It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.
Has Jonathon Porritt been eating organic Roquefort before bed again?
Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.
That’s rather ambiguous. Does that mean that technological and economic advances mean we might become a threat to them which implies no ecopaclypse? Anyway, who’s control are we out of? I think you know the answer: a Wellsian technocratic elite.
This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.
Highly speculative? Utterly deranged is what I’d call it. This clearly is what NASA does when it doesn’t have a shuttle to play with.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity “prepare for actual contact”.
Plausible! The thing about aliens is that they are, well, alien. If and when we meet them we will have to wing it.
In their report, Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis, the researchers divide alien contacts into three broad categories: beneficial, neutral or harmful.
So it could be good bad or indifferent. It is now clear that the reason NASA no longer have the capacity to put humans into orbit is they no longer employ rocket scientists…
Beneficial encounters ranged from the mere detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), for example through the interception of alien broadcasts, to contact with cooperative organisms that help us advance our knowledge and solve global problems such as hunger, poverty and disease.
…they do though employ people who watch a lot of bad sf movies.
Another beneficial outcome the authors entertain sees humanity triumph over a more powerful alien aggressor, or even being saved by a second group of ETs. “In these scenarios, humanity benefits not only from the major moral victory of having defeated a daunting rival, but also from the opportunity to reverse-engineer ETI technology,” the authors write.
Send in the Ewoks!
Other kinds of close encounter may be less rewarding and leave much of human society feeling indifferent towards alien life. The extraterrestrials may be too different from us to communicate with usefully. They might invite humanity to join the “Galactic Club” only for the entry requirements to be too bureaucratic and tedious for humans to bother with.
The EU in space. Now that is depressing. Imagine it. Continually bailing out Wolf 359 and Tau Ceti…
They could even become a nuisance, like the stranded, prawn-like creatures that are kept in a refugee camp in the 2009 South African movie, District 9, the report explains.
I have met quite a few South Africans and I am in no doubt that if “prawn-like creatures” were ever stranded in the RSA the South Africans would respond using the most basic of human technologies - the BBQ.
The most unappealing outcomes would arise if extraterrestrials caused harm to humanity, even if by accident. While aliens may arrive to eat, enslave or attack us, the report adds that people might also suffer from being physically crushed or by contracting diseases carried by the visitors. In especially unfortunate incidents, humanity could be wiped out when a more advanced civilisation accidentally unleashes an unfriendly artificial intelligence, or performs a catastrophic physics experiment that renders a portion of the galaxy uninhabitable.
I said sf movies. Obviously I meant Battlefield Earth.
To bolster humanity’s chances of survival, the researchers call for caution in sending signals into space, and in particular warn against broadcasting information about our biological make-up, which could be used to manufacture weapons that target humans. Instead, any contact with ETs should be limited to mathematical discourse “until we have a better idea of the type of ETI we are dealing with.”
We of course means they. The propeller-heads in the employ of NASA who know sums and stuff.
The authors warn that extraterrestrials may be wary of civilisations that expand very rapidly, as these may be prone to destroy other life as they grow, just as humans have pushed species to extinction on Earth. In the most extreme scenario, aliens might choose to destroy humanity to protect other civilisations.
This coming from NASA who have no manned launch system and has just cancelled it’s replacement - the abominably back to the future Constellation program is dismal.
“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilisation may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand. Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions,” the report states.
Again the link between greenhouse gases and civilisational development - interesting. Note this is almost the opposite of the AGW catastrophe. It is not saying that greenhouse gases are bad for us per se but that when Our Friends from Frolix 8 clock them on their spectroscope they decide to wipe us out before we can do them harm. This is quite weird from a green point of view. Is it simply the case that as increasing numbers of folks decide that CO2 won’t make the sky fall on it’s own the technomancer elite have to threaten us with alien invasion! If you think about it this is really the story of the tower of Babel retold in bad sf terms.
“Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. “These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.
Reading that convinces me more than ever that this is really is the Book of Genesis and the Tower of Babel and all that malarkey for this millennium (with a spot of Prometheus too). Don’t over-reach yourselves humanity or fire will fall from the skies, the seas will rise, dogs will live with cats, the first-born shall receive an ASBO etc. Except now it isn’t an angry guy with a beard with a fondness for smiting (because nobody would believe that except Michelle Bachmann!) but ET with photon torpedoes.
Even if we never make contact with extraterrestrials, the report argues that considering the potential scenarios may help to plot the future path of human civilisation, avoid collapse and achieve long-term survival.
That is a non-sequitur. This is Green propaganda in hopefully it’s death -throes. This is nothing other than stories to frighten children.
NASA calling time on the final frontier then? Good. Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and all the rest can do the real work. As the old joke goes, “NASA is still expanding into space - office space”. And it is an old joke which shows what a porkulent bunch of miserablists they really have become.
I hope these guys get to have a full and frank discussion of their views with Buzz Aldrin at a conference sometime soon.
Two aliens watching the spacio-visualisator.
“Progress report, Gleeple? How are the Earthlings doing?”
“I am afraid it is bad news, Blargo. They are still too primitive to join our club.”
“They have not learned how to advance yet? I thought they were on the cusp three hundred years ago?”
“They were, Blargo. But then they lost it again. I am afraid we just cannot risk letting them into the Galactic Libertarian Federation”.
Someone’s been watching ‘Avatar’ again.
“Avatar” is the perfect metaphor for socialism: beautiful to look at, but there’s soooooo much wrong with the whole thing.
“The aliens won’t accept us because we’re not carbon neutral.”
First Krugman tells us we need an alien invasion to solve the recession, then NASA starts warning us about space invaders. Is there something we’re not being told?
I mean, I knew Gore was a robot, (thought you could fool us by changing one letter of your name eh?), but I didn’t realise he was an alien robot until his programming broke down the other week and he started screaming in a strange language.
Of course, looking back in history, all those brontosaurus farts could have disturbed the atmosphere enough to cause the aliens to wipe out the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, but given the light speed delay, that information might only have reached the aliens some ten million years later and they’ve been wending their destructive way here for the last 56 million years or so.
Maybe Krugman has got wind of their arrival and is trying to warn us. (Krugman is clearly a member of the lizard overlord race. That goatee is fooling no-one).
Do NASA not have a PR team? Or did they rush this out while they were all at lunch?
I think it may have been written after a particularly long lunch.
Is there are serious thought given anywhere as to what aliens might be like? Are there any constraints we can reasonably use to get some kind of idea? Are they at least likely to be symmetrical, carbon-based, to communicate primarily by acoustic and visual means, to be somewhere around our own size, at least to within a few orders of magnitude? They will need to be many times the size of an iron atom, for example, but not so large they collapse under their own weight on the planets they want to visit. These give us upper and lower bounds, as a starting point.
If there really is a White House/NASA reception team preparing to greet aliens, I’d love to see the look on their faces if they ever get called into action (“blue, but we assumed they’d be green, now they won’t match my purse”; “are you sure those things are their arms, I mean if we shake the wrong bit this is going to be embarrassing”; “well, I didn’t expect them to speak English, but they must have speech transformers or something, I mean even we’ve managed to produce the Babel Fish and we can’t even get to Mars”; “Oh, they have got them but they’re set to generalized Polynesian, why? you mean we have to fly halfway round the world because they thought the middle of the Pacific was a safer place to land than New York?” “Well, what do you think we’ve been doing all these years? We’ve been cashing the cheques and sitting around on our arses. It wasn’t supposed to actually happen, was it?”
Those of us who delve into the past a bit, and my interest in palaeoanthropology regularly takes me back before the death of Elvis, and sometimes even further, are aware that the current changes in climate, the temperature of the Earth, and the composition of the atmosphere, even if they are real, are just noise when integrated into a longer timescale. If the Krikketers were going to get nervous about the Earth because of changes in CO2, the end of the Jurassic or the middle of the Eocene would have been good times to do it. Or possibly 1908 or 1945. Not now. [I see Kevin B has addressed this one]
By the way, they describe their idea as ‘highly speculative’. In the world of palaeoanthro and palaeolinguistics you come across a lot of papers where the writer hasn’t quite ironed out all the creases in their theory. ‘Speculative,’ in this context, has a precise meaning; it means ‘almost certainly cobblers’. ‘Highly speculative’ means quite definitely cobblers and the author probably thinks he’s Napoleon.
BTW2: There’s nothing basic about a BBQ. At least, so my brother-in-law assures us when he’s burnt the lamb cutlets again.
It’s not that I lose the will to live reading such stuff, but it does strike me that if the human race does die out at some point, there’ll be nobody left to give a damn anyway. And given the likely membership of the Committee for Deciding who will Graciously be Allowed to be Part of the Human race for a little while longer, I don’t fancy my chances very much.
CIngram,
You remind me of an old astrophysics joke about cosmologists - “frequently in error but never in doubt”.
Yes, I have thought a bit about “what aliens are like”. I was tempted to post about it.
I don’t think there are any. Not within shouting distance. THere might be quite a lot of life, but I suspect the overwhelming majority is varieties of bacterial sludge, and a tiny minority of life bearing planets have multicellular organisms. Out of those, the ones that hve developed a general purpose intelligent creature are very few indeed. There might not be another one in the Galaxy. The likelihood of one nearby enough to encounter is very small, I think.
On Earth, we’re a fluke. There are no other creatures with anything like our intelligence. Even our closest relatives are just animals. Chimps aren’t dim-witted; they have no capacity for intellect. It’s a simple as that. It just doesn’t seem to be a popular evolutionary strategy. Even our own species is only marginal.
Creatures that can build spaceships? Very rare indeed. That’s my guess. That’s why there’s no sign of them. They’re just not there to be seen.
It has to be said, another possibility is that, once you’ve explored the Galaxy a bit, you get bored with it. It seems very exciting at the moment, because we can’t do it. But, familiarity breeds contempt. A hundred years ago when travel was something must people couldn’t do, “darkest Africa” seemed terribly exciting. Now you can go by jet aeroplane, it’s mundane.
So maybe once you’ve put up with a lot of discomfort in spaceships, and visited a whole bunch of solar systems, you’re going “hmm, a star, woooh” and, “oh look, all the planets are miserable blasted wastelands covered in craters, haven’t seen any of those before” in a sarky voice, and you just go home. Because the universe is a mixture of dull and dangerous.
I suspect an advanced civilisation is pretty stable, and you all just stay home and enjoy living your lives, because you’re immortal and free of disease and crap like that, so the whole “must do something meaningful before I die” impulsion has evaporated. I think our descendents will be like that.; to our eyes, their lives will seem dull, but that might be what Utopia really is; just to have a nice easy life. In which case, risking it to see another Hot Jupiter up close probably just won’t be that appealing.
To bolster humanity’s chances of survival, the researchers call for caution in sending signals into space, and in particular warn against broadcasting information about our biological make-up, which could be used to manufacture weapons that target humans.
Oops! Too late! We have been transmitting radio and TV signals for close on 100 years now, and they’re winging their way through the Universe as we speak.
Can you imagine the scene at SETI when the first Alien broadcast comes in?…
This is it! it’s the real deal alright!! our first contact with extra terrestrial life, in sound and pictures too. Eh so what does it look like?
Well I could be wrong, but it looks an awful lot like a three headed, five tentacled, 16 feet version of I Love Lucy to me…
We’ve even sent off probes with all sorts of info about us, right down to music like all you need is love. So if anyone turns up in responce, they’re gonna be Hippie aliens right?
How do I get a job at NASA Nick? I know fuck all about rockets, but they aint in the rocket game anymore are they? But I can smoke weed and sip whiskey and make up complete bollocks with the best of ‘em.
A perfect example of “Once you cease to believe in God, you’ll believe anything”. A century or more ago it would have been “Don’t despoil God’s garden or He’ll come round with the slug pellets”, which, on balance, I think I prefer.
Anyway I think first contact will be with a probe, not the boys themselves, and we’ll become a sort of Big Brother house to entertain the folks back home. “Oh, look, they’re having a war again. I love it when they do that.”
Alien 1. “I see the CO2 levels on planet XZ123 are up. We’d better go and check it out”.
Alien 2. “The CO2 levels have been up and down like a bride’s nightie for aeons. I’ve been twice already and for what? Fucking zilch”.
Alien 1. “Still, we ought to go and have a look, if there’s an advanced civilisation developing perhaps cure their ills/zap them/invite them to join the Galactic Club”.
Alien 2. “Fuck it. You go if you like. I’m taking the family to the methane lakes this weekend”.
Roue,
A cynic might suggest that has already happened. We were “seeded” by the Galactic Broadcasting Corporation as prole-feed for the restless masses of the Western Spiral Arm. That actually makes quite a lot of sense to me. Our future depends not on CO2 levels as much as viewing figures.
RAB,
Answer to your question. God knows! But, “I know fuck all about rockets” is a bloody good start. What you like on promising the missus that you’ll put the shelf up “soon” and prevaricating for decades? Scratch that! If you can do the latter then it’s nuclear fusion for you my lad!
Ian,
Try this…
http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=33194
And the longer version…
http://stevens.edu/csw/?p=160
From John Horgan’s “The End of Science”.
Personally, at the time c.1997 I thought, “Yeah, looks like it’s going that way”. Now I’m not so sure. I’m beginning to suspect something more like “Mad Max”.
You know the game is up when they have to resort to the “monsters under the bed” argument.
Presumably it was a long weekend of intense scientific inquiry - DVD’s, beer, pizza and maybe a cheeky joint or 3. And yet, I didn’t see a single reference in the Guardian article to triple breasted humanoids.
The tentacles of Agenda 21 spread far and wide.
I saw that headline, read a couple of articles and decided it wasn’t even worth fisking. But good work, anyway.
Thanks Mark. Keep up your own good work on the true enemy - cows!!! Well, they’ve certainly killed more people than aliens
Researchers? What — and who — the hell were they ‘researching’?
Could they be more speculators than researchers? Today’s task for the team: come up with 15 implausible and ridiculous thoughts, all containing the key words ‘could,’ ‘might,’ possibly’ or ‘maybe’
Do not let rationality get in the way.
Tosh, I think they’d spent too much time looking at Uranus.
Not, yours obviously. Old joke. Sorry. I’ll get my coat.