the squids have the most awesome philosophy, stories, poems, songs, dance whatever.
Intelligence species don't necessarily have to care about other species - humans can't put on a good chemi-lumescent light show for beans, and maybe that makes us look F-ing retarded and boring to them - get the idea?
Other lifeforms might be so weird and alien to us, that we may never communicate effectively with them or want to because there might never be anything interesting to either of us
. For God sakes, the West has a tough enough time trying to communicate with the Middle East, let alone Ceti-Alpha 6 sand bug colonies.
Re:Squids (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Welcome! (Score:4, Interesting)
Sir Arthur C. Clarke made a famous observation about space explorers discovering aliens. If one considers the millions of years of pre-history, and the rapid technological advancement occurring now, if you apply that to a hypothetical alien race, one can figure the probabilities of how advanced the explorers will find them. The conclusion is "we will find apes or angels, but not men."
This kind of thinking relies on two notions ancient to western thought: the Great Chain of Being, and linear progress.
The Great Chain of Being [wikipedia.org] is an idea that we inherited from Christian times. It describes a hierarchy of matter and life forms, with rocks at the bottom, then plants, animals, humans, and above them, angels, and finally, God at the top. Each spot is 'better' than the one below it. So we see know why Clarke posits we will only find "Apes or Angels": he's placing aliens in the Great Chain of Being. Contrast that with, say, a more Japanese notion of life forms, where robots and humans and talking animals all inhabit and live in a world, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in peace, with each having their own niche of adaptation and way of making a living. It's a world-view you may have seen in a Miyazaki film.
The second Old Idea that Clark's prognostication rests on is linear progress. That there is a one-dimensional measure of 'goodness' or 'progress', and as time goes on, the value always goes up. In other words, things are always getting better -- we know more, we have more things, society advances. Contrast that with an idea of cycles of good and bad times, like you might see in Hindu thought, or of balance and homeostatis, like you might find in Greek or Native American thought. So, Clarke says we are either going to find Angels or Apes. Humans are right in the middle int he Great Chain of Being, and because of linear progress, we will become more 'angelic', sooner or later. Well, what about finding jellyfish? Jellyfish have been around the Earth's oceans for millions of years, and their basic body plan and way of making a living hasn't changed that much. Sounds like a fairly successful homeostasis, if you ask me. I'll bet there will be jellyfish as long as there are temperate oceans on Earth.
So I think if you put this reasoning in light of those two ideas, it becomes apparent that even one of our greatest 'science'-fiction minds is unaware that they are rooted in very old, religious cosmologies that are culturally based. We in the west are still in the Dark Ages of imagination, living under the tyranny of ancient, jealous, despotic Gods.
Re:Welcome! (Score:3, Interesting)
The claim that Clarke's prediction is based on mysticism is baseless. Not regarding humans as the best of creatures is foolish.
The claim that it is based on linear progress is contrary to Clarke's prediction, which implies a very nonlinear progress: very slow until recently, fast now and at least until we progress beyond what we might reasonably recognize as human. The part up to now is history. The rest is speculation.
Statis is not a good thing, unless you regard pain and early death as good.
Re:Squids (Score:4, Interesting)
Another point I forgot to mentions is what I call the "pioneer effect". We reached the moon many years having the technology to wipe out its inhabitants if there were any. It is likely any incoming alien vessel would be of the pioneer type, with just enough resources to reach the planet and maybe make it back but not much more.
Re:Really so Advanced? (Score:4, Interesting)
To my knowledge we have at least general knowledge of every major technology we would need to travel between stars
No offense, but WHAT?? There are so many problems with interstellar travel... lets consider a few, from the perspectives of spacecraft and tech available today.
Spacecraft range: The biggest single problem. Space is big. Really, really, REALLY big. The fastest spacecraft we currently posess would take centuries to reach Alpha Centauri (the next-closest star, a mere 4 light-years or so away). In theory, an ion-drive spacecraft could get up to a noticeable fraction of c, given enough fuel, but we can't currently provide that (ion drives are amazingly efficient, but they still need two resources - reaction mass and power). Ramscoops aren't currently possible, if they'll even work (we're not sure they would). Our best reactors have a lifetime of decades, but those are Earth-based installations - current long-range spacecraft are powered by radioactive thermal decay, which can't produce enough power over a long enough time - we would need to use fission, at a minimum.
Solar sails might be usable, but they're currently pure sci-fi. Also, at least some of the things they theoretically could do - "tack" toward a star, for example - just don't work. Sailboats can tack for two reasons: air pressure sufficient to make airfoils work, and water viscosity being much greater than air viscosity. It's possible - I don't know the math - that an "airfoil" could work in solar wind, but I rather doubt it. However, the thrust vector of an airfoil is perpendicular to the wind direction. Sailboats have keels for two reasons - to keep them from flipping over, and to force them to move only forward and backward (meaning that the airfoil thrust need only be slightly forward of 90 degrees to get forward motion). Without something to "grip" like that, even a 100% efficient solar-foil could only orbit a star at constant distance.
Warp drive... now we're out of even the realm of things we can begin to experimentally prove. There is a theoretical mathematical model that, *if* our understanding of relativity is correct, permits moving faster than light (actually, moving at any arbitrary speed, given enough power). In short form, it consists of compressing space in front of the ship, and expanding it behind - the space in the middle, where the ship is, technically doesn't move at all. Now, the problems:
We can't really compress space. In essense, we're talking gravity control here. In theory, with enough energy (or mass, they're related after all), it's possible. We dont' know how, though.
We do not know how to expand space. Negative energy - not the same as anti-matter, but akin to anti-gravity - has been theorized and *maybe* observed, but we can't produce it at will, certainly not over any useful distance or magnitude.
The theoretical power output required to be useful is, at minimum, far more than our entire race can produce. It might be more than the rest energy of the entire universe.
You can't see where you're going. Anything that hits the "bow wave" gets compressed into a burst of gamma radiation. This includes photons.
I trust I don't need to continue? Look it up if you want - it's a cool theiretical model - but I doubt we'll even know if it's possible within my lifetime.
Ok, how about spacecraft durability? At any kind of decent speed, a micrometeorite, even a spec of dust, could do incredible damage. Making the spacecraft more durable generally means adding mass, which decreases its acceleration and therefore max speed for a given amount of fuel. We don't currently have any kind of shield or navigational deflector that could block a rock of the size you use to skip stones - easily large enough to utterly destroy a spacecraft (if it is anything at all like what we can build today) travelling at the pitiful speed 0.01 c.
Finally, consider longevity. This is related to range, but worth its own discussion. Power, fuel, and durability have already been co
Re:Really so Advanced? (Score:3, Interesting)
God bless you. We need to get these ridiculous 1950s ideas out of our heads. When I was a child (in the 70s), I was told, in all sincerity, that I'd probably be able to go to the moon when I grew up.
Ain't gonna happen. Not now, not ever in my lifetime.
The thing is that the moon missions were batshit crazy. We were locking people up into tin cans and shooting them at the moon for no reason other than to say we did it. Yeah, it worked, but it was insanely dangerous and resulted in virtually nothing.
I am not so shortsighted as to say "never," but most of these sci-fi staples are so far off (even granting that science in science fiction is just a frame in which to tell a good human story--same as Shakespeare, who used the magical world of the royals) as not not really be worth discussing in real terms. We're probably not even going to make it to Mars in my lifetime.
It's a lot harder than just throwing together some vague concepts from physics and the plot of a pulp novel.
Re:I know (Score:1, Interesting)
Chemistry? (Score:3, Interesting)
Chemistry would work the best since there are so many obvious constants. ionization constant of pure water. All the orbitals of an iron atom. A benzene ring is ubiquitous. Curie temperatures. Melting and boiling points.
Except for the benzene ring what you are describing is physics i.e. the physical properties of materials. It might be the physics of a 100 or so years ago but that does not make it chemistry. Besides there are plenty of other obvious constants in physics: charge of an electron, mass of an electron, proton, neutron etc. nuclear masses, atomic orbital energies, spectral lines etc. although perhaps in another 50-100 years these will have been recycled into chemistry as well?