The Dark Forest, book two of the Three Body trilogy, delves into this idea. Great read and I won’t spoil it.
if an alien race interstellar/intergaltic, wanted war, they communicate by starting blasting/orbital bombardment from space as a demonstration.
One way to look at this is to consider why the aliens came in the first place. There’s some common sci-fi tropes around this, but most of them fall apart under scrutiny. Now, this scrutiny does assume that our understanding of the physical laws of the universe are “close enough” that we can rule out such magic as stargates, warp drives or the like. Yes, there are some theories like the Alcubierre drive, but those sit far enough at the edge of “might be possible” that I’m going to ignore them.
Give us your resources (water, gold, hair)
On the scale of “everything in our solar system”, the Earth contains a vanishingly small amount of everything which isn’t biological. Water, minerals, and other inorganic stuff is in vast abundance in comets and asteroids. And this ignores the possibilities of rocky bodies much, much, much closer to home for any alien species. The distances in interstellar space are absolutely vast. Just getting to the next star over is going to require an insane investment of time, material and energy. And then you want to stop, turn around and go back? XKCD did a What If a while back which contemplated catching up to the Voyager probe and bringing it back. It’s technically possible. It would also require something like 10-15 Saturn V rocket’s worth of fuel. Now multiply that by a stupidly large number for going to another solar system. The energy expenditure to go pick up rocks in another solar system is just never going to be worth it.
And then there is the issue of time. Thanks to the wonders of length contraction, a vehicle could accelerate at 1G half way to the target solar system, flip around and decelerate at 1g to be able to stop there. And the time for the travelers would actually be pretty reasonable. You could cross the disk of the galaxy in about 24 years (assuming you want to stop on the other side) [source]. Of course, that’s 24 years for the travelers. Back home a couple hundred thousand years will have passed. And you thought your dad has taken a long time to get cigarettes at the corner store.
Even just going to Alpha Centari , the traveler experiences 3.9 years. Back home, it’s 6. This means there’s a round trip time of 12 years, and that’s just for the closest possible star. It gets far longer really quick. It’s likely that hundreds or thousands of years will pass “back home” while the travelers are going somewhere. By the time they get back, their home may so radically different that the stuff they set out to get isn’t even in demand anymore. Here is a fun calculator you can play with the numbers yourself.
The last thing to mention is the fun of Reaction Mass. Again, unless we find some spooky new source of thrust, going forward means throwing stuff backwards. And when you’re talking about accelerating at 1g for years, that is an insane amount of “stuff” you need to huck out the back of your spaceship to keep that level of acceleration up. Once again, the scale of the universe results in insane requirements.
With all that said, strip mining nearby solar systems seems really unlikely. Perhaps more likely will be the next trope.
Hi, that’s a nice planet you have there. It’d be a shame if someone colonized it.
So, this has all the “fun” of energy costs and reaction mass as above, but at least you don’t have to worry about going back. And given the vast distances involved, this is a one way trip and communicating to the home world won’t need to happen. It’s going to be a case of launching a seed into the darkness and not expecting to hear from them again. Maybe provisions will be made to send back a “we did it” beacon. This will prevent reseeding the same planet over again. But, at a message latency of years (possibly centuries), keeping up a dialog is going to be pointless. Even a returning “we did it” probe could arrive back to a society which asks, “who the fuck are these guys?” Because all records of the trip got lost three centuries ago.
This is also something which is going to require a lot of faith on the part of the colonists. At best, the knowledge they have of the planet they are going to is years, decades or centuries out of date. Imagine getting part of the way there, only to realize that the planet you hoped to colonize got cooked by a large solar flare. You’re now committed to a journey which will end with trying to desperately setup some sort of long term habitat somewhere really inhospitable. I hope you’re good at creating O’Neill Cylinders. In fact, why didn’t you just make one of those in the first place and save all the energy and effort of flinging yourself at a distant star on a wing and a prayer? Unless your home star is about to die, leaving it doesn’t make much sense. Large rotating habitats are likely to be a far easier engineering challenge than building an interstellar ship. And they will be close enough to home that, if something goes wrong, help might actually reach them in time.
Our five thousand year mission is to seek out new life and explore strange new worlds
Ok, standard caveats here about energy costs and reaction mass. However, humans have done some pretty amazing things just for curiosity, aliens doing the same seems reasonable. Though this leaves the issue of time. Now, I’d expect that any such long range mission would be done with automated drones collecting data. Maybe with intelligent enough AI to recognize intelligent life, collect data and then start the long journey home. And maybe when it arrives home, it won’t get blasted out of the sky as some unrecognizable alien device, because the program which launched it got shut down due to lack of funding 50 years ago. But, the time from launch to probe return starts to get kinda crazy really fast. Imagine you launch a probe and, if everything goes exactly right, it doesn’t return for a thousand years. Maybe at some technological level this seems reasonable, but societies just don’t seem to be stable that long.
So ya, maybe this would be a reason for automated drones recording anything and everything they can. But sending people to do this means those people leaving home and expecting to return to a world so vastly different from the one they left as to be unrecognizable. Unless they somehow have a society that just doesn’t drift at all, it’s quite possible that they will arrive home and have to figure out the language their own people are speaking. I don’t doubt we would find people willing to take this on (heck, I might have gone for it when I was younger). At the same time, the investment of energy and resources will need to be borne by a society which has zero expectation of ever seeing anything back for that investment. Again, it’s possible, but also seems pretty far fetched.
The great invisible sky wizard of Frobozz demands we cleanse the universe of the unclean (this means you).
Another thing, which has motivated humans to amazing heights of effort, wastefulness and stupidity is belief. Nothing gets large groups of people motivated to piss away resources like a religion. Why would it be any different for aliens? So maybe, there is some species out there which is majority held under a strong enough belief system that they are actually willing to expend the time, energy and resources to obliterate any signs of alien life. And Earth just fucked up by having an oxygen rich atmosphere. As a possible sign of life, this means all Earthlings must die. So, how are we destroying the Earth? Well, we could go there, look for signs of life, report back, setup an invasion fleet, etc, etc. Or, remember that whole “slowing down” part of visiting another solar system? What if we skip that and instead just send several large chunks of iron and have them keep accelerating the whole way? They can then use advanced Lithobraking to turn said planet to a far flung cloud of debris. This takes less time and avoids issues with plucky pilots flying up the exhaust port of our invasion mothership.
Welcome to the Dark Forest. Population: Whatever it was, less all humans. If the goal is total annihilation, the same tech which would get a ship to another solar system is exactly the same tech needed to simply destroy a planet in that solar system. At the energies involved in a sizable object moving that fast, it’s going to exceed the binding energy of a planet. Fling a few such devices at a remote solar system, provide a bit of automated terminal guidance and program them to dust any planetary body which shows signs of life. Set a timer for a few years/decades from now to turn your telescopes that direction and wait for the show.
In this case, they won’t care what our language is and we won’t even know we’ve been “visited” by aliens, as we will have all died in massive flash of energy. Good times all around.
Conclusion
Unless there is a way around the speed of light limit to the universe, visiting other solar systems is probably off the table. Sure, there may be some very long range program to send automated drones to the nearest stars and collect some data/pictures for return to a later version of our society. But at the energies and timescales involved, it’s unlikely. And for further away solar systems, the timescales make it so impractical that it’s probably never going to happen. This also means that aliens visiting Earth and having to sort out our language, is also likely never going to happen. Getting out here just really isn’t practical.
You ignored the question
Arrival has an excellent exploration of this.
For those who haven’t, please consider reading the short story on which it is based by Ted Chiang.
Villeneuve made a number of changes, but there is one in particular that may (or may not) reframe your perception of a character in a notable way. Also, read everything else by Ted Chiang!
There are also a number of popular media articles on how the language piece was developed for depiction on screen.
The most sci-fi part of the movie was how all the governments on Earth had their best experts working on communicating and sharing information. The most realistic part was how they stopped sharing data and some religious nationalist dipshit tried to kill everyone.
One of the best scifi of all times.
My wife and kids watched it the other day. I thought it might be too slow for them but they loved it.
Good flick.
So good
I don’t think it really matters.
I think the aliens will either be for war or peace. The aliens that are in the middle will avoid contact with other worlds. The ones that are for war might try and seem like they are for peace but communication won’t really matter. The ones that are for peace will be experienced some at least and give us a wide birth.
I guess if we are the aliens first first contact then we would be on equal footing.
No aliens smart enough to conquer the limitations of light-speed will have any way to understand the concept of war. It’s that stupid.
It’s highly unlikely that any intelligent species capable of traveling the vast distances to cross interstellar space to make contact with another species would not also be intelligent enough not to make knee-jerk assumptions about the language(s) of creatures who are so alien to them that they don’t share a biosphere and have no ancestral commonality whatsoever. Even if the English word “the” sounds similar to the alien word for “let’s fight,” or whatever, they’d obviously know that this is not actually what we mean.
This is even assuming that they communicate verbally or even audibly in the first place. Maybe they talk by emitting light or radio waves at each other or something, for all we know.
And if the aliens arrive here with the intent of conquering us or blowing us up, they probably won’t care what we have to say nor how we say it anyhow. If they were intent on making peaceful contact they would be sending their very best of their equivalents of linguists and anthropologists specifically because of this kind of thing. Not to do so would be incredibly stupid.
(Stupid species don’t achieve interstellar travel. See also: We have not achieved interstellar travel.)
We look for things…
I think aliens capable of interstellar flight will be humanoids. Not necessarily based on primates; they could be feline, canine, anteaters, lizards, Zuckerbergs, whatever.
We clearly have the best form for tool use. If some drastic difference in morphology made for more efficient tool use, we would have evolved that form. Tools are very much our jam, got us where we are today.
I also think they would be from a biosphere much like Earth. They evolved under the same physical and chemical laws. Sure, there would almost certainly be radical differences in biology, but I think we’d recognize the basic building blocks. After all, amino acids are floating around in space.
OTOH, maybe they’ve evolved so far beyond tool use as to be unrecognizable to us. Maybe they use bots for tools and artificially modified themselves.
As to your penultimate sentence, that’s a plot point in science fiction classic Footfall!
Your arguments aren’t based on anything, and are clearly biased toward your own image. Even just limiting ourselves to known earth-forms, from an objective standpoint the octopus form seems at least as well suited to tool use. 8 limbs that can work fully independently on 8 different tasks, AND can be used in synchrony to work on a single task, AND have been shown to do extremely fine manipulation of small objects, AND has suckers all along the length of each limb that can be controlled in precise segments, AND has full continuous deformablity in every direction rather than a very small number of joints that only operate in a single degree of motion. It’s really no contest, the octopus form is superior
I’ve actually had the octopus in mind! Read Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the hoops he had to jump through to imagine a space-faring race of octopi was ridiculous, took me out of it. And they required us space monkeys to jump start 'em in the first place!
Fire use aside, think that boneless arm could swing an axe? Think they could push hard? Well, I could go on forever, but I think you’re missing all the great points of having an endoskeleton. No skeleton only works underwater, and no underwater species is using fire and all the tech that blooms from that. Cetacea are smart as hell, but no bony and dexterous digits, no fire, no tech. We can utterly rule out aquatic space travelers.
Please, let your imagination run wild! But consider at every point, how would that work in real life? And keep evolution top of mind!
Would alien tentacle fingers work? Could those boneless arms turn a tough bolt with a wrench? Nah, might be crazy dexterous but you gotta drop the bones for that dexterity. Would odd numbers of limbs work? Nah, outside of underwater animals, we don’t see that, because it’s not practical.
Nature tried all the weird shit in the Cambrian. The basic forms have survived since then. There’s no reason aliens would have radically different forms assuming they come from an Earth-like planet. So why is Earth so special?
Gravity’s one thing. Too much and our hypothetical aliens would never reach escape velocity. Too little and they’d be too wimpy to survive the forces. Sure, there’s flex room, but not much. Think on things like that.
Chemistry is a thing. We can speculate on sulpher or silicone based life, but nothing forms stable organic molecules like carbon! As I said, we already see clouds of amino acids in space. Why reinvent the wheel? The parts are out there, only fit together in certain ways.
“Maybe they don’t need liquid water! Maybe they’re floating around gas giants!” Fine. They’re not escaping any gravity well without tech, and that includes, at the very least, metal working. There’s simply no other way to start.
People bag on me as if I have no imagination, or worse, I’m too ignorant to look past my own backyard. I challenge anyone to imagine an alien other than I roughly outlined in my original post. Been reading science fiction and thinking on this for 40 years. Bet I can shoot down your weird aliens. Go!
Octopus in the right circumstances could literally break your arm with the force they generate. And tentacles could easily swing an axe. And they could easily twist bolts, in fact there are videos of them doing that type of thing on youtube. And there are tons of land mammals that have prehensile limbs, like elephants, monkeys, etc. I’m not sure what information you’re using to mentally model what tentacles can do, but it’s quite inaccurate
Under water.
I have no objections to aliens with prehensile limbs. Often wondered why humans are lacking. Must not have been so useful or we would have something more than a tailbone. But maybe another planet, another species, would have found limbs like that a bonus. Not ruling that out!
If someone has tech to do interstellar trips in a reasonable time, we already lost any war against them.
The good news is, they probably don’t need anything that we have, so the list of reasons to engage in war is kinda limited. Yay!
About communication, they would have an advantage understanding us, we are broadcasting into space for more than a century with radio signals carrying content of many of our languages.
The movie Arrival does an quite OK job showing how could be an effort to bridge the communication gap with aliens (besides the fiction), and is a good movie as well.
maybe to entertain them, us as ZOO animals.
Or, for religious/ritual purposes.
“Oh hey, you guys have liquid water? We’ll take that!”
“Well I guess we could trade you a few thousand liters…”
“Trade? Liters? No, we’ll just take it. All of it.”
Water isn’t particularly hard to find, and the recipe for making liquid water out of solid water is dead simple
Biomass is just about the only thing you couldn’t find out in the asteroid belt, and there’s little reason a species from a different biosphere would want any of our biomass.
Alas, it turns out that human cerebrospinal fluid is heroin to their biology. We’re going to get farmed like opium poppies.
Any mineral that you can think of, easier to get in space, close to their home star than here.
Everyone here assuming the aliens would be far more advanced than us.
Spoiler for the novel Footfall
Aliens that look like baby elephants roll up and throw rocks from orbit until we, quickly, give in.
They’re not much, if any, more advanced than us. They riding in a generation ship and using tech from an advanced race that died off, don’t know how to work half of it.
“The Road Not Taken” by Harry Turtledove. Short story.
The aliens have space ships and that’s it. They still use horses, bows and arrows, and spears.
Turns out, space travel is easy and we’ve been doing things the hard way…
Going to read that!
Why would Aliens desire war with us?
I see it like being overtaken on the highway — there are very few reasons for aliens to expend the energy needed to physically interact with us in the first place. And the reasons to do such a thing include:
- Halt our expansion into the universe because of our penchant for destruction
- Claim our planet for their own after destroying theirs
- Extract our resources
- ???
After expending the energy and resources to get into Earth’s orbit, it’s probably a lot more efficient to subjugate or destroy the dominant life form than to try and figure out how to communicate with it to achieve the above objectives.
Back to the highway analogy: most aliens wouldn’t want war with us… but we’re unlikely to ever cross paths with such beings in this vast universe, due to either time or distance.
4: Just talk and learn from us because they’re frickin’ curious.
I mean, that would be humanity’s motivation.
I assumed 4 would be some form of sex tourism.
That’s implied in “curious”.
Fair point.
Eh. The motivations of the people in charge of humanity would be resources or xenophobia.
We can’t even get along with other humans well enough to learn from them properly.
After expending the energy and resources to get into Earth’s orbit, it’s probably a lot more efficient to subjugate or destroy the dominant life form than to try and figure out how to communicate with it to achieve the above objectives.
Why? How so?
Blowing shit up is always easier than understanding the shit you’re going to blow up.
No, it really isn’t!
Easier, not takes less absolute energy.
Than what do you precisely mean by “easier”?
What else could it mean in this context? It means less mental exhertion and thought. You know, the things understanding requires.
Yes, it really is!
Um, yes it is. This is a very well known general truism. Destruction is almost always easier than creation. For example which do you think is easier, painting a complex painting, or destroying a complex painting?
Um, yes it is. This is a very well known general truism. Destruction is almost always easier than creation.
Certainly spilled milk can’t be put back in the milk jug, but I don’t think that proves destruction is easier than creation rather it underlines that what makes destruction devastating is that it cannot be reversed in the way the construction of something can.
My point is, why do you narrowly frame the choice as either destroying a complex painting or creating one?
I think history would beg to differ.
How so?
Centuries upon centuries of tribalism and war instead of diplomatic missions. Do … do you even know the history of humanity??
There’s a reason people call modern times the most peaceful time in history … while there are wars and genocides still going on.
Because the part of the alien race that will contact us are the ones representing their corporations and they want more resources.
The problem with that as even a hypothesis is the Earth is not unique what so ever as far as its constituent parts. Unless humanity itself was the resource of interest, there are billions of Earths worth of water, iron, uranium, carbon, oxygen, diamonds, etc, etc, etc between us and even most other planets within our quadrant of the galaxy.
Precisely and I know everyone has forgotten the concept of gravity wells* because Star Wars and other scifi shows constantly shows spaceships constantly flying up and down from planets like it is no big deal*… but ALL of those resources are stuck in the bottom of a gravity well which means the value of a bulk amount of any of that material is far less valuable than it would be distributed in space in other forms that could be mined without paying an immense energy tax (asteroids and smaller rock bodies than “planets” in general, i.e. why mine an earthlike planet when you could mine a pluto like planet or smaller?).
Sure, maybe aliens have Stargates or some other magic teleporting/portal device where they can appear magically on the surface of the earth and then warp back to somewhere outside the gravity well of Earth… anything is possible I suppose but if we can’t assume that nature doesn’t allow such a blatant paradox/violations of the conservation of energy than we can’t really have any speculative discussion about anything since it might just be superceded by magic at a later point.
The most valuable thing to an alien sentient species capable of such immense power would unquestionably be the genetic diversity of all living species on earth and that really would be the only scenario I could conceive of where aliens might desire to destroy humanity, I could see them having some kind of gardening philosophy where they could see we were a threat to the biological diversity of a potential ongoing source of genetic innovation and wanted to protect that by eliminating us… but even that is a stretch… from the timescale of an interstellar voyager, mass extinctions are simply the closing of one act and the beginning of another in the story of evolution, the evolution of life on Earth in all its complexity cannot be understood without taking into account mass extinctions… so then what would make an alien species decide to see the mass extinction that humanity is precipitating as fundamentally different?
Of course it is possible that an alien invasion force could show up and blow us up with lasers to harvest all our coal… but I think there are basic axiomatic assumptions people bring to the table about assumed ways that alien contact would bear out that are just downright silly and I will not stop making fun of them until this genre of conversation becomes more mature.
Yea, the only way I could see them intervening is if they were acrively against unnatural extinctions, and even that requires them to differentiate between the actions of species and the actions of physical objects (and to have such a distinction in concept in the first place). If they viewed humanity as akin to a bacterial infection about to destroy the host planet, I could see such a hypothetical species taking action.
Funnily enough about conservation of energy… it actually doesn’t hold up on the cosmic scale! It’s only true of closed systems, and the universe is a very open system. I forget the intricacies, though. PBS SpaceTime had an episode on the very topic some months ago.
All good points. I don’t see why that means they wouldn’t come and exploit our resources too. Maybe after they used up the other planets. Maybe they just like destroying things. People like to imagine aliens as moved past all the petty shit that holds humans back, but the ship of the aliens that we meet might just be “rich kids on vacation and want to shoot an elephant” type of aliens.
Yes, but one of those would have clear signs we’d see from afar first, and the other is wholly separate of your earlier proposition that they’d be corporate representatives looking for resources.
You are asserting a knowledge of something that you cannot possibly assert.
Hah… I know right. I mean every answer to that question is “asserting a knowledge of something that you cannot possibly assert.”
Why else ask the question?
The book Project Hail Mary explores some interesting ideas about how we could communicate with aliens.
This is 50.
There are core concepts that are likely to be universally understood.
Maths is probably the best and most common example. If we imagine the symbols have been removed and we work under the assumption that we’re manipulating objects we can show that 1 object + 1 object = 2 objects without any language necessary. From there we (aliens and humans) can work together to build a common foundation of understanding.
Don’t get me wrong, this will not be easy and there will be problems we haven’t thought of but there’s a good chance that a spacefaring civilisation will know enough about mathematics to build a new common language.
one of the sg1 episodes, where 4 advanced races uses elements of the periodic table as a common language, it could be that, much simpler than creating a math language.
It’s definitely a contender, I’m not sure it’s “much simpler” though. There is no simple option, it will likely be the most challenging linguistic problem the world has ever faced.
Assuming the periodic table will be the same is a huge leap. @[email protected] did a good job of explaining why in another comment. To paraphrase, our periodic table is limited to our perspective of the elements. There could be other even more accurate, and descriptive ways to fully encompass what an element is.
Maths already is a language of sorts, with logic built in. Whereas the periodic table is a technical description of elements.
Stargate has an episode on this where they use the table of elements as a universal language.
What’s interesting there is that our understanding of elements is almost entirely theoretical. The math works out, but we might be missing entire particle structures or interactions. We observe atomic forces and give them names, but it’s all built on particle theories that started as one lump and have been honed over time.
Aliens might have a periodic table of dimensional harmonic wave frequencies. Our concept of elements to aliens might be like when we meet an uncontacted culture which does not have numbers larger than 4.
Some parts of the theory have been demonstrated. For instance:
This is a scanning electron microscope image of a crystal structure (PrScO3). The bright spots are atomic nuclei.
The full paper is here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg2533
To interact with us in any meaningful way I think we have to assume that the aliens exist in our universe composed of atoms. Regardless of how they perceive the atomic structure, the structure would be the same.
Sure, but even that is based on perceiving electromagnetic waves visually. The electron microscope represents the smallest particle that we can bounce off of another particle. That’s why we can’t visualize things on a smaller scale. Then we have the Planck length which is the theoretical limit of what we can predict physics are like at tiny scales.
But imagine a life form that evolved to perceive gravitational waves instead of electromagnetic waves (light). Or maybe there’s some other force that we aren’t even aware of.
So much of our understanding of the universe is a reflection of some Precambrian paramecium mutating an eyespot or cilia that can detect sound waves.
Can’t remember the author or title.
Old short story where humans land on a planet where the advanced species has gone extinct.
The Terrans have no way of translating the language until someone finds a classroom and figures out what they used for the periodic table.
This was a stargate episode also im pretty sure.
the 4 great races uses periodic table elements to universally communicate.
A Fire Upon the Deep maybe? I think they found what amounted to a preschool?
No idea. Read it in high school and that’s a while back.
Aliens have been helping us develop super intelligent AI to bridge the gap between our species
I would imagine that if an alien species is making first contact, they have a reason to want to communicate and would have prepared based on our broadcasts or would bring along a specialist to study our language quickly.
The other options would be an accidental contact, in which case they might not be as prepared, or a contact that they are indifferent about communicating with us, in which case we are likely fucked.”
