Knowledge about aliens can be as dangerous as the aliens themselves.
Imagine that you have lived your whole life in a small village located in the wilds of the continental wilderness. This community has been isolated from the world for centuries. Once you set out to explore the world around you, bypassing the boundaries of the known territory. Suddenly and unexpectedly, you come across a pillar with a sign. The font on it seems unfamiliar, alien to you, but the text is quite clear. It says, "We are here."
What's next?
Happiness and celebration at the end of isolation? A simple shrug? But human nature suggests that this encounter is most likely to trigger a chain of events leading to disaster.
Suddenly your hideout is under threat from "them" unknown to you. Time-tested principles of governance and social order will come under pressure. Rumors, gossip and speculation will spread throughout your home. Inhuman efforts will be expended on erecting barricades, crops and property repairs will be delayed. The community will move towards destruction. But this pillar announcement is more than a half-understood idea, an elusive subtext that infects the world with its ambiguity.
This story is not the plot of a B-movie, but an allegory of what may happen after we solve one of the oldest scientific and philosophical mysteries - whether we have "neighbors" in space.
Today, the prospect of finding evidence of life beyond Earth falls into one of three well-known categories. The first is the study of the solar system. Mars can be called one of the main goals, since this planet, although alien to us, falls under a certain pattern corresponding to the usual earthly environment, and is also available for visiting. At the moment, robots on wheels plow the Martian regolith, and watchful eyes look at it from orbit. In the near future, the following Mars missions are being prepared: in 2018 it is planned to launch the robotic probe InSight, rover Mars 2020, return to Earth of soil samples, and the constantly discussed possibility of a manned mission.
But Mars isn't the only option. The icy moons Enceladus and Europa are showing signs of liquid water beneath the surface. Europa has an ocean twice the volume of all the surface oceans of the Earth, and it touches the rocky core of the moon - there may be a deep-sea hydrothermal oasis. The geyser-like ejections into space offer hope for a mission that can collect samples and look for signs of life.
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In the second category, located much further from us, there are exoplanets. Now we know that their number is enormous - tens of billions of planets at different stages, from geophysical youth to venerable age. Some of them may be analogous to the Earth. We are trying to determine the chemical composition of the atmosphere of at least the nearest of the planets in order to find signs of the existence of the biosphere. The James Webb Telescope and the next generation of 30-meter ground-based telescopes will have the ability to make rough measurements of the parameters of interest.
The third category is the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the SETI project. Trying to find structured, artificial signals by combing the radio wave and optical spectrum contains both the greatest risk and the greatest possible reward. Success will mean not only that life is somewhere else, but that in addition to our technologically advanced intellect, there are others in the Universe.
But the knowledge in search of which the mentioned projects are being conducted can change not only our scientific understanding of the world. Just like a signpost in the middle of nowhere, new information can infect our collective consciousness before we know what's going on. It can plant ideas in our minds that will fight for life on their own, question the status quo, and infiltrate our thoughts and behavior. We already have a name for this type of self-propagating and evolving piece of information - we call them memes.
In 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” to describe a culturally transmitted phenomenon. Whether it's a catchphrase, four-legged chairs, a dress code or a belief system. In this sense, the meme is a mutating and reproducing piece of human cultural evolution - a viral entity.
We, as highly socialized, information-obsessed beings, are particularly susceptible to memes. And not all memes are safe - some of them become toxic when bumped into other, well-established memes. An example is the clash of Western customs and conservative Islam.
What if we discover that we are surrounded by chemically incompatible aliens, and we learn that everything we thought was inevitable and optimal in our biology and evolution is just an accidental deviation? Such a discovery would go against Copernican ideals and overturn all the beautiful rationalization of the deep connections between life and the fundamental components of the cosmos.
Or, what if we detect an extraterrestrial signal with the message "you are all going to die"? Even if it is a translation error or a misperception of the existential brotherhood of aliens, our beings will quickly plunge into chaos, and destroy civilization no worse than effective weapons.
A message that describes a more straightforward intent can be equally damaging. It could be a new scientific insight or a technological blueprint sent to interstellar trade or defuse diplomatic relations, but it could also destabilize Earth's economy. Or the message may be a philosophical statement, the religious meaning of which may lead to conflict and unrest. Even "is there anyone there?" can become a problem - the decision, to answer it or not, can provoke more than verbal disputes among us.
We can also agree to send messages to aliens, to our detriment. If we determine the chemical composition of the biosphere of the nearest exoplanet, we will be tempted to send a message there - an attempt to establish communication with little chance of success. We are so impatient that we have already made such attempts. In 1974, the Arecibo radio observatory sent a meme-laden message of 1,679 binary digits towards a distant globular cluster. It contained a set of numbers, a simple DNA diagram, a hand-drawn human figure, and a diagram of our solar system. We also spent decades announcing ourselves loudly through broadband radio and TV broadcasts until we went digital. If we have a real target, we will try to send a probe to it, especially if we develop a way to cross interstellar space with a speed,close enough to light.
But such behavior is terribly dangerous for us if it triggers a response from our cosmic neighbors, or any sentient inhabitants of other worlds. Sending memes back and forth through space voids can run into trouble.
What do we do? We need to know if we are alone. Scientific curiosity and logic require this of any intelligent being. This is the central piece of the puzzle of knowing our origins and our nature, our place in the universe.
The answer can be found in the construction of a planetary firewall, a "meme shield" that protects us from the harmful knowledge of extraterrestrial life, but allows us to study space. It could be an artificial autonomous structure that takes on the task of SETI, and even the tasks of astronomers hunting for exoplanets. By providing an algorithmic or physical barrier between us and the rest of the universe, it would help control and filter out the flow of information - much like an Internet firewall protects a computer from viruses by examining the source and intent of data packets.
This armor could include a ban on private telescopes or radio antennas sensitive enough to stumble upon extraterrestrial "sign pillars." It can be equipped with automatic listening stations and telescopes that transmit disinfected results to their owners. The most risky data can be stored in the event of an existential catastrophe - when an extraterrestrial meme cannot do more harm than it already does - in the form of a last resort library, the ultimate example of a "break glass in case of fire" measure.
Such armor could serve as a camouflage for anyone looking outside, blocking attempts to discern the presence or nature of life on Earth, in the same way that host addresses are hidden behind computer firewalls. Or, for a more sinister scenario, she could try to actively infect other worlds with destructive memes in order to reduce the potential threat to Earth.
Just as the computer systems with the highest security requirements are disconnected from the internet, an ambitious armor could hide the Earth from the rest of the universe. A giant, high-tech Faraday cage with optical elements that precisely control everything that passes through it - an informational version of air filtration and containment for a laboratory dealing with biohazards. A more radical measure would be a complete rejection of our planet, exposed to memes. We can build the Dyson Sphere, this most important milestone in futurology and science fiction, and live inside it, turning to our star, closed from infectious space.
These ideas, of course, are purely speculative, in some ways even bizarre. Perhaps our kind of intelligence has some kind of immunity to alien memes infection. After all, after we realized that we inhabit one microscopic part of a huge Universe that does not have a physical center, we have not destroyed ourselves - at least not yet. Importantly, I don't think we need to be discouraged from looking for fertile places in space, and we hardly need to fence ourselves off from the splendor of the firmament.
But, as they say, we should be wary of our desires.