Beware Of Hungry Aliens The Next Time You Do SETI Research
Contacting aliens could end all life on earth. Let’s stop trying, Op Ed by Mark Buchanan, Washington Post
“More alarming is the possibility that alien civilizations are remaining out of contact because they know something: that sending out signals is catastrophically risky. Our history on Earth has given us many examples of what can happen when civilizations with unequal technology meet — generally, the technologically more advanced has destroyed or enslaved the other. A cosmic version of this reality might have convinced many alien civilizations to remain silent. Exposing yourself is an invitation to be preyed upon and devoured.”
Keith’s note: Oh no. Face-eating aliens want to “devour” us. We have all seen that movie before. See what this whole UFO report release meme is stirring up? Really, Washington Post? The op ed author Mark Buchanan seems to think that just listening for indications of other civilizations will somehow alert them that they are being listened to such they will come and eat us. How? Did they file a subpoena for our radio telescope observation records? Besides, we have been sending all manner of radio transmissions out for a centry. Its too late to call the signals back.
Even if these signals from Earth are not detectable or reecognizable by another civiilzation, there are aspects of what we have done to our planet’s surface and atmosphere that they can detect. These indications are called “technosignatures” and are a subset of the overall biosignatures that instruments like the Webb Space Telescope will be searching for on worlds circling distant stars. We don’t have to send ET any text messages. They can find us much more easily across greater distances by looking at our dirty air.
Also, the author is confused as to who Breakthrough Listen is paying to do their search. They buy time on various telescopes around the world. They are not paying the SETI Institute to do all of this. And the author seems to think that SETI = SETI Institute when in fact SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – is a scientific discipline that has been undertaken over the past half century by many organizations, institutions, and individuals around the world – not just one non-profit with that acronym in its name.
The author apparently wants us to wait a while to talk to ET until (apparently) we are capable of defending ourselves against any possible invasions by hungry aliens. Remember, he said that we risk being “preyed upon and devoured”. So we need to fight back the aliens at lunch time, right? I guess that means that the author wants us to develop weaponry far more devastating than the stuff we currently have – weapons that we can barely refrain from using – on ourselves – now. Somehow that plan seems to present a more clear and present danger to humanity than listening for ET.
Yes, there should be a plan for what to do if it is time to send messages to the all of the hungry aliens. Good. Let’s have some meetings and draw up the plans. We can even do them by Zoom so as to get into the whole remote interaction thing. That should not take more than a few years. Meanwhile where is the harm in listening. Who knows – we might actually learn something from these older, more advanced civilizations about how not to blow ourselves up.
I can’t wait to see what sort of letters to the editor the Washington Post publishes in response to this op ed.
Nothing today’s media says or does surprises me anymore.
Not-one-damned-thing.
I keep thinking that and then they find a new low which still surprises me.
“They can find us much more easily across greater distances by looking at our dirty air.”
One of the discussions at SETI’s recent Drake Awards, besides looking for radio transmissions, other techniques can be looking at a sharp rise in CO2 of atmospheres.
Reading the op-ed showed to me that Mark Buchanan did not “seem to think that just listening for indications of other civilizations will somehow alert them that they are being listened to such they will come and eat us.”
He said:
“Getting impatient, some other scientists are now pushing for a more active program — METI, for Messaging ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence — that wouldn’t just listen, but actually send out powerful messages toward other stars, seeking to make contact.”
So, its not listening but broadcasting. Not is a spherically propagating and rapidly diminishing radio signal but a focused beam pointed at some site base don some criteria. It will take time to get there. Still, there is at least a possible eventual risk to a human civilization of the future.
Odd that we do not have a collective way of deciding this should be done. Just because we can do something, does this mean we should? We see this in many areas, AI, robotics, genetic manipulation are a few.
SETI is harmless, METI not so much. Techno signatures sounds interesting if possible. Let us hope the UFO/UAP angle has no alien connection.
As far as the concern about “aliens eating us”, don’t laugh. Read “Safe on Mars”.
We’ve been sending radio noise out for many years now. If “they” are watching, we’re not invisible now.
Yes, that’s what’s always said. But this omnidirectional radio signal falls off in intensity by the inverse squared of the distance from the source. A typical radio station can broadcast at 50,000W at its source. At further distances, this power is spread to the surface of a sphere of growing radius. The surface area of a sphere is 4*pi*radius^2. So, at 1 AU (1.5e+11 meters), the power/unit area is 50,000W/(4*3.14*(1.5E11m)^2)=1.8E-19 W/m^2. Pretty small but we know we can do that. Voyager is about 153 AU away so the W/m^2 is 7.5E-24 W/m^2. Since we can communicate with it then know we can do that too. But what about 1 light year (9.5e+15 meters)? That is 4.4E-29 W/m^2. That is small and we haven’t even got to the nearest star, 4.2 light years away. That is 2.46E-30 W/m^2. You get to a point where the galactic noise drowns you out.
You need a very big, big antenna to detect such faint signals. Maybe other civilizations have done this. Who knows? Likely it is easier to build spacecraft to go there as are suggested by Breakthrough Starshot.
Also there was only a small window of time where we were full analogue and the signals weren’t encoded. Now they are and they are probably indistinguishable from noise unless you know the coding a priori. but as Kieth points out we have much louder technosignatures than our broadcasts…. the atmospheric background radiation for example. Hawking, too, was of the opinion that contacting an alien civilization would be an end to human civilization. The evidence was the European colonization programs and their impacts on indigenous cultures. Iain Banks called it an outside Context Event!
There is one odd point that is never touched upon that stumps me with this argumentation. Why would they bother? If they have that sort of technology why come down the gravity well at all? What resources are not more readily available in solar orbit? Meat? Hardly worth the bother. There was one reason that Banks again posited: Tourism! How many planets do you think have a moon of a size and in such an orbit that it perfectly blocks the Sun?
Anyway the volume of space that has been exposed to our technosignature has to be teaspoon in an ocean class of thing.
Spaceronin:
I would like to see these Earth technosignatures you are referring to that can be seen by alot of star systems. Do you have a paper? First, one has to be looking at the planet. Then one has to be able to resolve the spectra. What spectra means technology? Methane? Ozone? Fluorocarbon? I would suspect any spectra would be also said to be possible to be created naturally. Heck, astronomers see amino acids (glycine) in SPACE (interstellar dust clouds). Breakthrough Starshot-like programs would shotgun thousands of tiny star ships to every star they wish at fractions of the speed of light. Seems this would be more practical.
As to why they would come here, I dislike trying to think like an alien given we do not know if they are even biological. But going to Earth could be part of the education system (to fulfill credits), like dissecting frogs or going on foreign travel.
Try Google. Seriously.
Keith: Thanks. I had not thought of that.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv…
I found a nice paper to a 2018 NASA workshop.
A relevant excerpt:
“The degree of ambiguity of a technosignature: As with biosignatures (such as O2, which has both biotic and abiotic sources), some technosignatures might be easily mistaken for natural phenomena unrelated to life. For instance, waste heat from technology has a similar observational signature to astrophysical dust, which makes it difficult to distinguish,
whereas certain narrow-band radio emissions may not have a natural source.”
But the paper covers an innovative range of things to look for.
If they’re watching our news and entertainment programming, they probably think that we are some sort of planetary lunatic asylum.
Seems to me that if the aliens are truly hostile, then listening and finding out all we can pre-contact is even more imperative.
Probably their Prime Directive won’t permit advanced civilization aliens to contact us until we have some type of Warp drive. Obviously, the Washpost writers have too much time on their hands. Or maybe they have been cancelled…or should be. No, captain, no intelligent life on Earth!