But every expansion of inclusiveness contributes to a general background sense that increased inclusiveness is a major component of ethical betterment. Co-operation and tolerance go hand in hand. We can only expect this to become stronger in civilizations whose members vary as radically as we can expect AI nanotech robots to.
Level 10
Would the interstellar robots then bother to contact us at all? They might simply go about their own business, leaving us here to develop naturally. I like to think, however, that they might have some interest in us. We ourselves have a great interest in nature, studying creatures of all stripes. And again, it would be a minor investment for a Type 1 civilization to make to learn a lot about us. Just one “big brain” of the kind described earlier would be able to be personally acquainted with every single human and hold a separate conversation with each of us at the same time.
We Earthlings would soon enough be living in a Level 10 society. Perhaps we would see the robots, and decide we had to grow up quickly if we wanted to take part in the galactic civilization as a member instead of as a zoo. Perhaps the robots would see it as their moral duty to educate us. Or perhaps, even without the robots, the long, slow historical climb up the Hall scale will simply continue in the long run.
Big Brains, whether visitors from the stars or ones we build ourselves in the coming decades, will be a crucial part of the next moral development. The ability to know (and be known by) many more people than natural humans can, will be key to establishing wider networks of trust and co-operation. Deeper understanding of everything from economics to cognition will allow smarter systems of interaction to be designed.
To close on the same note that I opened with: We can say a lot about what interstellar robots would be like because we are tantalizingly close to being able to do the same things ourselves. This includes not only the bodies and minds, but culture and morality—at least from a very high-level, fuzzy point of view.
But by the same token, we don’t have to wait for robots to sail in from the stars. We can transform ourselves.
2
First Contact
JOHN R. SHOOK
The mighty Transformers, engaged in yet another episode in the millennia-old conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons, accidentally encounter Earth and its puny inhabitants. They had no idea we were here, we didn’t see them coming, and upon arrival they mask themselves to look like our own machines. A crash landing; a quick disguise. That’s all it might take.
First Contact. It’s an awe-inspiring question with so many potential answers. How might we humans figure out that we’re not alone? First Contact has long been the specialty of science-fiction writers, but real science is now catching up. Admittedly, few science-fiction stories start out the way the Transformers saga begins.
An alien civilization, of machine-intelligence life forms, stumbles across Earth while fixated on fighting its own internal civil war. This is not a typical plot in the science-fiction genre. Maybe it isn’t romantic or heroic enough. Don’t we prefer story lines that credit us intrepid explorers with penetrating into the galaxy’s goings-on? And don’t we appreciate aliens more, even the dastardly ones, when they sort of look and think like us? Science-fiction authors know a catchy tale when they write one, because they have a way of knowing us humans really well.
What about scientists? Well, most scientists also seem to prefer some other eventual outcome than the Transformers version of First Contact. Waiting around for aliens to find us is not the sort of hands-on proactive technological solution that keeps scientists employed and busy. Science is about discovery, right? So, let’s go out and find them first! And since aliens are probably a lot like us, at least where their vast intelligence and scientific curiosity are concerned, they’d naturally be looking for us too. And while we’re on the subject of motivation, muse the scientists, let’s infer that superior civilization implies superior virtue. If an advanced alien civilization has survived for so long, it probably has overcome hatreds and wars. These aliens are more like angels!
Tuning In
Neither science fiction nor science fact wants to make a place for seriously considering the strange Transformers scenario. We want to think that we can find them first; or if aliens find us, it’s because they were trying to. We want to picture aliens in vaguely anthropomorphic ways, so that they are weird but not too weird. We want to hope that advanced civilizations are far more ethically advanced, and not just technologically advanced. Our ideal scenario basically goes like this: Humans seek angels, angels are happy to be found, angels help humans. Does this story line sound familiar (consult nearest religion)?
Nothing about the Transformers plotline seems intuitive or satisfying. All the same, is the saga of the Transformers really so improbable? It might actually turn out to be one of the most likely ways that we finally encounter an alien civilization. Leaving science-fiction writers to their flights of imagination, let’s look at some scientific and philosophical reasons why the Transformers story may be wise prophecy. Like the Transformers themselves, the Transformers saga is more than meets the eye.
Let’s start with the scientists’ search for alien life. Go ahead, pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the highest-tech dish antennas and supercomputers. Analyze the random noise from nearby dense arms of the Milky Way, or from its little nebula clusters, all you want. Yes, we’re all curious about whether there’s life out there. But do we really know what we’re supposed to be watching out for?
It makes sense to suppose that any intergalactic civilization would have incredibly advanced technology. Such advanced technological powers would compare to our civilization’s powers, like our human powers compares to that of ants. So which technology are we using for our searches out into space? Oh yes, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), the pride of so many scientists committed to the goal of detecting ETs, is naturally using—radio. Yes, radio.
Remember radio? Quite the sensation in the late 1800s. The pulsing vibrations of electromagnetic radiation. Photons, essentially, streaming all throughout space. Photons have been around from the beginning, the Big Bang, some fourteen billion years ago. Even ‘empty’ space has been pretty full of these zippy little things ever since, and the universe’s trillions upon trillions of stars, and everything else involving collisions of atoms, keep making more. They can also be artificially generated and controlled with very simple electronics, and that’s what Marconi (the radio’s inventor, who later won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909) figured out how to do. Television is just a fancier version of radio transmission, using the same kind of electromagnetic radiation at higher frequencies. Since most AM and FM radio waves get absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, ET’s first sight of us might actually be a 1936 TV broadcast of Adolph Hitler. A cause for alarm indeed. But all this earthly information, the good, the bad, and the ugly, boils down to streams of little photons.
Photons are plentiful, cheap, and easy to make. Little surprise, then, that humans invented radio right around the same time that we invented the automobile. Now there’s a great technology that we can expect to be using for thousands of years into the future. Oh, no, I guess not. If humans are still relying on petroleum-powered internal combustion vehicles ten thousand years from now, this species has really hit a wall. Will we still be using radio ten thousand years from now? Perhaps, for the simplest of mechanical functions. But if electromagnetic radiation remains our most advanced means of communication for that long, then we won’t have progressed very far. We surely will not have dealt with some other major challenges for the spread of the species, such as reaching other star systems for colonization, and communicating in something close to real time across hundreds of light-years of space.
Perhaps advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, as they cruise around galaxies, emit some radio waves in the process. Our antennas might eventually detect them. But would they amount to signals? Would we be able to take notice of them as signs of intelligenc
e? Consider whether the noise produced by a washing machine constitutes a signal, a sign of intelligent communication by humans. Not really. Humans trying to detect alien messages in their cast-off radio waves might be like super-smart ants trying to detect advanced life forms using their high sensitivity to pheromones lingering on the ground.
From the ant perspective, the ants being so proud of their most sophisticated chemical sense, pheromones are obviously the best way to communicate. This assumption wouldn’t exactly be wrong. Lots of species use pheromones for all sorts of ‘communication’. It can’t be the basis for a genuine language, since chemical transmission and reception can’t achieve the precision of abstract concepts or the infinite variety of possible meanings that aural or visual interchange can accomplish. Chemical transmission is too crude and clumsy for syntax and grammar. But these super-smart ants might correctly suppose that even highly advanced life-forms will still use pheromones. Humans do, after all. Pheromones can silently but effectively indicate all sorts of interesting things, like sexual arousal or angry aggression. Perhaps human pheromones could be detected down on the ground by super-smart ants. Could they decipher our pheromone signals? Are our smelly odors anything like messages to be decoded? By analogy, radio may not help us decide that we have detected intelligent aliens.
When most people think of First Contact with aliens, what first springs to mind is probably something like either Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Carl Sagan’s Contact. Spielberg borrowed the title of his 1977 movie from J. Allen Hynek. Hynek assisted the U.S. Air Force’s Project Bluebook, the government’s official investigation into UFOs during the 1950s and 1960s. He proposed a classification system of first, second, and third kinds of alleged alien encounters, from distant sightings of spacecraft to seeing aliens up close. During an era fascinated by numerous accounts of alien sightings and abductions, Close Encounters of the Third Kind struck a chord with a public half persuaded that aliens were already hanging around Earth. Good thing none of this hysteria turned out to be verifiable. From 1969 to 1991, U.S. Federal Law criminalized any contact with aliens (no, I didn’t make this up).
Sagan’s contact scenario starts off with the decoding of alien communications recorded by giant radio antennas and climaxes with human conversations with aliens. Sagan’s 1985 book was, of course, a poetic exercise in wish-fulfillment. He lobbied vigorously for the funding of SETI projects, and he frequently predicted success within his own lifetime. Among those scientists who think that it’s both possible and important to detect alien civilizations, there is modest support for SETI projects of various sorts. Of course, since our light telescopes haven’t come across any evidence of alien activity (sightings of vast solar system-sized construction sites, randomly blown up stars, or suspicious high-energy rays), we don’t have much else besides radio to use at the moment. For all we know, broadcasting aliens might be using super advanced lasers, or neutrinos, or who knows what, which still remain out of our technological reach.
SETI projects, until very recently, have only tuned into radio frequencies which are easy to hear on Earth, because neither stars nor our own noise drowns them out. These frequencies wouldn’t be too practical for ordinary planetary communications, but they’d be ideal for long-distance beacons saying only “We are Here!” SETI was originally predicated on the notion that an alien civilization would want to clearly announce its presence to the rest of the galaxy. That’s why SETI’s failure to spot radio or TV signals from neighborhood stellar systems doesn’t mean much yet. There still could be plenty of intelligent life around us. Since civilizations as they advance won’t be broadcasting using electromagnetic radiation very much or for very long, and since there are probably more efficient ways to draw attention to oneself than photons, SETI would have a low chance of success anyways. If aliens get smarter than us, though, they should figure out that simply shouting across galaxies is pretty dumb in the first place. How are you going to make friends that way? And wouldn’t you simply be hanging out a “Come and Eat” sign on your planetary house for bigger, hungrier aliens? The Transformers aren’t all angels, remember.
Perhaps in another hundred years, with improved reception capacity to eavesdrop on all planets, at all frequencies, within a sphere of one thousand light years diameter around us, then SETI’s results, positive or negative, will really help calculate the distribution of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. Or so the scientists hope. Not all science-fiction writers have assumed that listening in on alien civilizations will be a simple matter of building an even bigger radio antenna, however.
Some of the most thought-provoking stories about contact explore the exact opposite possibility, that communication with aliens proves to be very difficult or quite impossible. Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris recounts the discovery of an oceanic-sized organism on a distant planet which is evidently capable of intelligent thought, but no human concepts are adequate for understanding this peculiar life-form. In the Transformers alternate universe, humans don’t have a communication problem with the visiting aliens’ language, because the Transformers learn ours. In the 2007 Transformers movie, Optimus Prime tells Sam that they acquired our language from the World Wide Web. This makes more sense. If the arriving aliens are supposed to be so much more advanced, wouldn’t they figure out our languages before we figured out theirs?
For aliens to learn our language to reveal themselves to us, they would have to first find us, of course. Shouldn’t that be the more common-sense scenario? Intergalactic civilizations, roaming around at high speeds (maybe even trans-light speeds) for long periods of time (maybe for thousands or millions of years), would presumably get to Earth first. At least they should be able to intercept our primitive signals while passing nearby on some interstellar highway. Even if they stopped using radio for their own communications long ago, they could easily program one of their space sensors to automatically pick up any primitive signals. This still presumes that advanced aliens keep up some curiosity about infant civilizations. We still care about annoying ant infestations.
The nearest extraterrestrial (ET) highway would have to be close to Earth, though; within about eighty light years, in fact, since high-powered broadcasts first escaped the Earth in the 1930s. Since satellites, cables, and Wi-Fi are quickly replacing high-powered antenna broadcasting even now, the Earth will soon go pretty quiet again. Only loud but dumb things like military radars will keep beaming into space, but there’s no message in there. Our century-long bright flash of sports, news, and entertainment will keep going further into space, like an expanding shell of exuberant smoke that means the fire of intelligent life to any one still bothering to listen for those frequencies. Perhaps a million years from now, some alien receiver will notice our species’s primitive smoke signal and wonder if its senders are still alive. Similarly, we might eventually pick up primitive broadcasts from a long-vanished alien civilization on the other side of the galaxy, if we’re patient enough. That’s a more likely scenario, actually, than tuning in a nearby civilization. Disappointingly realistic, in fact. We finally hear from them, but not quite in time to have them over for tea.
Dropping In
So far, science and common logic advises us that radio is not a smart means of First Contact. What we really, really want is a Close Encounter of the Third Kind, anyways. Then they should come to us! Why aren’t they here already? Where’s ET? That’s a very good question. It’s such a good question that it has been used in arguments that conclude that no other advanced galactic civilizations exist right now. If they did, then they’d have already gotten here; but they aren’t here, so they don’t exist.
Now, this knock-down argument against ETs relies on certain additional premises. First, you’d have to assume that ETs would even want to explore this galaxy so thoroughly. Second, you’d have to already think that it would be pretty easy for ETs to get here. Third, you’d have to rule out the possibility that they have already been here, or maybe that
they are here right now, IN DISGUISE!! Fourth, you’d have to guess that visiting aliens, if already here, are pretty much benign and unaggressive, since we haven’t yet been eaten or enslaved. In other words, we aren’t going to get caught up in something like L. Ron Hubbard’s Battleground Earth or the 1996 movie Independence Day. (On the other hand, the incoming aliens might simply be uncaring bureaucrats intent upon demolishing Earth out of the way, like the poetic Vogons in Douglas Adams’s Hichhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.) Summarizing, it takes four major assumptions to get this argument going against ETs. Success means no ETs at all, and no Transformers scenario for First Contact, ever.
Fortunately for advocates of the Transformers scenario like myself, all four of this argument’s premises are probably wrong. We could not possibly rule out ETs in this way. In fact, as we question these four assumptions, the Transformers scenario actually becomes more plausible! Let’s start with the silly notion that advanced civilizations earnestly want to reach us. In the Transformers scenario, our heroic ETs have no reason to fool around with such primitive life forms like ourselves. We don’t have any impressive technologies or energy sources, and the Transformers don’t need lots of oxygen or water-rich planets to inhabit for themselves. Most alien civilizations capable of intergalactic travel are probably far more like the Transformers in this way. For us to think that advanced ETs are vitally interested with planets like Earth is like super-smart ants imagining that we humans are obsessed with finding big anthills so that we can move right in. Pretty silly.
What really troubles our human imaginations is this darker scenario, instead. A slightly more advanced alien civilization, just capable of bumbling around nearby stellar systems, wants to find more Earths for colonization and exploitation. This is the Star Trek scenario. For every nice Vulcan civilization in our corner of the galaxy, how many nasty Klingon and Romulan civilizations might there be? In other words, we start envisioning the same basic scenario as European explorers bumping into North America four hundred years ago and wondering how to deal with Native Americans, while the Native Americans wonder how to catch up with European technologies. The ETs that keep us awake at night are really only us in disguise, with greater technologies but the same ethics. Not angels, but devils.
Transformers and Philosophy Page 3
