I must be smart, because when I first heard about us transmitting messages into space I had the same thought as Stephen Hawking. Basically, any alien life form capable of picking up our broadcasts would be at least as powerful as we are. And, if they could travel vast distances in space, they’d clearly be more powerful than we are. Why would we want to meet such life forms? Hawking compared it to Columbus and the Native Americans. Didn’t work out too well for the Natives. Of course, they didn’t have William Shatner.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I, for one, welcome our new….
All I could think of was the aliens landing and all of a sudden there are Shatners peering over every shoulder making us get our hotel reservations from Priceline. The world conquered not with a bang but a whimper.
There are a lot of details that confound that simple statement. And most have to do with biology and neurophysiology than they have to do with physics.
My inspiration here is the section in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which an alien life form is mismatched in scale to our scale and gets run over by a car.
For example, “picking up our broadcasts” does not necessarily mean being interested in them. What if they appeared to the alien life form as the equivalent of what we see as snow on TV, static on radio — just because of the mismatch of communicating frequencies.
You get the point.
But assuming that they function enough like us to understand the significance, source direction, and distance of origin of those broadcasts and further assuming that they have means of covering space at near light-speed rates or can manipulate the geometry of space or have physiologies that perceive extremely long voyages as not long at all, then what exactly does “more powerful than we are” mean if, for example, they are milli-microns in size? Which current lifeforms on earth might be descendants of intelligent extra-terrestrials or even their exploration probes.
But the most important question is “Why would we want to meet such life forms?”
To this point, the driving answer is our own galactic loneliness. But a second reason is more instructive: the colonization of space. We want to be Columbus all over again on a grander scale.
But assuming understanding of our messages, why would they want to meet us?
And what exactly does “power” mean in this scenario?
Most arguments for alien life forms (other than Tea Partiers) are based on the “universe is a big place”, “appearance of life isn’t so difficult”, “appearance of consciousness”, “law of averages” logic, with an extra dollop of “the universe is a really big place”. What if this universe is in the tail of the law of averages for all universes and has only one planet with life forms and consciousness and broadcast messages?
Which scenario is most terrifying and which most exciting — a universe burgeoning with intelligent life some likely very dangerous or being all alone in the cosmos?
Any alien life form capable of getting here will be here to observe. Not to steal our oxygen, iron, vanadium, or eat our delicious brains (yum!).
On a more serious note, I’ve known for years that sending “Here we are” messages into space is crazy, ever since hearing Jared Diamond mention it in an on-stage interview he did at the 92nd St. Y in NYC.
You know, the guy who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel.
It was an aside in discussing some other question. Simply, he noted that when two isolated cultures come into contact, in human history it nearly always turns out that one of them tramples the other. It’s nothing to do with good or bad intent, necessarily; one is more powerful or more organized, and nature takes its course.
That being the case, it’s at best a 50-50 proposition as to whether we would be the trampler or the tramplee — an inherently stupid risk to take.