If we should pick up signals
from alien civilizations, Stephen Hawking, our century’s Einstein, warns: “we should have be wary of
answering back, until we have evolved” a bit further. Meeting a more
advanced civilization, at our present stage,’ Hawking says “might be a
bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don’t
think they were better off for it.”
Mankind has always been driven by
contradictory drives. The relentless curiosity that pushes us forward
and is directly responsible for our progress from caves to cities.
The fear of change that tells us “hang on, these caves/cities are
really nice, we don’t want to risk losing them.” There isn’t any
greater potential threat to the status quo than the discovery of
extraterrestrial life, which is why some people would prefer we didn’t
try.
After a half-century of scanning the skies for intelligent extraterrestrial life, astronomers have little to report but an eerie silence, eerie because many scientists are convinced that the universe is teeming with life. The problem could be that we’ve been looking in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. At this week’s conference at London’s prestigious Royal Society, Paul Davies, astrophysicist and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University, discussed a new roadmap for the future of SETI, arguing that we need to be far more expansive in our efforts, by questioning existing ideas of what form an alien intelligence might take, how it might try to communicate with us, and how we should respond if we ever do make contact.
There has also been controversy recently over attempts to contact
intelligent aliens, where instead of hiding in the corner and listening
real hard, some astronomers beamed intense directional messages up up
and away. Critics decried these actions as dangerous, though their
fears reveal more about us than any eventual ETs. They assume that
they would be similar to humanity, so their first response to finding a
more primitive culture would be to exploit the hell out of it. While
such a fate might be pleasingly ironic (for anyone who isn’t human, at
least), others contend that any species that can make the journey here
has advanced to a point where their goals are rather higher-minded than
“Shoot us”.
Dr Alexander Zaitzev, of the Institute of Radio Engineering and
Electronics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, doesn’t think much of
these worries either way. A proponent of METI (Messaging to
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), in a recent paper he shows that the
odds of one of the METI messages being detected is a millionth of that
due to powerful radar pulses regularly used in astronomical
investigation. Though whether writing a paper saying “This METI thing
we’re doing has only a tiny chance of working” is overall a good idea
remains to be seen. An important point is that METI represents an
intentional will to make contact, rather than the accidental alien
interception of some random radiation from Earth - the difference
between saying “Hello!” and just being a suspicious strange noise late
at night.
Most of the objections to contacting aliens are weak under close
examination. We can’t suddenly decide to hide after fifty years of
pumping electromagnetic radiation into space without rhyme or reason -
in fact, we’d better hope that an advanced civilization doesn’t catch
an episode of “American Idol” and just vaporize us outright.
Then there’s the assumption that aliens would have the same kind of
technology we do - despite the extremely obvious fact that our
technology can’t actually get to other exo planets. Any attempt to mask
radio emissions will likely look like cavemen closing their eyes to
hide from satellite imaging.
The simple fact is that certain people have always opposed progress
while other, better people have driven it. “Experts” decried boiled
water as unhealthy compared the vital stuff straight from the river,
cursed antibiotics as a temporary placebo, and confidently declared
that computers were nothing but expensive toys. As an intelligent
species we must make every effort to contact anyone (or thing) we can.
Edited and Reposted for commentary by Luke McKinney.
Related Galaxy posts:
Stephen Hawking: “Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution”
Stephen Hawking: “Asteroid Impacts Biggest Threat to Intelligent Life in the Galaxy”
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