Wheelchair Guy vs Mr. Skeptic

[Glassfan]

Stephen Hawking's Universe, a new documentary series scheduled to show on the Discovery Channel beginning Sunday, May 9th, has already begun generating some controversy. Reviewed in the The Sunday Times (25 Apr 11), he suggests that while extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist, humanity should be doing all it can to avoid any contact.

Hawking maintains that some of these intelligent life forms might pose a threat, and that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity. "We have only to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet (hey, wait a minute!).... 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 well for the Native Americans."

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine has already responded in his Scientific American (June 2011) article, The Myth of the Evil Aliens. He states; "With the Allen Telescope Array run by the SETI Institute in northern California, the time is coming when we will encounter an extraterrestrial intelligence."

He argues that humanity ain't all that bad (alright!) - civil liberties are up, wars have decreased (?), crime and violence are down (?!), and if we extrapolate these trends into the future, we get a sense of what ET is like. (I just hope we don't catch them during a Hitler phase)

My personal opinion; I have to side with Hawking on this.

Mr. Shermer seems unaware in his article (perhaps due to time constraints) that SETI has recently closed down owing to lack of funding. Jill Tarter (Jody Foster, Contact), Director of SETI, has argued that it's really a pity that the search is ending - just when these 50 promising new planets have been discovered by the Kepler mission.

Apparently, of the millions of stellar systems investigated by SETI in the last half century, they somehow missed these particular 50.

She also maintains that if we did discover ET, and he turns out to be a bad guy, we can just refuse to talk to him.

Hnmm....
It seems to me that the moment ET is discovered, it will go out over the Internet and the whole world will know about it within a news cycle. At that point, thousands of entities around the planet will be beaming messages towards it - Governments, NGO's, University Physics departments, Observatories, terrorist organizations, hackers - hell, any crank (like me) with a credit card and local Radio Shack. Transmissions might include entreaties, declarations of peace, declarations of war, proposed alliances, insults, rock and roll, and of course, demands for membership into the Planetary Federation.

It's been growing on us. 50 years after Dr. Frank Drake proposed the search, SETI has drawn a blank. Zilch. Nothing. Nada. Supporters suggest we are only just beginning. Critics say that SETI's fundamental assumptions are flawed, including that to advanced civilizations, radio frequency communications are oh-so-last-millennium.

Well, I think it's an interesting topic for discussion...

 

[Nick Carpathia]

It's probably fine. They'd probably have killed themselves or undergone a civilization collapse a few million years ago. And if they haven't, well, they're not getting around the light speed limit.

 

[civ_king]

I think Stephen Hawking should stick to mathematics and theoretical physics, you wouldn't trust someone with a doctorate in literature to do open heart surgery would you?

 

[Thedrin]

I'm with Hawking on this.

If humanity encounters an intelligent but technilogically inferior race, I wouldn't trust us to treat them well. Whatever the advances in human rights (and I'm not convinced that some localised improvements in this can be reasonably assumed to continue) said alien species will not be human and there will be no shortage of entities on Earth willing to take advantage of that.

I see no reason to attach a greater morality to another species.

 

[Thedrin]

I think Stephen Hawking should stick to mathematics and theoretical physics, you wouldn't trust someone with a doctorate in literature to do open heart surgery would you?

What kind of doctorate would you trust to speculate on an alien society?

 

[GoodSarmatian]

What kind of doctorate would you trust to speculate on an alien society?

A Doctor in Whoology ?

 

[Berzerker]

doesn't religion just about everywhere claim aliens were already here and will be coming back?

 

[Virote_Considon]

What kind of doctorate would you trust to speculate on an alien society?

The sort of doctorate needed to become a Bishop in the Catholic Church, of course.

 

[Mr. Dictator]

I'm down with ET.

Only concern is the language barrier would be too difficult, assuming they have a "language".

 

[Kyriakos]

I recall some old thread exactly about this topic, where i mentioned the native Americans<---Spanish paradigm to the same effect. Not that this means much, it is a simple way of viewing the matter, focused mostly on fear.
However i think that if we ever meet aliens they will most probably not be some humanoid creature with similar but more advanced science; in all likeness it will be something very different, and chances are we won't be able to really communicate due to the great differences in our way of thinking and theirs.
That said i would not want an alien encounter to happen while i am alive. Mankind has already done a pitiful job of advancing while we were under the impression we were alone; if we become relegated to some undeveloped species chances are our fate will become even worse and more marginalized.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

There is a relevant xkcd for this, and is sums up my opinions on the issue precisely:

 

[Singularity]

If someone reached us physically from an alien civilization I would draw two conclusions personally:

• They have reached such a sophisticated level of technology that they can travel these mind boggling distances without flexing too hard. Meeting us would be like a biologist going on a field trip to discover a new species of organisms. And hopefully they would see the sense in not wiping us out since they most likely don't need anything on or in our planet that they wouldn't get anywhere else in the galaxy/universe with minimal effort.
• They're desperate and we're an oasis in a desert. They cobbled together their last resources to travel here and will make sure they have this oasis for their own as soon as possible upon arriving here.

So, yeah. I think Hawkins has good reasons to be reserved in a big meet and greet with potential new civilizations. At least I wouldn't broadcast a signal into space saying "oasis here". The active sbroadcasting of signals(Active SETI) is madness. Listening is fine, signaling is bad. We have however been shouting at the cosmos for some time. And various signals will be arriving in our stellar neighborhood within the next century(with the exception of the Arecibo message that should arrive at the globular cluster M13 in roughly 25.000 years).

We should be more concerned with getting ourselves out of low earth orbit than to try to shout at the heavens.

 

[classical_hero]

If we are searching why has not any other alien civilisation tried to do the same? It has been 50 years of fruitless searching and we have sent out so many messages that it should be obvious that we are alone in this universe from a physical perspective.

 

[Leoreth]

Well, on the negative side we know that every intelligent lifeform that is able to visit us is likely to be way more technologically advanced than we are, so at least if they decide to engage in colonial behaviour we wouldn't be able to stop them.

On the positive side, it's likely that this civilization went through the same trouble as we did: wars, overpopulation, depleting resources - and still they managed the difficult task of interstellar travel. This might mean that they were able to move past this kind of behavior.

I don't really know what Hakwing has to do with this. Of course he has the same right to speculate about that as everyone else, so the "literary critic doing heart surgery" argument isn't really applicable, but his reputation makes his speculation look more educated than anyone else's, which isn't the case.

 

[Nick Carpathia]

You are of course assuming that they behave in a human-like social individualist manner. If you ask me, if a lifeform wants to colonise the deep space niche, you're pretty much going to have to engineer out any biological drives pertaining to feeding and breeding .ie. transform yourself into a von Neuman. On the plus side, they'd probably not compete with us for resources stuck on the bottom of a gravity well. On the downside, they are an existential threat as something that can dance around gravity wells at will, even if their life cycle runs on the million-year timescale, can casually shunt some mass to intercept with our orbit and destroy our biosphere.

And again, that's assuming that our cultural development, which has lasted a few dozen millenia, will intersect with a active stage of our hypothetical von Neuman's life cycle (both spatially and temporally). Magic 8-ball says probably not.

 

[Perfection]

Do you know of an article (not just a news article, those suck donkey balls) that better talks about Hawking's view? I have Scientific American so I can look at Shermer's view, but it would be unfair for me to talk about Hawking's without actually looking at it.

 

[Cutlass]

If we are searching why has not any other alien civilisation tried to do the same? It has been 50 years of fruitless searching and we have sent out so many messages that it should be obvious that we are alone in this universe from a physical perspective.

What we could detect, and what might detect us, in 50 years is something like 0.05% of the galaxy we live in. Hardly a representative sample.

 

[ArneHD]

Why would any alien species even WANT to invade another alien species? If they are after natural resources, then surely the technology required for interstellar travel would allow them to take these from uninhabited planets, no need to target an inhabited one.

If someone reached us physically from an alien civilization I would draw two conclusions personally:

• They have reached such a sophisticated level of technology that they can travel these mind boggling distances without flexing too hard. Meeting us would be like a biologist going on a field trip to discover a new species of organisms. And hopefully they would see the sense in not wiping us out since they most likely don't need anything on or in our planet that they wouldn't get anywhere else in the galaxy/universe with minimal effort.
• They're desperate and we're an oasis in a desert. They cobbled together their last resources to travel here and will make sure they have this oasis for their own as soon as possible upon arriving here.

So, yeah. I think Hawkins has good reasons to be reserved in a big meet and greet with potential new civilizations. At least I wouldn't broadcast a signal into space saying "oasis here". The active sbroadcasting of signals(Active SETI) is madness. Listening is fine, signaling is bad. We have however been shouting at the cosmos for some time. And various signals will be arriving in our stellar neighborhood within the next century(with the exception of the Arecibo message that should arrive at the globular cluster M13 in roughly 25.000 years).

We should be more concerned with getting ourselves out of low earth orbit than to try to shout at the heavens.

A few things: I don't think any regular radio broadcast will be strong enough to detect once you get more than a few light years out into space, they would have to be very lucky to pick that up on accident. Also, why would Earth be some kind of Oasis? The aliens we may encounter will have a completely different biochemistry that we do, if they intend to live here, they might as well start over with a new planet, it would probably be faster.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

I like Hawking but I think he's way off base here. In the worst case scenario, we contact another intelligent species, they turn out to be huge dicks, and then what? We still have no reason to believe they'll be able to physically get to us, that whole pesky speed of light limit and so forth, so why should we feel compelled to care about this? It's like talking to someone on the phone, if they are jerks we'll just hang up on them.

 

[Kyriakos]

Maybe human life itself will be a resource to a significantly different alien species.

Or they could just use us as toys/attractions, as in: