What would we do if we really found rock-solid evidence of a It's roughly five times the mass of Earth and probably belongs to the class of planets .. Of course, a human civilization rich enough and advanced enough for.
Table of contents
- Potential cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact
- Lost in Strata
- Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth before Ours?
- Silurian Hypothesis: Seeking evidence of civilised life on Earth before humans
And it is clear that there is a significant intelligence gap between humans and all other animals on our planet. So animals indeed may not be the greatest analog for technologically advanced extraterrestrial life forms.
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This may only hold true in terms of smartness, however—the diversity of living things on our planet suggests many possibilities for other aspects of alien life, including anatomy, communication, and social behavior. There is a deeper underlying question here. Since we doubtlessly did originate from animal ancestors, the gap between us and them must have been bridged at some point in time.
Perhaps it was not a jump, but a continuous evolution.
Potential cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact
How much ability for abstraction and appreciation of complex numbers did they have? The more conservative the respondents, the more harmful they considered extraterrestrial contact to be. Other significant correlation patterns indicate that participants [ which? Psychologists Douglas Vakoch and Yuh-shiow Lee conducted a survey to assess people's reactions to receiving a message from extraterrestrials, including their judgments about likelihood that extraterrestrials would be malevolent.
Various protocols have been drawn up detailing a course of action for scientists and governments after extraterrestrial contact. Post-detection protocols must address three issues: The Declaration of Principles contains the following broad provisions: A separate "Proposed Agreement on the Sending of Communications to Extraterrestrial Intelligence" was subsequently created.
Paul Davies , a member of the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup, has stated that post-detection protocols, calling for international consultation before taking any major steps regarding the detection, are unlikely to be followed by astronomers, who would put the advancement of their careers over the word of a protocol that is not part of national or international law. Scientific literature and science fiction have put forward various models of the ways in which extraterrestrial and human civilizations might interact. Their predictions range widely, from sophisticated civilizations that could advance human civilization in many areas to imperial powers that might draw upon the forces necessary to subjugate humanity.
The implications of discovery depend very much on the level of aggressiveness of the civilization interacting with humanity, [34] its ethics , [35] and how much human and extraterrestrial biologies have in common. Many writers have speculated on the ways in which a friendly civilization might interact with humankind. Albert Harrison , a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis, [40] thought that a highly advanced civilization might teach humanity such things as a physical theory of everything , how to use zero-point energy , or how to travel faster than light.
Baum, of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, and others consider that the greater longevity of cooperative civilizations in comparison to uncooperative and aggressive ones might render extraterrestrial civilizations in general more likely to aid humanity. Futurist Allen Tough suggests that an extremely advanced extraterrestrial civilization, recalling its own past of war and plunder and knowing that it possesses superweapons that could destroy it, would be likely to try to help humans rather than to destroy them.
Tough considers advising and acting only with consent to be a more likely choice than the forceful option. While coercive aid may be possible, and advanced extraterrestrials would recognize their own practices as superior to those of humanity, it may be unlikely that this method would be used in cultural cooperation. According to Tough, it is unlikely that the avoidance of immediate dangers and prevention of future catastrophes would be conducted through radio, as these tasks would demand constant surveillance and quick action.
Even if an ancient and advanced extraterrestrial civilization wished to help humanity, humans could suffer from a loss of identity and confidence due to the technological and cultural prowess of the extraterrestrial civilization. Michaud suggests that a friendly and advanced extraterrestrial civilization may even avoid all contact with an emerging intelligent species like humanity, to ensure that the less advanced civilization can develop naturally at its own pace; [48] this is known as the zoo hypothesis.
Science fiction films often depict humans successfully repelling alien invasions , but scientists more often take the view that an extraterrestrial civilization with sufficient power to reach the Earth would be able to destroy human civilization with minimal effort. Deardorff speculates that a small proportion of the intelligent life forms in the galaxy may be aggressive, but the actual aggressiveness or benevolence of the civilizations would cover a wide spectrum, with some civilizations "policing" others.
SETI researcher Carl Sagan believed that a civilization with the technological prowess needed to reach the stars and come to Earth must have transcended war to be able to avoid self-destruction. Representatives of such a civilization would treat humanity with dignity and respect, and humanity, with its relatively backward technology, would have no choice but to reciprocate. Politicians have also commented on the likely human reaction to contact with hostile species.
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly , Ronald Reagan said, "I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. Robert Freitas speculated in that the technological advancement and energy usage of a civilization, measured either relative to another civilization or in absolute terms by its rating on the Kardashev scale , may play an important role in the result of extraterrestrial contact.
Because of the long transit times of radio waves between stars, such interactions would not lead to the establishment of diplomatic relations, nor any significant future interaction at all, between the two civilizations. According to Freitas, direct contact with civilizations significantly more advanced than humanity would have to take place within the Solar System, as only the more advanced society would have the resources and technology to cross interstellar space.
However much planning an extraterrestrial civilization may do before contacting humanity, the humans may experience great shock and terror on their arrival, especially as they would lack any understanding of the contacting civilization. Ben Finney compares the situation to that of the tribespeople of New Guinea , an island that was settled fifty thousand years ago during the last glacial period but saw little contact with the outside world until the arrival of European colonial powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The huge difference between the indigenous stone-age society and the Europeans' technical civilization caused unexpected behaviors among the native populations known as cargo cults: Finney argues that humanity may misunderstand the true meaning of an extraterrestrial transmission to Earth, much as the people of New Guinea could not understand the source of modern goods and technologies.
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He concludes that the results of extraterrestrial contact will become known over the long term with rigorous study, rather than as fast, sharp events briefly making newspaper headlines. Billingham has suggested that a civilization which is far more technologically advanced than humanity is also likely to be culturally and ethically advanced, and would therefore be unlikely to conduct astroengineering projects that would harm human civilization.
Such projects could include Dyson spheres , which completely enclose stars and capture all energy coming from them. Even if well within the capability of an advanced civilization and providing an enormous amount of energy, such a project would not be undertaken. Whether an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would send humanity a decipherable message is a matter of debate in itself. Sagan argued that a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization would bear in mind that they were communicating with a relatively primitive one and therefore would try to ensure that the receiving civilization would be able to understand the message.
Given the age of the galaxy, Harrison surmises that there exist several "galactic clubs", groupings of multiple civilizations from across the galaxy. As more extraterrestrial civilizations, or unions thereof, are found, these could also become assimilated into such a club. Whether a broad spectrum of civilizations from many places in the galaxy would even be able to cooperate is disputed by Michaud, who states that civilizations with huge differences in the technologies and resources at their command "may not consider themselves even remotely equal".
When two Canadian astronomers argued that they potentially discovered extraterrestrial civilizations through analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey database, Douglas Vakoch doubted their explanation for their findings, noting that it would be unusual for all of these stars to pulse at exactly the same frequency unless they were part a coordinated network: Michaud suggests that an interstellar grouping of civilizations might take the form of an empire, which need not necessarily be a force for evil, but may provide for peace and security throughout its jurisdiction.
An extraterrestrial civilization may choose to communicate with humanity by means of artifacts or probes rather than by radio, for various reasons. While probes may take a long time to reach the Solar System, once there they would be able to hold a sustained dialogue that would be impossible using radio from hundreds or thousands of light-years away. Although faster-than-light travel has been seriously considered by physicists such as Miguel Alcubierre , [75] Tough speculates that the enormous amount of energy required to achieve such speeds under currently proposed mechanisms means that robotic probes traveling at conventional speeds will still have an advantage for various applications.
Freitas finds numerous reasons why interstellar probes may be a preferred method of communication among extraterrestrial civilizations wishing to make contact with Earth. A civilization aiming to learn more about the distribution of life within the galaxy might, he speculates, send probes to a large number of star systems, rather than using radio, as one cannot ensure a response by radio but can he says ensure that probes will return to their sender with data on the star systems they survey.
Freitas points out that probes, unlike the interstellar radio waves commonly targeted by SETI searches, could store information for long, perhaps geological, timescales, [78] and could emit strong radio signals unambiguously recognizable as being of intelligent origin, rather than being dismissed as a UFO or a natural phenomenon. Given the age of the Milky Way galaxy, an ancient extraterrestrial civilization may have existed and sent probes to the Solar System millions or even billions of years before the evolution of Homo sapiens.
Lost in Strata
The confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligence could have a profound impact on religious doctrines, potentially causing theologians to reinterpret scriptures to accommodate the new discoveries. Contact with extraterrestrial intelligence would not be completely inconsequential for religion. The Peters study showed that most non-religious people, and a significant minority of religious people, believe that the world could face a religious crisis, even if their own beliefs were unaffected.
Funes speculates that a decipherable message from extraterrestrial intelligence could initiate an interstellar exchange of knowledge in various disciplines, including whatever religions an extraterrestrial civilization may host.
Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth before Ours?
Tim Folger speculates that news of radio contact with an extraterrestrial civilization would prove impossible to suppress and would travel rapidly, [65] though Cold War scientific literature on the subject contradicts this. Apart from the question of who would represent the Earth as a whole, contact could create other international problems, such as the degree of involvement of governments foreign to the one whose radio astronomers received the signal.
Even in the absence of close contact between humanity and extraterrestrials, high-information messages from an extraterrestrial civilization to humanity have the potential to cause a great cultural shock. Contact with extraterrestrial civilizations would raise legal questions, such as the rights of the extraterrestrial beings. Taking all this into consideration, what remains is a menu of diffuse long-lived tracers including fossil fuel combustion residues carbon, primarily , evidence of mass extinctions, plastic pollutants, synthetic chemical compounds not found in nature and even transuranic isotopes from nuclear fission.
In other words, what we would need to look for in the geologic record are the same distinctive signals that humans are laying down right now. Finding signs of an altered carbon cycle would be one big clue to previous industrial periods, Schmidt says.
Silurian Hypothesis: Seeking evidence of civilised life on Earth before humans
Such changes are detectable in changes in the carbon isotope ratio between biological and inorganic carbon—that is, between the carbon incorporated into things like seashells and that which goes instead into lifeless volcanic rock. Another tracer would be distinctive patterns of sediment deposition.
Large coastal deltas would hint at boosted levels of erosion and rivers or engineered canals swollen from increased rainfall. Telltale traces of nitrogen in the sediments could suggest the widespread use of fertilizer, fingering industrial-scale agriculture as a possible culprit; spikes in metal levels in the sediments might instead point to runoff from manufacturing and other heavy industry. More unique, specific tracers would be non-naturally occurring, stable synthetic molecules such as steroids and many plastics, along with well-known pollutants including PCBs—toxic polychlorinated biphenyls from electrical devices—and CFCs—ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons from refrigerators and aerosol sprays.
The key strategy in distinguishing the presence of industry from nature, Schmidt notes, is developing a multifactor signature. Absent artifacts or convincingly clear markers, the uniqueness of an event may well be seen in many relatively independent fingerprints as opposed to the coherent set of changes that are seen to be associated with a single geophysical cause. If, for instance, dinosaurs built interplanetary rockets, presumably some remnants of that activity might remain preserved in stable orbits or on the surfaces of more geologically inert celestial bodies such as the moon.
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Wright also acknowledges the potential for this work to be misinterpreted.