Motherboard: Or how to avoid Mars-Attack-style bloodshed when we eventually encounter aliens.
Author: Mirjam Guesgen
Although there is still a long way to go before direct contact with extraterrestrial beings, some scientists have made serious efforts to prepare for their arrival. One of the biggest challenges after the meeting, and one that many sci-fi films show, is how to avoid the Mars Attacks-style carnage and the potential end of our civilization.
One solution might be: instead of participating in a war, why not try trading with aliens? This is an idea put forward by Daniel Helman, professor at Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam. We even have a commodity on Earth worthy of an intergalactic trade agreement, says Helman: DNA is from animals, plants … and even from us.
Helman proposed the idea at the International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles in May. When I spoke to him on the phone after that, he explained why an ordinary Earthling who sells goods - tools, weapons or technology - simply would not be interested in these goods from aliens. Any alien civilization that comes into contact with Earth will be far more advanced than us and not interested in our technological relics, he said. However, they may be interested in sharing some of their cutting edge technology or scientific ideas in exchange for something they couldn't get at home.
Hellman said that what makes genetic information so unique is that it is the result of millions of years of evolution and interaction with Earth's specific environment. Basically, it is a record of everything that has happened on Earth up to this point, from mass extinctions to the industrial revolution. “Our environment is unique, so the genetics of all organisms here and in the solar system is unique,” explained Helman.
This is how a trade deal with aliens could go, Helman explained. First, we will need to collect DNA from all living things, from everything that contains the building blocks of life as we know it. Then all the genetic information of a particular organism must be deciphered by scientists (for example, the human genome project, which was completed in 2003). This genetic information will be divided into parts with the life history of the organism: pictures of it, maps of where it lives, diagrams of its evolution, and details of how the environment affects the expression of these genes (epigenetics). What you get is a neat little package of almost everything that makes up a living being, besides the being itself.
The DNA sold comes with the added benefit of storing genetic information elsewhere, Helman said. It's like an insurance policy to save the Earth, in case we destroy life ourselves through nuclear war or climate change. The possibility of a civilized insurance policy could also force people to try harder to preserve living beings, Hellman reasoned.
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“You cannot form a basis for trading if you have no goods,” he told me. “If we destroy biodiversity, then we are limiting the unique goods that we have. This is a utilitarian reason for promoting biodiversity.”
The idea of landing aliens on Earth, not to mention trading with them, may seem far-fetched for now. After all, of the more than 3,700 planets that we have discovered outside our solar system, only about 50 of them have a chance of life.
But Dr. Nikola Schmidt of Charles University in Prague believes that there is nothing strange and far-fetched in thinking about life on other planets or about our potential interaction with them. Schmidt works in the field of planetary defense, an area of research that aims to figure out how to protect the Earth from things outside its realm, be it an asteroid or an alien being. Our relative isolation in our galaxy and the pace of technological and social evolution - along with our planetary destruction - prompts our desire to look elsewhere, he said.
Schmidt's preoccupation with Helman's idea is what alien intelligent beings can do with the genetic information we give them. “This can be a threat to us,” he said. "They can, for example, create diseases that target us."
Daniel Ross, a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who is interested in how we can decipher foreign languages, said that it is not so much about finding definitive answers to questions (we have no funds), but about theorizing potential scenarios … If contact is made, he said, “This will be a game of interstellar poker. If you have never played poker before, then this is very bad for you.”
Ross notes that how we can interact with alien civilizations is similar to how we interact with other cultures: understanding their language, finding a common ground, and finding fair and equal ways to coexist without suppressing one culture with another.
Helman compared the discussions around alien contact with the conversations people have around the ethics of artificial intelligence. An intelligent, autonomous AI does not yet exist, but scientists theorize what moral values it may have, its rights as an intelligent being, and how our relationship with it may function.
Hellman's theory is part of a group effort by ethicists, planetary scientists, linguists, and other scientists in the arts and sciences to prepare for extraterrestrial contact. His conference talk was among those who responded to the invitation of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) and Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), an international group of scientists trying to figure out how to write and send messages to the universe, and how these messages can be interpreted - for better or for worse.
Hellman views an international, non-profit, scientific advisory group as a way for further discussion and potential plans. There is no group yet to discuss intergalactic commerce, although METI and SETI could create one; Hellman hopes that a scientific article he will publish later this year will help in creating such a group.
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