
China's Race to Find Aliens First - anarbadalov
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/what-happens-if-china-makes-first-contact/544131/?single_page=true
======
cetalingua
Our problem is that we have very limited imagination (and sensitivities) when
interacting with other sentient beings even here, on earth. For example,
cetaceans evolved in the environment where vision is limited. Hence, dolphins
and whales do not have emotional facial expresssions that are so important for
human primates. It confuses us when interacting with them, are they sad,
happy, in pain? We have no idea. Next, is our profound inability to understand
their complex acoustic communication, there is no Rosetta stone, and we are
completely lost again. Any race to communicate with aliens should start with
decoding non-human communication systems here on earth (shameless plug, anyone
is interested to support our tiny fledging startup?)

Finally, the recent situation with rescuing last living vaquita dolphins in
Mexico once again demonstrated that humans have hard time imagining umwelt of
other species. The plan was to capture remaining vaquitas and to put them in
protected sea pens. Without any doubt, human intentions are good here, but as
we often do, we go full steam, brute force into the situation. As a result,
captured vaquita died from capture myopathy. This animal is shy, cryptic, and
it cannot handle being surrounded by scary , noisy giants, touching it,
grabbing it with its appendages, despite the fact that "giants" have all good
intentions. This example is very relevant to thinking how we should interact
with possible "others" or handle the signal, if it will be received one day.
Even with all good intentions, we can still create chaos and danger, simply
because we cannot understand "others" and how they see, experience the world.

~~~
arcticfox
I'd never heard of vaquitas. Incredible that yet again a species is terribly
threatened due to Chinese fertility treatments.

> But like all cetaceans, the vaquita breathes air, making the gillnets
> deadly. The nets are set to trap another endangered species, the totoaba.
> This fish’s swim bladder is used in Chinese medicine to make a soup believed
> to boost fertility—and demand has skyrocketed in recent years.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/navy-use-
dolphins-...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/navy-use-dolphins-
track-down-worlds-most-endangered-porpoise-180963908/)

~~~
cetalingua
They just abandoned capture plans, only around 20-30 vaquitas remain, it is a
truly devastating situation.

------
azernik
This article is a bit unfair to the dark-forest conception of interstellar
life. The axiom that Liu put forward was not about some inherently
expansionist nature of intelligent life, but about the difficulty of
communication and understanding. It takes two round-trips to communicate, but
a small multiple of one for a species that can launch an attack that moves at
a substantial fraction of the speed of light. And such attacks may be fast
enough, or hard enough to detect, that second-strike capability is impossible.

In his books he explicitly compares this to the prisoner's dilemma - maybe you
yourself don't want to expand beyond your own star system, but as soon as you
know another species exists, you know that if they _are_ hostile and _do_ find
you, they will destroy you before you know there's any threat. And so _you_
are incentivized to attack when the other civilization has not yet been
alerted to your presence.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
The article says

> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a
> moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.

How about

> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a
> moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of another. The hunters
> are strangers who do not trust each other (or even have a language in
> common), so can respond with long dangerous negotiations to establish good
> intent, or with a swift bullet. Everyone knows this, and acts accordingly.
> The stable state is pre-emptive strikes, zero trust, maximum hostility.

~~~
FranOntanaya
This is a very "me vs them" individual bias vision. It assumes every
individual civilization can take another with a "single" obliterating bullet
like some street gang conflict.

In practice we are ant colonies in that dark forest. Unless you can understand
enough the rumblings of another civilization, you don't know how far they've
expanded. They may have fully functional, fast replicating colonies in one of
the trillions of Oort cloud objects and you just pissed them off by trashing
their historical sites.

We could go insane hypothesizing destruction on light-years bubble scales, but
then you can rest assured other civilizations are now aware of your existence
and will take note of your undesirable quality as neighbor.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
A good answer, though I am merely summarising what I understand of Liu Cixin's
argument.

Yes, across interstellar distances, a single strike with a very high velocity
object might take out a planetary civilisation before they could react. But as
you say, that might not be enough.

It's even worse than "you don't know how far they've expanded", even a fast
strike from nearby on the cosmic scale can take hundreds of years, and you
can't know how far they will have expanded by then.

~~~
azernik
Same (I'm GGP)

I think it also makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of interstellar
warfare - mainly that against a single-system enemy, attacks are quick and
destructive enough - and hard enough to defend against - to destroy all
ability to retaliate with high certainty. A sort of MAD gone wrong, with an
attacker not having to even worry about the possibility of a second strike by
the more resilient elements of enemy forces.

------
brango
Anyone know anything about the credibility of the Disclosure Project[1]? I
think something like 100+ ex-service personnel testified under oath that
they'd witnessed UFO activity.

If 100+ people testified to seeing me do something illegal, a court would
convict me (barring exceptional counter-evidence).

Having researched things as best I can I am now of the opinion they're already
here, based mainly on the number, diversity and credibility of witnesses (e.g.
ex-military personnel, former nuclear military personnel, Air Force, etc, not
that any I know anything beyond that).

[1] [http://www.disclosureproject.org](http://www.disclosureproject.org)

~~~
boomboomsubban
I looked over some of them, and this isn't very reliable. Eyewitness reports
aren't terribly credible in the best of situations. Eyewitness reports of
people in stressful careers often working long overnight hours aren't credible
at all.

Our memories are terrible, our brains make stuff up when confused, and sleep
deprived dreams are very hard to distinguish from reality. Add in the large
amount of amphetamines used in the military during that period, the very
secretive weapons testing going on, and things like MK-ULTRA and these seem
really far fetched.

~~~
raverbashing
So, if we can't trust their memories in those occasions (which I agree is
problematic), why are we trusting them with doing their jobs under such
conditions?

I'd like to add that it might not be that all events happened under strenuous
(personal) situations (and who knows how much evidence like recordings or
other stuff might have been buried)

~~~
dingaling
> why are we trusting them with doing their jobs under such conditions?

Process, process, process. Or "train as you'll fight" in more bellicose terms.
Drill and rote is the only way to get fallible humans to do the correct thing
regardless of environment and conditions.

However it's when things occur for which there's no process in place that you
need flexible, quick-thinking NCOs and officers. And that's achieved by
constantly putting them into those scenarios, as the British Army learned in
its 'small conflicts' since WW2. Analyse, assess, plan and react within
minutes.

Unfortunately the higher echelons seldom retain that capability after years in
stuffy corridors. It would be interesting to study the proportion of UFO
"affirmations" originating from sharp-end military personnel versus desk-
jockeys. I reckon the latter will be the vast majority.

------
sushisource
Wow. A fantastically written article. I have a hard time buying the pessimism
that intergalactic contact is doomed to end in conflict, but it's not like
anyone really knows.

Now, the bit about chaos on earth if we do find others... Yeah, that's scary.

~~~
sgk284
I agree that the pessimism is disheartening, but looking at the limited data
we have, is there any evidence of an intelligent species (e.g. humans)
discovering the presence of another intelligent species (e.g. humans) without
conflict soon thereafter?

Not a fan of extrapolating from single data points, but it's the best we've
got for now.

~~~
malux85
I think it will likely go beyond that. If aliens are hyper intelligent they
probably go well beyond sentience to something else and may not even consider
us “conscious” (or whatever they have)

Then think about how we human treat much lower life forms. For example, a
plant. We have no ethical issue mowing down a paddock of plants because we
don’t see them as equal life forms. We have mostly no ethical issue of killing
millions of cattle/sheep for mostly the same reasons.

When there’s a large intelligence differential, the smarter one might not even
try and communicate

~~~
MarkPNeyer
Which humans? And which other life forms?

Plenty of humans treat animals with respect. I see people like spiritual
leaders as being far more conscious than political leaders or sociopath CEO’s.

I don’t think this increased ethics is some weird quirk of spiritual leaders,
but rather a deep feature of true intelligence.

It would take a lot of energy and computional capacity to make it all the way
across deep space. I don’t see how a species could do that if it were fighting
itself at home.

If it’s not fighting itself at home, why? Dictatorships are unstable because
there’s always someone else who wants to be on top. The only way I can imagine
a stable societ with that much reach is if the society contains individual
members who care ahout each other.

A house divided against itself will not stand, and a social network at war
with itself can never reach the stars.

If you imagine how different humanity would have to be for us to get out that
far, we’d have to all be concerned with the welfare of all humans. Once
empathy reaches critical mass, the bodhisattva vow becomes an obviously
correct moral imperative. I think of it like a schelling point for
sufficiently introspective intelligent minds.

Once you’ve expanded empathy to all humans, you can’t stop there. He only way
to truly care about all humans - in all their myriad forms and oddities - is
to care about all beings.

~~~
mazerackham
this sounds like a dream

------
melling
This caught my eye:

“China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the
entire 20th century.“

China appears to not be slowing down.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Concrete is not what most buildings are constructed out of in the USA. Steel
at the tall end, wood at the shorter end, some brick here and there, whereas
china is concrete for the vast majority of buildings. This is like saying
Chinese ate more chicken feet in 2016 than Americans did over the last 100
years.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Yes, to the dead reply to my answer. Chinese build mostly with concrete unless
the building is over around 30 stories tall, then they have to use steel of
course. The reason they use so much concrete is that it’s cheap, and they can
use lots of unskilled migrant labor. Remember, china builds as much to keep
poor farmers employed as much as it does to actually create the structure. The
drawback to this approach is that overbuilding is required and the structure
become decrepit more quickly.

The USA uses less concrete for opposite reasons: wood is plentiful, skilled
workers to build with steel are also plentiful, and anyways, you can’t import
cheap Chinese or Indian workers to build in concrete like the Middle East and
Singapore does.

------
mceoin
Nothing good will come of this. Stay dark in the forest.

~~~
narrator
What if we're the North Sentinel Island (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island)
) of the universe? The universe is a really really big place and there are
probably plenty of habitable planets, especially with terraforming. We're
probably just a little remote violent oddity. The most interesting thing about
the earth is probably our DNA. They can get that easily without destroying us.

~~~
Houshalter
Do you know that the Sentinel Islanders aren't as crazy as they seem? The vast
majority of hunter-gatherer societies are quickly wiped out when agricultural
ones show up. This isn't even something that only happened in the distant
past. Even today, in Brazil, farmers massacre natives for their land.

Why do we need so much land? Don't we have enough? But our numbers have grown
exponentially. And even though we don't need that much land at the moment,
there's still some small positive economic value to more land. And so the
natives lose.

A similar thing applies to civilizations. The universe only seems big until
you factor in exponential growth. Even if humanity could travel a fraction of
the speed of light. Give us a few hundred thousand years, and we would settle
and overpopulate every planet in this galaxy. And be on our way to the next
one.

There are other reasons aliens would want to stop us. If they value human life
at all, they might have completely alien moral systems and want to impose them
on us. Human society is pretty awful with lots of suffering. No moral aliens
would leave us alone to our own devices. But do we really want to get stuck
being ruled over by them forever with no autonomy?

If they don't value human life, we are really screwed. In the future we could
expand and advance and become a threat to them. It costs them nothing to
exterminate us and prevents any future conflicts or costs we might cause them.
So why not?

~~~
narrator
If ETs are able to travel around the Galaxy at faster than light speed that
means that they have have the ability to harness absolutely enormous amounts
of energy. Probably each Extra Terrestrial ship has multiple Tsar bombs worth
of energy at their disposal. Their society must have developed some sort of
maturity to make war and violence obsolete, much like World War has become
less prevalent with the advent of the atomic age or they would have
annihilated themselves early on.

~~~
pc86
> _Their society must have developed some sort of maturity to make war and
> violence obsolete_

Why "must?" That just sounds like an assumption based on what you want to be
true. It is just as likely that a civilization you describe exists but has the
exact same type and frequency of internal squabbles that humans do.

~~~
pegasus
With that much power, "internal squabbles" equals mutual annihilation. Just
imagine if terrorists could easily make their own thermonuclear weapon etc.

------
xster
Please please don't spoil the book for others while writing comments.

------
Yizahi
So I assume they did found the guy to run it?
[http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2105278/china...](http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2105278/china-
offering-over-million-dollars-foreigner-run-worlds-largest)

------
sidcool
Somehow I am sure that some governments have already made contact with ET
intelligence. This will be revealed in a few decades may be, when world is
ready for it. A conspiracy theory but something unknown gives me the
confidence and belief.

------
justinzollars
I'm enjoying the Atlantic more and more

------
jordache
the three body problem was a horrible book. The whole notion of detecting
signals from other civilizations is not a novel concept in Sci-fi world. There
are much better articulated & compelling examples from other science fiction
works..

~~~
bcherny
I enjoyed the book. What are some better ones you recommend?

~~~
philipkglass
If you want some first contact stories that are better (IMO) than The Three
Body Problem, try:

\- Blindsight by Peter Watts (cannot recommend this strongly enough)

\- The Forge of God and sequel Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear

\- Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

\- Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

I appreciated getting a non-Western take on one of the most durable SF tropes
in the Three Body Problem, but I didn't much enjoy it overall, and didn't read
the sequels. It didn't hang together logically for me. The aliens could have
built orbital habitats in their home system faster and easier than finding a
replacement planet, even if they couldn't directly fix the problems of their
home planet. Also I had a hard time squaring the aliens' (believable, hard-SF)
colony ship capabilities with their magical, completely-beyond-known-physics
"sophons" that they sent ahead.

~~~
thriftwy
Just wanted to concur that Blindsight is an awful book. I see it recommended
everywhere but I've found it thoroughly uncompelling.

As far as recommendations go, Mote in God's Eye is hard to beat.

~~~
phaemon
To "concur" means to agree; I'm not sure what word you meant but I'm assuming
it was a synonym for disagree.

EDIT: oh, did you perhaps misread "cannot recommend this strongly enough" as
"cannot recommend this"? That would make sense.

~~~
thriftwy
No, you're right in that I am mistaken. I was meant to provide a negative
review to balance a positive review.

------
phirschybar
wow. I've always held to the Star Trek theory that any advanced civilization
must be benevolent.

------
dEnigma
Story aside, that's some very unlucky/lacking contrast between the main title
and the title background image.

------
adamredwoods
If extra-terrestrial being are using communications technology we haven't
reached yet, which I feel is the case for faster-than-light communications,
then we have a long time to go yet.

------
techwraith
Haven't they read The Three-Body Problem?

~~~
mattmanser
It's extensively discussed in the article.

