Where have all the cool aliens gone?
In regards to GeekLethal's post, a necessary precursor to worrying about what to do once you've received a singing telegram from ET is worrying whether you have a telegraph machine to receive telegrams with.
I think that worrying about ET's message is pointless. It is clear that hyper-advanced aliens, wise with the knowledge of the eons, will completely endorse my worldview. Therefore, to prepare for their arrival, attend to my words and all will be well.
The fact that reasonably thorough searches of the sky have completely failed to reveal the existence of radio broadcasting, Dan Rather in the sky aliens leads us to several potential scenarios, all of which rather undercut SETI as it currently exists.
1) The cool aliens don't use radio. If we are going to be accepted by our social betters, we must move beyond attempting to speak with a hick accent on the radio waves. Quantum entanglement, even with our current, limited understanding of the laws of nature, holds open a possibility of FTL communication. Other quantum high wierdness may also be infinitely more efficient than radio. Some heretics even believe that relativity may be incomplete, and that gravity may propagate significantly faster than light. We have only recently become even marginally technologically competent. By galactic standards, we were born yesterday, and slept in late today for good measure. Are we to imagine that radio is the ne plus ultra of communication techniques forever?
2) There are no aliens, cool or otherwise. This would certainly explain why we haven't gotten any dancing ape telegrams on the white house lawn. It would be reassuring in some regards to know that we have the galaxy to ourselves. Given the rate at which we have lately been discovering planets, its feels unlikely to me that there is no one else out there, anywhere.
3) There is some compelling reason that the aliens are not communicating at all. Long time readers will know about the novel Killing Star, which set outs the Central Park analogy for life in the galaxy:
Imagine you're alone and unarmed in Central Park at night. From where you are, weapons are concealed and intentions hard to discern. The very last thing you do is wander around shouting, "I'm here! That could attract the attention of decidedly unsavory types. What do you do? You hunker down, keep quiet; and wait for a policeman to come round or for daylight and walk out of the park. However, there are several unfortunate differences between the universe and Central Park:
- There's no policeman
- You can't leave the park
- Night never ends
If this scenario even remotely approximates reality, sending signals into space is just about the stupidest thing we could imagine doing. It's painting a bullseye on your chest, and screaming, "Shoot me!"
I don't think that SETI is at all likely to detect any signals. The energy cost to send a radio broadcast that would be coherent at distances greater than a few lightyears is absolutely enormous. And if aliens are sending narrowcast sigals, we would only pick them up by the thinnest of chances. The only remotely plausible radio broadcast would be the nearby deathshout of a species that had been wacked a la Killing Star, and no longer had anything to lose. At that stage, stealth is no longer a priority and having some memory of your existence better than no existence at all.
Life on this planet is scary enough. I don't think that life throughout the galaxy is going to be the big rock candy mountain, either. As we develop the technology to start moving around outside the cradle, we will have to be more than a little cautious.
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Martian slime would mean
Martian slime would mean nothing - it'd make some scientists happy and some theologists sad, but that's about it. The real question is what we do with some form of intelligent life, and I don't thinkk we have any decent answer to that. We'll probably just do it by the seat of our pants, like we do with most of these events.
Well, first of all plenty of
Well, first of all plenty of world religions will have to find a way to shoehorn Martian slimemolds into their particular Creatoriffic Master Plan. That will be fun enough.
Discovering non intelligent
Discovering non intelligent life - slimemold or equivalent - will not present too great a problem. It will change things, to be sure, but the changes will be more on the lines of the Copernican revolution. The size of our world will be bigger, and there will be more things in it.
This change in perspective will be pretty big, eventually, and it would likely spur a lot more conversation about the possibility of more competent than slimemold lifeforms. Learning about how the Martian/Europan/wherever came to be will vastly increase our knowledge of biology, as it it will give us another specimen to look at. Up til now, we only have one evolutionary history to pick at. Having two or more to compare will allow us to really figure things out.
An interesting bit of trivia is this: at a Seti conference a while back, scientists were encouraged to bring there ideas for easily translatable mathematical schemes for communicating with ET. Of all those who were brought, not one was figured out by anyone else.
Communication across the eons will be more difficult than many imagine. First off, the more compressed a bit of information is, the more random it will seem, because all regularity has been taken out. Also, without reference to physical objects, it may be hard to figure out what they're talking about. And finally, there is no guarantee that an alien alien will use any assumptions we are likely to peg. Say you're trying to transmit a picture without compression - how many pixels wide by how many tall? Get the dimensions wrong, and its gibberish. How many bits to define a pixel? Get that wrong, and it's gibberish. But what if they're not thinking in rectangles? What if it's a spiral picture, like those lumpy crafty rugs? Or something more obtuse? What if they aren't transmitting pictures, but 3d images? They would think that every intelligent creature would percieve the world that way. Even worse if it was smell or some other sense we are completely unfamiliar with.
We might not ever know anything more than the fact that intelligent life exists.
Of course, it may be easier. But the effect that Europeans had on aboriginies and injuns was not due merely to the knowledge of superior technology. Most of the effect came from Europeans using that technology to kill, maim or enslave the injuns and aboriginies. If they aren't right here I think most people would be able to cope with the idea of superintelligent ET somewhere else. (We've already had that idea, in fact. The sure knowledge of angels, UFOs or the kingdom of far Cathay never really troubled anyone in the past.)
We could learn a lot, if we can decipher their messages. But when the reply time stretches into centuries, dialogs are hard to maintain.
If life is truly common throughout the galaxy, we might need to worry about aliens close by. Proximity will be the only situation that will really cause any trouble - within a couple hundred light years.
Carl Sagan discussed, in
Carl Sagan discussed, in general terms, scenarios of interspecies contact in deep space.
I don't remember which book it was...heh, maybe all of them...but from what I recall Dr. Sagan observed that in terrestrial experience, when one "alien" culture came into contact with another, one was clearly and overwhelmingly dominant technologically, culturally, militarily. So the idea of finding other societies in space that differ only in basic physiology and shape of ray-gun is kinda silly. Not that you, Buckethead, support that idea, but I just want to get it out there.
Furthermore, the idea of actual physical contact is extraordinarily improbable given the vast distances involved. Even being roughly proximate in spacetime is unlikely.
Nevertheless, Sagan went on to sketch out a couple of possibilities. One scenario was that two species are entirely unaware of each other and go on about their business yet are actually nearly coincident. They just lack the necessary tools to allow each to recognize the other. I believe that some of those SETI folks at the Hahvahd conference were trying to explore that possibility.
But my original question still stands. Well, Buckethead wisely updated it so now it would read, "Assuming we have the means to detect an alien society, what do we do once we've found it?"
I can follow the line of reasoning that suggests we might be able to share data, via prime numbers and certain mathematical expressions, but sooner or later they're going to want to know whether the next episode of American Chopper is a repeat, or who wins the World Series, or ask to borrow money. And what are we supposed to do then?
Let's make it less exotic- what if a Mars probe actually digs up some Martian slimemold? And for purposes of this piece, assume that the broader scientific community agrees that it is indeed slimemold, and not snot from a disgruntled NASA tech.