What to Expect With Alien First Contact
Image credit: Disney (Toy Story)
In the full original article HERE, George Dvorsky ponders
What to Expect From Aliens When We Make First Contact
(Though I strongly suspect that we will not be the advanced spacefarers reaching them... and that we have already been in contact here on Earth...)
Dvorsky suggests: "Given the vastness of space, it may only be a matter of time before we make contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. But how might an alien civilization react to such a monumental meet-and-greet, and can we possibly know their intentions? Here’s what we might expect.
Alien civilizations will most assuredly be like snowflakes: no two will be the same. Each will differ according to an array of factors, including their mode of existence, age, history, developmental stage, and level of technological development. That said, advanced civilizations may have a lot in common as they adapt to similar challenges...
“Convergence is one of the best arguments for Darwinian adaptation, but its sheer ubiquity has not been appreciated,” he noted in a recent University of Cambridge article. “Often, research into convergence is accompanied by exclamations of surprise, describing it as uncanny, remarkable and astonishing. In fact it is everywhere, and that is a remarkable indication that evolution is far from a random process. And if the outcomes of evolution are at least broadly predictable, then what applies on Earth will apply across the Milky Way, and beyond.”
Morris contends that biological aliens will likely resemble humans, including features like limbs, heads, bodies — and intelligence. And if our levels of intelligence are comparable, then our psychologies and emotional responses may be similar as well.
Biological aliens are not likely to be primates, but some might be very primate-like. For terrestrial species, the mode of evolution from a Darwinian to a post-Darwinian phase may follow similar patterns. And from a social constructionist perspective, humans and aliens may also share similarities in the socio-political realm.
That said, if alien species evolved from different biological precursors, like animals similar to fish, insects, dinosaurs, birds, or something we don’t observe here on Earth, their behaviors will likely be markedly different, and thus very difficult — but not necessarily impossible — to predict. But it’s fair to say that an overly belligerent, anti-social species, no matter how intelligent or physically adept, is not likely to advance to a post-industrial, space-fairing stage.
If aliens are biologically and socially like us, therefore, they may share many of our desires and proclivities, including our interest in science, and in meeting and interacting with extraterrestrial life. At the same time, however, they may also share our survival instinct and experience trepidation at meeting “the other.”
Should we make first contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), we’ll have to make sure that we come across as friendly. Hopefully they’ll do the same. But even if we’re happy to meet each other, a major challenge will be in assessing the risks of cultural and technological exchange; just because we get along doesn’t mean that something unintentionally bad could happen. As a historical example, the introduction of Eurasian diseases to the Americas during the colonization era is a potent reminder of what can happen when disparate and formerly isolated civilizations meet.
As Stephen Hawking has said, “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”
The late Carl Sagan had a different take, arguing that it’s inappropriate to make historical analogies when discussing alien intentions. A contact optimist, he said it was unlikely that we’d face “colonial barbarity” from advanced ETIs. According to Sagan, alien civilizations that lived long enough to colonize a good portion of the galaxy would be the least likely to engage in aggressive imperialism. He also thought that any “quarrelsome” extraterrestrials would be quashed by a more powerful species. What’s more, he didn’t think that technologically advanced ETIs would have anything to fear from us, so we needn’t fear them.
As NASA’s Chief Historian Steven J. Dick has pointed out, the dominant form of life in the cosmos is probably post-biological. Advanced alien civilizations, either through their own trans-biological evolution or through the rise of their artificially intelligent progeny, are more likely to be machine-based than meat-based. We ourselves may be heading in this direction, as witnessed by current and pending advances in genetics, cybernetics, molecular nanotechnology, cognitive science, and information technology.
As Dick noted in his paper, “The Postbiological Universe”:
Because of the limits of biology and flesh-and-blood brains...cultural evolution will eventually result in methods for improving intelligence beyond those biological limits. If the strong Artificial Intelligence concept is correct, that is, if it is possible to construct AI with more intelligence than biologicals, postbiological intelligence may take the form of AI. It has been argued that humans themselves may become postbiological in this sense within a few generations... the cosmos may be peppered with artificial superintelligence (ASI) — machines that either succeeded or supplanted their biological forebears.