ET’s and their impact on us

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah


In this second post on Paul Davies’ The Eerie Silence: Renewing our search for alien intelligence, I want to focus on his discussion of what ET’s could be like and what the impact of the reception of a clear, meaningful signal would be on us.

First, if ET’s contact us, whether deliberately or not, they most likely will be (much) more technologically advanced than us. At minimum, they will have developed radio communication and mastered radio astronomy, thoroughly knowing what the Galaxy is like (structure and contents: stars, nebulae, dust, halo, etc.). And since our civilization is very recent, more likely they will have appeared ages ago (the Milky Way is about 12 billion years old) and have had time to make unimaginable progress. (If we’ve progressed this much in the past few centuries or millennia, think how they would be after millions, if not billions of years.) One immediate conclusion stressed by Davies, is that the existence of such ETs would imply that civilizations are not doomed to disappear – through various risks, internal or external – after a short time, as it has been feared and argued for many years.

This leads him to a discussion of the Fermi Paradox, which the Italian physicist stated very simply 60 years ago, “where are the aliens (if they exist, they should have reached here already)?”, and which Davies and many other thinkers regard as a very strong argument, even though there have been many proposed explanations for it, some stronger than others (see the recent book by Stephen Webb). Indeed, with millions of years of scientific progress and technological development, the aliens would have known pretty much everything about the Galaxy and, most probably via self-replicating machines, colonized or networked through it. They probably would be able to extract energy from rotating black holes, which Davies explains very simply, steal planets (for useful materials), program viruses, and… reengineer themselves! Indeed, just think of what a combination of advanced nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and information technology can do just a century or two from now, then extrapolate hundreds of thousands or millions of years into the future.

Here’s what Davies concludes from a discussion of the above considerations:

I think it very likely – in fact inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe. If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature, a conclusion that has obvious and far-reaching ramifications for SETI.

By “post-biological”, the author means “reengineered” creatures, with largely enhanced capabilities, particularly brain power, up to any fundamental limits imposed by physics. Long before that, ET’s will have “transitioned” to super-machines with “godlike mega-brains”. Davies then spends several pages further envisioning the nature of such machines (perhaps EQC’s, “extraterrestrial quantum computers”) and what that would do, for the species and w.r.t. the Galaxy. “Why would such an entity bother to contact us?” he asks. He concludes that such “entities” would not even have any interest in the physical universe, they may perhaps spend their time solving elaborate Math problems, proving new theorems, entirely living a life of the mind…

OK, let’s come back to issues that our minds can at least imagine and perhaps address, such as what would happen if we receive a message from a species which is, let’s hope, not so far ahead of us. Should we fear or should we welcome such a contact? Davies tells us: “An alien civilization that goes to the trouble and expense of actively trying to contact us would probably be highly altruistic.” I agree. In fact, Davies imagines that such a species would want to help us make faster progress, for example by telling us how to achieve (sustained) nuclear fusion and thus solve our energy problem. It might tell us where in the “Galactic Wide Web” we could simply download the blueprints/solutions/data for whatever we may want to know at this point in our technological and cultural stage.

So, science-wise and technology-wise, we most likely stand to gain from such an encounter. What about culturally, especially our religious systems of belief, which are so widespread and engrained in most human societies? Davies has several good pages on the topic, although he focuses almost entirely on the impact that would have on Christianity.

He writes: “Undoubtedly, the most immediate impact of an alien message would be to shake up the world’s faiths.” A paragraph later, he gets more specific: “Christianity is the religion most challenged by the concept of extraterrestrial beings, because Christians believe that God became a human being (specifically, a Jewish political dissident).” He then explains that because Jesus’s goal was to save humans, not dolphins or gorillas, and not even the Neanderthals, the question poses itself: should aliens be the subject of salvation? If yes, how and by whom; if not, why not? Davies then goes on to briefly review the few Christian thinkers who have over the past few centuries tried to address this problem, coming up with two possible standpoints: multiple incarnations (“one savior for each deserving species”) or only one savior (Jesus), and Christians called upon to spread the word throughout the Galaxy and the Universe.

Then Davies draws more general conclusions: “What is clear, however, is that any theology with an insistence on human uniqueness would be doomed.” (And here I should point out that this largely applies to Islam, at least in its standard views, even though many Muslims not only accept ET’s but even claim that the Qur’an alludes to them.) Davies adds: “Although slow to change, religion is very adaptable.” He compares this new challenge to that posed by Darwin’s Evolution, which also questioned Man’s special status within most religions; he concludes: “The discovery of advanced extraterrestrial beings would represent a far more explicit threat of the same nature, and prove that much harder to assimilate.”

What remains then is to assess the probability of such an encounter. That’s anyone’s guess. Davies presents his views, which are a mixture of hopes and of realistic appraisals of the field. No doubt, this is a fascinating subject.