Stop Telling Aliens We’re Here
Rogue scientists are broadcasting humanity’s existence out into the universe. That’s a big mistake that could destroy us all.
It’s Alien Week on my Substack!
Don’t worry: I don’t believe that little green men from Mars have abducted your aunt. There is no serious reason to believe that extraterrestrials have made contact with Earth. But many physicists do believe that intelligent life may exist somewhere out in the vast stretches of the universe. And of late, some activists have started advertising our existence to them. Like eminent scientists including Stephen Hawking, I think that this is a big mistake—one that, in the unlikely event that these transmissions find their intended recipient, could have devastating consequences.
So today, I am sharing an essay arguing against the practice of Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). And for Saturday, I invited Douglas Vakoch, the most eminent proponent of METI, onto the podcast for a deeper debate about the issue.
I promise to return to decidedly terrestrial concerns—such as why journalists so often seem to speak in unison and how to fix grade inflation—for my next columns.
Yascha
P.S: If you want to receive all of my writing, plus add-free access to all episodes and bonus materials of The Good Fight, please become a paying subscriber today!
The beginning of humanity’s putative end comes in the second episode of the Three Body Problem. Ye Wenjie is working at Red Coast, a (fictional) compound erected in the 1960s by communist China to listen for signs of extraterrestrial life. After years of long, arduous shifts listening to the empty ether, Ye picks up on a shockingly clear signal. “Do not respond,” the decoded message from outer space reads.
I am a pacifist in this world. You are lucky that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you: do not answer. If you respond, we will come. Your world will be conquered. Do not answer.
Ye looks out at the mountainous landscape, which has long been her home, and which to the best of her knowledge she may never be allowed to leave. Then she turns on the transmitter and points Red Coast’s giant radio satellite at the source of the message. “Come,” she types. “We cannot save ourselves. I will help you conquer this world.”
It is part of the brilliance of Liu Caixin’s novel, on which the splashy Netflix series which debuted a few months ago is based, that Ye’s decision to respond to the extraterrestrial message, thereby revealing humanity’s existence, is both understandable and monstrous. It is understandable because she had experienced some of the greatest horrors humans are capable of inflicting upon one another during the Cultural Revolution, watching impotently as her father’s own students beat him to death for the counterrevolutionary act of refusing to abjure the laws of physics. And it is monstrous because she persists in sending her message despite an explicit warning about the dangers to which she is single-handedly exposing all members of her species.
Reality is less dramatic than science fiction. But the moral dilemma facing Ye is, strangely, real. For here on the good old non-fictional earth, there is an influential coterie of scientists who insist that we should do what we can to broadcast humanity’s existence to any extraterrestrial civilization that may be inclined to listen.
Any article about aliens has a vague whiff of wackiness. There is, despite recent Congressional hearings into this matter, no serious reason to think that UFOs have visited the earth. Little green men aren’t hiding out on Mars. So why should we earnestly debate what message to send these imaginary creatures?
No sensible physicist believes that aliens have abducted your UFO-obsessed neighbor. But most do think that the existence of intelligent life forms on other planets is a real possibility. The scale of the universe is incomprehensible. An immense number of planets fulfill the preconditions for the development of intelligent life. There is nothing peculiar about the belief that someone or something may be out there. “To my mathematical brain,” Stephen Hawking said, “the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”
This makes the question of whether we should try to locate, and contact, such lifeforms a serious concern. We do not know whether aliens exist; but if they do, the decision of whether or not to communicate with them could have momentous consequences for humanity.
So far, we humans have mostly restricted ourselves to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The SETI Institute, a private, nonprofit research organization, has built a variety of instruments designed to detect signs of extraterrestrial life. So have other institutes and universities. This activity is reasonably uncontroversial: If somebody is trying to send us a message, it would likely be beneficial to receive it; we can then figure out how, and whether, to answer.
But over the past few years, a number of scientists have proposed that we should go beyond SETI. Disappointed that we have not yet discovered any extraterrestrial life through the passive act of listening, they insist that we should take more active steps to broadcast our existence to the outside world and enter into communication with aliens.
Some believers in what has come to be known as Messaging to ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (METI) have started to take matters into their own hands. METI International, a non-profit based in San Francisco, for example, sent a message to Luyten’s Star, a red dwarf located twelve lightyears from the sun, in 2017. In so doing, these scientists seemed to harbor a hope once also held by Ye Wenjie: that aliens would be inclined to help, not to destroy, us.1
But is METI a good idea—or could it prove to be the beginning of the end for us humans?
It is impossible for us to know what aliens would be like. Perhaps they would look much like us or perhaps their biological makeup would be completely different from that of any species we’ve encountered on earth. Perhaps they would be embodied like terrestrial forms of life or perhaps they have long since transitioned to the digital realm. Perhaps they would be wonderfully altruistic or perhaps unimaginably sadistic. But while it is in most respects impossible for us to go beyond speculation, there are at least two things we can surmise with a reasonable degree of confidence.
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First, any aliens who could effectively make contact with us would likely be much more technologically advanced. The Earth is over four billion years old. Humans have existed for about 300,000 years. And yet, we have only acquired the technical means to advertise our existence to the outside universe over the last hundred years. So for the extraterrestrial life forms we encounter to be at a similar stage of technological development, they too would, despite the vast timescales involved, need to stand at the very beginning of their ability to correspond with creatures on other planets. That would be a wild coincidence, making it much more likely that any extraterrestrial life forms receiving our messages would hold a vast technological advantage over us.2
Second, any aliens who could effectively make contact with us would, like all forms of life, have undergone a process of evolution on their own planet. Just like humans, they would in their evolutionary history have had to compete with rival species. And just like humans, they would have succeeded in either subjugating or extinguishing rival life forms. So even though it is impossible for us to know anything about how morally righteous members of this alien species might be towards each other, we should at least suspect that they are capable of prioritizing their own interests over those of rival species—including, presumably, those that, like us, hail from different planets.
These two pieces of information are limited and tentative. But they are enough to justify deep skepticism about the naïve moral assumptions that the most vocal proponents of METI seem to make. According to them, a civilization that is much more technologically advanced must also be much more morally enlightened: “METI-ists speculate that ET will receive our intentional communication as a signal that we are ready to join the galactic club,” John Gertz explains in the most thorough critique of Ye Wenjie’s imitators published to date. “Surely, they will send us a laminated membership card along with a welcoming gift basket, included in which will be our very own embossed copy of Encyclopedia Galactica, filled with great wisdom, science, technology and culture.”
We cannot rule out the possibility that extraterrestrials will treat us with such wisdom and kindness. But we also know from the history of our own species that technological superiority need not go hand-in-hand with such moral enlightenment.
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Open a biology book, and you will see how brutal humans have been to rival species. We have done terrible damage to other primates. And we may even be to blame for the demise of other humanoid species, from Europe’s Neanderthals to the Denisovans who once populated parts of Asia.
Open a history book, and you will see how brutal humans have been to members of their own species. We are capable of taking up arms against people who hail from very similar cultures, as bloody conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to the current war in Ukraine remind us. And we are ruthless in exploiting the weakness of more distant cultures that are technologically inferior, as the violent story of French, British, Russian, Japanese and Mongolian colonialism attests.
Perhaps aliens are nothing like us, making humanity a cruel and grotesque outlier in the ranks of extraterrestrial species, all of which turn out to be much more genteel than us. But what limited evidence we have about encounters between species and cultures at differential levels of technological development makes a powerful case that such a hopeful outcome is far from assured.
Blaise Pascal famously argued that, in the face of uncertainty, it is rational to believe in God—or at least to act as though one did. His reasoning is strikingly simple. If you act as though God does not exist, and you turn out to be wrong, you will go to hell, paying a terrible price for your error. If on the other hand you act as though God does exist, and turn out to be wrong, your fate in the afterlife will not be affected.
Pascal’s wager is, as a long and distinguished line of philosophers have argued, not altogether convincing. But it illustrates that we can reflect on the likely consequences of our actions even in the face of deep and persistent uncertainty. This is the spirit in which humanity should ponder the prospect of METI.
The arguments I have made in this essay are a good reason to believe that great danger could lie ahead if we alert aliens to our existence. Famous scientists have publicly recognized this. “If aliens visit us,” Hawking warned, “the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.” But nor can we rule out the possibility that aliens would generously give us the gift of their superior knowledge and technology, allowing us to live a life of plenty. In other words, attempting to contact the aliens is to roll the dice. And that raises the question of whether our current state is so wretched as to justify rolling the dice in such a dramatic fashion.
Ye Wenjie believed that it is. Given her cruel life story, it is easy to see why. But for all the serious poverty and the terrible conflicts that persist on Planet Earth today, such a view is unduly catastrophist. The great majority of people on earth value their lives; are reasonably satisfied with their earthly sojourn; and are grateful for the many ways in which the burdens they carry are lighter than those endured by their ancestors.
Advocates of METI want to bet the future of humanity on a roll of the dice. But as a prominent list of astronomers, historians and entrepreneurs wrote to their more foolhardy colleagues in an influential open letter, “the decision whether or not to transmit must be based upon a worldwide consensus, and not a decision based upon the wishes of a few individuals with access to powerful communications equipment.” They are right. We must not let a few naive enthusiasts wager our fate in this irresponsible manner.
True, there have been some previous attempts to broadcast humanity’s existence, such as the “Golden Record” time capsules launched on Voyager 1 and 2 in the 1970s. But this is not a justification of current efforts at METI for two reasons. First, these earlier attempts were using far less powerful technology, and are therefore far less likely to be picked up. And second, the whole point of new efforts at METI is to engage in communication that might be picked up by people who otherwise would not learn of humanity’s existence. If there was no way the new forms of communication would make it more likely for us to be discovered, they would be pointless, and the people who are engaged in efforts at METI totally irrational; but that simply isn’t the case. (That argument also explains why METI is a bad idea even though there is already some possibility that the much less powerful radio transmissions in which humans have engaged for their own terrestrial purposes over the past hundred years might be picked up by a highly technological civilization of extraterrestrials that is closely watching our corner of the universe. Some risk of discovery may exist regardless of METI, but that cannot be a justification for deliberately trying to increase that risk.)
This would be even more true for any alien civilization that would actually be able to communicate with us at length or pay us a visit.
This is unrealistic. Both the speed of light limit and the cost of moving a large mass over light years precludes notions of "invasion by aliens". Think of the vast cost of moving something like a spaceship able to carry enough aliens and equipment to prove a danger to civilization here.
An analogy with Apollo might help. It took a rocket the size and weight of a skyscraper to send a craft the size of a VW Beetle to the Moon. The amount of energy required to get HERE from THERE when the distance is light years, in some meaningful time, is unimaginably more than going to the Moon. And you have to carry half that energy with you to STOP when you get here!
Wouldn't there have to be overwhelming benefit to undertake this? Moreover it may not be physically possible in our universe to do so.
What exactly would such putative aliens want when they got here that would be worth that expense? Our solar system isn't particularly unique, beyond having living things on our planet?
The Three Body Problem is excellent science fiction, but also is a brutally depressing world view. Not sure that we should be ruled by it.
Moreover, as usual to make the story work, the author has to have the McGuffin of faster-than-light travel, which does not exist in our universe. Without FTL, the whole story falls apart.
I remember hunting quail as a boy of twelve with my father and a friend of his who had a boy my age and dogs bred and trained for the purpose. The key to success was the dogs. Without dogs the birds would move through ground cover well ahead of the advancing front of the hunters without need of taking flight. With dogs the birds could be brought to ground, holding their position in complete stillness, with the dogs frozen in point, until the advancing hunters were practically on top of them before exploding as a covey from cover in a heart stopping whir and blur for which one was never adequately prepared.
Every time I hear discussions of the desirability of advertising our presence to aliens I think of hunting quail and how their most basic instinct was not to break cover until their discovery was a certainty. There relevant world was significantly composed of things they might eat and things that might eat them.
If the laws of physics are universal, and chemistry is built upon those laws, it seems probable that the Darwinian model of biological possibilities might have relevance to speculation as to the sociobiological nature, behavior, and moral propensities of sentient aliens. Presuming their development to have been guided by something similar to our own gene directed evolution, adjusted of course for their own particular corner of the universe, we would do well to approach the however unlikely prospect of contact with extreme caution. As has been pointed out, contact between a technologically advanced culture and one of less technical advancement rarely works out well for the latter. If representatives of an alien culture were able to reach us, their technical superiority would be assumed. That they may be presumed to have more advanced moral sentiments is a different matter.
If our putative aliens are sufficiently advanced they may have moved beyond our postmodernist world view of human perfectibility or have skipped that stage altogether. We have developed according to the imperatives of genetic survival and one may be forgiven for not seeing those imperatives in abatement. Humans are built on a predatory model as vehicles for genetic continuity. As social animals our selfish genetic interests are advanced by altruistic propensities which give mathematically predictable advantage to strong kinship relationships. Our gene selfish interest is further advanced by the degree that culture becomes inclusive, that ‘us’ expands to include ‘them’ to the extent that the world becomes safer from externalities as a regulated theater for genetic competition. It may be argued that morality, or the propensity for moral behavior, does not extend beyond intragroup dynamics, however much that group may be expanded by an overarching cultural ethos. But however well ordered, to the advantage of those best adapted to that order, life remains exploitive. We eat to live. I cannot think that aliens would not be guided by similar principles.
The speed of light remains a traffic law that shows little signs of being repealed. But what if our aliens were, as refugees from Troy, or as the spinoffs, the second sons and second daughters, of a culture that had reached the limits of expansion, were on a one-way journey in huge ships capable of sustaining complex colonies over trans-generational periods of time, capable of processing for sustenance materials encountered in its perpetual wanderings, like giant sharks gliding amongst the stars. They might be imagined to launch their own spinoffs gestated from expanding populations and intergalactic debris. A planet like our own might provide a welcome respite and timely reprovision. Relations with the natives…
The quail were delicious.