I recently read Carl Sagan’s book, Demon Haunted World. At one point Dr. Sagan suggests an interesting intellectual challenge.
If a person were to claim to be an alien/have contact with aliens/be from the future, what knowledge could he or she (or it) possess that would tend to prove their claim? In other words, what should a time traveler or interplanetary traveler know that we don’t know?
For simplicity, assume that this person would be familiar with our basis of knowledge, scientific and mathematical processes, etc.
Also, this is a test of what they know. Pulling out a working time machine or pocket cold fusion reactor would be a little too easy.
Well, provided, of course, they knew in advance that they would be met with this challenge, they could, for instance, give the properties of an as-yet-undiscovered but still pretty easy to find extrasolar planet. We could probably verify their claim after a few observations, if they chose it right.
Since I am able to travel faster than light, I can tell you the exact details of a supernova that I observed last week the light from the explosion is due to arrive here tomorrow morning at just before 9:32 GMT.
You see? I dyed my hair and skin to conceal my REAL identity! I couldn’t do anything about the height, so I went along with the “I’m NATURALLY short” excuse. Oh, that thing? It’s not MY tentacle. My pet squid is just hiding in my pocket. Heh heh…
A friend of mine used to wear a medallion that had a crop circle pattern engraved in it. She’d ask people if they knew what it meant. If they knew, that meant they were aliens.
I recognized it, but just laughed and said I didn’t know. Had I been quicker off the mark, I would have said, “Sure. ‘No services this exit.’ Why?”
Isn’t there some mathematical question that can be asked? For example, provide the complete prime factorization of some extremely large number that’s large enough to make it difficult for us to solve, yet easy to verify a solution. While that alone wouldn’t prove alien-ness, it should weed out 99% of the hoaxers. Then you can get onto more difficult problems.
In the book, Sagan suggests asking for a simple proof of Fermat’s last theorem or the Goldbach Conjecture. I’m sure any unproven math theorem would do. Maybe the 4-color map thing.
Try turning the question around: You’re picked up from Earth and dropped on an alien world. Your consciousness is somehow transferred into a physical form that fits into the alien environment. Prove you’re really a being from another planet.
The suggestion about higher mathematical functions suffers in this scenario. Imagine, for example, you get in a speedboat here on Earth and go to a remote island. You encounter an isolated culture without modern technology. If they ask you how the outboard motor on your boat works, can you explain it? Yes, a minority of engineering-minded folks know about internal combustion and pistons and crankshafts and all of that, but nine people out of ten wouldn’t be able to answer beyond “you attach the fuel line, yank the cord until it comes on, and steer, and the little spinny propeller thing pushes you forward.”
The demonstration performed by Kevin Spacey’s character in K-Pax, creating an interstellar diagram, is very impressive, and would be difficult to explain away, but I find it more than a little implausible that the “average” star traveller would be able to do that.
