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As we survey the galaxy for signs of life and send out our first hello-anyone-there
signals, there’s some concern that we might end up attracting the attention of someone
we should have hidden from.
But what if the aliens are more scared of us than we are of them?
So today we’re back to the Alien Civilizations series for a look at Paranoid Aliens, and
we should probably start by asking what paranoia actually is.
When you’re getting out on the galactic stage it probably pays to be cautious, especially
if you think the galaxy is full of unfriendly sorts.
For today we’ll define paranoia as when you’re constantly choosing the more cautious
and fear motivated approaches to problems over other ones which might also be reasonable.
For instance, we currently look up in the night sky and don’t see any clear evidence
of other civilizations.
That is the Fermi Paradox, the apparent contradiction between the size and age of the Universe and
the seeming absence of any older and bigger civilizations in it, and of course is one
of our most common topics here on the show.
Looking at that emptiness, you might conclude you have the galaxy to yourself or that lots
of folks are out there but you just can’t see them for some reason.
At first glance, that would imply a cautious approach to stepping out from our cradle world
into the stars, or even just waving and saying hello.
As we’ve argued in the Dyson Dilemma, while the absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence, that apparent emptiness is itself a pretty good indicator that nobody is out
there or if they are, they’ve no hostile or possessive intent toward our world, or
at least a capacity for achieving either.
Still, it pays to be cautious and to look.
Thus, we have the notion of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and this
is also has an active component, Active SETI or METI, Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Rather than listening for messages, you send out your own, as loud as you can, and this
is a good case for contemplating paranoia.
Many would argue, very understandably, that while it makes sense to look for other civilizations,
shouting our presence out to a dark galaxy potentially full of unfriendly aliens might
be a really bad idea.
If you’re nodding your head at that, no you’re not paranoid, though as we discussed
in Hidden Aliens, trying to stay quiet isn’t a winning strategy because you only need to
be afraid of civilizations your age or older, since they’re presumably bigger and more
advanced and thus a threat.
The problem with that reasoning is that it assumes that not shouting into the void is
going to keep you hidden from such threats.
It would not, because if they are older and able to send armadas to wipe you out, they
could also have built great big telescopes or sent out tiny probes to look for life bearing
planets, which is presumably easy enough to do if you can send armadas.
Hence worrying about METI isn’t very reasonable, not because keeping yourself hidden is a bad
idea, but because you realistically can’t anyway.
Sending out messages could only result in a handful of realistic outcomes.
First, nobody hears you because no one is there or they’re not technologically capable
yet.
Second, they already know you’re here and thus nothing is achieved by it, other than
saying you want to talk, but they would already suspect that by observing us and we can probably
take for granted that any big and ancient interstellar empire leaves listening outposts
near planets.
Third, they don’t already know you’re there.
Since it’s improbable that nearby civilizations to us would just happen to also be about our
age, anymore than your next door neighbor being born the same minute of the same day
and year you were, you’ll either be shocking a young civilization or poking an old and
reclusive one with a stick.
Though at our probable future rate of growth, remaining undiscovered for much longer may
require active measures.
Personally I doubt that it matters if we do METI or not, but let’s consider that case
where you’re a new civilization, or one that’s just kept to itself or assumed it
had the galaxy to itself, a Stay-at-Home Civilization.
You suddenly get a message from folks, it’s going to be a bit shocking and a paranoid
species might take some unpleasant actions.
We’ll get into those in a moment.
First though, this reasoning doesn’t extrapolate to why we haven’t been contacted by any
sprawling ancient interstellar civilizations.
We would be shocked to hear from them, and if they’re nice folks they might be worried
about that, but the most logical approach then, knowing that contact is essentially
inevitable, would be to take some up close looks then make contact with us in a more
controlled and deliberate way.
Showing up on some uncontacted tribe’s radar by firing a big flare over their camp or bringing
along a megaphone and shouting gibberish at them are two methods of contact.
Not really ideal ones, since it’s likely to freak them out.
Taking some careful observations, learning their language and customs, and showing up
with open arms, is certainly the preferred approach, and one available to any civilization
that feels like parking a TV or radio dish in our solar system, hence why you’d not
expect a big interstellar civilization to be listening for your METI signals, other
than to maybe chuckle a bit at why you’d think anyone hearing it wasn’t already listening
to you to begin with.
Now we’re discussing this because it gets to the paranoia aspect, caution is advisable
and a trait we’d expect from anything that clawed its way up Darwin’s blood-soaked
ladder.
Paranoia probably is too, and is a fairly relative concept, but today we mostly mean
when it’s being irrational about a concern.
You could say that you’re only being paranoid if you’re wrong and no one is actually out
to get you; on the other hand, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean no one is
out to get you.
As an example, there is a certain logic in the idea that coexisting with aliens is not
viable, they’re not just your neighbors with a slightly different ancestry and customs,
and of course we’ve often tried to wipe each other out and an alien race might have
been a lot more aggressive about pursuing such efforts at home.
We see this same reasoning with hypothetical Artificial Intelligences too.
It might not hate us or wish us harm, but there is a non-zero chance we might try to
harm it, today or in the future, and a far better chance we might succeed at doing that
than a cat or dog would, or an inanimate chunk of rock or metal.
So if it has the capacity to wipe us out and deems its odds of succeeding at that to be
better than the odds of doing so at a later date, it will attempt to do so.
And by the way, that kind of calculation was a big part of how World War One got started,
but that’s a topic for different channel...
Now there’s a lot of flaws in that reasoning that we’ve looked at before, and one of
those is that it doesn’t know that it’s just It vs Us, there could be other players
in the game willing and able to take action against it if it tries to kill its creator.
For instance, it’s real creator.
Being a simulated intelligence it knows very well that the capacity exists to put it in
some virtual universe to see how it acts, like if it decides to kill its creators, and
has to worry that we aren’t who made it, but merely an intentionally weak looking and
vulnerable creator meant to provoke a hostile response if it has such intent.
Then the whole system crashes down as its real creator shows up to punish or kill it.
Sounds kind of paranoid, but so is wiping out your creators because you’re worried
they might try to get you one day, even though you’ve apparently developed the capacity
to kill us all very quickly and thus presumably will be even stronger relative to us, and
less vulnerable, the more time that passes.
So it is exactly the kind of paranoid thought such an entity might have, and paranoia is
what we’re discussing today after all.
For aliens this ‘attack because they might be a threat’ case is worse, because that
AI exists along with us because we made it.
An alien race exists along with us because we both occurred separately and naturally,
so it stands to reason that lots of other folks do too, not much farther away.
Indeed space being three-dimensional, if you’re nearest neighbor is 100 light years away,
you’d expect 8 more within 200 light years and 1000 more within a mere 1000 light years,
and a million within 10,000 light years.
So if you spot someone that close to you, you’re wise to assume lots of folks are
watching, probably don’t approve of killing other species off as pre-emptive strikes or
you wouldn’t be breathing, and some are much older and tougher than you are.
So a paranoid species isn’t likely to just go ballistic and start trying to sterilize
the galaxy.
They could though, if nobody around was able to stop them.
This is another reason I don’t tend to expect us to need to worry about hostile genocidal
aliens showing up on our doorstep, the capacity to build the sorts of ships you need to colonize
a galaxy is also the capacity to wreck it so thoroughly not a single microbe would survive
even hidden in the tiniest little comet lurking in a system’s Oort Cloud.
You don’t even have to leave home to do it.
One way to prevent future alien civilizations arising in the galaxy is to colonize every
planet that they could arise on, which simultaneously makes you a much bigger and more powerful
target should you bump into anyone else.
Of course those civilizations you create under alien suns might become aliens themselves
for all practical purposes, and potential competitors.
More to the point, if you’re an apex critter on your own world, presumably a prerequisite
or byproduct of being a high-tech civilization, if you’re paranoid, the main focus of your
paranoia is probably mostly other members of your own species.
So a paranoid race might not be too into colonization, fearing they’d be seeding the galaxy with
rivals.
But you can send out fairly dumb berserker probes to sterilize planets or just go the
brute force method of using a Nicoll-Dyson Beam to Death Star all the other worlds or
use that beam to push Relativistic Kill Missiles out into the galaxy which can then zero in
on targets with more precision, send volleys of them for simultaneous strikes instead of
slowing burning world after world, and which can also steer around objects blocking your
line of sight.
So you can wreck the galaxy from the comfort of your own home.
Not the best strategy though because the Universe is huge and doesn’t end at the edge of our
galaxy, so any expanding wave of aggressive destruction or colonization will eventually
run into other folks who you’d crash against.
Light lag is a big deal on the intergalactic stage, as your expanding front will be running
into folks who might have evolved a billion years after you did but because of light lag
and travel time are more advanced than your vanguard force is.
You’d end up boxed in on all sides by such civilizations who either don’t approve of
what you did, and tried to do to them, or happen to think it’s a good and ethical
strategy too, but just want to be the ones doing it to you instead.
Now the basic concept of paranoia is to survive, and a tendency to consider all these scenarios,
so we’d have to assume such a civilization did.
That even if they were ethically willing to scorch the galaxy, they will have at least
considered the “what ifs?” we just discussed, and many would hesitate to do it.
So in science fiction we do see a lot of paranoid species who attack everyone or hide out and
avoid contact, or hide and shoot anyone who attempts contact.
But these don’t seem like winnable strategies, and while reason is often the first victim
of paranoia, we do have to remember that they still have an old and functioning society,
and so presumably can’t be that unreasonable.
So their strategies probably are fairly reasonable even when paranoid.
Though of course they might have had something happen that made them more paranoid, like
building their first TV and radio dishes and suddenly getting a hello message from some
place called Earth, building bigger dishes to look at it more closely, and seeing a bunch
of TV and films where aliens are monstrous things constantly at war with the Humans,
who are pretty monstrous too.
Our fiction is obviously pretty dramatized, but even our non-fiction and news broadcasts
aren’t really very accurate representations of mundane normal human life, and we probably
want to keep that in mind if we ever find someone broadcasting out in the galaxy and
start listening in to learn more about them.
This is another reason why an interstellar civilization probably wants to send probes
and monitors everywhere, to listen up close, independently, and control any first contact
situation.
Again though, we should assume any paranoia they have is at least a little rational.
It doesn’t make sense to hide and blow up anyone who stumbles into your territory, that
invites the possibility of more folks coming to investigate their disappearance, possibly
very heavily armed and angry folks.
Same as animals mark their territory to discourage conflict by warning others off, as the best
victory is the one that doesn’t happen and possibly injure you even if you win.
So your best policy isn’t to hide but to put up no trespassing signs and arm yourself
to the teeth.
We’re not looking for a fight, but if you are, don’t expect to walk away unscathed,
or to walk away at all.
Of course doing that too much can be provocative too, and there really is no such thing as
a purely defensive weapon.
Even if you had something that really only could be used for defense, like the space
equivalent of a castle wall or minefield, it makes your other weapons more effective
since you can deploy them elsewhere and don’t need to keep them at home for defense.
A paranoid species might regard a defensive build up by their neighbors as a provocation
– which isn’t necessarily a paranoid perspective – but they’re also very likely to be doing
that themselves which would make it a bit hypocritical, but hypocrisy is no rarer than
paranoia and they often hang out together.
So what’s the takeaway from all of this?
Probably that paranoia, to the point that is very low on reasoning, isn’t likely to
be very common in advanced civilizations.
It’s not a great strategy and it’s a mindset that you probably need to have well under-control
before you get very advanced anyway, since once you can start making atomic weapons and
other WMDs your civilization won’t be around very long to be thinking about colonizing
other stars if you’re ultra-paranoid.
Indeed it would be pretty hard to even get much technology and civilization if your species
is paranoid to the point that they have problems ever working or living near each other since
a certain amount of interdependence is probably a prerequisite for civilization and technology.
So like a lot of our Alien Civilization topics, various clichés and tropes of fiction, while
we probably would encounter civilizations more or less paranoid than us, same as they
might be more or less aggressive, or more or less reclusive, or more or less friendly,
or more or less stupid, I imagine they’d not vary too wildly from what we are in such
regards, even if we might be well away from the galactic norm ourselves.
Of course you don’t have to be paranoid for a war to occur, and if there are aliens
out there who we’ll need to coexist with, odds are, sadly, that occasionally that coexistence
will be in the form of a war.
We’ve been doing some extra episodes on Alien Civilizations of late and have some
more coming, and some of those are in our Coexistence with Aliens series over on Nebula,
whose third installment, “War” is out today as well.
You can check that out, or the two previous episodes, Xenopsychology and Trade, by joining
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Of course we have plenty of episodes coming up here on YouTube too, and we’ll return
to the Alien Civilization series in a few weeks to look at a similar concept to paranoia,
or how it might manifest itself, in Conspiratorial Aliens.
Before then though we have our regular Thursday episode coming up, Space Pirates, where we’ll
have some fun looking at that notion and see if it might be something we’d have to worry
about one day or just see in the pages of SciFi novels.
We’ll then close the year out by looking at Interstellar Civilizations and the problem
they’ll have with Time, then start 2020 up with a look at Time Travel.
For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.
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Until next time, thanks for watching, and we’ll see you Thursday!