What Happens If China Makes First Contact?(theatlantic.com) |
What Happens If China Makes First Contact?(theatlantic.com) |
As usual this article places to much emphasis on the human. We really aren't that important. Our political systems are irrelevant in the grander scheme.
We humanize aliens because otherwise movies would be boring, but more likely they would be very different from us, heck, we might not even recognize them ourselves.
We figured out rockets well before nuclear ( Robert Goddard’s rocket launch in 1926, vs the Chicago Pile in 1942 ). Seems to me that the same thing could be true for something like warp travel.
Secondly, we try to communicate with dogs, apes, dolphins, etc. That gap is pretty big, but nowhere near ants -clearly it could be, I’m just saying there is no reason for it to be that big of a gap
I doubt they would want us to spread ourselves into their galaxy and bring our problems to them.
Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year’s Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien’s messages.
Ahh, there we go. Thank you.
Long article. I didn't read all of it, but the parts I skimmed were good. I had no idea that China had its own answer to Arecibo.
EDIT: not sure why this is getting downvoted. The title of the post is literally one of the biggest plot points of Arrival. It would have been somewhat tone-deaf to popular culture had the article come out with this title and not mentioned Arrival. And sure enough it did. That was my only point. I wouldn't have made this comment if the post were titled "China's Answer To Arecibo".
Thank god, because we are treating ours like shit.
http://nullbloggers.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/white-dielectric...
https://qntm.org/retrospective
It's a fantastic read, set aside a few minutes to go through it, you won't regret it.
The interesting thing about both theories of relativity is that they only add one or two rather small ideas to existing theories each (electrodynamics and Newtonian mwchanics) and derive sweeping fundamental facts about our spacetime from that. Most of the building blocks were already there, but were not recognized for what they really are. The theories have held up very well to all direct tests we could come up with so far. This makes chances that there are loopholes or omissions left right there rather slim (based on our current knowledge, of course). There are oddities like solutions to the field equations that allow time travel. But as far as I know, these are mathematical oddities and unphysical solutions.
I have never understood how the destruction of quantum entanglement can avoid violating causality. Our professor confused us to no end at this point in the lecture and I have never tried to follow up on my own.
The usual idea is that since "wave function collapse is instantaneous" we can measure the spin on Earth, collapse the superposition and then Pluto can "notice the collapse".
However, there's no way to notice that entagled particles have decohered without looking at both of them side by side. Or said another way, the entire planet Earth could be entagled with some giant blob of matter in an alien lab in Andromeda, but we have no way of discovering this without comparing Earth matter with the alien lab matter.
I've got my unreasonable hopes pinned on some incarnation of the Alcubierre Drive. Just gotta find that negative energy density first :)
It'd be like Marconi trying to decipher a modern spread-spectrum encrypted RF datastream.
If a civilization wanted to be detected, they could easily send out clearly understandable signals - big carriers with slow modulation. Arecibo could in theory communicate with a similarly sized dish across the galaxy. An answer would be a long time coming, though.
they are imperfect, sure-- their abysmal human rights record will soon be matched by a collapsing xenophobic West.
but they are evidence that humanity can produce contiguous government without overt destruction of rivals even when capable of doing so. they are evidence that humanity can persist in peaceful trade with other civilizations, even if troubled internally.
china is no leader of "the free world" to be sure, but they are far from irresponsible recipients of first contact.... they have no interest in humankind's eradication, and they likely have plans for contact in the exceedingly unlikely chance that it occurs.
every empire has its victims. the question posed by the OP's article was why not the chinese empire rather than the anglo-american empire as a point of first contact.
in all honesty, i trust the chinese not to fuck up first contact more with a bellicose message, especially given the west's political incapacitation /fall to fascism
In another case, if they establish communication with a certain country/organization, but they cannot arrive, and somehow can only communicate with that certain country/organization, then it could be a different story.
I am sure the Pentagon and NASA have a plan if a "moon-sized" object with a deliberate orbit suddenly appeared in the night sky or was detected by a space telescope or an amateur astronomer using Mars as a gravity boost.
What would be more amusing if they were coming here to live underwater.
The plan probably is about communication channels and who decides what, and what not to do, more than what to do. Regardless of the content, I'm very sure it's not going to be followed, even if it did exist.
Thinking about this, sending a celebrity rather than a politician/religious/military is probably a good idea.
Most of our planet is water. US has the biggest/best Navy & intelligence systems. And also pretty aggressive spirit.
Russia has 1/6 (IIRC) of our planet's land mass and also a very stubborn spirit.
So my uneducated guess is ET is going to be chatting with either Trump or Putin.
...God help us...
Why? it's an elaborate pun in their alien language and the alien bureaucrat in charge of that decision really loves puns.
The world is already a shitty place. Earth doesn't need to add more species that don't understand or love puns.
It reminds me of a creature in a certain animation I watched.
Probabilistically unlikely for us to be the only ones, but just a thought.
How do you even measure that? If the number of coincidences required for life to emerge is large enough, the probability of observing life on a planet could very well be far bellow 1 over the number of planets in the universe.
That would make us probably alone :(
Probably like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
Which means there's no really good reason we can't move our factories to space and turn Earth into a Life Haven.
Hell, maybe the whole galaxy has quantum wifi.
To reliably send a signal across large distances, it's much better to use a bright light source focused at the target. When you start with trillions of photons, it doesn't harm the signal quality very much if a few of them hit interstellar dust on the way.
It's like looking for telegraphy systems when everyone else are using radio waves.
Is there something else you're thinking of other than entanglement?
I think a much more interesting thought experiment is this: if an alien race chooses to make First Contact with us, what’s the likelihood we’re actually the first for them? Being a student of history, it’s a stretch for me to think they wouldn’t know these sorts of events trigger drastic changes in the native populations (usually resulting in death) when encountering a more developed civilization. So, I’m forced to conclude that if they do make First Contact with us we’re either the first for them and we’re doomed, or we’re not and they have some sufficient protocol for First Contact that’s “good enough” that they benefit in the exchange. Either way I don’t think Humanity makes out well unless we get lucky with some really benevolent explorers.
I think we should really stop thinking that space travel is the natural continuation of the geographic explorations and colonizations of our past. It has nothing to do with it- new planets cannot be colonized because they're uninhabitable (Earth included for an alien) and distances are too big to transfer significant amounts of population.
What if it's just a scout/science vessel?
Some people believe that science advances should progress like explosion, and "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". In this case the possibility of aliens being at the similar level with us is small.
But I think you have a point. Sometimes I doubt the speed of science advances. Maybe the aliens are not so far away from us and their astronautics is not much stronger than our level. They don't look like magicians. In this case things can be boring, may be just an age of discoveries for the aliens.
Quoting wikipedia:
The last four parameters, fl, fi, fc, and L, are not known and are very difficult to estimate, with values ranging over many orders of magnitude
I hope we choose to view them as invasive species.
It does. And its very deep answer is "the Chinese fuck up because they're a bit dumb, and only thanks to a very bright, young and beautiful American the world is saved, again".
Of course, it would also depend on the aliens’ goals and the circumstances of their arrival on Earth. If they just want the planet, they may as well show up with guns blazing, as in War of the Worlds or Attack the Block or Battle: Los Angeles or Skyline. If they’ve landed in distress, they also likely wouldn’t bother concealing themselves, as in District 9.
Anyway, I’ve always been fascinated by imagining what would actually happen if some fairly anthropomorphic aliens really did show up tomorrow, on a diplomatic mission (not guns blazing). Portrayals in fiction are fascinating, where world religions try to explain it (or view it eschatologically), governments debate whether to preemptively attempt to annihilate them, etc. How would I react?
Several science fiction pieces have been written and filmed about alien cultures only finding value in other species' history, stories etc for their entertainment.
The Chinese have never stopped being routinely bellicose during the CPC era. They annexed Tibet through violence. They're desperate to annex a successful, independent nation - Taiwan - that wants absolutely nothing to do with that. They're willing to use violence to acquire Taiwan as needed. They're currently using bellicose military intimidation and threats to annex an extremely large amount of territory from Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan.
It would be the equivalent of the US routintely threatening to invade Canada to annex Vancouver + Toronto. Then annexing Baja California from Mexico. Then invading Cuba, annexing it and systematically de-Cubanizing the island culturally. Then annexing territorial waters in the Gulf, Caribbean, Pacific and Atlantic from Canada, Mexico and several other Latin American nations.
Show me another nation that has annexed more territory in the last 50 years than China. And they're obviously not done yet.
I've got some further bad news for you. A century of results indicates that Communism is just as bad or worse than Fascism. The overall current human rights position and behavior of the West is radically preferable to that of present day China.
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One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. (Sorry for butchering the quote)