Essay: A First Organized Thought on Alien Contact

Over the past year, Americans have enjoyed a reemergence of discussion about the potential for aliens to exist. Firstly, two of the highest grossing and most anticipated films last year were District 9 and Avatar, both of which centered on human interactions with alien life forms. In both cases, humans are regarded as the superior species, and quite irrationally, a human is the savior of both alien races as well.

I'll leave the film buffs to critique the movies, but I'd like to focus on those alien-human interactions that are often misconstrued and misleading. Regarding this renewed interest in aliens, one recent article by the Times has quoted world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking as stating, "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans." Which, for anyone who has seen Avatar, I assert that Dr. Hawking just summarized the film.

Beyond the film and the article, discussions of alien life has been as far reaching as the Vatican, which if that doesn't blow your mind, you aren't an American. So, maybe something's out there. We're all coming to the realization that the probability for life to exist elsewhere at some other time is quite high. And some would even say alien life has already been proven to exist.

Given that life has shown to survive in the absolute worst conditions, in the hearts of volcanoes, under thousands of pounds of pressure in the sea, and yes, even in the harsh no man's land of space, I argue that life not only exists elsewhere, but that the universe is teeming with it. Life is a part of the universe's development, not an exceptional phenomenon.

Complex life is a crap shoot. We've only found any evidence of massive multi-cellular beings on one planet, Earth. Our planet houses a rich biosphere of millions of complex life forms that have developed over many millions of years, and one must keep in mind that the vast majority of species that have existed on this planet are now extinct. We are around 15 million years of evolution as hominids, 100,000 years of homo sapiens, 10,000 years of cultural civilization, and 200 years of technological development and globalization. Our Earth has been around for 4.54 billion years. Our universe is speculated to be around 13.75 billion years old.

We are so very young. And we are so very naïve.

Intelligent life is something ill-defined. As excellently stated (and I wholly recommend reading this article), if you find intelligent life once, it's a miracle; twice, and it's a statistic. What do we mean when we say "intelligent life"? If we mean self-conscious beings, then we have possibly identified multiple species on this planet that show increasing evidence of being self aware. If we whittle it further, and we mean self-conscious beings that can utilize tools and manipulate the environment, we bring the list down even further. At this point, we arguably ascertain, not certainly, that humans are the only species to clear this definition. But let's make it absolutely clear that we have broadly categorized human beings, and intelligent life now means self-conscious beings that can make use of the environment and also make sense of the environment. That is, we know why things work, not just how. Now we are fairly sure, within a negligible margin of error, that we are a miracle. We'll use this last definition for the framework of this discussion.

I won't argue the semantics of my definition, nor will I suggest that the last definition is "proper" or "correct". In fact, I aim to disprove my definition as inherently anthropomorphic.

Stephen Hawking points out that life does not necessarily need to form on planets with stable atmospheres. Some astrobiologists have theorized that life forms could be produced or live in stars, in gas giants like Jupiter, meteors and asteroids, or under ice in moons like Europa (also highly plausible since our multicellular life originated in the oceans). For the most part, our speculations on the development of life on Earth and extraterrestrial life are based off of evidence and data that are highly selective, not by some ulterior motive to mislead but by the inherent design of our experiments.(1) With each passing year, new results and theories change the possibilities and usually broadens the number of ways in which life can appear and survive.

This same principle applies to speculating on what intelligent extraterrestrials would be like, physically or cognitively. If the definition of intelligence must become more refined as life evolves, we can't be sure that we can be able to talk to any other self-aware being. For all we know, discussion with a space-faring alien race could be like trying to talk to dolphins now, or unfortunately for us, we could be no different to them then microbes are to us. This is exactly why we can't speculate with absolute assurance as to whether or not we should or should not communicate with intelligent aliens. We don't know what they would want with us, and we can't be certain that they would want anything from us. (2)

Before I continue, it helps to understand our current theory of the technological development for intelligent life forms. The simplest method is to analyze civilizations by the Kardashev scale. Simply, there may be three types of civilizations. Type I civilizations have the ability to harness the energy available on a single planet. Type II civilizations have the ability to harness the energy available on a single star. (So, we are almost a type I civilization, and if we colonized the solar system and collected the energy from the sun and each of the planets, we would be type II.) Type III civilizations can harness the energy from an entire galaxy. Civilizations of the last type would see us as no different than we see ants on the highway.

Carl Sagan grants one likely suggestion that when any two alien civilizations meet, it is highly probable that one civilization will have a huge technological advantage to the other, so much so that the other species would have absolutely no chance at survival in combat (a type I to a type II, or otherwise similarly analogous). Since it would be fruitless for the technologically lesser species to wage war, they will likely not. As for the technologically superior species, if they are so advanced that they don't need to steal resources from the lesser, it may instead welcome alliance in lieu of destruction. Yet, that means neither species can be inherently deleterious or with otherwise harmful intent that would make war inevitable.

For arguments like Dr. Hawking makes, that we ought to fear that aliens could be a threat to our existence for our resources (say, aliens wipe us out to mine our planet) or for habitation, we make the assumption that the aliens need our resources, that they are malevolent to other species, and that they are a type I or type II civilization. Not too far removed from where we are now, but still many thousands of years ahead of technological development ahead of us. A type III civilization could either ignore us completely, exterminate us cleanly and systematically, or could utilize our resources without our knowledge.

But we still consider too many anthropological arguments. We assume that these species are space faring, that they developed to utilize resources like we do, and that they may argue logically as we do. It is possible that, for any space faring civilization, they may be content with mining asteroids or other "lifeless" habitats, leaving alone other species as soon as they begin to leave their home planet and colonize their galaxy.

Furthermore, we have to consider the nature of the civilization. How do they perceive the world? Do they see the visible spectrum as we do, are they limited to blues and greens, or can they see ultraviolet and infrared? How perceptive are they to sound waves? Are they bipeds like us? Do they have opposable thumbs, tentacles, or some other means of manipulating their world with tools? Do they have religion? Are they sadistic or benevolent? Is their logic, mathematical, and physical understanding agreeable to our own, with necessary concessions? Do they have a currency, or an economy, or history, or literature? And lastly, how would we know these things once we find them?

Self awareness is but one element of intelligence. Human beings have tried for thousands of years to reach heightened states of awareness, most notably through meditation. In fact, astronauts have actually experienced what is known as the Overview Effect, which is the weirdest thing I've learned in years outside of particle physics. Essentially, several astronauts have reported feeling a euphoric, enlightened state, the Overview Effect, that is an awareness that all things are connected. If that doesn't surprise you, you probably already know about it.

We are young, and we are naïve. We make assertions based on what little we think we know. Yet, we don't appreciate how little time 200 years of technological development is. We don't see how much we've progressed from xenophobic hatred of other races to globalization that will only flourish if we start to put aside our differences. And for those of you who think I'm naïve to say that, what other time in history have we so fiercely defended every race as equal, and we continue to fight for the equality of each person? Humans have progressed. As long as we survive, we will continue to do so.

What little inferences we can make of our own development and history are ill suited to prepare us for the inevitable meeting with an "intelligent" being outside of us. Whatever intelligence means to them, however "inferior" we may be when this happens, the best we can do is to progress. It is our nature as humans, and it may be the nature of other species as natural in this universe. I can't say. I don't know.

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The majority of these ideas and examples were compiled from previous knowledge and sources, and easily referenced back in this thought provoking thread on Reddit.

(1) Some examples include criticisms of how SETI conducts their searches for alien life, or how we searched for alien life on Mars 30 years ago.

(2) If we truly wish to speculate, life may differ greatly from star system to system, or galaxy to galaxy. It is possible that each galaxy has its own flavor of life, an inevitable result from the concentration and constituents of molecules in the galaxy. Some galaxy may favor a more gaseous life form, what would appear to be a sentient cloud, a being able to survive in space. I won't delve deeply into these thoughts, for these are the realm of science fiction and speculation, and we only have so much direct evidence to glean the possibilities of life.