Hey, Mr. Spaceman
Won’t you please take me along
I won’t do anything wrong
Hey, Mr. Spaceman
Won’t you please take me along for a ride
— “Mr. Spaceman,” The Byrds (1966)
Maybe we should look up, suggests Harvard’s Avi Loeb. The head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s Black Hole Initiative, etc., etc. thinks we Terrans should be prepared for encounters with, if not extraterrestrials themselves, then with their technology. Probes, that is.
Loeb writes in The Hill:
Earlier this year, the U.S. military and intelligence community issued a report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP, also called UFOs). Before the report’s release, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe stated, “we are talking about objects that have been seen by navy or air force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for.”
The attention-grabbing part of this statement is the reference to “satellite imagery.” I — and the hundreds of scientists engaged in studying UAP — have never seen any publicly released data on this. We would be extremely interested in analyzing any data on objects that enter the Earth’s atmosphere and do not follow ballistic orbits like meteors. But no such data is currently available to open scientific analysis.
A new Department of Defense office budgeted for 2022 “will empower military and civilian personnel as well as the intelligence community to report incidents and information involving UAP.”
Loeb considers the possibility that analysis could show the UAPs are not LGMs themselves but rather “physical objects from another civilization.” That is, hardware, perhaps with artificial intelligence (AI) meant for “seeking information about the habitable planets around the sun.”
Interactions with such devices means we need protocols in place for immediate engagement rather than through radio signal-delayed communications that might take years or centuries.
Currently, there is no international agreement on how humanity should engage with a visiting object of extraterrestrial origin. It would be prudent to formulate guidelines before they are needed. Any engagement could have implications for the future of humanity and should not be left to the spontaneous whims of a small team of researchers.
We should weigh the risks and benefits that will result from different engagements. The decision tree on how to proceed will have branches that depend on the objects’ properties and behavior. Since it is difficult to forecast these unknowns in advance, decisions will have to be reached in real-time.
Deciphering the intent of an intelligent extraterrestrial equipment may resemble the challenge of breaking the code of an encryption device. We might need to rely on our AI systems in figuring out the intent of extraterrestrial AI systems.
A proper interpretation of prompt contact with extraterrestrial technologies could bring about the most significant advance in understanding of the reality around us in the entire history of humans.
Extraterrestrial contact might also have the benefit of giving humans someone else to fear instead of each other, not that the distraction would last. The strongest hatreds seem to arise between groups that most resemble each other, as Elizabeth Kolbert notes at The New Yorker, citing a 1954 social science experiment at a Boy Scout camp.
“The participants had been chosen because they were so much alike,” she writes. “All it took for them to come to loathe one another was a different totem animal and a contest for some penknives.”
Since that time, we have sorted ourselves by our “mega-identities” defined by ” one, all-encompassing group.” No, not Terrans. Just your standard “Us” vs. “Them.”
Kolbert continues:
“We need to work on ourselves,” Robert B. Talisse, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt, urges in “Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side” (Oxford). “We need to find ways to manage belief polarization within ourselves and our alliances.”
The trouble with the partisan-heal-thyself approach, at least as this partisan sees it, is twofold. First, those who have done the most to polarize America seem the least inclined to recognize their own “impairments.” Try to imagine Donald Trump sitting in Mar-a-Lago, munching on a Big Mac and reflecting critically on his “own thinking.”
Second, the fact that each party regards the other as a “serious threat” doesn’t mean that they are equally threatening. The January 6th attack on the Capitol, the ongoing attempts to discredit the 2020 election, the new state laws that will make it more difficult for millions of people to vote, particularly in communities of color—only one party is responsible for these. In November, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a watchdog group, added the U.S. to its list of “backsliding democracies.” Although the group’s report didn’t explicitly blame the Republicans, it came pretty close: “A historic turning point came in 2020–2021 when former President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States. Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process.”
At this point, having proof, not just of extraterrestrial life, but that an extraterrestrial intelligence has taken an interest in our little planet out here in the galactic sticks might be welcome. It wouldn’t keep us from wanting to kill each other for long, but a lot of us could use the break.
NASA is hiring priests to make human beings prepare for a possible alien first contact in the future. Maybe they know something they are not telling us.