What proof do we ask of an alleged alien?

Great Debates
1

(The following IMHO moment is inspired by Carl Sagan, in his book The Demon-Haunted World)
If those who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) currently among us here on Earth are even remotely to be believed, we must have evidence.

The physical claims (disturbed earth at landing sites, implants, parts from the Roswell landing, ets) have repeatedly been insubstantial, and those that are not are more easily and completely explained by much more mundane phenomena. Until and unless some substantive physical evidence comes to light, we don’t have anything there to go on.

But all is not lost–oh no! There are many who assert that they have been or are in direct verbal or mental contact with an ETI. Alas, we have no empirical evidence for this–we must simply take their words for it.

Fair enough. Purely as an intellectual exercise, let’s take their words for it.
Situation:

*You are approached by someone who claims to channel/communicate with an alien. (Alternatively, one who claims to be an alien.)

“I can prove it,” he says. “Ask me anything,” he says, “anything at all.”*

What do you ask? What can one ask an alleged ETI that will, if not prove, at least strongly suggest he is truly otherworldly?

Ideally, any such question would have to be beyond the realm of current human knowledge, but we must still be able to recognize a correct answer. But there may be some very useful queries that do not meet that ideal. We’ll assume no serious difficulties in communication.

A first suggestion (from Sagan):

“Please provide a brief proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.”
Ideas?

2

Well, gee Andros. Could you come up with a tougher one? I would think a rough (since the full explanation would require far too much time) explanation of how one accomplishes interstellar travel should be sufficient. But then, I suppose that might not work since we might not have the basis needed to understand the system used. Hmmm…Lemme think on that one for a while.

3

Ask him to show his Green Card? His Registration Form filled out in January of Each Year?

4

I would ask him to have the “alien” describe the problem of figuring out a totally alien mind-set and what he went about to get around it.

5

This is assuming that a simple blood test or tentacle count won’t work, right?

Two possibilities I can see:

  1. Ask the alien where he’s from (which star system, etc.). Then (with the help of a trained astronomer, ask him an unresolved (on earth) question about that region of space, which should be easy for a local to resolve, especially a local with access to space travel technology. Emission spectrum oddities would be perfect for this. Yes/no questions would be a no-no, of course, since you will have to check the answer for correctness.

  2. Use some sort of “trick” question that would only confuse a real alien, but which a human would give himself away by attempting to answer, such as a phony version of the above: “Why is your star so dim?” when it isn’t especially.

If a human insists he had contact witha liens, the obvious qusetion is “where’s the proof?”.

6

“I’m sorry, but no such proof exists.”

If you could ask more than one question, you could do a little better. After all, if they say “no proof exists” for all unsolved problems in mathematics, it starts to look suspicious, Godel or no Godel.

How about, “what number am I thinking of”? (No, it’s not 37. It’s the 237th digit of the 12th value of the Riemann zeta function, which I happen to not know. In fact, I don’t even know what I’m talking about! :wink: )

-Ben

7

Well, much as I like Sagan it seems arbitrary to decide that an alien civilization capable of contacting us must have solved any particular question of science or mathematics which presently eludes us. It seems to me that only two elements are certain: the alien can travel physically between planets or the alien can communicate instantaneously across interstellar distances (in the channelling case).

In the first case I would ask the alien to bring me th elost Mars probe.

In the second case the physical alien must necessarily be within the light cone of an astronomical event whose light has yet to reach the Earth. I would ask him for a precise description of/prediction for such an event.

8

Suppose he answers: My ship wreaked. You ask: Show me the wreckage. He answers: It disintegrated without a trace. I could think of equally evasive answers to the other scenario.

Not picking on you in particular Spiritus. I just wanted to emphasize that charlatans are pretty crafty people and it would be difficult to distinguish between them and a sincere alien.

The proof must come from the alien. I would ask the same question that I would ask of OJ, Is there anything, anything at all, that would make me believe you? And if the facts fit I would have to admit.

9

This question is a relative of the “Turing Test” devised by Alan Turing.

There is lots of literature on the Turing Test, e.g., see http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~asaygin/tt/ttest.html

10

I don’t know if there is any one question that would be sufficient. One supposes that a more advanced civilization must have more knowledge, but we can not predict what knowledge set would be required for interstellar travel because:

A. We don’t have that amount of knowledge.
B. There could be many exclusive knowledge sets that would be sufficient to accomodate said travel.

Even if you asked for the alien’s genome, he/she/it might legitimately say, “I don’t know what you are talking about,” as knowledge of genetics may not be a requirement.

However, if one were to obtain a tissue sample from the prospective alien, it would be a pretty good start. It seems pretty unlikely that its genetic structure would match anything on Earth. (Unless we buy into the ancient astronaut theories…)

11

Then In would think he was most likely a liar, but I would ask for a genetic sample to give him another chance.

Really? His race has lost the ability to witness stellar events? He doesn’t know where our planet is in relationship to his own? Any question can be avoided, but we draw conclusions from the answers nontheless.

Crafty? The charlatan’s craft depends upon expoiting the strong desires of his victim. A pattern of evasive answers is generally quite distinguishable from sincere truth.

12

My suggestion: “Draw the night sky on your home planet.”

We can all do a rough sketch of the Big Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia, and a few other common constellations. Some of us might be able to indicate the ecliptic, the band of the Milky Way, the relationship of the Pleiades to Orion, and so on. There aren’t a lot of experts who could include Bootes and so on, or who could remember which stars are in the southern or northern hemisphere depending on which season, but a rough sketch is within the capacity of most of us, and particularly those of us who, like the assumed alien, are interested in the sky.

Wherever their home planet is, it’s going to be elsewhere in space, and therefore the relative positions of the stars will be different, either slightly or greatly. Their constellations will be different, or will be oriented differently to one another. In any event, an alien star traveler will be able to provide a general diagram of the major features of his home planet’s night sky.

Clearly, it’s beyond the reasoning capacity of a normal human to visualize the galaxy in three three spatial dimensions, place himself in a new location within it, and then determine the positions of stars from that new perspective. However, it’s definitely something an Earth-bound astronomer could (within limits) accomplish, and anything offered by a supposed alien could be verified, at least to some extent, by such an expert.

A simple, verifiable, difficult-to-falsify test. What do you think?

(P.S. I borrowed this from the book K-Pax, soon to be a major motion picture starring Kevin Spacey as a mental patient who claims to be a star traveler and Jeff Bridges as the psychiatrist who evaluates him.)

13

BTW, there is a proof now of Fermat’s last theorem, so that question is out. :slight_smile:

This reminds me of Smullyan’s island of knights, knaves, and normals, where knights always tell the truth, and knaves always lie, but normals can do either. There is no infalliable test for normalcy.

There is no deductive test that proves alienness the same way there is no way to a priori prove that other people exist (for all I know, you all are figments of my imagination). It comes down to what one considers sufficient inductive proof of alienness. While knowledge which is beyond that known to man is possible, there’s a proof issue there (“How do I know that you really know what’s behind the sixth moon of Antares? You could just be making that up.”). Functioning technology far beyond our collective abilities would be a good demonstration, as are proofs of heretofore unproved mathematical theorems; but both of these still have the problem that someone might have developed them in secret and not informed the rest of the world. Actually transporting a credible witness into space and back again would be more convincing.

14

Andrew Wiles has proved Fermat’s last conjecture.

I would think that a biological sample would be the best choice. However, is that something you really want to ask an alien? “Let me stick this needle in you.” That would seem kind of rude. As DaddyMack has suggested, perhaps the usual Straight Dope retort of “Cite, please” would be best. Let the alien convince us.

The flaw I see with Spiritus Mundi’s questions (lost Mars probe, describe an astronomical event that we haven’t seen yet) are that those might not be things feasible for Jane Doe, from Planet X, who has come to visit us here on earth. I sure wouldn’t know how to prove Fermat’s last conjecture.

Are we assuming that this alien
a) Has a library of information on its vessel containing most of the knowledge from the home world, or
b) Is here with no artifact/reference base from their home world?

15

I think his point was more along the lines that the imposter alien can claim to be from anywhere as long he is smart enough to only provide new information that is unverifiable by our current technology.

Except the semantics of his answers would be necesarily alien, correct? In that context, it is possible that a real alien might seem evasive when it couldn’t understand our questions.

16

Arnold

Well, we are talking about 2 different cases. In one case the alien is physically present. The request for material evidence of interplanetary travel (lost Mars probe) does depend upon the alien’s continued capability for such travel. In the absence of that, a biological sample is a good fallback.

The second (more difficult) case concerned an alien “projecting his consiouisness” into a human. This rules out any phyysical evidence. Information available on his home world but not on Earth is the most reasonable test. Astronomical phenomena are a good candidate for something observable, verifiable and objective. He doesn’t have to have the knowledge “at his fingertips” so long as he can gain access to it from his home world.

mrblue92

Which is why he would not be convincing. That was my point.

The problem presupposes that we can communicate effectively with the alien. Why should we then assume that said communication will be semantically ambiguous?

17

Why all the tough questions ?

Why assume the alien is mega clever ?

Ok, our astronauts are smart guys BUT if they have cheap space ships etc. perhaps they wouldn’t send there smartest people ( they probably work in research and from our history we are likely to shoot and cut em up !).

I doubt any advanced ET would risk contamination / close contact etc. to be honest, its much more likely they would communicate via radio or optical means ( optical seti ? ) first.

We would then know they are ET due to the source of the transmission.

OR… does this sound too boring and rational ?

I can just see the ‘inter species’ knowledge transfer treaty being spelled out on TV and all the X-file fans saying ‘ohh no thats soooo boring !’

18

Cervaise

I’m not an astronomer and could be wrong, but I’d think the vast majority of astronauts would be hard pressed to draw enough of our own sky accurately enough to pinpoint our own location. But even if they could, the imposter could just claim to have jumped here (through… I don’t know… a transdimensional rift?) from a galaxy billions of light years away. There’s no way to verify what his sky looks like.

Spiritus

But then the real alien who was unable to provide any verifiable evidence would but just as unconvincing…

I assumed “serious difficulties” did not include semantics. Although I realize that this is a theoretical question, if we really want to be honest here I think that it’s an unreasonable assumption to think there would not be a great deal of confusion when trying to understand an alien.

Incidentally, I wonder if we could answer the converse… What question can you ask a human that he can answer and prove he’s not an alien?

19

I would think he’s a liar before any questions were asked. However, if we assume sincerity is a characteristic of our alien it would show on his… whatever. Anyway the genetic sample might work however, the parameters of the problem only allows us to ask questions.

You just had to drag race into this :). You are assuming telepathy is directional. The telepath does not know your location unless you are in eyesight of him. As a result the alien wouldn’t know the relationship of his planet to ours. Or how about you’ll see some supernova 10k years from now. How frequent are detectable stellar events? What is frequent on the cosmic time scale?

I hate to ask have you seen the movie…? But have you seen the movie Terminator? The police questions this Connors guy about being from the future and a Psychiatrist concludes Connors is loony. The answers to the questions posed to him possessed a pattern of evasion, but from the perspective of the viewer they were honest responses. They could have asked who won the 2002 superbowl and he could have answered, I never kept up with the sport. To which they would have responded Yea likely story!

You are correct charlatans do exploit the strong desires of their victims. Without a desire to believe any answer that the sincere alien gives which does not offer up the proof we desire will appear deceptive. Questions alone may not be enough to help our little alien friend.

20

predictive

What stars in the vicinity of your home system have gone Supernova, whose light from that event has not yet reached the earth, At what time will astronomers be able to confirm the event?

esoteric

What are the size, mass and orbit of Nemesis?
(if you were travelling from another system, you’d have to account for this object)

Artistic

Since you are verbal creatures, could you recite some of your culture’s finest poetry ?

Linguistic

Woud you teach me your home planet’s language?

Physics]

As a traveler/communicator over great distances, you must have some expertise in this area. How did you overcome the speed of light?

How does your star-drive work?

Please correct these equations (holds up picture of standard model)