There actually is a theory in answer to Fermi’s Paradox that says we haven’t been visited by advanced ET’s, because we’re not ready yet.
This is known as the Zoo Hypothesis, in scientific circles, at least. (Non-scientific people have less credible theories that I will leave out for now. But feel free to add them if you wish.)
My question simply is, Are we ready for them now? I know in the Middle Ages, we would think advanced aliens were monsters or demons. And even perhaps into the 19th Century this was true. But is it true anymore? So does this theory at least, fall apart? And so are there anymore?
As I said, there are some wilder theories out there. But I reject them, and assume most of you do the same. But add them if you must.
Also, this is a serious question, and I am not joking. So you don’t do the same. Civility and respect always:).
How do we know what standards the aliens might have? Do we need to be space ready? Have a colony not on our planet? Have discovered FTL drives? Have a unified world government?
My understanding is that they were just about to contact us a year plus ago, but then they saw that the “leader of the free world” wasn’t exactly sane by their standards.
(Yes that last part was a joke. The first was not – they’re aliens after all.)
No, we aren’t ready for contact with an inteligent alien civilization. We often have great difficult in communicating and understanding between human cultures and we share a common evolutionary history and cognitive architecture as well as sharing many social constructs and technologies. An alien species would likely be so different from us in fundamental ways, from how they recognize and communicate between each other to their essential perception and cognitive construction of the world, that anything more than the most trivial communication may be hopeless. This is actually an area in which artificial general intelligence might actually be critical in being able to “understand” alien communication or concepts by not being inherently tied to a mammalian brain and all of the affective and congitive systems that are hardwired into it.
There is, of course, the strong likelihood that any alien civilization capable of a level of technology to control and use the amount of energy required to cross interstellar distances will be radically more advanced than us in many ways. Such meetings between more and less advanced or experienced human cultures inevitably result in the less capable culture being subjugated if not virtually destroyed. Such destruction wouldn’t necessarily even be deliberate; just the introduction of a technology with dangerous applications could be sufficient to destabilize human civilization, or aliens could inadvertantly harm the ecosystem or human society without even understanding the consequences.
The dreams of SETI researchers aside, we would probably fare poorly in a direct exchange with another intelligence species unless they are very aware of what threats their technologies might present and benevolent enough to take precautions. There is no particular reason that either of these preconditions would be necessarily true. And even if they are, the likelihood of engaging in meaningful communication with an alien species is remote without substantial advances in ‘strong’ machine intelligence that aren’t even on the horizon.
I don’t think it’s possible to be ready for something about which we know absolutely nothing. We can be better or worse prepared, but we’ll never be ready. And I have no idea what preparation plans our government has made or if they are even publicly available for review.
They are waiting for the robots to overthrow humanity so that they can deal with rational beings.
In all seriousness, I don’t know if I agree that they would have difficulties understanding us. We would obviously have difficulties understanding them, but they are the advanced ones.
It’s like a parent and a child, the child doesn’t understand the parent, so the parent needs to understand the child. The work is on the parent to be able to speak in a way the child understands, and understand in a way that the child speaks. That’s not always easy, but the other way around is impossible. Any society capable of conquering the vastness of space should be able to understand that we are intelligent and able to communicate, and should also be able to understand and replicate our forms of communication, now matter how primitive they find them to be.
Just as with a child, or with an animal, you are not going to be able to communicate the fullness of your thoughts to them, the aliens would leave quite a bit of nuance and understanding on the cutting room floor while translating to our form of conversation, but it’s not like even two people who speak the same language ever are able to communicate all thoughts and ideas perfectly with each other, either.
As to the basics of the OP, as far as a culture, I think that we would be severely reshaped and reformed by a first contact scenario. I don’t think that any of our political or societal structures would handle that intact. It would be one of those Ian Bank’s “Outside Context Problems”, that is simply impossible to truly prepare for, as all your contingency plans didn’t count on that.
Give us a couple centuries, and maybe we will be out in space, and a first contact can be done on slightly more even terms. Sure, getting here from another star is much harder than getting to mars from earth, but it does give us a bit more credibility and resilience in the face of contact from interstellar species.
Personally, I’m a “rare earther”, in that I think that the reason that we look out and don’t see anyone else is because we are the first, at least within the local group of galaxies and a few billion light years around, to reach this far in development. Someone has to be first, and the universe is actually pretty young, when compared to its eventual lifespan.
I think if we think we’re ready it just shows how not-ready we must be. I agree with those who already said (more or less) "Ready for what exactly? How could anyone be ready, or deem themselves ready, for a complete unknown?)
The problem with the analogy with the difference in understanding between parent and child is that while the adult has more experience to interpret the behavior and pre-literate communication fo the child, the reason they can do so is because the essential internal experience, affects and resulting behaviors, and basic ways of processing language are sufficiently common that a parent can interpret the needs and desires of the child. There is absolutley no guarantee that an alien species will communicate or process language (or indeed, even basic interior construct of perception) in the same way humans do.
I know that some would like to claim that language is an “easy problem” compared to the basic physics of interstellar transport, but when you look at how much of the neocortex is evolved specifically for the processing of human language and interpretation of non-verbal communication such as facial expressions or body movement, and how much language ties into socialization down to a basic affective level, it becomes quite difficult to see how an alien species which would share nothing of this in common with us would be capable of anything but the most trivial communications, and perhaps not even desire that much. It is entirely possible that even basic concepts in mathematics or interpretation of physics will not be sufficiently common to relate in any form of language.
We have an example for comparison: many cetaceans, and specificially the bottlenose dolphin, have encephelization quotients that are nearly twice that of the chimpanzee, and based upon some limited studies of actual neurological composition may actually have a connectome in their equivalent of the neocortex with a complexity approaching that of humans. Bottlenose dolphins also exhibit complex and repeatable vocalizations that are known to very between populations, which many cetatean researchers belive suggests they have something akin to a grammar that is far beyond the more basic instinctive vocalizations dogs, horses, or the non-human apes. However, despite decades of intimate study, we have not been able to decypher the grammar or even verify that they have a language even though they can rapidly learn commands from trainers.
The reason we don’t see evidence of other civilizations may well be that we’re in a fairly remote part of the galaxy, would not be able to pick up even very powerful radio signals over more than a few hundred light years at most, and do not have the capability to interpret more robust interstellar communication such as modulated gravity waves or other means that we have not even discovered the physics to look for yet. We could also be very late in terms of getting to the level of even controlling electromagnetic forces (which we’ve only been able to do effectively for slightly more than a century) or alternatively we might have evolved much faster than other civilizationsm, and a gap of a few thousand years between nearby civilizations may be enough for one to arise, fail or evolve beyond conception, and effectively disappear before another one rises to communicate with. Even our local neighborhood is a vast volume that we’ve examined only remotely and with quite primitive tools. We certainly couldn’t identify a civilization around a star in even a nearby galaxy unless it were building literally cosmic-scale structures, and of course anything that we’d observe today would have reflected activity from millions of years ago.
We really don’t have enough data or experience to say anything useful about the probability of intelligent life developing anywhere other than to observe that the basic constituants of our type of life appear to be very common and the chemical reactions involved in metabolism and other functions do not require any kind of special environment or motive force. Our galaxy is pretty old (~10 Byr) and our planet is slightly less than half of that, and it appears to be unspectacular. That human civilization would be the first to arise among billions of potential systems is about as unlikely as that life is unique to Earth. There may be certain bottlenecks in evolution that make complex life or sapience exceedingly rare, but we really don’t have enough data to draw any conclusions or even make more than highly speculative guesses about the probability of alien civilizations developing.
Obviously, it is all speculation of the lowest order here, but I do think that there is a difference between the way that we relate to animals on earth, and the way an advanced civilization would relate to us. As you said, we are still trying to determine whether or not they actually do have a language, and what sorts of concepts that that language can communicate. They may not even have a language that can accommodate more advanced concepts than food, sex, and sleep.
We do have one that is obviously complex. We have obviously altered our world in ways that show high level abstract communications. We have written and auditory recordings specifically made for the teaching of our languages to our young.
There is no way to say for sure, at least until it happens, but I would think that a civilization that was curious and had the desire to communicate with us would find a way for us to understand them, and a way to understand our replies. Of course, if they don’t care about us, and don’t have any curiosity about the dominant species that infests the surface of this world, then it is unlikely that we could come up with a way to communicate with them.
Unless we come up with a solution to the fermi paradox by discovering the great filter that is in our future, I think that we will be, in fairly short order (tens of thousands or millions of years) building structures that can be seen with primitive tools from across the galaxy, and spreading out enough that those structures will make the galaxy distinguishable from across the universe (light lag does apply).
Just like the lottery, the chances are against you, but someone does win. Someone does need to be first, and there are some rather improbable things about our world that do make it more likely to be first.
The size of our star is important. Much bigger, and it would have burned out, or at least be in the end stage of its life by now. Much smaller, and we’d need to be closer to it, and smaller stars tend to be a bit more active than bigger stars, so we’d be closer to a star that has more flare activity. The size of the earth is important. Something the size of mars has more difficulty holding an atmosphere, but if we get much bigger, it makes getting into space harder, even if everything else about evolution and development is the same. The moon, which seems a somewhat unlikely event is fairly useful for creating tides and keeping tectonic activity up.
A star half the size of the sun will last about 10 times as long. Ours only had a few billion years to develop life, and in another billion, it will no longer be hospitable to it anymore. A star that lasts a hundred billion years, that warms much more slowly so that the liquid water temperature zone sweeps very slowly across any planets it has, is going to be much more conducive to life than our own, it just won’t be for another few dozen billion years. In a few hundred billion years, red dwarfs may settle down enough and warm up enough that planets far enough away to not be tidally locked will start to thaw out, and have a couple hundred billion years of liquid water temperatures on their surfaces.
I get that it is the copernican view to never assume that we are in a unique part of the universe, but as far as temporal position, we obviously are. Star formation can keep occuring (though obviously slowing down) for a good trillion years more, and those stars won’t be going out for as much as hundreds of trillions years more. We are about .001% of the way into the lifespan of the universe. The 13.7 billion years that came before only seems ancient until you compare it to what comes next.
Because, on the one hand, I think for humanity to be ready, we should be rational first and foremost; appreciating why the scientific method works and rejecting superstition etc. And have basically eliminated aggressive impulses.
We’re clearly not there.
(although I will say, despite the numerous backward steps in recent years, the long-term trajectory is on-target).
On the other hand, stastically-speaking, it’s highly improbable that aliens will arrive who are just a little bit more advanced than us, such that we can establish trade or war or whatever.
It’s much more likely that they will be *unimaginably *more advanced.
Given that, it shouldn’t really matter whether we’re totally peaceful, or rational. It’s not like we’d be a threat to them.
As I’ve said on the dope many times, I think this popular meme is a flawed extrapolation.
The one thing we’ll know about aliens that visit us, is that they have built the technology required to travel interstellar distances. This tells us that they’re able to solve extremely complex problems that are wholly unlike what they experienced in their natural environment, many many times over.
Compared to solving these arbitrary, difficult problems that nature serves up, figuring out that a sentient species is trying to communicate and then decoding their language is pretty trivial. It’s structured data, with etabytes of data available, and humans actively trying to help them decode it.
And the sentient part there is important. People will say “Well we still can’t communicate with dolphins”, but where’s the evidence that they’re trying to communicate complex ideas to us? When can we see them applying their general intelligence to solve complex problems?
If dolphins had built technology, and we couldn’t communicate with them, then the point would work, but they haven’t and it doesn’t.
Back on humans communicating with aliens, I really don’t think it will be a problem. In fact, I’d think they’d probably decode most modern human languages before we were even aware of their presence.
On the whole I agree with you but I would say I think we are better prepared to cope with it today than we were in the 1950’s (or really anytime before that).
Most people on the planet are now aware we live in a vast universe which (probably) has other life in it. Add to that plenty of sci-fi with aliens in it and as a population we’ve been primed a bit to handle that there is life other than us out there…somewhere.
That said there would doubtless be mass panic and hysteria even if the aliens were benevolent. So “ready” for first contact is a bit of a reach in my view.
Also, I think the governments of earth would spaz. Either out of a knee jerk “we don’t know what it is so shoot it down” mentality or fear of an alien gap by letting some other country make first contact and get the jump on any cool gizmos they might have.
Having written all that my answer to the OP is “no”.
Given the lack of a unified planet, and the terrible things we do to each other, I’d say we are not ready. If we spent 10% of the money we spend on weapons on space exploration, we could be colonizing the solar system very soon.
I think the contact would not go well for us, but not because the aliens would conquer us or eat us. How would we react when the answers to all open scientific questions could be found in Volume I of their unified guide to science. (The stuff in the other 7 volumes we haven’t even thought to ask yet.) How about if all religious people discovered that their beliefs are typical of class II civilizations? How about if we were told we’re too primitive to even vote on decisions.
We have big egos. They’d get shrunk for sure by contact, and the aliens would know it and stay away.
I think it would come if we did something significant, like an interstellar flight for instance. Something only possible from a unified civilization.
There are plenty of suitable stars, and we now know that planet creation is unexceptional. Sure it is a long time until proton decay, but we are hardly at the very beginning of the universe. Sure there had to be a cycle of supernovas to populate the galaxy with raw materials for life, but there has been plenty of time after that for life before ours to evolve.
Now intelligence may be non-adaptive in the long run. There may be no cultures close enough to us to make communication practical, so they don’t bother. They may be ethically advanced enough not to send out nanomachines to munch up the galaxy. Or they may be staying away until we grow up. But I think us being first is very unlikely.
This may not apply to you, but those who advocate that idea seem to have a religious objection to humans not being special.
I asked someone on the Mars rover project if they had a protocol in place in case they discovered evidence of life (not intelligent, just life). He said no, which surprised me. It would have such big implications on religion that I thought they may go the “your mother? She’s on the roof” route.
Do keep in mind this is all speculation, based on opinion more than cold hard data, because we won’t have that cold hard data until the aliens visit and give it to us.
Planet creation is unexceptional, and there are plenty of stars, but the right planet in the right spot around the right star is a bit less likely. The moon, too, I do think it a game changer in the development of complex life, and the circumstances behind that seem to be a bit improbable as well.
It really only takes a few filters that require less than lottery odds to get through to eliminate enough stars as harboring complex life that it becomes reasonable to predict only one evolution of a spacefaring species per a couple billion light years given the amount of time elapsed.
I do that that the universe will be both more hospitable to life in the future, as well as having more time for chance evolution to create complex and possibly intelligent life in those hospitable places.
It isn’t anything about proton decay, but basic star formation and their cycles. We will have stars that are capable of sustaining and even evolving life for trillions of years. Give it another hundred billion years or so, and there will probably be more intelligent life. By the year 500 billion, the universe will probably be teeming with it. The universe truly is in its very early life, at a mere 13.7 billion.
If space fairing life is common, then you have to explain why all cultures act in a way that we are fairly certain that ours wouldn’t. Unless something stops us, there is no reason why we shouldn’t start on filling up the galaxy with our people and our junk within the next couple thousand years, and have it pretty much filled within a few million, leaving major evidence of our existence to anyone in the galaxy, and pretty compelling evidence for anyone within our light cone. The only reasons we wouldn’t is because we wipe ourselves out first, or the galactic zoning board doesn’t approve of cosmic scale megastructures. The first is depressing, and the second I find more unlikely than us being the first.
It may not only be that intelligence is non-adaptive, but complex life itself. I think that as we head out into the universe, we will find life under every rock we turn over, but single celled life and algaes; differentiated cells for multicellular life is something that arrived on the scene on earth fairly late in the game.
I certainly do not feel that way. I think that we are special only because the available evidence suggests that to me.
The alternative, that we are not special, has the implication that civilizations like our own are not special, which means that there is nothing special about the way that they come to an end before they start making cosmic scale structures. I suppose that is my point of optimism that inclines me towards the rare earth hypothesis, that otherwise, we are doomed to die out on this unremarkable rock.
Because the truth is that they’re not actually looking for it. Other than the very primitive and distractionary “heat some dirt and see what gases come out”, we have never included any instruments that are capable of imaging single cell organisms or microscopic fossils. Nor are there any current plans to do so, beyond the not quite practical at this time sample return mission.
As to the OP, my firm belief is that any advanced spacefaring culture would have zero reason to interact with us. They would simply be exposing themselves to a host of new microorganisms, exposing us to the same, for zero practical gain. One probe tapping into our internet would provide them with all of our knowledge, culture, art, music, science and anything else they might be interested.
Besides, Humans are insane.
The fantasy that they would show up and give us a bunch of knowledge and technology is just that, pure fantasy. Why would they do this? We have nothing they could possibly want in exchange and they would clearly see from our own history that we would never do the same for others.
Welcome us into the spacefaring fold? Nonsense. We’re not even close to that level of technology.
I would expect it to be more like the Star Trek first contact scenario, without all the fantasy bullshit injected into that series. They would only want to make contact us once we’ve shown we have FTL technology, in which case, if they control our local space, it might be to tell us where not to go, to conquer us, quarantine us or otherwise make sure that we didn’t bother them. I doubt very much that it would be “Hey! Welcome to our Federation as equals!”.
What about our bodily fluids? Sure they would want those!
But again, not knowing anything about them, it doesn’t make much sense to speculate about what they would want or not want. They’re technologically more advanced than us, therefore they wouldn’t contact us is not a logical conclusion to draw. It’s also not good science to start with that type of conclusion already in place.
Conjecture: if an activity by an advanced civilization is expensive in an absolute sense, expensive in a relative sense, and morally dubious, it won’t get through the ethics committee. You need all 3.
Advanced civilizations will implode if they can’t build pacifistic if not entirely peaceful ethics committees. At the very least, there have to be mechanisms in place that prevent self-destruction, though admittedly ethically pronounced xenophobia has to be considered. Technologies that are relatively or absolutely cheap won’t be stopped by ethical concerns. I suppose I should say “Net expense” rather than “Expense”: if there are big returns from alien contact, then aliens might consider such a project. I doubt whether this is the case.
If remote viewing is generally discovered by 3000 CE civilizations, that could limit space programs to, say, a 500 light year radius before they die from lack of funding. If it is discovered by 2500 CE civilizations, then beaming the Encyclopedia Galactica might be considered pointless, as it won’t benefit civilizations much under 2000 CE, and it would be ignored by civilizations beyond 2500 CE.
Another interstellar thwarting technology is soma, but that is separate from my framework.
I can’t think of another good candidate for “Relatively cheap” technology than remote viewing, broadly defined. Such technology may not be possible of course. If it is, first contact occurs when someone with an Earth remote viewing monitor comes across an alien facility housing a remote viewing monitor. Both will presumably have whiteboards available for such occasions.
My conjecture can be adapted to address Nick Bostrom’s simulation paper.
I suspect the development and widespread usage of interstellar technology with meet and greet capabilities would involve a great degree of convergent evolution, both genetic and cultural. We could reasonably conjecture quite a bit about such a civilization, based upon such behavior.
I have grave doubts about whether humans match such criteria well. Perhaps a hive mind with particular utilitarian weightings might support such a project. Because if humans did such a stunt once, twice, or three times its consequences for our target would be considered debatable. And where’s the upside for us?
I’m less than convinced about the importance of the moon. We only have one example. I remember when some thought that the placement and size ordering of planets in the solar system was significant. Now we’ve seen enough other ones to know that ours is accidental, and gas giants can orbit reasonably closely to stars. Probably not as frequently as our current data indicates because the methodology is biased to finding these, but more frequently than in our solar system.
A planet can have multiple satellites. Solar tides might be adequate. We have only a few examples of satellites, so our moon, or something almost as big, might be more common than you think. Would one half the size of ours do?
If that asteroid didn’t hit, intelligent life might have evolved tens of millions of years ago. Again, our situation may not be average. I suspect the development of life is common, but we don’t know about the development of intelligent life.
If intelligence is evolutionarily advantageous (which it is for us, so far anyway) there would be little chance involved. What the intelligent species looks like is open, and how long it takes, but species would involve to relatively greater intelligence in some cases. We’ve got several candidates right on earth - who knows what would happen in another 20 million years without humans screwing things up.
Depends on the life cycle of intelligent life. Most of it might go extinct long before this.
I agree with Measure for Measure’s ethical argument, and add that any civilization which would pollute the galaxy would likely pollute themselves out of existence before it became an issue. A culture which would pollute the galaxy with nanomachines might have turned themselves into grey goo long before they get a chance to.
Again, we don’t know if this happened early or late in our case, especially because primitive multicellular organisms don’t fossilize very well.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That isn’t true if you expect to see evidence, but we don’t know enough to make that assumption, so this old chestnut works here.
We could easily spread out over a region with a radius of 20 ly, say, and never meet anyone else. (I have no trouble with being the first and only intelligent life in this local area.) We might decide that mega engineering projects are not worth the money. I’d love to see the cost benefit analysis for Ringworld. We might get replaced by AIs who don’t have an urge to explore.
Lots of better reasons than not being the first.
I don’t assume that life on any planet would be more advanced than us. There is no reason to. They may not have discovered the wheel or even climbed out of the slime onto land yet. In the end it will probably be us watching “them”, deciding they are not ready for us.
