Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Are you afraid?
In a few days I'll turn 49. Statistically, I've got a couple more decades to go. Realistically, I could drop dead tomorrow from an undiagnosed heart condition, develop cancer or some other terminal disease, or just get hit by a truck. You tend to take this sort of philosophical attitude when your own parents both died before they hit 40.
But that does not define my life - I do not constantly worry or live in fear. I don't panic when I hear that they've found a couple of car bombs in the heart of London, any more than I lose my head over reports of a new strain of bird flu discovered in Indonesia, or that there are weather conditions that favor the development of tornadoes in my area.
I take reasonable precautions, try and keep track of my health, wear my seat belt, indulge in particularly dangerous sports rarely, and try and keep aware of my surroundings. I do carry a concealed weapon (legally - all licensed and everything), but no more expect that I will have to use it than I expect I'll have to use any of the several fire extinguishers around the house and in the car. I don't go poking around bad neighborhoods or bars late at night, don't seek to draw attention to myself when I don't know what the tactical situation is.
And I guess that's where I come down on the question of whether or not we should be broadcasting "contact" signals out into the cosmos, in the hope of connecting with some other intelligent life.
Just about every major science fiction author has dealt with the question of alien contact at some point or another. Sometimes it is handled with an assumption of happy-happy E.T. helping us out, being part of the big brotherhood of intelligent species. Sometimes it is having us be lunch. Sometimes we're the bad guys, enslaving other races or having them for lunch.
I tend to agree with Carl Sagan's position that we're unlikely to be at anything resembling technological parity with another race (and this is the premise of Communion of Dreams). And I tend to agree with those who advocate a certain caution in making our presence known in the universe. Via MeFi, there's a very good article on this very topic in The Independent by Dr. David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC Science Editor and a respected astronomer, that I heartily recommend. An excerpt:
The fact is, and this should have been obvious to all, that we do not know what any extraterrestrials might be like - and hoping that they might be friendly, evolved enough to be wise and beyond violence, is an assumption upon which we could be betting our entire existence. When I was a young scientist 20 years ago at Jodrell Bank, the observatory in Cheshire, I asked Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Jodrell Bank and pioneering radio astronomer, about it. He had thought about it often, he said, and replied: "It's an assumption that they will be friendly - a dangerous assumption."
And Lovell's opinion is still echoed today by the leading scientists in the field. Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. "It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses," he says. " We must be prepared for either possibility."
The Nobel Prize-winning American biologist George Wald takes the same view: he could think of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a superior technology in outer space. The late Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who died a decade ago, also worried about so-called "First Contact". He recommended that we, the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos, should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes. He said there is no chance that two galactic civilisations will interact at the same level. In any confrontation, one will always dominate the other.
Do I want to see us in some community of space-faring nations, such as the reality envisioned by J. Michael Straczynski in Babylon 5, or Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek? Yeah, that'd be cool. Do I expect it to happen that way? Um, not at this point. The only thing we know is based on our experience here on Earth, where whenever a technologically superior culture encountered a less sophisticated culture, the latter always came out the loser to a greater or lesser degree. Until we have some solid information to the contrary, I don't think that it would be wise at all to draw attention to ourselves. After all, we have no idea what the neighborhood is like.
Jim Downey
Cross posted to my CommunionBlog.
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You guys got it all wrong!
The aliens aren't coming from deep space, they're already here! They live inside the hollow earth. They are shape shifting lizards, and can impersonate human beings perfectly. I know it's hard to believe, but I've seen websites! Pictures even! I've even seen picture proof they kidnapped shrub and substituted a lizard for him. It's all out there, really!
And can anyone truly look upon Darth Cheney and not believe a malevolent reptilian intelligence lurks under that human-appearing surface? I rest my case. Be afraid, very afraid...
mike
Hollow Earth
I've been trying to get somebody good at physics to tell me the implications of something I figured out not long back: The center of the earth pretty much has to be at zero G. Ditto for any planet, and for any star, and for any spherical body.
It seems to me that the area of greatest density in any spherical body is a sphere some distance out from the center, and the center itself would be less dense, possibly a great deal less. It would lend weight to the idea of the Hollow Earth. I don't believe it, of course. I'm just sayin'. :D
Sounds like BS to me
Granted, physics was never my strong suite (although I was good enough at electromagnetism to get me an A on that class), but this seriously sounds like BS.
First of all, it's pretty much assumed that a hollow spherical (well, OK, OBLATE SPHEROID in the case of Earth) body the size of a planet (or a small moon, in the Death Star's case) would not occur naturally because the force of gravity would pull all material to the center, and without the pressure caused by the mater coalescing in the formation stage of the planet we would not get a material strong or unified enough to form a hollow shell.
The net force of gravity in a sphere is zero because for any given place you are within the sphere the gravitational pull of the material around you forms a net force of zero. This is where my knowledge of the subject goes from "well I did well enough on this part of the test" to virtually nothing. I know that the solid iron core of the earth is the densest part of the planet, and I know that this is due to the pressure from surrounding materials, but I'm not sure how that squares with the "net gravity within a sphere equals zero" argument, except that pull of gravity is related to mass. So if the materials in different strata have different masses that would determine where the pull of gravity started to zero out. So far as I know this is consistent with what we know of gravity, which is that at the very center of the earth the net gravity is zero, but that as you go outward gravity increases until you're at the surface.
Mostly where I've seen the argument that the net gravity within a sphere is zero is in cases in which the sphere's mass was uniform throughout or in which the mass was greater on the outside than on the inside.
In addition having read up on deep sea lifeforms recently, I am certain that if such lizard people as the guy you're responding to talked about did exist, they would not be able to exist on the surface any more than you could exist in outer space with just an oxygen mask over your face. They'd explode, plain and simple.
So many variables = a shitload of questions!
I apologize in advance for the length of this comment. It goes in several directions and answers nothing. This subject has appealed to me since I learned how to read, and over the years I have asked many questions which will not be answered in my lifetime. If anyone has any input, please speak up.
Has there been enough time yet for other races to evolve past us? While we can construct ideas about the early universe on a large scale, we still don't know if life could have started much earlier than it did. Perhaps whole civilizations have reached our point or further and still exist. Maybe they started earlier but eventually died out. It could be that we're the first to make it this far, or the first to develop at all. You can make models to estimate the chances, but any
hard evidence is either so subtle we haven't noticed it, or light years away.
One question that sticks in my mind relates to the limitations of propulsion. How fast and efficient will traveling become in the future? Every bit of evidence we have seems to say that the speed of light as good as it gets, and maybe only a fraction of that for solid objects or human beings. If there are no new technologies or discoveries that will get us at least up to the speed of light, we (and any other planet based races)will have to rethink our whole existence if we wish to travel. And as Hank pointed out above, living permanently in space could turn out non-feasible, and then we're just stuck here, and aliens are stuck where they are. It seems so pointless and frustrating to be able to detect millions of other galaxies and yet not even be able to navigate our own. Is it just coincidence that the speed of light is often abbreviated as S.O.L.?
My own "hope" is that there are older, wiser races who are either exploring the universe themselves and just haven't found us yet, or that we are being quarantined (or more likely just ignored)since we are still so ignorant. (Kind of like a god fantasy, really, except I don't worship them or ask favors.) I do like the premise of Star Trek First Contact- once a species can break the S.O.L. barrier, they are worth meeting, since they can then become an ally or a threat.
And now, I get to the actual question of the original post: Am I Afraid? Yes, quite so. Mostly afraid that we are a fluke, a chance so rare that even if a billion civilizations have come and gone, that we will always be too few and far between to even know about each other, much less meet.
As far as the way Jim intended the question, not so much. On the one hand, I see that most of our progress has involved callousness and cruelty on someone's part. On the other hand, when you take such attitudes to the extreme, the problem takes care of itself. Like a virus that kills too quickly or a predator that consumes all the prey; if the future leaders remain as they are now, shortsighted chickenhawks and religious madmen, we will do the right thing and exterminate ourselves long before we get the chance to fuck up someone else's world. I can only hope that such selection levels the field for aliens as well.
In the end, when I put my favorite vain fantasies of making contact aside, the most sage advice comes from Hank (as seems to often be the case.) We're talking about leaving the neighborhood before we've even gotten to know the neighbors.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't stretch our brains by thinking about it, or stretch our potential by working towards such knowledge.
It's likely that whole civilizations have appeared and gone
...since the universe is much older than the Earth. And if speed-of-light really is the law, as the T-shirt suggests, it is very possible we'll never be able to converse with any of them. It could wind up as electromagnetic archeology from the other side of our moon, picking up signals from civilizations that no longer exist.
Very unlikely anyone would attack our planet for its resources - space is full of resources that aren't defended by nuclear weapons. And even an armada of spaceships that visits us, is still very, very far from home. Yes, I know they may have even better weapons but they can pick up water, minerals, hydrocarbons, anything they want from lifeless worlds and no one will bother them or likely even ever know about it.
More likely hostile aliens would arrive, if ever, because their religion tells them to convert us.
circumstances
Well if their atmosphere is similar enough to ours for them to live they'd probably take a stab at conquering our world because it would make a better, less energy intensive base in the long term. If light speed is the fastest that is possible, that increases the importance of being fully self-reliant, which makes an inhabitable and inhabited planet both a more enticing and a more intimidating prize (it's like the question, if you have a choice between a big risk with a big prize or a small risk with a small prize, which will you take? Or will you be the guy who stays home and not take the risk at all). Another possibility is medicine, if we were half as smart as we seem to think we are we'd realize that unknown species have potential in the medical field. That's something a lifeless planet simply cannot offer.
But yes, chances are there have been some civilizations that have died out ages ago. Just as it is possible that some intelligent species will pick up our radio transmissions and by the time their reply comes back we'll have died out (one way or another, personally I'm hoping we don't take our planet with us, something like an over-efficient plague would be nice about now).
Whew.
Good gosh, Neil. You'll get me all flustered.
And I agree with you. If I have any fears along these lines, it's fear that we'll never know that we have neighbors. Never know that THIS period in our history is survivable.
Every time I see those pictures of distant pieces of sky, with thousands of galaxies pictured, I always wonder "What if 'intelligent' life is so unlikely that THIS is the only place it happened?"
As I mention...
...here: "...an awful waste of space." one of my favorite quotes is from R. Buckminster Fuller, and it's what I use for my email .sig: “Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not.
In either case, the thought is staggering.”
Sort of like how I think about the possibility of god...
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Scenarios
Well, in terms of contact with alien civilization I tend to think of a few different scenarios:
1) One is superior to the other, to the point where one is capable of inter-stellar travel on a realistic time scale (note: by realistic I mean "within one or two generations of leaving base", I don't mean "warp 6 Scotty, I want our ETA to be 12 hours"), and the other is not capable of inter-stellar travel. They less advanced race may be just getting to their moon, like us. Seriously, we can go to the moon, but we haven't even set up a permanent base there. So far we cannot function without relying on supplies from earth, and that's something we'll have to give up if we actually want to think about setting up colonies on the moon or Mars, let alone traveling to the stars.
2) Both are relatively equal. In this scenario both are capable of getting beyond their solar system. This scenario actually has two different sub-scenarios
2.a) One meets the other in their solar system. Basically a situation like chess when your king is in imminent danger. All they have to do is take out your planet (or at least make it unlivable) and they've won, meanwhile if you take out their ships they know you're well armed and will send better ships.
2.b) You meet in deep space. Here the outcome depends on two questions: can you communicate? and would it be easier to just kill them and steal everything they own or should you work together? Judging by humans you'd basically have a 99.9% chance of conflict occurring.
The ultimate question to deciding any scenario is "what do they want?", the ultimate answer is generally some variant of "resources". They're parasitic entities that require a host to survive (I would say if they are technologically superior to us this is the best scenario, since here they need us for something, and judging by humans if you aren't needed you're slaughtered). If it's food, we're basically bipedal pork roast, and as I said in a previous post, there's a strong possibility that anything developed enough to invent space travel would be carnivorous or omnivorous. It is also certain that if these aliens have a similar temperament to humans than they are aggressive and warlike, because most of the inventions that we rely on to get us the baby steps we're capable of into space came from wars. I mean seriously, the only reason my parent's generation even cared about the moon landing was to beat Russia.
I find Star Trek to be a nice dream, but honestly, I think it's pretty unlikely. For one thing Star Trek assumes that most of the intelligent species are humanoid, and genetically similar enough to reproduce with viable offspring (and seriously, we can't even reproduce with our closest relatives, what's the chance of reproducing with something from another planet?). For another it assumes that most intelligent space-faring lifeforms communicate the same way. Considering how many creatures communicate by pharamones I find it silly to assume all intelligent lifeforms will communicate using the same method. That being the case I don't think it's very likely that pathogens affecting humans or other Terran lifeforms will affect an alien species (I mean geez, if you can name me a virus that affects every organism on this planet I bet you could get a Nobel prize with it). It's much more likely that we'd kill them with allergies. Think pollen, it doesn't actually hurt you, but because it's an unknown organism your body assumes that it's dangerous and repels it. Now imagine stepping out of your nice space craft onto an entire planet of whatever you happen to be allergic to, and unless you retreat into your nice, well filtered space ship it's never going to stop.
So strategies: The best strategy is to keep quiet. The baby fish that hide live a lot longer than the baby fish that go swimming out into open water. Other than that, act helpless. Seriously, if you're dealing with something with advanced technology that can cream your sorry ass into the ground you don't want to look dangerous. That way if it's a species that is willing to ignore harmless organisms it will leave you alone, and if it isn't you can take it by surprise. And like Gulliver says, the secret to long life in space is "taste terrible". Then there's always becoming pets, food or slaves, because any of those the alien race has a vested interest in keeping you alive. Seriously, slavery worked well for black people, white people didn't kill them off, which believe me they would have done had they been useless. Tragic as choosing life at the expense of freedom is, it is also one survival strategy that works. Or you could choose freedom at the expense of your life, it's really your decision, and ultimately it depends what's important to you. If it's preserving the pride of your race and your freedom, then die, just don't expect bragging rights. If it's preserving your bloodline, sell out and live. If it ever came down to a choice like that, there'd be people in both camps, and ultimately there would be enough who would sell freedom for life that the aliens would figure we're a good source of livestock.
One thing we should not assume is that aliens would have a vested interest in keeping us alive. We have a vested interest in keeping our planet alive, and so conserving ecosystems and their species. They on the other hand wouldn't necessarily, and would probably have brought things like seeds and embryos of their home species to use on conquered planets. Again judging from the way life acts on earth, the chance that an alien species would discover earth and not try to exploit it is nil, unless the species evolved in an environment so dissimilar to our own that our planet would be toxic to them, and so uninhabited planets would be an easier resource mine.
Inedible
Considering how many things here in our own eco-system are either non-nutricious or outright poisonous I know I wont be first in line with my bar-b-q sauce to eat the steak from the purple alien cows of Aldebaran 5. Unless there is some as yet undiscovered selection mechanism for handedness of amino acids and sugars its a 50-50 bet that their will be the wrong way and you will get absolutely nothing from eating them (with the possible exception of digestive difficulties). Similarly I am not worried about being lunch for some alien organism, however it is always possible that they wont find out that I am not tasty until after they have 'sampled' me, rather like the great white sharks. Still it doesn't keep me up nights.
true
Very true. I hadn't considered chirality or the difficulties inherent with not having the enzymes needed to properly break down a structure into its component parts. For example an extra step with its own amino acids is needed to convert fructose to glucose (which can then go into the glycolitic cycle). If their/our biochemical structure were wrong the eater would actually loose more energy than was gained in the process of digestion (although the nutrients might make this worthwhile).
The idea of being eaten (regardless of whether it's by terrestrial or extraterrestrial organisms) really doesn't bother me for some reason. OK, the idea of being eaten alive by maggots has bothered me since I volunteered at a wildlife rehab clinic, but that's a case where the maggots are eating their way from your eyes/nose/mouth/ears into your brain, or from your anus into your glutial muscles. Seriously creepy.
Eaten
I thought that maggots ate only dead tissue and in fact they had been used to clean wounds because they would not eat any of the still living tissue.
Days of future past
I read through Charlie's blog as well and I found no fault in his analysis except for one point which I will get to in a moment. There may well be some dramatic scientific breakthrough just around the corner which makes space travel more viable but right now it is looking like a pretty dear investment. If we as a species thought it was worthwhile then we could make it happen (slowly and/or poorly). I think the best solution is simply to send out frozen fertilized eggs with the previously mentioned artifical womb and grow the people there rather than sending fully grown people, after all a fertilized egg contains all of the instructions necessary to make a human being and weighs a hell of a lot less.
Consider though the dramatic technological innovations that started at the end of the 19th century and went until about the middle of the 20th and changed the lives of people forever. The list is long.
Photography, Electricity, telephone, Refrigeration, X_Rays, Automobiles, Airplanes, , phonograph, movies, radio, television, nuclear weapons, nuclear power.
Since I have been alive there have been very few of these dramatic changes. When I was a kid they landed on the moon. Aside from that... What has changed in the past forty years? Not transport. Trains, car, planes, all would be instantly recognizable to someone from the 50's. They'd look a little different, but they sure wouldn't seem like magic. Aside from cell phones and computers I think advancement in most other things has been slow. Our cars still run on gasoline and have the same piss-poor mileage that they did decades ago. The Standard Model of particle interaction still rules the day. They are dotting i's and crossing t's, but no major shake ups have occured. This is why I don't have much hope for sudden innovation.
As to the interaction with alien biology question I'd have to say right now we'd have a bit of a problem considering we have barely begun to understand Earthly biology. In fact all some hostile alien would need to do to wipe out all life on our planet is send us just the right virus since all living things here operate on very similar principles (DNA etc.) They could get a group rate and send a variety of viruses just to be sure. No dramatic independence day type attack required.
As promised the one thing Charlie did not seem to think of.
Why should we go into space and colonize? The answer is simple. We are life. That is what life does. It spreads.
Yeah, maybe.
I still maintain that Charlie's comments echo perfectly the comments in this post on Paleo-future:
Taken from the August 14, 1906 Lake County Times (Hammond, Indiana). And the guy who said that was a well-known inventor of the 19th century. He just couldn't foresee how things would change so much. We're in a similar situation, unable to understand where the future is leading, barely able to understand how we got to where we are now.
Innovation tends to go through an "S" shaped curve (think the 'long S of Colonial times), where the return on the initial breakthrough/investment is very good until you reach the top of the S. It is only at that point that alternative technologies start to become even slightly attractive options for exploration and development. With many of the developments you mention being mature technologies, we're only now reaching this point. My guess is that we'll see another round of breakthroughs in the next couple of decades, which will take a century or more to fully exploit.
I completely agree with your final point, however, and it is why I fully expect that we'll eventually figure out a way to move off planet. I may not live to see even the beginning of that, but it will eventually happen, if we don't kill ourselves off first.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
A scenario from Battlestar Galactica that made me laugh
The rag-tag armada of surviving humans, fleeing the Cylons, finally arrives at "Earth", the legendary lost home of humanity. Commander Adama is escorted to the UN where he coolly explains the Cylon threat and prepares the rest of humanity to defend itself.
Adama: "Do you have any nukes?"
UN Leader: "Oh, yes, we have many thousands, and we can whip up plenty more in a heartbeat."
Adama: "So the Cylons have already been here! But with your defenses, no wonder they leave you alone."
UN Leader: "No, we never heard of Cylons before you came here."
Adama: "So... who were you planning to use all those nukes on?"
UN Leader: "Oh, our nation-states use them to defend from each other."
Adama (quietly) to the Galactica Armada president: "Tell the fleet we're getting out of here at oh-nine-hundred tomorrow. These people are crazy!"
Hehehehehe...
Or, perhaps more likely in that scenario, Adama says quietly "Wow, let's get these people in ships - they're ruthless enough to have nukes for their own squabbles, the Cylons will never know what hit 'em..."
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Visitors
"It's a cookbook!"
Or: They're already here, they're evil, and one of them is our vice president.
Seriously, I don't think they can ever get here. (And if they do, I’m not sure WE will be here.)
Ditto in reverse for us. I doubt we'll ever get off Earth. First because we're only intelligent by comparison with the next best thing on EARTH, which is not that intelligent, and I just don't think we're capable of it. Second because ... I don't think we're SEPARABLE from Earth.
I've been thinking about this for years, and it seems to me that there's only ONE living thing on Earth, and we're just somewhat-and-only-occasionally-self-aware bits of it. Don't anybody go leaping at Gaea, or anything mystical. I don't mean any of that. In part I mean the simplest possible indefinitely sustainable environment is the size of a solar system.
But turn the question around: If WE got to Frolix 8 and found intelligent creatures there at a low level of technology, on a planet rich in metals, petroleum, and fertile land, is there any doubt that we’d fuck them over in a heartbeat?
YOU might not, and I might not, but the corporate/military people who would actually make the trip and control the outcome (think Enron, or Dick Cheney) would rip their guts out and tan the ropy strands for export, without even thinking about it.
...
I can imagine a couple of remotely possible scenarios for visitors:
1) They send machines (or they ARE machines).
2) They send a device that reconstitutes them on the spot by nanotechnology or some sort of artificial womb tanks.
Yet I think both are fairly unlikely because of the time factor. I mean, I can imagine a complex gadget sailing through space for 10,000 years, but I have a hard time believing it would function afterwards.
We SF fans like to think of machines as the descendants or replacements for organic thingies, but I really have my doubts about it. Living things are just so damned compact, efficient, and low energy, compared to the big kludgy mechanisms we have. We talk about Von Neumann machines as if they’re something a Japanese company could come up with in ten years or so, but ... self-replicating machines? Something that goes out and finds ALL the raw materials (and all the energy) for remaking itself, contains ALL the machinery and instructions for refining and shaping and fitting-together of all the parts?
I have a hard time seeing it. Especially if it has to travel in the vast frozen desert of interstellar space for several thousand years.
The promise of nanotechnology begins to make me believe, but I’m not there yet.
...
On another front, I think we already live among aliens, some of which I’d very much like to communicate with. Elephants, chimps, gorillas, dolphins, whales ... what else?
We have anecdotal evidence for several of those that seems to show they THINK about things. Why don’t we try talking to them first? Instead, we kill them.
I have this notion that if you were to raise kids and baby elephants together over a period of years, you might get someone who understood both sides enough that a communication breakthrough could happen. I’d like to see that experiment tried.
I kinda think it won’t be, though, and part of it is ... just low intelligence on our part. We’re so stupid we think we’re superior, and most of us aren’t even interested in the idea. Even if you had the funds to set up the Elephant Communication center, you’d be an international laughingstock, and child protective forces would come in and crucify you, in short order.
...
Finally, with the entire energy and technological output of the planet Earth available, we have ONE space station.
Just one. What if there’s a reason for that?
Rocks
One of the scarier propositions I've run into goes like this:
Faster Than Light (FTL) travel is impossible, warp drives and controlled wormhole fantasies aside. The possibility that alien civilizations will be able to visit each other personally is therefore extremely remote. Attaching motors to a large rock and accelerating it to near light speed velocities, however, is fairly trivial. The very worst thing you could do in that sort of universe, therefore, is to announce your location to any who might be looking, because all it would take is one hostile civilization with a "Wipe them out before they can ever do the same to us" mentality to start hurling rocks at your planet in its nice, fat, predictable orbit. Tracking incoming asteroids at that speed would be virtually impossible. Before you know it, bam, your nice little race and the planet it sits on is vapor.
The most prudent course of action is to shut the hell up and make like a hole in space. It's not hard to imagine a culture taking that kind of world view, that it's better to eliminate the competition before they even know you're out there to make painting a target on your surface very, very stupid.
I don't personally hold to that philosophy, but it makes a very frightening kind of sense.
Scary Propositions
It's the possibility of old ladies with poisoned hatpins in the supermarket that gets me shaking. You're checking out acorn squash in the produce department, all unaware of your surroundings, and suddenly ... ZAP! ... you're dead.
I no longer go out to shop.
Catless bags
There are actually only two things that we could rely on in this alien contact situation as described.
1) The aliens have the technological means to receive our signal.
2) They have an understanding that the signal is the product of another technological species and not simply noise.
Besides the fact that listening and waiting is no longer an option I would not worry too much about this for a number of reasons. Firstly unless they have somehow gotten around some pretty massive physical barriers travelling to us here would be (to understate the case somewhat) rather difficult. Secondly even if they had both the means and the desire to travel to us here there is no guarantee that should they desire to conquer us we would be compatible with their biology. Although it is a staple of science fiction and certainly star trek to be constantly landing on inhabited planets containing alien ecosystems without respiratory or skin protection we have no guarantee that the alien life forms would not try to colonize us right then and there. Think War of the Worlds in reverse. Would you want to breathe unprotected on an alien world full of alien organisms? Anyway it might be in the aliens interest to keep away rather than trying to master Earthly biology. Hell, we are having a hard enough time and we live here.
I hate to say it but our species is in no way ready for contact. As a group we are rapacious, violent and over fifty percent of us base our lives, or at least our beliefs, on fairy tales. What species in its right mind would want contact with us? I figure we would probably be a good candidate for quarantine.
Yes and no.
Um, maybe. Or maybe not.
As a fan of SF for about the last 40 years, and an author of such myself, I can assure you that I can construct reasonable explanations for dealing with any issues about biological contamination you might come up with...so long as I get to stipulate advances in our own tech or having a different alien tech on hand. ;)
Your broader point about quarantine is good, though, and the supposition I use for my novel. Makes about the most sense to me - hell, I wouldn't want to contact us if I was an alien species.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Also...
...thought I'd let people here know, I went ahead and posted this over at dKos this morning, and we had a pretty good discussion there. You can see the thread here.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.