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Will Aliens Treat Humans Humanely?
by David Stodolsky < david.stodolsky@socialinformatics.org > An advanced society of intelligent beings will likely be "altruistic" due to shared kinship (which is understood) and the need for care of the young (and others during periods of sickness, etc.). This would be driven by evolution. Due to the suppressive effects of Gama-Ray Bursts, we are likely to find civilizations more than 30,000 years advanced in other galaxies. Since, the ones in our galaxy would be on the average 30,000 light years away, their stage of development at the time a broadcast intended for reception by SETI was sent would be the same as ours, given the time it takes for a signal to get here. A misbehaving civilization could cause problems for its galactic neighbours by triggering a Gamma-Ray Burst. One defence against this would be "armour," which would not be available to travellers and new colonies. Another would be messages designed to help new civilizations develop benevolent cultures. This would be much more effective, if it worked. Solid research suggests that much inhumane behaviour is driven by death anxiety: < http://www.ernestbecker.org > So, dissemination of knowledge facilitating immortalization could be enlightened self-interest. However, this type of knowledge might develop so fast that any civilization capable of receiving a message would likely also have perfected immortalization. It only took 161 years to go from cell theory to the gene map. Effective immortality is probably less than 50 years away. I guess the question is how many years between the ability to receive/decode a message and the development of effective immortality. Most likely, electron microscopes, communication and information technology, etc. are needed to perfect immortality. Thus, message reception capability would always come on-line prior to immortalization. But the message format would have to be "easy," if there was going to be any impact on the problem of immortality. Have there been any studies of dependencies between communication and life-science technologies? Even if a civilization decided to use Gamma-Ray Bursts to clear its galaxy of potential competitors (by nudging neutron stars or black holes onto a collision course), it still could value communication with extra-galactic civilizations in dealing with really hard problems. The average hostility of intelligent civilizations could be tested by measuring the frequency of Gamma-Ray Bursts. If Bursts are being used in an offensive manner, it should be possible to detect that their frequency is above the chance level. Of course, there is a complication that galaxies of friendly civilizations would reduce the frequency of Bursts, Universe-wide. This, of course, offers another reason for galactic cooperation: making sure that potential Bursts are avoided by intervention of those nearby. According to recent work, a Burst in our own galaxy is overdue, so let's hope we live in a friendly one. It looks like any observational tests would take a long time, unless the tendency to control Bursts in predominantly friendly/unfriendly direction is dominant. A civilization of immortals would want to eliminate the treat to their existence due to the running down of our Universe. We can conceive of a communication "network" dealing with this problem, since it is unlikely that a solution would only benefit a part of the Universe. I will argue for a "transcendent," natural religion that would be adopted as obvious by all advanced civilizations. Religion is defined as a belief system assuming dependence on a power superior to natural law. The belief system will give guidelines for ethical behaviour. Are we limited to this Universe? If the "we" is human beings, then it seems we are limited to this reality/universe. But if the "we" is a transcendent intelligence of which humanity is or can be a part of, then all bets are off. We regard our physical laws as an instance of all possible realities, which we just happen to have due to the conditions at the moment of formation of our Universe. It may be possible to create new universes with different physical laws: http://www.transhuman.com/mirrors/www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/baby.txt and it is argued that successful industrial civilizations will eventually create black holes (baby universes). SeePossible Implications of the Quantum Theory of Gravity, An Introduction to the Meduso-Anthropic Principle by Louis Crane. < http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/9402104 > This is a nontechnical paper about how the activities of technological civilizations could influence the evolution of baby universes. The Meduso-Anthropic Principle refers to certain life forms which are vastly different at different stages of development, such as corals and jelly fish. In this case a universe is a "meduso" stage which gives rise to the "anthropic" stage, intelligent life, which in turn produces new universes, and so on. Thus, intelligent life transcends physical law in the cosmos as a whole. Our Universe could be a black hole in an other universe created by intelligent life there. This should induce a reverence for intelligent life! The guideline for behaviour we can derive from this is that humanity better develop the ability to produce black holes, if we want to function as first class citizens of the cosmos. This is a non-trivial task, that will take a while. One approach is to capture the entire output of the Sun and redirect the energy to a sphere of ultra-high energy lasers. They would fire at the same time and a black hole would appear at the beam-crossing point. Black holes make ideal power sources, all matter dumped into them is converted to energy. Now, where do we get that spare Sun? Could we even play a role in production or stabilization of our own Universe? That is, be crucial actors in a "loop" of universes including our own? Now we are getting speculative, butOn a General Class of Wormhole Geometries(DeBenedictis & Da) gives "an example which demonstrates how multiple closed universes may be connected." |
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