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How would you handle first contact with modernized aliens?
electricitylikesme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Suppose that the crazy russian somehow works out to be correct, and humanity starts launching interstellar ships within say, the next 50 years. Obviously our first mission is more or less going to be to head out as fast as possible and start establishing some of the parameters of the Drake equation.
So let's say we come across another species, who appear to be at roughly our level of advancement now (and let's presume we have our current technology with evolutionary improvements more or less). How would you handle doing a first contact with someone a lot like our current state - nuclear weapons aimed at multiple different factions, entrenched religious beliefs?
Bear in mind that we don't have universal translaters. So we've got to face the major hurdle of working out who to communicate with, how to communicate with them, and the possible ramifications or provocation of a military response if we do this wrong (i.e. alien fleet in orbit, would we nuke it?)
So let's say we come across another species, who appear to be at roughly our level of advancement now (and let's presume we have our current technology with evolutionary improvements more or less). How would you handle doing a first contact with someone a lot like our current state - nuclear weapons aimed at multiple different factions, entrenched religious beliefs?
Bear in mind that we don't have universal translaters. So we've got to face the major hurdle of working out who to communicate with, how to communicate with them, and the possible ramifications or provocation of a military response if we do this wrong (i.e. alien fleet in orbit, would we nuke it?)
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Basically it would boil down to "Approach with caution, give nothing away."
I'd think it would depend on what types of ships make first contact, where we make first contact in relation to the others homeworld, and depending on whether either of us needs something that the other species is preventing them from gaining.
Unless the aliens have a fundamentally xenophobic culture/religion, I just don't see that factoring into the initial meeting. Maybe, afterwards when we both send some form of diplomats, but not when it's most likely two space captains in the middle of nowhere.
This is important as it would affect communication, as well as whether we might be fighting later over potential colonization.
The second question, if the first is "yes", would be "Are their females hot?"
If they're a race of foxy alien babes, I'd volunteer to do them.
Attempting to make first-contact actually at another species colony/homeworld/(and to a lesser extent)space stations just seems like it's asking for trouble.
If the alien species is not already space faring, I would think we should leave them be, other than perhaps a "wave" of sorts, just let them know they arent alone. But giving them nothing more than that knowledge, and the time to come to grips with it on their own.
What we would probably do would be a mix of colonialism and cultural/economic exploitation/domination. Similar to what we currently do to 3rd world countries.
MWO: Adamski
No common body language, probably no common biology, perhaps not even common atmosphere, planet, environment effects, life cycle, culture, communication method (these strange monkey people appear to flap their lips to communicate).
That this hasn't even been seriously discussed shows the huge amount of anthromorphism and assumption in any such conjecture.
Also if any one nation on this planet is in charge of first contact it's pretty damn likely we'd attack first because someone would suffer from catastrophic culture shock.
Before making our own first contact, I'd do surveillance, learn their language, and send messages out alerting them to our arrival first. No reason to cause a panic.
Its ok, Mass Effect taught us that all alien species will speak English with North American accents. [/silly]
In seriousness, my gut instinct would be "leave this crazy planet the fuck alone" unless there was a compelling reason not to.
The only reason language seems like such a trivial thing to us humans is it's completely automatic from birth. In fact kids have a number of critical periods for language development, indicating the brain goes through rapid changes specifically to pick up language. It's entirely possible that without these automatic, evolved periods, we wouldn't even have a society.
It definitely wouldn't be a complicated one anyway.
Yep. I think the first thing to look out for is whether or not they have an 'alien visitation subculture' and how prevalent it is in the mainstream culture. I kind of define that as the type of people who go to Roswell on a regular basis, and not for fun or just because it's something to do.
Any type of interaction needs to be official, kind of like Mars Attacks, but without the ensuing unpleasantness. I wouldn't ask for any information that I wasn't willing to reciprocate with, but I'd would not provide them with the location of Earth.
I wouldn't 'prepare' for war, but I would think that we would be prepared to keep them away from us in case it came to that.
How would humanity do it? Nukem, conquer them, move them all to a small, arid, resource-less reservation moon, and claim all their planets and territories as unused free space to be colonized.
What if they don't even use the same communication method as us.
What if they flap bits together and talk in ultrasound.
Human linguists would be no more help than a bum on the street, nor would a diplomat or a psychologist.
Shit what if they don't even us a language? What if they use a system of complicated intuitive body language or something. To us that would be as hard to decode as telepathy, especially if they're using gestures using body bits we couldn't possibly duplicate.
A hive mind?
What about a non conventionally sentient space faring race? There's absolutely no reason one couldn't exist.
We can't even assume an alien race would be able to differentiate us as a creature or thing worth talking to, if they even do talk.
Giant floating space whales wurbling through the stars on rocket farts powered by sunlight.
Honestly this thread is more helpful for determining how human beings think than anything else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUcOaGawIW0
Seems about as helpful as anything I could come up with. It would be interesting to see how different alien species are from us. I mean, assuming evolution works the same way in the universe (adaptation that is beneficial to your survival in your environment) there must be some kind of similarities between them and us.
This thread is awesome. The idea of trying to figure out a problem such as this would make me feel anxious and stressed, not excited to have met an alien race...
But that doesn't exclude any other math once you figure out the basics, which should be fairly easy compared to figuring out a damned language.
But doing everything in numbers and true/false scenarios isn't going to get you much further than hey 2+2 = 4, yay!
God I hated that Rama video game.
You and that Big Mac still share a common ancestor if you go far back enough, allowing for some points of reference at least. How do you begin to communicate with a creature that has absolutely nothing at all in common with you?
Also, I think Binary is the best math system to try and use with them.
I think establishing communication is of paramount importance. I think we could find some linguists and scientists who would be more then happy to risk death for the chance to establish communications, I don't see us sending in "disposable peacenik hippies".
I think an interesting way would be to pick a location that looks promising on their planet, far enough from cities not to be threatening, and land some robots and communication equipment, holographic stuff so we can project an image of ourselves.
Pointing is a human concept. Primates don't even point the way we do.
I'm just pointing out (ha) that since our entire framework for understanding the concept of communication is human, it may be a bit hard to step outside of that framework for a while and realize that so much of how we operate is arbitrary and not a necessary component of intelligence.
The current favourite theory that I personally agree with is that we task switch attentional resources, only doing one at a time, but we preprocess them with automatic habits built up as we get used to doing them.
If any "aliens" have a "thinking bit" that is truly parrallel though, there's no way in hell we would be able to either keep up or understand their thought processes.
By the same token, their math would probably not be the same as our math.
All the propositions I've seen for alien communication and existence are grounded in assumptions that I don't think are really safe. Even the idea that aliens will "evolve" in any way similar to us is making an assumption. The existence of DNA and genes and all that stuff depended on the chemical makeup of our planet, didn't it? A similar planet might end up with a similar system of evolution and complex life, but what if there are other paths by which life can come to be? What if there are other forms of abiogenesis? What if there are "advanced" species that we wouldn't even recognize as "alive," necessarily?
Assuming that we even recognize this other species, communication would be a massive problem, I think. It would require years and years of work and cooperation. If the species has a "mind," in some way or another, their psychology would be entirely unfamiliar and we would have zero common ground, unless we are spectacularly fortunate and life tends to follow a similar path and generate species similar to us.
I think any aliens we do meet are probably going to look more like abstract information than bodies, and they will probably want to talk to our AI systems more than they want to talk to us.
My approach is: let the robots handle it and hope everyone involved lets biological beings rest in peace.
Actually a lot of animals "point". And while they don't do it the same way, it can usually be interpreted. I've seen plenty of wild horses "point" by gesturing their heads. It wasn't hard to understand.
Most of the stuff people think of as intelligence, btw, is classified as "knowledge" by intelligence researchers.
We are spectacularly incapable of understanding how we work on a fundamental level. (By this I mean uneducated, but even then I'd say knowledge doesn't equal a meaningful measure of control) Most people have absolutely no idea how wrong their conception of what makes a human "human" is, including most people who try to study or understand themselves without external help or observation.
We just aren't built with the right nervous system for self analysis, we aren't designed to see how we work introspectively at all.
Understanding a completely alien creature? I honestly believe we'd fuck it up badly.
Even aliens similar to our own animal species would be foreign to us - like in Ender's Game, where the aliens are mostly mindless drones directed by queens. If they don't understand our model of life, where we have billions of individuals with minds and self and value, they wouldn't care about snuffing out what are apparently teeming masses of biological machines - it's more like clipping fingernails. We would see them as horrible murderous aliens, brutally slaughtering our valuable primate kin.
These are the sorts of problems that would create conflict out of simple misunderstanding of fundamental differences.
We can prepare for communication with vaguely hominoid creatures. We can prepare for the possibility that we're going to need mechanical aids to even hear the speach of the alien creatures. We can prepare for the fact that they lack language as we know it (albeit not very well). We can't do any of these things, though, if we don't allow ourselves to make some sort of assumptions about them.
As far as the thing that I think would be the biggest barrier, it would probably be the likely complete lack of human-type reactions to anything. We're so used to human pragmatism, curiousity, rational/irrational thought, etc that we really don't know how to approach anything outside of that. Just watch the next time you see people walking past an obviously insane individual on the street; their brains shut down and just tell them to keep moving. With aliens, it will go even further until we're out of mammalian behavior and social cues, and maybe even animal cues as we know them altogether. Starting from there, we're basically fucked.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
If you do that people will, as a function of beaurocracy if any alien communication happened, focus on the assumptions and assume they are the limitations of possible communication.
No, this idea needs no assumptions other than "not human" and you explore every possible direction that is not human with no limits.
After all human is "relatively" easy, if they think like us we'll get along like a house on fire, with the screaming and the burning..
I know it looks like I'm shutting down discussion, but I'm actually shutting down human centric discussion. Since it's pretty pointless.
And with strange æons even death may die.
You have to prepare for the widest range of possibilities you can potentially imagine, and then a couple more besides. You can't do that if you're just spinning in circles talking about how we can't know, because we all know we can't know, but we're trying to fix it so that when we do know we can act.
Thus, all the "they might look like giant bass that communicate through telekinetically manipulating hydrogen molocules, but we can't know that" stuff is silly; we can't know, so we start brainstorming and figure out how to deal with all the jacked up possibilities.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I was agreeing with you there, I was just criticising the first sentence in light of what we do know about human beaurocracy.
And that stuff was brainstorming. I was trying to make people think like you are right now by throwing out numerous wild examples.
Most of the posts have been "ok so we can communicate" then moving on to very human centric planning, which is what I have been objecting to. The single most important thing to plan is all the possible ways to communicate because anything else will build from that.
Just to spell this out you and I we are talking about the exact same thing alright Prime. Take the angle you think I'm going with and put it next to you, pointed your way. Alright?
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.