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The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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The Sound and the Fury about Stephen Hawking’s Alien Warning
May 11th, 2010
Last night I caught the much discussed Discovery Channel episode of Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking dealing with aliens. The initial clip on the website is “Fear the Aliens” which is the controversial bit. Hawking, unlike Carl Sagan, apparently thinks that we would have much to fear from technologically advanced aliens and that we should be careful about announcing our presence lest they come here and exploit us the way Europeans exploited Native Americans. Hawking…who lives in a culture that cares and reveres him despite the disease that has left him all but paralyzed. He is so revered that almost everything he says is much discussed. More so even when he is likely wrong.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,†he said.
Prof Hawking thinks that, rather than actively trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials, humans should do everything possible to avoid contact.
He explained: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.â€
The show is up in its entirety on youtube. I’ll embed it here, although I don’t know if it will stay up. Some companies don’t bother youtube much, and some are ruthless about getting shows removed. If you want to cut to the “fear the aliens” part, start at about 7 minutes in on part four.
It’s really a light documentary for general public consumption with lots of speculation and little science. I had planned to write something about this a couple of weeks ago, but it was a busy time and I didn’t get around to it. Everyone else did, however. I haven’t even read all the commentary. Some are at least as qualified as me, given that I am an astronomer and science fiction writer, but who is to say what is qualified when the only data we have is that there is essentially no data when it comes to aliens. We haven’t found them some places we’ve looked, and they’re not here enslaving/eating/mating/toying with us. Probably.
I wanted to compile some of the responses from some people I respect and from some other sources, too (not that I necessarily disrespect some of these, but I don’t know the authors so well). So when it comes to Hawking’s views on aliens…
Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, disagrees.
David Brin thinks no one has a clue and should stop making assertions about things they’re clueless about. I wanted to quote a few paragraphs from Brin on a tangential point that I think deserves a spotlight:
Finally, some of the researchers in this field have expressed deep contempt for science fiction. This ready dismissal of the entire field of gedankenexperimentation by thoughtful and scientifically deep authors is nothing but flat out – and proud – ignorance. Such people dismiss – without having ever read them – mind-blowingly original thought experiments by the likes of Bear and Banks and Vinge (and me), which make up the only real library of what-if extrapolations that our committees could quickly turn to, in the event of a post-contact situation!
To call such explorations “simpleminded” and unimaginative and based solely on copying the human experience is to declare openly “I am satisfied that B-Movies typify ‘science fiction.’ I have never cracked the spine of a grownup science fiction contact scenario… nor will I, ever.”
That’s just dunderheaded and closeminded and especially unworthy of people who have earned great merit in other fields. People who now propose to represent us, if and when we meet the alien.
Paul Davies thinks that Hawking is wrong.
George Dvorsky thinks that not only is Hawking wrong, everyone else is, too.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on CNN doesn’t seem so fearful, attributes Hawking’s ideas to fears that aliens will be like humans, which is pure speculation:
PZ Meyers sort of disagrees, thinking blind biowarfare more likely than Independence Day scenarios. He also thinks the other episode of the documentary series he saw was crap.
A whole bunch more posts from scienceblogs on the subject.
A bunch of articles in a recent Journal of Cosmology with more responses. (Scroll down partway, past the Panspermia section to the Hawking on Aliens section).
LA Times article reporting the opinion of some other scientists.
I tend to agree with Carl Sagan and see Hawking’s view as bad science fiction. Let me explain why. Any alien civilization that possesses the technology to visit Earth and exploit/enslave/destroy us can already find us whether or not we start shouting at the stars. Our planets will be totally detectable. They can see that we have oxygen and hence life in our atmosphere. They will likely be able to see the lights from our cities, if not more, and have a good clue about our technology level with or without listening for our radio broadcasts (with lightspeed delaying the report according to how far away they are). Furthermore, they will be so much more advanced than us that we literally will have little to exploit. They’ll have the time and energy to terraform if they care to actually live on planets and need not search out an Earth. Comets are a lot handier water sources than oceans deep in gravity wells, and we’d not be likely to be edible or tasty to them either. If they’re out there, can come here, and want to fuck us over, we’re screwed and being careful, quiet, and fearful will not save our asses. There’s also the case to be made that being quiet is not being neighborly and would make us be viewed with suspicion and concern, so we might as well talk. If talking gets us judged, well, so be it. I just wish Rush Limbaugh won’t be on the radio when the aliens listen.
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Thanks for gathering all these critiques in one place. I haven’t gone through them all, yet, but will eventually. I’m more on the ‘be wary of aliens’ side because what we don’t know has the potential to kill us. Maybe not for our water or land (as you point out) but maybe for some other reason.
Here’s a 250 word flash fiction response.
Aliens Pillage Earth and Steal Human Influence Technology
The alien fleet was first noticed by a spy satellite turned the wrong way. It took awhile to establish communication, but the two sentient communities finally understood each other. The aliens rapidly appreciated Earthian culture and spoke forthwith stating that they planned on using Earth as a toilet and a garbage dump and then plunder the resources. Earthian culture forthwith launched as many nuclear tipped missiles as they could humanly muster. Green looking force fields ballooned out from the alien ships and quickly ate the exploding warheads sucking in the radioactive debris for desert. Then they actuated their mission statement.
They first released their bodily waste which filled the upper atmosphere with ozone. Then they began to take natural resources by siphoning off carbon dioxide and methane from the atmosphere. Next they landed and dumped their garbage of millions of solar cells that were worthless because their efficiency of 30 electrons of electricity per one solar photon was only now 1/4 as efficient as when new 400 years ago. They snickered at Earth solar cells with their 4 electrons per one solar photon efficiency. Next they needed consumables so they stole all the nuclear reactors and waste from the entire planet. Finally, they needed entertain-ment for their long trip so they robbed away from the collective culture the concept of religion. And when they ultimately left, people didn’t know what to think anymore, so their minds filled up with thoughts that the fundamental health of each individual was really important.
Ha!
There are some really thoughtful responses in the links and some interesting discussions in the comments on many of the websites. I’ve only read part of them myself. It’s at least hours of fascinating reading.
I tend to disagree with everyone on this. I do agree that being quiet likely won’t do us that much good. They’ll find us anyway. It’s highly likely that aliens are doing what we’re doing: looking for exo-planets. Maybe they want ones like ours, or maybe they want different ones. But if they’re intelligent, they’ll eventually look (or already are).
I don’t, however, think anyone knows what they are talking about when it comes to the violent or non-violent nature of aliens. Nobody knows. Everyone is guessing. I suspect that everyone is a little right. If there are loads of aliens out there, then some of them might be peaceful, and some of them might not. Some might not be interested in us because they’re too advanced to bother, and some might be interested because they’re like us and just figured out that we exist. But I don’t think it’s fair to say Hawking is wrong or that anyone else is wrong. We simply do not know anything about aliens. Period. We don’t know who they are, what they look like, how they evolved, what they’re temperaments are like, and so on. All we know is what we can reflect onto others from ourselves.
So, if we’re going to take any road presented in this discussion, it should be one of caution. Better safe than sorry. If we end up wrong by being cautious, we lose nothing. If we aren’t cautious and we run out into space naively thinking everything is cake and puppies, the worst result of that is disastrous for the species. Don’t be silent, just cautious.
I tend to agree with the idea that aliens who would be sufficiently advanced to reach us, would have no reason to reach us. To get here, their technology would have to be so good that they wouldn’t need our planet anymore, and all that leaves would be studying us, or communicating with us for scientific purposes. I think they’d likely prefer to avoid us, instead; why deal with the headache that our fears and suspicions would bring to them, just so they can learn a bit about us? In any alien-contact scenario for a very long period to come, the advantage would be heavily in our favour; if we or they didn’t manage to get us totally destroyed, we’d certainly gain far more from any information exchange than they would. Therefore if we do make alien contact before we could instigate that contact ourselves, then we’d probably be dealing with a race that wanted to help us out (even if, by doing so, they would likely destroy our basic societal structures with too great an influx of new technology).
Maybe speculation doesn’t achieve much when we are trying to impose human logic onto an alien mindset. So what about the evidence? Well, in the field of ufology one man’s evidence is another’s unreliable anecdote. What the accounts suggest, though, is that these beings regard humans as creatures to be probed and messed with mentally to see how they deal with first contact. To apply some human imposed logic, it makes sense to abduct those who may not give a definitively credible account; in other words not a scientist, or anyone with authority or influence to which the media would give weight. A nuclear-capable civilisation to respond in a state of panic can’t be a good thing, so the safest option is to prepare the ground, and maybe eventually a few discreet contacts can be made at a high level.
One reason they might want to come here – as one of the contributors mentioned – is simply for the real estate, the ready-made biosphere, though not our alien viruses and bacteria (another reason for not presenting themselves). Our technology may be interesting to them not because it’s more advanced but the different way it is bound to have developed. Sure, they may have mastered way to manipulate matter at a quantum level to create anything they could think of, but would they have thought of the curious leisure devices like games consoles and things that have no practical purpose.
Anyway, trying to guess the alien psyche without evidence (whatever qualifies as) is no better than wild speculation. At least many science fiction writers have had a damn good go at it. And (I’m thinking self-interestedly) will lead the way.
David Brin is always worth listening to on this subject as he’s done some of the very best, most serious work on the Fermi Paradox (in the Quarterly Journal of the R.A.S. if I remember correctly; I read it when it was first published but I think it’s available on his website now). Mike is right that any alien civilization just a little bit ahead of us can find us if they want to, but I still think we should err on the side of conservatism here. There’s no need to go shouting, HEY, HERE WE ARE (especially since there’s no way to get a planetary consensus that that’s the corrct thing to do). It is possible that unlikely scenarious can happen (it’s uh, a big galaxy) such as in Niven and Pournelle’s Footfall and Turtledove’s interminable World at War series. In both of these the earth gets discovered and invaded by societies just a LITTLE ahead of us technologically. This is perhaps the most likely dangerous scenario. I do agree that biowar is the easiest way to take over a planet: just engineer a virus that makes everyone sterile and you have the planet all to yourself in about a century, which is pretty damn short on interstellar travel time-scales (assuming you don’t have ftl).
Thanks for all the links, Mike. It will take awhile just to scan them (like SETI, seeking signs of intelligence).
I love those paragraphs from David Brin. I don’t know if he makes this point explicitly but – if we limit this to science fiction writers who are well-versed in science and have carefully developed their scenarios – then the scientists he’s talking about that show such contempt for science fiction writers can’t even claim to be any better qualified to discuss this topic.
There really are no authorities. We only have this one instance of life, so far. Not a clue how to fill in most of the variables in the Drake equation. We are somewhat familiar with human psychology (much less so with animal psychology even here on Earth). We have almost no sound basis for extrapolation.
Scientists that make bold claims on this subject today are writing science fiction themselves.
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