Humanity Shouldn't Be Afraid To Say Hello to Aliens --- Some scientists worry that beaming signals into space could lead extraterrestrials to conquer Earth, as in the TV series '3 Body Problem.' But wouldn't they be more interested in learning about us?

"Thanks to the popularity of Netflix's new series "3 Body Problem," we have a new existential threat to worry about: humanity's urge to blab to the cosmos. In the series, based on a trilogy of novels by the Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin, greetings naively sent into space doom the Earth to conquest by extraterrestrials. As sci-fi horror scenarios go, this one is quite respectable. Sociologists, game theorists and astrophysicists like Stephen Hawking have been warning for decades against transmitting signals that could reveal humanity's location to interstellar predators.

The worriers argue that there's a good reason we haven't detected signals from any other intelligent life in the universe: The only civilizations that survive are the ones smart enough to keep quiet. A species that jabbers as soon as it learns to transmit radio signals could fatally attract the attention of an older civilization with much more advanced technology, just as the European discovery of America led to the decimation of the native population.

Even a benign extraterrestrial civilization might feel compelled to annihilate us, out of fear that we would annihilate them at the first opportunity. 

Unable to discern our intentions because of the vast delays in communicating at interstellar distances, they would make the logical next move in what game theorists call a "sequential game with incomplete information." A character in Liu's novel "The Dark Forest" explains this idea using the title metaphor:

"The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life -- another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod -- there's only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people."

The "dark forest" hypothesis, as it's come to be known, is one way to resolve the paradox named after the physicist Enrico Fermi: In a universe with so many potentially habitable planets much older than Earth, why haven't we heard from anybody else?

More than a dozen times in the past half-century, radio astronomers have used powerful transmitters to send signals aimed at other stars. The most recent messages were sent in 2017 from a radio transmitter in Norway by a group named METI International, founded by the American scientist Douglas A. Vakoch. METI is the acronym for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which is also known as "active SETI" (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).

It is vehemently opposed by some scientists who have been passively listening for signals from other civilizations. In 2016, about 30 critics, including Elon Musk, signed a statement condemning the use of "high power communications equipment on Earth to transmit various messages to unknown extraterrestrial intelligences." John Gertz, the former chairman of the board of the SETI Institute, has argued that this "reckless endangerment of all mankind" violates international law and should be subject to criminal penalties.

It's certainly possible that aliens could regard humanity as a lower form of life, as far below them in intelligence as the buffalo were to the Europeans who slaughtered herds on the Great Plains. 

Our technology might seem so primitive that the aliens would consider us "savages," as the European settlers called the natives they displaced. But whatever the aliens thought of humanity, there's no reason to assume they'd want to eliminate us.

The fear of conquest by aliens rests on the dubious premise that they would greedily crave the natives' land and resources. But that's not how civilization is proceeding on Earth as our technology advances. In the past, armies fought wars over access to scarce resources (salt, grain, oil), and 20th-century intellectuals predicted that overpopulation would lead to an "age of scarcity" with catastrophic global shortages of food and energy. But thanks to technological progress, humans today are better nourished and wealthier than ever. Over the past century, the cost of food, energy and other commodities has plummeted more than twentyfold by comparison with workers' wages. Natural resources now matter less to individuals or societies seeking wealth than an intangible resource: knowledge. The modern economy is increasingly dominated by industries that traffic not in physical commodities but in information: finance, software, communications, entertainment, artificial intelligence, education and research.

Because of this economic shift, today we wouldn't react as 16th-century Europeans did to the discovery of a "new world" with less advanced technology. We'd exploit it differently. Sure, there would be oil and mining companies ready to extract resources, but they'd run into fierce opposition from scientists, politicians and activists determined to preserve and study its ecosystem and native cultures.

Why wouldn't aliens react similarly to the discovery of Earthlings? Why would a civilization with the technological ability to travel across the galaxy and conquer Earth be desperate for food or natural resources? Human engineers are already devising schemes to grow food in space, mine asteroids and "terraform" Mars into a habitable planet. A more advanced alien civilization would presumably have plenty of survival options that don't require traversing the universe to conquer another planet.

Earth's farmland and minerals would be far less valuable to the aliens than the knowledge to be gained from studying the strange new life-forms on Earth. Even if they regarded us as appallingly primitive creatures, even if they felt no moral obligation to spare an inferior species, they'd be as eager to observe us as we are to watch animals in a zoo.

In fact, aliens may already be observing us without making themselves known, a possibility known as the "zoo hypothesis." I prefer this to the dark forest hypothesis as an explanation for the Fermi paradox. In this scenario, the reason we haven't heard from aliens is that they want to observe the behavior and evolution of Earth's creatures unaffected by outside influences. METI enthusiasts like to think that aliens would generously share their advanced knowledge, enriching us with wondrous technology and miracle cures for disease. But maybe the aliens would rather preserve us in our "natural" state so as not to contaminate the data they're gathering. If that's the case, then they would ignore our greetings and pleas for friendship.

On the other hand, maybe alien civilizations have just been waiting for us to become capable of interstellar communication, and would be as curious to converse with us as we would be with them (or with an animal at the zoo). It's always possible, of course, that we've heard nothing so far because we really are alone in the universe, or because we're too far away from anyone else to communicate. But if any intelligent beings are out there in the darkness, let's not assume they're genocidal predators. It wouldn't kill us to say hello.

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John Tierney is a contributing editor to City Journal and the co-author of "The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It."" [1]

1. REVIEW --- Humanity Shouldn't Be Afraid To Say Hello to Aliens --- Some scientists worry that beaming signals into space could lead extraterrestrials to conquer Earth, as in the TV series '3 Body Problem.' But wouldn't they be more interested in learning about us? Tierney, John.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 25 May 2024: C.3.