Think of this video as a prelude to something else.
To celebrate this channel having passed ten thousand subscribers, and indeed growing by
50 percent in a month and a half, I'm in the process of making a long form video about
a subject that I've been thinking a lot about lately.
It's the notion that a communication contained in an alien radio transmission may be very
different from the expected "Hello, you are not alone".
Expect that video soon, but in the course of researching that material I came across
a very old idea that I'd heard before, but I've always found myself skeptical as to whether
any of the variations of it could actually happen.
But it does lie within the realm of the possible, especially when considering that we would
probably be dealing with a civilization far more advanced than us, so I merely present
this material to you to ponder as food for thought.
It's the idea of a malicious alien radio signal.
This could come in several forms.
The first of which is computer hacking, the idea that a signal could contain malicious
code that could take over or damage our systems.
This is the one I'm most skeptical about since it would require a pretty intimate knowledge
of our technology to pull off.
There are problems there.
But even they did have some kind of way in, and this may surprise you, SETI doesn't really
look at the content of a signal, rather they simply look for the presence of one.
Take the Wow!
Signal for example, the infamous circled numbers that some have taken to be content, actually
aren't, they are merely a measure of the strength of the signal.
I would not call that a fool proof buffer, but it is a layer of protection.
If we did get a signal, we would have ample time to think it through and be careful before
trying to decode the message.
But even then, the aliens would need some serious knowledge of our computers and software.
That's pretty hard to get if you're light years away studying this planet from afar.
Even if you somehow did it, say you saw a computer in a television broadcast, you would
still be seeing an earth computer from the past.
In other words, the hack could come as a design for a malicious punch card, and we'd be laughing
at the aliens.
But, there may be a wildcard here.
That would be the notion of a von neumann-bracewell probe hiding within this star system silently
studying us and gathering information until its time to hack us.
What an alien hacker probe hiding in the solar system could do is an unknown and I leave
that up to the programmers and security experts to ponder, though I think I'd worry more about
such a thing sending this civilization back to the stone age by emitting an EMP, which
would be the ultimate in malicious SETI signals and a real shame if that were the first signal
we received from an alien civilization.
But there is another possibility for a different type of malicious SETI signal, plans for a
doomsday device.
This idea goes back decades in sci fi, including Stanislaw Lem's novel His Master's Voice.
The basic idea is that we receive a set of instructions to build something, as in Lem's
novel or in Contact.
We think it's one thing, but it ends up being a device that annihilates us.
I find this scenario hard to swallow as I suspect that no one on this planet will just
build the thing without knowing what it does first.
But a variation of this might be more of a concern, say the aliens simply transmit open
plans for advanced weaponry under some false pretense, say they tell us that there is an
all powerful machine civilization lurking in the galaxy and that we need to protect
ourselves against.
In that scenario, the aliens might bet that with all that weaponry around, it would only
be a matter of time before we destroyed ourselves.
The last possibility is a malicious computer virus.
This faces many of the same problems of alien hacking, creating any sort of really targeted
dangerous virus would need a lot of knowledge of earth computer systems.
But, then again, against our best efforts computer viruses persist to this day.
But within this thinking, there lies another rather terrifying possibility.
That possibility is an out of control virus unintentionally sent to us by an infected
alien civilization.
Say this virus is artificially intelligent, and it infects the computer and communications
systems of alien civilizations in order to replicate and spread itself throughout the
galaxy.
Perhaps the first friendly communication we receive from an alien civilization is antivirus
software.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier clearly having spent Halloween
spooking myself writing this script and eating leftover candy and be sure to check out my
books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel for regular, in-depth
explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in
which we live.