What If We Find Aliens And What Can We Learn From Them? - Alternative View

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What If We Find Aliens And What Can We Learn From Them? - Alternative View
What If We Find Aliens And What Can We Learn From Them? - Alternative View

Video: What If We Find Aliens And What Can We Learn From Them? - Alternative View

Video: What If We Find Aliens And What Can We Learn From Them? - Alternative View
Video: All Tomorrows: the future of humanity? 2024, March
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Researchers working on the SETI program - the search for extraterrestrial civilizations - dream of one thing: to receive a confident signal from distant aliens who are trying to contact us. But imagine that one day this signal arrives and is thoroughly tested and proven, and its strength will be equivalent to the WOW signal, once received by the radio telescope in Ohio in 1977.

We will amicably congratulate each other, applaud the scientists, they will receive their prizes. And then another question arises. What to do next? Should scientists send a signal in response, they say, we received your message, let's talk, hello?

Or should we listen to Stephen Hawking, who warned in 2010 that we should avoid contact with aliens, so as not to collide with them in a bloody (or whatever they have spilled) battle?

Scientists have been discussing this issue for a long time. Back in 1960, a special document was prepared at the Brookings Institution in Washington, which considered the potential risks of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.

The consequences in any case will be unpredictable, but they will depend primarily on how we, earthlings, who cannot find a common language even within our human society, will address aliens. Even if the whole planet gathers to talk to aliens, the fact is obvious: only a society that is superior in strength and development dominates in the Universe. The rest survive and change. And the better we can understand the factors that influence such situations, the better prepared we will be.

Brookings said the US government is carefully considering the potential public reaction to such a revelation, which can range from a sense of solidarity among humans to disorientation, paralyzing anxiety, and anxiety about aliens, as in the 1950s films War of the Worlds and The Day When The earth has stopped. Brookings suggested examining how past earthly civilizations reacted to alarming discoveries before clearly deciding whether the news should be made public or the discovery kept secret, which would be, in my opinion, sheer swinishness.

This is exactly what scientists thought decades later, when they came to the conclusion that the discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization would be too important an event to be kept secret. So they started trying to coordinate the international response. In 1989, SETI researchers approved a protocol for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, which was updated in 2010. Its most important principles are:

1. Anyone who detects a signal should make sure that extraterrestrial intelligence is the most likely explanation for its source, and not natural or human noise, before moving on to the second step.

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2. Before disclosing a result, the discoverer must secretly alert other SETI researchers so that they can confirm the presence of the signal and join forces to observe it.

3. The discoverer must notify the International Astronomical Community and the UN General Secretariat.

4. Do not respond to the signal before consulting with international authorities.

In 1993, the SETI conference brought together scientists from the United States and the then Soviet Union, and NASA spokesman John Billingham presented the document titled SETI Post-Discovery Protocol: What Should You Do After Signal Detection? Billingham noted that the complexity of the answer lies in the fact that aliens may have known about our existence for some time, which means they had more time to observe and study what they have to deal with. He suggested that scientists and governments from around the world need to come to a common agreement on the contact protocol. Anyone who will communicate with aliens must address on behalf of the entire civilization, and this address must be pre-established by protocol. The actual message should contain the following information: there is intelligent life on Earth,we received the signal and understood it. There should also be information about what living organisms, including humans, live on Earth, and the sender should encourage the aliens to send additional messages to establish a dialogue.

In 2010, the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs began working on an international agreement on a contact protocol. The head of the department, Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman, told colleagues that extraterrestrial life in the universe is most likely present due to how many planets we have discovered outside the solar system and how many more remain to be discovered.

“When we establish contact, we need to get together and give one answer that will take into account all the feelings, emotions, experiences associated with the discovery. It is the UN that is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination”.

But despite the existence of a single protocol, scholars and political leaders still have to face a dilemma that people have not dealt with since the clash between Europeans and Native Americans in the late 15th century. We are haunted by the realization of how destructive the consequences of meeting two fundamentally different cultures can be, especially when one is less technically savvy.

In a 2011 document titled Fear, Pandemonium, Composure, and Triumph: The Human Response of Extraterrestrial Civilization, psychologist Albert Harrison noted that we have already recreated alien archetypes, and our public response to their appearance is almost ready. If they are "wise, kind and friendly" creatures, humanity will experience a new Golden Age, everything will be fine. The "catastrophic model" assumes that outsiders will be "threatening, imperialistic, using force, bluff and pressure", intent on using our world or eager to destroy it. There is also a third option: the aliens will be a post-biological species, combining organic matter and technology, practically achieving immortality.

In my opinion, this scenario will be the most unexpected, since earthlings will have to reconsider the established concepts of life and death and abandon the religious beliefs that we have followed from time immemorial.

However, if the outcome is favorable, there will be a lot to learn from the aliens

If you've watched the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, you remember the scene when a flying saucer lands in Washington DC and the alien Klaatu emerges from it. In his hand he has something that resembles an earthly weapon. After a soldier shoots at Klaatu, a robot comes out of the plate, easily deals with the soldiers and turns the tank into scrap metal. The wounded Klaatu rises to show that he had a miniature telescope in his hand, capable of peering into space further than Earth's observatories. According to the text:

“It was a gift. For your president. (Looks sadly at the broken object.) With his help, he could observe life on other planets."

Stop. Ok, this is just a movie. The paradox is that the scene could very well be real if we made contact with aliens, who are likely to be much more advanced than we are. We are afraid of aliens, rightly believing that they can conquer us or completely destroy us, and to a lesser extent believe that they are friendly and just want to share their knowledge with us.

In 1995, Stephen J. Dick of the United States Marine Observatory wrote that the discovery of extraterrestrial civilization would have the same mind-blowing impact on science and our understanding of reality as Europe's discovery of Greek science in the 12-13th centuries or Copernicus' discovery in the early 1500s that The sun, not the earth, is at the center of our solar system.

Many scientists, however, believe that extraterrestrials of the super-evolved type have no point in conquering us. A civilization of this type is unlikely to want to visit or conquer us, as in the movie "Independence Day", where such a civilization spreads across the galaxy like locusts, seizing planets one after another and sucking their resources dry. In fact, there are countless dead planets in space with the richest reserves of mineral resources, and they can be collected without hindrance without messing with the stubborn local population. The attitude of a civilization of this type towards us could be compared with our attitude towards ants and an anthill. We will not bend over the anthill and offer beads and other trinkets to its inhabitants; rather, we simply will not pay attention to them.

“For ants, the main danger is not that people suddenly want to invade an anthill or destroy the ant genus. The main danger is that the anthill will interfere with people, and it will simply be demolished in passing. Do not forget that if we talk about energy consumption, then the distance between this type of civilization and our zero type civilization is much greater than between us and the ants."

"Physics of the Impossible" by Michio Kaku

There are several areas of our development that can progress significantly as a result of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization:

1. The secret of traveling faster than the speed of light will be revealed. It is assumed that the aliens who visit our planet will arrive out of nowhere, having covered a huge distance. The nearest potentially habitable planet is located at least 13 light-years from us. It can be assumed that the aliens will use technologies similar to the warp drive predicted by Miguel Alcubierre and which is being developed in the NASA laboratory, or something else that lies beyond the human imagination. Aliens may also have anti-gravity technologies, if one believes that flying saucers can perform impossible aerobatics (well, let's leave out that their existence has not been proven). Of course, alien guests will be happy to share new technologies with us.

2. Freedom from the limitations of our biology. People are gradually getting used to the ideas of transhumanism - they are developing exoskeletons and electronic devices, such as implantable microchips, that improve vision. But if an intelligent extraterrestrial species has existed even for several thousand years longer than we do, they could well become completely post-biological beings, whose brains represent a fusion of natural and artificial intelligence. Perhaps they don't even need bodies - they live in machines of their own design (let's hope they don't look like the "terminator" Arnold Schwarzenegger - that would be too strange). The same NASA scientist Stephen Dick spoke about this in 2006. We could make a qualitative transition to the future with the help of transhumanistic devices of aliens.

3. Compensation for damage to the environment. It is likely that aliens with a much more advanced civilization have mastered planetary engineering - the ability to make important and special changes to the environment. They could help us patch holes in our atmosphere and reverse the destructive process of climate change.

4. Resolution of conflicts. International conflicts kill far fewer people than in the past - each year until 2010, approximately 55,000 people died from wars. This is a third of the deaths from accidents in the 1980s. But people still want to kill each other: according to various estimates and according to the UN, in 2011 there were 468,000 murders worldwide. If a sentient extraterrestrial species lives longer than we do, they probably created a deadly technology at least as powerful as ours, or they built a Death Star, for which earthlings do not have enough money. However, the further development of civilization should have led to the settlement of conflicts without the use of violence. We could ask them to share this method with us, or make us stop killing our own kind.

What is noteworthy, many theorists of extraterrestrial life agree on one thing: if there is a coalition of intelligent aliens of different races in space, this coalition, for its harmonious existence, accepts civilizations that have reached a certain level of technical development, world outlook and, most importantly, that have stopped internecine wars. Which does not shine for us in the near future.

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