Who’s Afraid of the ET Wolf?
The Atlantic just told me that China has thrown itself into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) all the way, and good for them. Oh, I think the chances of success are remote, but the potential payoff is so huge that it’s worth trying, and it isn’t bombs or mass-consumption.
But some of this article is rather too optimistic about the Unquenchable Force of Living Creatures:
Many of the night sky’s stars might be surrounded by faint halos of leakage, each a fading artifact of a civilization’s first blush with radio technology, before it recognized the risk and turned off its detectable transmitters.
The idea that we are surrounded by a silent host of intelligent lifeforms, each planet keeping radio silence for fear of the Really Big Bad Wolf descending from the darkness of the galaxy — it’s a charming idea, but a much more likely hypothesis, based on the single sample of planets with intelligent life that we have, is that any planet that gets inhabitants smart enough to emit radio waves ends up being killed by the exponentially growing waste from those very inhabitants.
The Sun is a comparatively young star — stars in the galaxy average a billion years older. Our whole galaxy is just over 100,000 light years on its longest axis. Even if a civilization expanded at just 1% of 1% of the speed of light — that’s one light year every ten thousand years of civilization, heck, we could conceivably still do that! — it still would already have taken over the whole galaxy no matter where it already started.
With a billion-year head start, “They” would be here, now, and would have been here for all history, and even if They had through some unfathomable Buttle/Tuttle clerical error missed us, we’d see unmistakable evidence of their existence through the strangely darkened stars as Their power usages dimmed Their very suns themselves.
But, unfortunately it’s seeming more and more clear that there’s an inescapable trap that any intelligent species must inevitably fall into.
Intelligence evolved because it was selected for — because it offered an advantage in survival and reproduction.
But natural selection primarily favors intelligent decision making in time scales ranging from fractions of a second (“the tiger springs — but you’ve jumped to the next brach 200 milliseconds before!”) to hours (“You failed to guess where the good hunting was again, and tonight your weakest child dies”) to years (“You pick a fertile place to farm, but your dumbass brother farms on the flood plains and is swept away”). Evolution presents many problems with a small number of moving parts — “a wolf” or “a hostile person”, or “a pack of wolves” or “a hostile group” (which might seem to have many parts but are modeled as a single dangerous thing with lots of parts).
Sooner or later, once we got the trick of being clever, as we became able to use unbounded amounts of all the resources in the world, we were going to run into problems at a billion-person scale, problems that are not fight-or-flight, problems that needed to be evaluated over time scales of decades and centuries and even millennia — and humans as a group are almost completely unable to do that. We didn’t evolve to do it, and really the only reason that evolution keeps us alive after our wives hit menopause is that our guidance might be helpful in preserving our grandchildren and their ability to reproduce.
I have friends who have children. I’m quite sure a lot of them would literally die for those children — push them out of the way of a bus, and perish happy for the chance to do so.
And yet as a group they are unable to act in the slightest on matters like the climate emergency, the biggest bus ever to hit our civilization, a veritable sea of busses descending on everyone’s grandchildren for the rest of time — unable to act even to the limited extent of changing their dietary, shopping or vacation habits, let alone changing their vocation, their location, their avocation or their reproduction.
I love the idea of ghosts, even though I’m highly skeptical of their very existence, because they offer even a faint hope of some sort of low-rent life after death. And in the same way, like a lot of people these days, I’d be really happy to discover that aliens existed, because it would show that some sort of sustainable technological civilization was even possible.
Given that we don’t seem to be able to pull off the limited amount of cooperation necessary even to keep our own biosphere alive, let alone the incredible level of sustained cooperation for tens of generations that it would take to truly colonize even the closest (barely) livable planet to ours, it’s certain to me that any civilization that was able to get over all those problems, not kill themselves, and work together long enough to manage a thousand-year project like getting to the stars would be extremely decent people, actual People who I would happily have a beer with, and not some ravening Bad Wolf ET come to ravage our women and ravish our planet at great effort but to no obvious advantage to themselves.
