Astronomers from Germany and the United States said that alien messages, if received, must be destroyed without decoding. Scientists believe that humanity is unable to identify dangerous computer viruses that can be hidden in data and pose a threat to humanity. The research preprint was published in the arxiv.org repository.
It is believed that the message from extraterrestrial civilizations (ETI) can be received in the form of signals that will be caught by radio telescopes or alien artifacts. Scientists believe that a message sent by "brothers in mind" is likely to be malicious with a fairly high degree of probability. Humanity should refuse to read the message, since one cannot be sure that the sender is not an evil, militant civilization.
Researchers believe that several types of dangerous messages are possible. Information such as "tomorrow we will turn your sun into a supernova" will cause panic whether that is true or not. Otherwise, it may be a large text that will have a demoralizing effect on the culture. As an example, experts cite a hypothesis according to which the Bible contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.
The article considers the most probable type of hypothetical message, which is analogous to the Cosmic Call message made by the RT-70 radio telescope near Evpatoria. It is a series of binary characters that are decrypted as a picture. If the message is printed on paper for further analysis, then only the meaning of the message is harmful. However, when using a computer, a message that is too complex to manually decrypt can be a dangerous code, which requires the isolation of the digital device.
Scientists believe that it is impossible to meet all the security conditions to decrypt the message. They propose a scenario according to which a friendly message was received by humanity, including a "galactic library in the form of artificial intelligence." Even if the experiment is carried out on the moon using an isolated computer, and in the event of a threat, nuclear charges are activated, the robot will probably begin to manipulate people, promising them rewards for its escape. In addition, the "library" can teach people how to create complex technologies without warning them of side effects.