If intelligent extra-terrestrial civilizations evolve in a way similar to ours, then we should have little fear one might respond to receiving a signal from humans by invading Earth.
That’s the argument put forth in a new paper from YouTuber Alberto Caballero. The paper is not peer reviewed, nor is it particularly rigorous, but it does put forth an interesting thought experiment: Can we presume to know anything about civilizations on other worlds based on what we know about ourselves?
“These findings could serve as a starting point for an international debate about sending the first serious interstellar radio messages to nearby potentially habitable planets,” writes Caballero.
Caballero works with a whole lot of assumptions, including the famous Drake Equation that attempts to estimate the likely number of technologically advanced civilizations in the galaxy, to calculate that the odds of any of those civilizations being “malicious” is almost zero. Well, specifically:
“Such civilization has an estimated probability of 0.0014% of invading another one.”
Um, okay. But what exactly is that figured based on?
Caballero presumes the hostility of a civilization on another world can be guesstimated by extrapolating the rate at which fewer regimes on Earth have invaded other nations since 1915 as we have also been growing more technologically advanced at the same time.
In other words, if this correlation were to hold true and steady until the point that humans have achieved interstellar travel, we’ll surely be very peaceful and all in on the Starfleet ethos by that point, right? And so maybe any aliens who are capable of interstellar travel will be equally chill?
While there’s holes in this logic big enough to fly a Death Star through (our full dataset for how planetary civilizations develop and behave still remains at exactly one, no matter how much probabilistic reasoning you throw at it), it remains fascinating to me.
It’s unclear why we can extrapolate anything about the evolution of our civilization to other worlds. We’re pretty sure we can hold our understanding of physics constant throughout the galaxy, but even our grasp on such fundamental concepts is a little loose if we’re honest. Famously, the math governing quantum physics at the super small scale doesn’t line up with our understanding of cosmology and the universe on the largest scales.
Again, what’s really at the heart of Caballero’s reasoning appears to be a desire for researchers to pursue messaging extra-terrestrial intelligence, or METI. METI is an offshoot of SETI (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) that involves targeting exoplanets or other regions of the galaxy that seem to be good candidates for hosting life and directing signals at them a la “Contact.”
“We could send up to 18,000 interstellar messages to different exoplanets and the probability of invasion by a malicious civilization would be the same as that of an Earth collision with a global-catastrophe asteroid,” he concludes.
Again, this calculation is based on a series of guesses and an assumption that everything in the Milky Way galaxy in terms of social evolution works the way it does on Earth. Moreover, it leaves out a key point: we’ve already been signaling the entire galaxy for more than a century.
Humanity’s radio transmissions have been propagating outward into the cosmos since the early 1900s at the speed of light. Now it’s true that we’ve only made a few efforts to target those signals at potentially habitable worlds, and there are some smart people out there who worry about the wisdom of METI given our complete and total lack of data on other civilizations.
But I have an assumption of my own: Any civilization advanced enough to figure out interstellar travel is probably also sufficiently advanced to scan the galaxy thoroughly enough to pick up the century’s worth of white noise emanating from planet Earth.
Put another way, if I had to bet on it, I’d bet that any civilization capable of reaching us already knows we’re here.
So I guess I actually agree with Caballero: It seems that whatever advanced civilizations are out there (If there are any… Occam’s Razor suggests they aren’t nearby) probably aren’t malicious because they haven’t invaded us yet.
Or maybe they just don’t think we’re worth the trouble.
Source: Forbes
