
In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists - howrude
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/In-search-of-ET-Fear-of-what-s-out-there-has-13640953.php
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jandrese
This is not something I'm worried about. Unless FTL travel is real, the amount
of resources necessary to make the trip to kill off/enslave humans makes the
entire effort unprofitable. Basically, if you have the ability to travel
between star systems, you already have the technology to exist effectively
forever in a self contained environment. You can mine asteroids/planets
forever in your own solar system for effectively unlimited materials.

Its like you are thirsty so you build an intercontinental jet plane from
scratch using parts from around your house to fly to Japan to steal a single
Coke from a 7-11.

~~~
pmoriarty
Even mere humans, who've only reaped the fruits of serious scientific
advancement for a few hundred years have already come up with a way to get to
Alpha Centauri within 44 years.[1]

All such spacecraft would have to do to cause massive devastation is aim at
Earth and not stop, though it's likely that more advanced civilizations could
come up with more effective means of destruction.

Alien civilizations could have advanced scientifically for thousands, hundreds
of thousands, or even millions of years. It is unlikely that we can accurately
put limits on their capabilities.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29)

~~~
jandrese
Project Orion is a cocktail napkin estimate. The actual problem is much much
harder.

But as you point out, anything that can travel between the stars can trivially
wipe out all life on Earth without warning. They also know we exist already
thanks to the changes in the chemical composition of our atmosphere. If they
want to kill us then we're dead.

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rdiddly
_" Any predatory civilization would probably have detected us by now simply by
analyzing our atmosphere, they reason. Humans, Vakoch said, have been using
radar, which can purportedly be detected 70 light-years away, since World War
II. Television and radio signals would long ago have signaled our presence to
malevolent space ruffians, he said."_

That's how he justifies the broadcasting of signals, but take the next logical
step: It also indicates either that nobody is listening, or that they're
unable or unwilling to contact us, or that they're already in the process of
trying. In any case, it's hard to imagine the METI messages would change
anything. By that same argument. And I mean why would the
intentional/contrived message be any more persuasive than all our "honest" and
un-self-conscious messages to each other over the years? Anybody who was
curious could have learned everything by now.

I also would like to call out the typical assumption of a "technically-
advanced race of aliens" and whatnot. The aliens always seem to be technically
advanced, don't they? In other words, like us, but more so. That's a mirror
you're looking at, and it's how you recognize something man-made. _Homo
sapiens_ is the one with the fetish for _techne_. It seems the aliens we
imagine are always either similar to us (which we like) but better, or else
they're dissimilar, and predictably worse/more evil (and tend to look like
combinations of creatures from THIS planet that we don't like... insects and
reptiles figuring prominently). That's more a mirror of our dislikes, but
still a mirror. Aliens are always created in our image, and that shows an
embarrassing narcissism & lack of imagination. We're just projecting our hopes
& fears. Keep your mind open.

One more nitpick: _" We won’t know for about 25 years, assuming the communique
is sent at the speed of light."_ Pretty good assumption, given that it's not
possible to send EM waves at any other speed!

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SOMA_BOFH
I haven't seen any anti-METI argument which counters this:

"Humans, Vakoch said, have been using radar, which can purportedly be detected
70 light-years away, since World War II. Television and radio signals would
long ago have signaled our presence to malevolent space ruffians, he said."

~~~
blueadept111
Counter argument:

So if we've been using radar since WWII, and radar has been capable of
signalling our presence to alien civilizations, then we don't need METI.
Alternatively, if METI is proposing a signal that can reach alien
civilizations in a way that TV and radio signals cannot, then the original
objections to METI still stand, and the TV/radio signal argument is a red
herring.

But really, it's just common sense. Everything we know about the universe
tells us that complex organisms exist at the expense of simpler organisms. As
a nascent space-faring civilization, we are the minnows in the ocean, and
signalling our presence to the bigger fish is the kind of mistake that a
minnow only makes once. What exactly is the perceived positive outcome of
making contact with a more advanced civilization?

~~~
svachalek
This, exactly. What METI is proposing, as I understand, is a stronger, more
unmistakable signal of intelligence which carries higher risks.

Also, this is 70 years of noise, a blip on the galactic timescale, getting
weaker the farther it goes. We can't stop what's gone out already but that
doesn't make us obligated to keep advertising our presence forever.

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sbuttgereit
I think the fears of some ET empire with Darth Vader (or similar) at the head
is very misplaced. Just think of the economics... "let's go exploit that world
10 LY away from us that we don't fully understand and which will still takes
us an insane amount of time to enslave and milk resources from!" What a
scalable strategy given the size of space... one might even say it's
astronomically large! The resource consumption alone would be a very
speculative bet by any would-be invaders... unless they were already close at
hand, but we're probably already too late to prevent that....

Naw... if there is any alien apocalypse to worry about it's that some advanced
civilization saw a life friendly Earth through their telescopes, perhaps
millions of years ago, and decided to seed the place with their own bio-
material and without any regard to what life might be there. It won't be a
marching army, but a "Terra forming" project that may well already be underway
if its happening at all, I would expect.

~~~
tigen
You can't know or understand possible ET motivations or capabilities.

Humans routinely drive other species on Earth to extinction, our own cousins.
We also damage our own planet's environment.

It may be logical for an ET to just destroy us the way you might destroy a
harmful bacteria, which might otherwise spread unpredictably. It wouldn't be
about wanting slaves or raw resources (although as someone said, Earth itself
might be considered somewhat valuable).

~~~
sbuttgereit
"You can't know or understand possible ET motivations or capabilities."

True, but my argument is that their intentions fundamentally don't matter. The
real costs of acting on ill-intentions through interstellar space would
probably give any real life Klingons or Romulans pause.

Meanwhile we fly, sometimes even into space, drive, walk outside, stay inside,
eat/drink things that we shouldn't (but enjoy), and a thousand other risks
which are substantially more real on an everyday basis... and many of those
risks also come with rewards that can make life much more full and rich.

I think making contact with aliens would most likely just 1) confirm we
weren't alone or 2) might actually be of benefit as we exchange knowledge and
ideas, and/or 3) tell us that evolution tends to creates fearful, xenophobic
entities where it also develops intelligence... in that order and with no
further consequence than the knowledge.

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maxander
We're already sending out a signal into the cosmos (and one more powerful than
the radar signals others have mentioned)- the recent sharp upswing in CO2 over
the last hundred or so years [0] would look markedly artificial, which
combined with the presence of oxygen (which wouldn't stay in the atmosphere if
it weren't continually renewed) strongly indicates at least a complex
ecosystem, if not directly implicating an industrial civilization. Detecting
light reflected from exoplanets is something we can already do, or nearly so,
so we can count on this being detectable from large distances by alien
civilizations with access to potentially megastructure-scale space telescopes.
At that point, any reasonably curious or concerned ETs could send a probe to
get a closer look.

Earth, as far as we know, is an unusual planet, and obviously so. Either we're
wrong, and there's Earths all over the place, or we're alone, or ET has been
keeping an eye on us for a long time already; that we're "hidden" is hard to
imagine.

[0] [https://www.co2.earth/co2-ice-core-data](https://www.co2.earth/co2-ice-
core-data)

~~~
kerbalspacepro
If you saw a sharp change in the atmospheric composition of a planet in our
solar system would you think "volcanoes" or "life"?

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Smithalicious
Most known cases of two formerly separated civilizations coming into contact
have ended like the European invasion of the Americas. I think we'd do best to
be cautious unless there is at least a slim hope we could ward of an invader.

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dfilppi
Dumb statement: "Television and radio signals would long ago have signaled our
presence to malevolent space ruffians, he said." There are only 11 known
habitable exoplanets within 50 light years that we know of. Assume there are
1000 within 100 light years. The odds of a super predator in that small of a
sample are virtually 0. Plus, even if they had their armada on standby, it
takes at least 100 years to get here. Apparently there is little intelligent
life on earth.

------
Digit-Al
To be honest I think we are vastly more likely to be destroyed by ourselves
than by aliens. Maybe we'd be better off enslaved by aliens; we could be the
green mans burden.

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kyriakos
Sounds like a lot of scientist have been reading the Three Body Problem.

I think we should worry more about AI taking over rather than aliens. Its
actually much closer to home. On the other hand the only alien intelligence
which has the luxury of interstellar travel is the one which has no sense of
time and that would be alien AI again.

~~~
kerbalspacepro
The Three Body Problem and ASI are two songs on the same instrument: value
misalignment in cases of massive power differentials.

In an indifferent universe, two optimizers optimizing different things will be
in conflict. Can we build machines that optimize what we want to optimize? Can
we align our optimization with aliens before it becomes optimal for one of us
to annihilate the other?

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jkartchner
I figure it's all moot anyway. We are probably alone in the universe. Fermi's
paradox is a thing.

~~~
jandrese
I don't think we're alone. But I do think we're kind of trapped in our Solar
System along with everybody else. Interstellar travel is so outrageously
expensive that by the time you have the technology to do it you necessarily
have the technology that makes it unnecessary.

An interstellar journey means you need a ship that can survive indefinitely in
deep space, where you don't get free energy from solar panels or have easy
access to comets to mine for materials. An in-system habitat has to be a
solved problem before you can even consider building one. But at that point
you have effectively unlimited living space, energy, and materials so why
bother?

Even if your sun is turning into a red giant you can move your habitats to the
optimal distance to sustain life. It's really hard to imagine a time when
Humans have used up the entire mass of the other planets in the solar system
and need to look outward for resources. You could build an almost unimaginable
number of O'Neill cylinders using only the mass of Jupiter.

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evolvedcleaning
Being enslaved by evil aliens is among the worst of fears. The risk isn’t
death or annhilation; it’s being denied the mercy of a short (100 years)
existence, in bondage and suffering.

I fully support a careful approach to combing the cosmos.

Edit: May I ask why this is being downvoted?

~~~
blotter_paper
I didn't downvote you, but this seems extraordinarily unlikely to me. Why
would our extraterrestrial overlords want to use _us_ as slaves? They
travelled a long way to get here, surely they should have robots or a
genetically engineered underclass or something. We're in the process of making
human labor obsolete ourselves. The only scenario I can imagine where this
makes sense is one where the aliens have interstellar travel but lack decent
genetic engineering, and they're interested in exploring/building/mining in
places that are inhospitable to both their own biology and robotics but not
our biology (like a planet whose gravity would crush them that also has an EM
field that would fry circuits without exceptional shielding). This seems like
a stretch to me. I feel like wiping out a potential future threat is a much
more reasonable incentive, with exploitation/study of an already existent
biosphere being a runner up. Most of the things they could want humans for
would be more efficiently accomplished by phytoplankton and krill. You're
right that nigh-perpetual enslavement is the most horrifying possibility, it
just seems implausible.

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rvcdbn
What possible resource does Earth or human civilization possess that ETs
advanced enough to pose an interstellar threat would be interested in?

~~~
NickM
I sort of agree, but to be fair a nice habitable planet could be a really rare
and valuable resource in and of itself, assuming there are any life forms out
there with biology similar enough to our own to find Earth desirable.

~~~
jandrese
Also assumes there aren't a bunch of Earth-like worlds that are otherwise
uninhabited that would be much easier to colonize than one with potentially
hostile/poisonous natives.

~~~
kyriakos
or that the potential alien invaders are not adapted to a completely different
environment than earth's

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coleifer
Not discussed by the article, but I wonder...Is it more terrible to find out
that nobody's out there? Nobody's listening?

~~~
zzzcpan
Or how about this: find out that somebody's out there, but not evolved enough
to be listening? This I find likely. Fixes Fermi paradox too, since this
doesn't assume high probability of random life on some planet evolving as far
as we did in those billions of years.

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zwaps
brb, hiding behind Jupiter

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bovermyer
I will never understand people who are afraid of the unknown.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I will never understand anyone who would randomly pick a mushroom from the
forest floor and start nibbling on it.

~~~
bovermyer
Eating mushrooms in the wild is not even remotely similar to inviting contact
from other sentient species.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Was that what the parent comment said?!? I thought it was something about not
understanding fear of the unknown. And then like I thought, hey is there a
metaphor that might show how sometimes that it would be wise to have some
little bit of wariness about the unknown at least? And then I said ah hah,
there is and I wrote it down. I'm pretty sure it went something like that.

~~~
bovermyer
You can be cautious around something without being afraid of it.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
sure - and people might play semantic games about what words really mean but
at some point these concepts blend into each other. hence
[https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/caution](https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/caution)

Another word for caution noun

    
    
        Careful forethought to avoid harm or risk:
        calculation, care, carefulness, chariness, gingerliness, precaution, wariness. See fear
    

I guess most people would admit a relation between the concepts, caution seems
to me to be admitting there might be something to be afraid of. So to clarify
my earlier metaphor with a concrete meaning: I will never understand anyone
that acts like there can never anything to be afraid of in the unknown.

And I mean the perfect lack of knowledge is impossible, yes if I definitely
did not know anything about something I would not be afraid of possible
problems with that thing - how could I?

But we always know a bit even about the 'unknown' even if the thing we know is
that there might be something in that unknown thing that would be dangerous to
life, as many things in the Universe are like extreme heat, cold, releases of
kinetic energy, too much water, or the presence of elements of one sort or
another in more abundance than is healthy for us, or life that is similar to
life on this planet since much of life on this planet is focused on killing
other life on this planet for various reasons. I'm walking in an unknown
environment on this planet I might still be afraid because I don't know what
large carnivores it has, but I do know it might have large carnivores.

~~~
bovermyer
I see where you're coming from. I maintain that caution and fear are
different, even if they're related.

My original post was probably too broad to be useful. This topic requires
nuance that I didn't express.

