When Aliens Attack: Would ET Eat Us, Enslave Us, or Exterminate Us?

[Valerie]

When Aliens Attack: Would ET Eat Us, Enslave Us, or Exterminate Us for the Good of the Galaxy?
Posted by Victoria Jaggard of National Geographic News August 19, 2011



Just in time for the news that Jodi Foster helped save the main SETI array from funding doom, astronomers in Pennsylvania and Washington State have released an updated paper on the many scenarios we may face if aliens ever make contact.

Most media have so far jumped on one idea from the authors that extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) might attack us not out of spite, “but instead out of a universalist desire to make the galaxy a better place.”

In other words, Earth may get blown up to make way for a hyperspace bypass, because aliens value galactic infrastructure more than our lives.

Or humans may be eradicated from the planet because we’re making a mess of our own ecosystem, and aliens are concerned about our destructive potential if we start to spread across the Milky Way.

Specifically, and perhaps not surprisingly, many headlines have targeted this line from the study:

    Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilizational expansion could be detected by an ETI because our expansion is changing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere (e.g. via greenhouse gas emissions), which therefore changes the spectral signature of Earth.

But this is just one sentence out of a 33-page paper that thoughtfully examines a full range of ET contact scenarios and how humans might respond.

The paper is a fun read and needs little de-jargonizing, so I will end by simply presenting this figure from the study that nicely summarizes the discussion (click the image to see a slightly larger version):

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/08/19/when-aliens-attack-would-et-eat-us-enslave-us-or-exterminate-us-for-the-good-of-the-galaxy/

[Valerie]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/17/jodie-foster-hunt-aliens-donation

http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.4462

http://news.discovery.com/space/save-the-galaxy-destroy-humanity-110818.html

[Kristin Moore]

Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? A scenario analysis
Seth D. Baum, Jacob D. Haqq-Misra, Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman
(Submitted on 22 Apr 2011 (v1), last revised 16 Aug 2011 (this version, v2))

    While humanity has not yet observed any extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), contact with ETI remains possible. Contact could occur through a broad range of scenarios that have varying consequences for humanity. However, many discussions of this question assume that contact will follow a particular scenario that derives from the hopes and fears of the author. In this paper, we analyze a broad range of contact scenarios in terms of whether contact with ETI would benefit or harm humanity. This type of broad analysis can help us prepare for actual contact with ETI even if the details of contact do not fully resemble any specific scenario.

Comments:    33 Pages, 1 Figure, PDF File
Subjects:    Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph)
Journal reference:    Acta Astronautica (2011) 68:2114-2129
DOI:    10.1016/j.actaastro.2010.10.012
Cite as:    arXiv:1104.4462v2 [physics.pop-ph]
Submission history
From: Jacob Haqq-Misra [view email]
[v1] Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:04:33 GMT (366kb)
[v2] Tue, 16 Aug 2011 23:07:41 GMT (366kb)

http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.4462