Jill Tarter, who recently retired as head of the SETI Research Center, has taken to popularizing her life-long cause, hoping to find additional funding, among other things. And then I faced a certain flaw in the widespread ideas about the problem.
Pop culture aliens have nothing to do with real ones
Our understanding of intelligent life and technically advanced civilization can be ridiculously limited. “All these“People in Black-3”,“Prometheus”, etc. are entertainment and metaphors of our own fears, which have nothing to do with what the first contacts with aliens will actually be,” the scientist believes.
According to Ms Tarter, the authors of Hollywood melodramas go too far both with benevolent aliens and with monsters seeking to destroy the Earth.
Good aliens don't exist either
The researcher believes that both Hollywood aliens and their perception in popular culture are, calling things by their proper names, a catastrophic failure of imagination. These are simply projections of how we subconsciously imagine aliens from other planets. Advanced civilizations outside the solar system will interest us, at best, as much as a biologist empathizes with the culture growing in a petri dish. To think otherwise is terrifying, ineffective narcissism.
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In this sense, Jill Tarter calls unsuccessful previous attempts by Carl Sagan, one of the actual founders of SETI, to spread more adequate concepts to the masses through, in particular, the novel Contact, which was used in the 1997 film of the same name. It is difficult to imagine not even the mechanisms that allow aliens to instantly become like people, but their motivation. It is clear that Sagan wanted to calm the masses, make them forget all these horrors from the "War of the Worlds" and similar literature. But why should a purely hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence generally be benevolently disposed towards people, up to and including organizing a free excursion to the center of the Galaxy for them?
Well, the ideas of ufologists about the constant interference of aliens in earthly affairs are completely theater of the absurd. This is just a transfer of ideas about otherworldly demons and angels into the 21st century: a long and covert pulling at the invisible (and non-existent) strings of human governance is not needed by a civilization that is so energetically powerful that it can afford interstellar travel. Such conspiracy activities by aliens are simply a manifestation of human gestalt in our own psyche.
According to Ms Tarter, who is very restrained in her assessment of the prospects of contact, we do not yet have any direct evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and if we ever receive a signal from it, it is doubtful that we will be able to learn from it what aliens look like or how they see the world. And this, of course, only if the signal is based on the types of radiation we can imagine and we are able to decipher it.
By the way, the scientist is not clear about the motives of hypothetical aliens for spending a significant part of their GNP on a trip to Earth. Judging by astronomical data, we do not have an excess of heavy elements in comparison with any of the discovered Earth-like planets. No "Avatar" in relation to the Earth, in her opinion, is absolutely impossible in real life. Nor does it seem plausible to her the hypothesis of pathologically loving murder or simply evil alien civilizations, including the version of Stephen Hawking. First, it is difficult to imagine their development without self-destruction. Secondly, there are simply no traces of any hypothetical "death stars": they are not visible through telescopes, their activity is invisible to the naked eye.
Ultimately, the ex-head of the SETI Project Research Center believes, given the more than 10 billion age of the known stars with high metallicity (and therefore planets), almost all attempts to directly imagine communication on an equal footing with an alien civilization are possible only in option 10 -year-old child tapping on the wall of an anthill in Morse code: "Hello, ants, how are you?"
The problem is that ants - that is, we - may simply not know Morse code.