...There's aliens, and stuff.
No, really.
Art Bell, famous UFO conspiracy theorist and cult radio host, actually got a professional watcher from SETI - Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - on an interview on his show. Said dude, Dr. Stephen Greer, claims that SETI has been receiving extraterrestrial signals of intelligent origin, they are increasing in frequency, and they are being jammed by an earth-based source, to prevent word getting out.
SETI, of course, denies all of this, and it's likely that they're not lying; Dr. Greer relied almost exclusively on hearsay during the interview (which you can find here.)
But it does make you wonder.
The government would of course cover up any actual contact with extraterrestrial intelligences as a matter of course; people are stupid, and you know as well as I do that there would be panic, and people in L.A. would burn their own houses down.
There's also the tiny fact that the likelihood is that any race we would make first contact with would be hostile. Eggheads love to dispute this point, and so do I, so here goes.
- In Nature, the drive to expand a species' territory is directly linked to that species' aggressiveness.
- The assumption that a naturally aggressive species cannot survive to advanced technology isn't even consistent with OUR OWN experience, and that's the assumption upon which many scientists base their belief in inherent XT benevolence.
- Another unsafe assumption that many scientists make is that any civilization with which we could make contact would be ancient or far more advanced than our own. (This point will get expanded upon below.)
See, technology, assuming it follows the track ours follows - I'll tell you why I make that assumption in a bit - goes in stages, from less to more advanced. Once a society takes a step to a higher stage of technology, it quits using the older technology.
Once we moved from messengers to telegraphy, we pretty much did away with the Pony Express, didn't we? Then came the telephone, and telegraph operators fell into disuse. Now cell phones are taking an ever-increasing share of the communications "pie" from land lines, and so on.
Now. Picture a vast, ancient alien species, capable of manipulating science in ways of which we can currently only dream. Whatever advanced means of communications over interstellar distances they've devised are irrelevant; do you suppose they're still looking for someone to send them a radio signal? Particularly, a radio signal which carries meaning only so species using atmospheric vibrations - sound - as communication, encoded in modulations of the radio signal's frequency?
Not likely.
This is the same reason I discard any species whose technology follows a different track than our own; if we're using pulses of radio waves to generate sound, and they're using directed microwave radiation to stimulate heat receptors, or infra-red, or ultraviolet - see, there's a huge range of ways to communicate, even only under the science WE know - there's simply very little likelihood that they'd be listening for what we're saying.
SETI is a perfect example of this. SETI scans the galactic "background noise" for - radio waves. Which means that any species we'd come into contact with would be at a relative technological par with us, (maybe 50-100 years' worth of research either way, I mean) and following a similar technological path. This also means that they would be biologically similar organisms, since technology is largely dictated by a species' senses, means of natural communication, and natural tools.
By the same token, any biologically similar species is very likely - note, I did not say certain, because we'll never know until we find 'em - to behave in similar ways, as well. Territorial aggressiveness, xenophobia, and natural hostility are survival traits. Look at any successful species in nature - every one of them has biological means of self-defense, a fight-or-flight instinct, and hostility or fear of any other species. (This excludes symbiotes, which are kinda biologically SPECIAL, and only have exceptions for their symbiotes, responding to all other species in the same way everyone else does.)
In addition to this, the drive to colonize the stars must come from one, and only one, biological source: running out of room. Species which outbreed their niche expand, or die. This means that any extraterrestrials we would be likely to encounter would be young, hungry for life-supporting planets - like ours - biologically and behaviorally similar to ourselves, at a relative technological par, and terrified of us.
Scientists assuming that our first contact would naturally come from an established, older species assume that such a species would still even recognize our signals for attempts at communication; that they would be capable of interstellar travel, and that being an older species is required for interstellar travel.
The simple fact is that we could travel to distant stars ourselves, with the technology currently at our disposal, if we were sufficiently interested in space exploration. We're not; our society is sufficiently fucked up that we're worrying about the ground, rather than the big-ass rocks falling from the sky. But we could if we tried.
We'd just be taking a hell of a risk. I'm not saying that any species we run into out there is automatically assholes - but it does seem more likely than the alternative.
And, as you've heard me say before - we might even be alone, but that does seem like a waste of a whole big universe, doesn't it?
