Physicist Michio Kaku: "Reaching out to aliens is a terrible idea"

X-rays, nuclear power, atom bombs, radar, transistors, lasers, they had a good run

but physicists haven’t actually invented any new technologies for a while … have they?

1 Like

They’re awaiting new shipments of physics from CERN.

1 Like

The other civilizations are very, very far away.

Assuming we should have seen them by now is pretty darn silly, especially since we didn’t even have the ability to start detecting exoplanets until well into the 1990s. Even if every single planet outside our solar system had human-level civilizations we probably still wouldn’t be able to detect them with our current technology even if they’d been actively trying to get our attention.

1 Like

Plus, to blend in, they’ll show up in rollerskates and afros, with a fine line of white powder beneath their probosci. Under the scintillating light of the alien version of a disco ball, Earth scientists will furiously work out a translation of the first communication at the first contact with an alien species. That translation will be:
“Where’s the party?”

2 Likes

8 Likes

In his defense, it’s always stupid when the interviewer asks an ostensibly authoritative scientist about religion. The only correct answer is to not answer.

1 Like

Because precursors to mammalian species were exposed to those archaeon hundreds of millions of years ago and have an immune system that reflects that.

Are you including all possible interactions of their invasive species with all possible species on Earth? Why should all Earth’s species immune systems be more sophisticated than theirs? Eg, an alien microbe that thrives on and kills off the world’s plankton: good bye ocean food chain.

I would think any intermixing of alien/Earth microbes/fauna/flora would be a disaster for one or both planets.

The other half of Fermi’s observation was that if there are intelligent life-forms that can travel in space within our galaxy, they could spread from star to star across the galaxy at some practical small fraction of the speed of light, and find us eventually if they chose to do this.

Would intelligent life seal its children into generation ships, and send them to conquer the stars, and wage undying galactic war for their empire, without the practical possibility of sending back gold, tobacco, slaves, or anything of value? I hope that anyone or anything that can live long enough for interstellar travel, and keep itself occupied and amused, will also have a more mellow attitude than those among us who dread them.

Afterword:

I think we can be more positive about this, despite the sketchy data and reasoning. If there are many intelligences in our galaxy, as we suspect there may be, half of them will have evolved intelligence before us, and a million year start would be plenty to conquer our galaxy at a fraction of the speed of light. So, the fact that this hasn’t happened suggests of these many intelligences that may exist, not a single one has tried to conquer the whole galaxy.

Even the gloomy answers won’t really do. We could yet pollute ourselves to death, or play at global thermonuclear war. I expect we may yet make a lot of other species extinct, but I doubt we will manage to kill all the humans. And those that remain would be determined to start again and not make the same mistakes. Maybe.

2 Likes

Hold on now. The jury is still out on that one. I still have not seen any evidence of intelligent life anywhere in the universe, including here.

1 Like

I think you’d be surprised. IIRC, thanks to the good old inverse square law, our radio transmissions will be down to the odd individual photon at most respectable astronomical distances. We’d have to be much cleverer (or stupider) to send signals that can really reach far enough.

project_orion

6 Likes

the problem with this fantasy of meeting aliens is that somebody is bound to be completely disappointed. either we spend another who-knows-how-many years getting our technology to the point (assuming we don’t die out or use up all our resources before then) of discovering life on another planet and it’s just like, bacteria or tribbles or something, or else an alien species with vastly superior technology will discover us puttering around here and be like, “wow, you guys are really, really dumb. we don’t want any.”

1 Like

Yeah, Jan 6 kind of sealed the deal on that question. Jury dismissed.

1 Like

There’s no hiding in space. If you emit any kind of EM that can be distinguished from naturally occurring sources you will be found. Also, space is big and it’s unlikely we have anyone close to our level of technology in the immediate neighborhood. Gotta remember, there’s many stars all over the universe and no guarantee the right ones will be near us with technologically advanced life. Even then, there doesn’t seem to be any viable FTL methods so they’d be slow boating to us. And again, we’d see them before they could react. So I think Kaku is just blowing a ton of smoke up everyone’s butts.

I still think the chances are low, because most life we know of depends on very specific compounds…for instance we depend on L- amino acids and not the counterparts…and it actually doesn’t take much for an unexpected one to kill it. But here I can agree that any exception is not going to be mitigated. I wasn’t focusing on other species, which definitely don’t all have sophisticated immune systems, among other problems.

In fact, I can say that contact with a technologically advanced species is already going very poorly for most species. :frowning_face:

…There’s a lot of hiding in space because it’s big. It’s like the ocean…sure, there may not be any cover, but lose something in the middle of it and you are not likely to see it again. You’ve seen the map of how much of the galaxy our radio broadcasts cover so far?

And at that distance, they are already faint enough that they would be getting overtaken by noise. No doubt someone sophisticated enough could find a way to clean the signal some, but there’s a limit to how much is mathematically possible, and I think it is fair to say it will be hit long before they cross the galaxy.

As for us seeing things coming, we are still discovering rocks in our own solar system, and we just noticed that the star closest to our own has a planet five years ago. We still don’t even know how massive it is, let alone anything else about it.

1 Like

Yes and no. If we’re talking a civilization that has a similar or greater infrastructure in orbit of their own planet or in their solar system then the odds are they can see us. By see, I mean detect EM that includes the light spectrum of our star and planet. And just being a few decades ahead in terms of technological progress would mean they got the advantage to see even better. That means they could do spectral analysis to see what’s in our atmosphere which lets them made reasonable conclusions that some kind of civilization is here on Earth just from our industrial emissions into our atmosphere. Or was there wrt light speed lag of course. It’ll be more of whether they are looking at us so it’s a needle/haystack thing. Beyond that, not much is ‘protecting’ us.

Nope. If we’re talking regular non FTL travel methods other than maybe laser sails you’d see what was coming in. It’s all about the fact such objects emit IR/heat and your thrusters for deceleration will emit way more than just the ambient radiation of your vessel. So we’re talking it’ll be like seeing flashlights in the dark. Now you could argue we’d have to look for it which is true but even with that factored in home field advantage is still in play as long as you continue to build up space telescopes for IR and other parts of the EM spectrum.

I agree. Had the Aztecs met the Spaniards at sea, on their terms, it may have gone considerably differently. There was also the “White gods from the sea” mythology that played into it. I suspect there is little danger of (most) of us thinking of an alien civilization as “gods.”

3 Likes

Well, we seem to be speaking past each other at this point, so I’m going to call it a day on this one.

1 Like

3 Likes

I choose to disregard the retcon.

3 Likes