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Our problem is that we have very limited imagination (and sensitivities) when interacting with other sentient beings even here, on earth. For example, cetaceans evolved in the environment where vision is limited. Hence, dolphins and whales do not have emotional facial expresssions that are so important for human primates. It confuses us when interacting with them, are they sad, happy, in pain? We have no idea. Next, is our profound inability to understand their complex acoustic communication, there is no Rosetta stone, and we are completely lost again. Any race to communicate with aliens should start with decoding non-human communication systems here on earth (shameless plug, anyone is interested to support our tiny fledging startup?)
Finally, the recent situation with rescuing last living vaquita dolphins in Mexico once again demonstrated that humans have hard time imagining umwelt of other species. The plan was to capture remaining vaquitas and to put them in protected sea pens. Without any doubt, human intentions are good here, but as we often do, we go full steam, brute force into the situation. As a result, captured vaquita died from capture myopathy. This animal is shy, cryptic, and it cannot handle being surrounded by scary , noisy giants, touching it, grabbing it with its appendages, despite the fact that "giants" have all good intentions. This example is very relevant to thinking how we should interact with possible "others" or handle the signal, if it will be received one day. Even with all good intentions, we can still create chaos and danger, simply because we cannot understand "others" and how they see, experience the world.
I'd never heard of vaquitas. Incredible that yet again a species is terribly threatened due to Chinese fertility treatments.
> But like all cetaceans, the vaquita breathes air, making the gillnets deadly. The nets are set to trap another endangered species, the totoaba. This fish’s swim bladder is used in Chinese medicine to make a soup believed to boost fertility—and demand has skyrocketed in recent years.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/navy-use-dolphins-...
They just abandoned capture plans, only around 20-30 vaquitas remain, it is a truly devastating situation.
This sounds like an amazing project! I'd love to help in any way I can. Do you have a website where I can learn more about your startup?
Our website (cetalingua.com) is still under construction, but you can sign up to be notified when it goes live.
Fascinating - do you need any data analysis/modelling help? My email is in my profile, let’s chat
Yes, absolutely, will email shortly.
This article is a bit unfair to the dark-forest conception of interstellar life. The axiom that Liu put forward was not about some inherently expansionist nature of intelligent life, but about the difficulty of communication and understanding. It takes two round-trips to communicate, but a small multiple of one for a species that can launch an attack that moves at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. And such attacks may be fast enough, or hard enough to detect, that second-strike capability is impossible.
In his books he explicitly compares this to the prisoner's dilemma - maybe you yourself don't want to expand beyond your own star system, but as soon as you know another species exists, you know that if they are hostile and do find you, they will destroy you before you know there's any threat. And so you are incentivized to attack when the other civilization has not yet been alerted to your presence.
The article says
> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.
How about
> it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of another. The hunters are strangers who do not trust each other (or even have a language in common), so can respond with long dangerous negotiations to establish good intent, or with a swift bullet. Everyone knows this, and acts accordingly. The stable state is pre-emptive strikes, zero trust, maximum hostility.
This is a very "me vs them" individual bias vision. It assumes every individual civilization can take another with a "single" obliterating bullet like some street gang conflict.
In practice we are ant colonies in that dark forest. Unless you can understand enough the rumblings of another civilization, you don't know how far they've expanded. They may have fully functional, fast replicating colonies in one of the trillions of Oort cloud objects and you just pissed them off by trashing their historical sites.
We could go insane hypothesizing destruction on light-years bubble scales, but then you can rest assured other civilizations are now aware of your existence and will take note of your undesirable quality as neighbor.
>The axiom that Liu put forward was not about some inherently expansionist nature of intelligent life
Huh? All the other stuff you said is perfectly true, but in addition to that, there's an axiom in his book explicitly stating that "civilization continuously grows and expands."
The idea the bring not that they will expand to take you over, but that you can't trust a weaker civilization to stay weaker.
Anyone know anything about the credibility of the Disclosure Project[1]? I think something like 100+ ex-service personnel testified under oath that they'd witnessed UFO activity.
If 100+ people testified to seeing me do something illegal, a court would convict me (barring exceptional counter-evidence).
Having researched things as best I can I am now of the opinion they're already here, based mainly on the number, diversity and credibility of witnesses (e.g. ex-military personnel, former nuclear military personnel, Air Force, etc, not that any I know anything beyond that).
I looked over some of them, and this isn't very reliable. Eyewitness reports aren't terribly credible in the best of situations. Eyewitness reports of people in stressful careers often working long overnight hours aren't credible at all.
Our memories are terrible, our brains make stuff up when confused, and sleep deprived dreams are very hard to distinguish from reality. Add in the large amount of amphetamines used in the military during that period, the very secretive weapons testing going on, and things like MK-ULTRA and these seem really far fetched.
> people in stressful careers often working long overnight hours
Doesn't look like that's the case for all of those witnesses. A lot of them seem like engineers - people that are paid for their minds (including their memory), rather than their head count.
So, if we can't trust their memories in those occasions (which I agree is problematic), why are we trusting them with doing their jobs under such conditions?
I'd like to add that it might not be that all events happened under strenuous (personal) situations (and who knows how much evidence like recordings or other stuff might have been buried)
Think about this - since mid 2000-2010 we have 1 or 2 billions of smartphone users (and a few hundred millions of older phones with cameras). And those billions of people have been using them for over a decade. Now the question - where are the photos of anything extraterrestrial?
And no, secrecy doesn't apply here really. People manage to take pics of secret military hardware, of terrorist leaders, of practically anything anywhere.
Well I did watch a film on Netflix ("UFOs: The Best Evidence Ever (Caught on Tape)"), but even in that it was obvious some was CGI - they had analysed it and reported it as such.
It's quite an old documentary so videos are pre-smartphones and pre-widespread availability of CGI software. But that'd be the other problem. If you search for "UFO" on Youtube there's loads of footage, but it could all just be CGId.
If these are real, is it alien or highly advanced Earth tech? It doesn't really matter from the perspective of if these aircraft are able to manoeuvre how they are reported to, the tech is obviously centuries ahead of what is publicly acknowledged and available now.
The main problem I have with analogy to a court of law is witnesses corroboration only works if all the witnesses are describing the same event, or are at least a series of deeply interrelated specific events local on a particular person or place or entity.
If witnesses are all talking about a series of separate events all over the globe at different times that aren't associated with each other, those claims are all systematically vulnerable to biases and don't serve to reinforce one another.
Wow. A fantastically written article. I have a hard time buying the pessimism that intergalactic contact is doomed to end in conflict, but it's not like anyone really knows.
Now, the bit about chaos on earth if we do find others... Yeah, that's scary.
The problem is that even some remote robots left alive guarantee a second strike on the attacker. So any dark forrest strike would have to be engulfing the whole solar system.
I think we would detect such events by now.
Unless you can manage to disguise your strike as a "natural" disaster. The Pulsars rotation angle just tiled and the rays emitted cooked the system.
A tragic accident in a unjust, unfeeling universe.
May they rest in pieces.
I agree that the pessimism is disheartening, but looking at the limited data we have, is there any evidence of an intelligent species (e.g. humans) discovering the presence of another intelligent species (e.g. humans) without conflict soon thereafter?
Not a fan of extrapolating from single data points, but it's the best we've got for now.
> I have a hard time buying the pessimism
I have an easy time buying it.
Look at the intelligent life we know about on earth. Elephants, dolphins, whales, primates, dogs, etc...
How do we treat those life forms? By and large: Like shit.
How are we, as a species, going to handle "new" life forms... intelligent life forms... advanced life forms... that can "bite back" if we try to treat them like our own earth bound life forms?
I would say, as a standard answer, hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Humanity... has a large contingent that embodies the worst.
Yeah, seems like it would be all too much work to have a conflict with an alien species. I mean, why even bother? We're probably pretty early to the civilization party anyway.
This caught my eye:
“China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th century.“
China appears to not be slowing down.
Concrete is not what most buildings are constructed out of in the USA. Steel at the tall end, wood at the shorter end, some brick here and there, whereas china is concrete for the vast majority of buildings. This is like saying Chinese ate more chicken feet in 2016 than Americans did over the last 100 years.
I read once that at its coal burning peak China opened one completely operational coal burning power station every day. Now they are closing them just as fast and switching to green power.
Nothing good will come of this. Stay dark in the forest.
What if we're the North Sentinel Island ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island ) of the universe? The universe is a really really big place and there are probably plenty of habitable planets, especially with terraforming. We're probably just a little remote violent oddity. The most interesting thing about the earth is probably our DNA. They can get that easily without destroying us.
Nothing at all will come of this. There is practically zero chance of ever detecting a signal from the one or two other intelligent species that might be in our galaxy.
But your comment sounds like you are concerned about broadcasting. The chinese (like SETI) are just listening. Of course, we're all broadcasting all the time but, so what? What do we have to fear from being heard?
I suspect that any theoretical aliens which would have hostile intentions towards us and could get here to inflict them is going to be able to find us even if we don't go out of our way to make our presence known.
More seriously, although those stories are a lot of fun, (and also check out his short stories which I felt are better):
It is very unlikely that there is anything out there that is capable of actually coming here, for the same reason it's very unlikely we can ever leave the solar system. A radio "conversation" over many generations - if that's even possible - would be the high point of our civilisation.
Let's hope they don't use the Sun as an amplifier.
Isn't it primarily for receiving signals rather than sending them? Of course if we ever do receive a convincing signal that appears to come from extraterrestrials, it is nearly unthinkable that no one would send anything back in that direction, so I see your point.
Presumably they haven't found a way to use the Sun as an amplifier yet.
Too late for that. Humanity has been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for more than a hundred years now, since the days of Marconi.
I think if the earth were to get destroyed (which is becoming more and more likely), an alien invasion would be the best way to get there.
Please please don't spoil the book for others while writing comments.
So I assume they did found the guy to run it? http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2105278/china...
Somehow I am sure that some governments have already made contact with ET intelligence. This will be revealed in a few decades may be, when world is ready for it. A conspiracy theory but something unknown gives me the confidence and belief.
I'm enjoying the Atlantic more and more
the three body problem was a horrible book. The whole notion of detecting signals from other civilizations is not a novel concept in Sci-fi world. There are much better articulated & compelling examples from other science fiction works..
I enjoyed the book. What are some better ones you recommend?
wow. I've always held to the Star Trek theory that any advanced civilization must be benevolent.
Story aside, that's some very unlucky/lacking contrast between the main title and the title background image.
If extra-terrestrial being are using communications technology we haven't reached yet, which I feel is the case for faster-than-light communications, then we have a long time to go yet.
Haven't they read The Three-Body Problem?
It's extensively discussed in the article.
That's exactly where their inspiration came from, they even invited Liu Cixin to visit the facility.