Imagine for a moment if someone from an ancient civilization on earth were somehow transported
to the present, say someone from the 10th century to now.
They would recognize certain things, a kitchen knife would be recognizable in any era as
humans across the globe have used such tools since time immemorial.
We know the value of a sharp object, no matter the era.
And it has to be said, even today stone tools aren’t obsolete, surgeons in some cases
still use obsidian in surgery because it’s many times sharper than a metal razor blade.
But there are also things that would absolutely mystify them to varying degrees.
They would know what an automobile does, it clearly moves, but they wouldn’t know how
it worked.
A cell phone would be utter magic, and perhaps might even be something to bless or destroy.
Yet, we live only a thousand years later than that human we transported was from and that
much has fundamentally changed.
That’s a drop in the bucket of time in a universe 13.8 billion years old.
Yet we have the expectation of first contact with an alien species, and when it happens
it will be straightforward and unambiguous.
But maybe we should pause and rethink that expectation.
Maybe the order of first contact in the universe is not the Vulcans landing and saying hello
when they detect a certain technology, but maybe it’s more like Contact where first
contact is ambiguous, and then its baby steps from there for presumably a very long time,
much to Jodie Foster’s chagrin where the aliens thought it proper to make her look
crazy.
There is reasoning to this approach in that it may be better to acclimatize a civilization
to first contact long before it happens, or if you will predispose the situation for the
target civilization so they aren’t utterly repulsed when you reveal that you’re a six
legged Reptilian-Insect species with huge gnashing teeth.
But more seriously, how do you reveal yourself to a civilization that only recently could
even envision an alien first contact, when you are in fact a post-biological god-like
all powerful machine civilization?
Think about that, only four hundred years ago the idea of alien life was not an interpretation
usually taken by humans.
More often than not, people back then would have attributed the activities of a close
alien civilization as acts of the gods, not acts of aliens, and definitely wouldn’t
have understood an artificially intelligent machine supercivilization.
The go to explanation for anything weird would have tended towards the theological, rather
than the astrobiological, and even the concept of how we think about other worlds only relatively
recently became a matter of exoplanets rather than other universes.
This is a concept known as cosmic pluralism, and it’s very ancient but in a different
form.
In the west, you can trace the metaphysical form of the argument back to the ancient Greeks
with Anaximander who died around 546 BC, though ideas globally along these lines are far older.
In the Greek sense, it was more along the lines of parallel universes than other planets,
and even ideas of an infinite universe.
Then came Plato and Aristotle and the bottom fell out of the debate, and the thinking moved
towards one unique earth, and no other worlds of any kind.
This was perpetuated into more recent times, and as Giordano Bruno showed, challenging
certain things got you burned at the stake after condemnation by the inquisition, and
while it wasn’t his assertion of cosmic pluralism that condemned him per se, it was
still one factor of many used against him.
But in other parts of the world, such as the middle east, medieval thinkers just assumed
there were other worlds with life.
Fast forward to the early 20th century, where the conception of alien life had gone further
than we even take it today.
Ideas of intelligent life on Venus and Mars were rampant, and basically accepted by the
American public at least, and many people just assumed the aliens were there.
After all, how special could we be in a universe as big as it is?
But later we found it was, in the very least, far more complicated than that, Venus and
Mars present very hostile environments to what we know as life.
The point is, we have only relatively recently through the scientific process have even been
able to conceive that alien life might try to contact us, basically Cocconi and Morrison’s
seminal paper that kicked off SETI and of course Nikola Tesla’s reports of picking
up alien signals, which he apparently didn’t find interesting and stopped listening to
inn order to pursue other matters.
So this brings up a question, would aliens land on the white house lawn, step out and
say the proverbial Klaatu Barada Nikto?
Or would they beam that out as a radio signal?
Well, probably not because we’re so early in the game as far as being able to even comprehend
alien first contact.
Think for a moment about an alien civilization that knew there was intelligence here, say
they passed through the solar system 100,000 years ago.
They might know that there was a potentially technological species here, or in those days
possibly several related species, that had the potential for civilization.
They may intend to send a signal, but only after they pick up a technosignature.
That sets up a scenario where alien first contact doesn’t happen until you broadcast
a technosignature strong enough to warrant a response, which we really have not done,
and remember that technosignature has to cross conceivably thousands of light years before
it’s picked up, and we’ve only been transmitting plausibly detectable technosignatures for
a century.
If through contact with each other, any number of alien civilizations could be out there
that know about us, but are just waiting for us to hit technology from their perspective,
leading to a future where basically a whole slew of contact signals come in as the galactic
internet hears we’ve arrived at technology, but only after a latent period where we wonder
about the Fermi Paradox and toy with ideas that we may be alone.
But even then, you have to wonder about the evolution of cultures on an inhabited world.
Would an alien civilization picking up a new technosignature take into account that if
they sent a message, the recipient civilization may not be able to handle it?
This gets into the infamous Brookings Report of 1960, which was a study that in part tried
to determine what the implications of the discovery of alien life might be on humanity.
The report recommends further study, but implies that maybe it would be better to withhold
any such discovery from the public.
One could make a case for this, that it might upset some religious views, but not most of
them, and may also cause a kind of panic in the wrong circumstances.
But only for a short time, and at this point, I think most people would just shrug and move
on because if a civilization that hits on the notion of alien life and communication
with it, eventually it simply becomes accustomed to the idea and first contact can happen without
mass hysteria.
Perhaps the great silence is simply aliens waiting for us to acclimatize before they
hit us with a hello.
This also works for close aliens.
In this case, you might have a von Neumann probe that crossed vast amounts of space to
get here.
The von Neumann probe concept is interesting because it removes the galactic distance factor
from the equation.
A biological creature might care about the passage of time due to a finite lifetime,
but a self-repairing machine may not care at all and as Fermi pointed out, the galaxy
is well old enough for a machine civilization to have propagated across the entire galaxy,
it would only take a few million years at sub light speeds to colonize the entirety
of it and place a probe in every star system.
Time is a different factor for non-biological civilizations, and in fact, may not be a factor
at all as far as galactic colonization and exploration is concerned.
As a result, it’s plausible that an alien civilization may have stationed a watcher
probe in this star system in the distant past that radios home occasional updates on the
progress of anything that’s going on in that star system.
This is smart, it allows you to do on site science with close measurement on everything
from impending supernovae to abiogenesis on exoplanets, and periodically transmit home,
on time scales of hundreds or thousands of years.
For science, you can look at Antarctica from the air, but it’s better to land if you
really want to study it, and that’s very much the case with exoplanets.
But as the prime directive of Star Trek Fame illustrates, it may be better to keep quiet
and hide your presence as best you can, specifically because you are more advanced.
This is actually a really spooky proposition because an alien civilization that’s very
good at hiding itself is the most scary type because you’ll never know they were there
if they are in fact present.
Perfect hiding is just that, perfect.
And that in itself is a perfectly good solution to the Fermi Paradox, that aliens are just
really good at hiding themselves and do it flawlessly and thus can’t ever be detected
even if they are present in huge numbers.
But they also may not particularly care if they are detected or not.
In which case they simply become unresponsive aliens that get spotted every now and again
as, well, UFOs, but as to communicating to the civilization on the planet they are observing,
they remain aloof and do not make contact until they feel the civilization is prepared
for it.
They may even do this on purpose, let themselves be seen as weird UFO/UAPs, so the civilization
under study sees them, discusses them, and then acclimatizes to their presence and when
things get to the level that they can step out of their saucer and show everyone their
horrific abomination insectoid nature without so much as a single person yelling it’s
a cookbook and everyone just shrugs and says “it’s just aliens” and moves on.
This is smart in another way.
Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear
as magic.
And that’s very true.
The ant eater doesn’t know how the Tesla works, it just knows to get off the road,
at least hopefully for the ant eater’s sake.
So presenting god-like technology to a civilization barely able to make a steam engine may not
be the best idea, rather a slow acclimatization once again would appear the better route.
And there is also data gathering.
The more you know about a civilization, and the ins and outs of its cultures, the better
prepared you are to make first contact.
This problem can’t be over-stated.
Miscommunication is a huge problem for us when we talk to each other as humans, wars
have started that way, but that’s way more of a problem for a civilization from an alien
world coming here and trying to communicate with us.
If it could manage to cross light years of space and time, it would know of this potential
problem ahead of time.
It may have no concept of verbal language, rather it may communicate chemically, in which
case saying hello could well be poisonous to a human.
Or if they do speak vocally, they may be a hundred times louder than we are, or a hundred
times quieter.
Or worse.
Show up in the year 1500, visit the Holy Roman or Chinese or Japanese Emperor and see what
the guards do with the halberds, swords and guillotines.
Or head to the Vatican walking on your six legs with the amphibian tongue flicking at
flies along the way to say hello to the pope, can you really expect a congenial response?
Heading to the Vatican cafeteria and having an informal lunch after talks does not seem
to be in the cards as far as alien first contact before at least the 19th century is concerned.
And there are diseases, before any first contact you need to know what you’re dealing with
on that count, both for your own safety and those you wish to contact.
So in a nutshell we really are the first iteration of human civilization throughout history that
could even conceive of alien first contact, much less think about how to do it.
And the solution to the Fermi Paradox here is simply that we have not had this ability
long enough to expect to have been contacted on an equal footing with the other civilizations
of the galaxy, nor should we expect this for some time and it shouldn’t be surprising
that we see a great silence right now, because we ourselves have been silent for most of
our history, only recently becoming aware that there may be others out there to talk
to.
But I leave you with this, what happens if we know aliens are present in our star system,
but they never make first contact at all?
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently worried about Star
Trek IV.
There they didn’t care about us, they just wanted to talk to the whales.
What if the first communication we get from an alien civilization is a bitmap picture
of an opossum.
Very unsavory and not something I look forward to and be sure to check out my books at your
favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations
into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.