Elon should head that one, especially if it’s risky.
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…which will likely already be long dead by the time that light got to us. We have zero evidence upon which to be afraid of aliens, because we have zero evidence they could reach us or affect us in any way. The speed of light is what it is. This is no more rational than fearing that the earth might explode tomorrow because the ancient aliens guy was right about there being hidden nuclear bombs in the core.
If there’s some inconceivable magic technology that violates everything we know about physics and can put alien battle cruisers in our orbit next year, then it’s safe to say said magic technology already knows we’re here and us pointing telescopes at them and sending weak radio signals that their great great grandaliens might hear isn’t gonna change anything.
“But why risk it!” people may cry. To those people, I direct you to Pascal’s Wager and say lighten up and embrace the possible. Stop living in fear.
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The part that stings is that those nudes were from back when we were in much better shape and we still got nothin’. If the aliens ever do show up they’re bound to be disappointed by how much weight we’ve put on since the 70s.
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“that’s a terrible idea… we should do it” sounds like a tumblr post
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Pioneer 10 will encounter a star called HIP 117795 in 90 thousand years, according to Google, though that’s difficult to believe, since it means these 1970s space probes are moving at 0.1% of the speed of light, which seems like a lot
Perhaps we can just get the plaques back and send Elon along to HIP 117795
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And this is why I stopped listening to anything Michio Kaku had to say about anything except applied physics long ago. Whenever he steps into the more philosophical aspects of science, he almost immediately goes off the deep end. His whole, “the multiverse means God could be out there somewhere” is of particular note. He likes being in the spotlight, even when it means flirting with woo.
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As bloodthirsty as Cortes was, it was just him and a small group of followers. He mostly conquered by aligning himself with certain tribes and inserting himself into the political landscape of Central America. So, really, we don’t need to be afraid of an invasion as much as aliens coming in and aligning themselves with political powers on this planet.
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How about the less talented people writing about it?
That book relied on teleportation. However, it would be interesting to game out what a cold war or hot war would be like when limited by sublight speed travel. Could make for an interesting story-line.
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They Live.
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May I recommend The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks?
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It’s presumably the same chain of logic he used in choosing a name for his book 
.
I dunno, if I was an alien civilization and I got a call from us, I would think long and hard before picking up the phone.
On second thought, I wouldn’t think that long at all about it.
Has it crossed anyone’s mind we’re already being ghosted? Not invited to the prom? Ditched?
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So given an absence of evidence for malignant alien intelligence, you conclude there is evidence of absence? Sorry if I’m still a bit hesitant.
Also, your comment about how these civilisations will all be long dead by the time they get our message seems rather optimistic. This list indicates there are plenty of known planetary systems that could receive a signal from us in less than a century.
The point is that what we know is far outweighed by what we don’t know. David Brin has some very good thoughts about this and on balance the argument for shouting at the cosmos are weak.
He really does.
From my POV:
On the one hand - if they’re smart and powerful enough to get here at all, we have nothing to offer them, no way to stop them from taking it if we did, and no way to threaten them. So why would they care?
On the other hand, sure, it’s possible they’re extremely cautious and unwilling to risk letting us develop at all and habitually wipe out any intelligent life they know about. It’s not an unreasonable strategy for a civilization that prioritizes its own survival over timespans of millions of years or more. And since we know so little about what types of psychologically might evolve on other worlds, there could be all sorts of unfathomable-to-humans reasons they might want to destroy us.
Of course, in that case, they probably sent out von Neumann probes to every star in their light cone some time in the Precambrian era, marked Earth as potentially interesting and worth watching well before the age of the dinosaurs, and long ago self-assembled and self-replicated said probes into a fully autonomous base in the asteroid belt preparing to send a few big rocks our way the moment we look likely to start leaving our gravity well in any significant numbers. It’s kinda the obvious, cheapest solution.
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Father Divine, a cult leader of the 1920’s through the 50’s, once said
The trouble with this world is that there are too many metaphysicians that don’t know how to tangibilitate
The Timeline of the Development of String Theory and Its Derivatives
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Unless the aliens are already here, or almost here, there’s no way we’ll be hosting get-togethers. Even the closest exoplanets are almost unimaginably far away. Now aliens might have very fast travel, even if we do not, but as far as we know, they are still thousands of years away from us. The nearest exoplanet is 4 light years away, and if we got ‘lucky’ and we found a civilization was there, it is still 24 trillion miles away. Even at 20,000 MPH, the trip would take 137,000 years.
https://www.ucolick.org/~mountain/AAA/aaawiki/doku.php?id=how_long_would_it_take_us_to_travel_to_alpha_centauri
Remember, all other exoplanets are even farther away. Worrying about attracting aliens is like being upset that someday Sol will expand beyond the orbit of Earth only it’s more speculative!
Thank you for the recommendation (and catching the hint I was fishing for one). I’m a fan of hard scifi and can always use a good recommendation.
But what I was suggesting was investigating what would or could start happening during our lifetimes. Slow and limited communication, misinformation, masking locations and capabilities, and possible first strike considerations.
For example, do you launch a biological weapon or kinetic weapon in hopes of wiping out someone who might fear us enough to launch first? And hide that launch for the 100 years it takes to travel the distance. Some scenarios could make the basis for interesting stories … if they don’t already exist. They don’t necessarily need to be about actual war, but avoiding it. (Hunt for Red October is like that)
The closest story I’ve run into was a Probability Zero story (2 page short story) about how each civilization had a different reason for not sending a signal (paranoia, budget, religion, etc). So they all listened instead. And all they heard was silence.
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It is interesting to speculate, though. Once, we would have been able to see the sodium lines from street lights. This would probably show up when our radio signals cannot be detected.
When I was young and had a telescope, the age of the universe was somewhere between two billion years and infinity, and telescopes would probably never be able to resolve stars other than the Sun into discs, let alone see planets. The next of telescopes are now expected to bring in thousands more planets. I don’t think we will be picking up alien street lights, but…
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Are you also scared of the invisible dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage, or Bertrand’s Terrible Teapot orbiting Mars? Because that’s the current argument for being afraid of aliens.
You’re assuming one of those systems has a civilization at just the right stage to be a threat. This question has been studied at length and time is the biggest problem with alien contact. When you run the numbers (even the very generous Drake equation ones) the amount of technologically capable overlap (we can speak, they can hear) we have with any other civilization is likely to be smaller than the time it takes to get light back and forth because the odds of being close AND advanced AND right now are vanishingly small. Civilizations are definitely out there, but odds of hearing from any of them is probably zero. Never mind being physically attacked.
The argument is that science is how we learn things and everything has risk. We risked annihilation of the species to develop nuclear energy. The thing that may save us from climate change. To not send out radio signals to make the greatest discovery in history (life at n=2) because of some theoretical fear that is vanishingly unlikely and for which there is zero evidence is patently silly, IMHO. There are far better things to spend your time being afraid of.
Besides all that, this argument always boils down to them being so advanced they can violate all physics to get here, yet somehow can’t see us, but we can find and see them with our puny 21sr century radio telescopes? If they’re dangerous, they’re already on their way here. Might as well enjoy the next 10,000 years on our nice little rock.
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