A brand new study calls for humanity to arrange for an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence and examines the possible social consequences of such contact.
Initially, the results of first contact strongly rely upon the way in which it takes place. The paper offers the view that first contact with alien life poses considerable risks for humanity. Moreover, a primary contact event could also happen without being culturally recognized.
The intriguing latest research paper is led by Andreas Anton of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany.
Scenarios
Anton and colleagues serve up a set of scenarios:
- The signal scenario is the idea of SETI (seek for extraterrestrial intelligence) programs, wherein radio astronomers seek for signs of alien civilizations. It assumes that radio telescopes can pick up artificial signals from the far reaches of space.
- The technosignature scenario envisions that future powerful telescopes will find evidence of past or present extraterrestrial technology.
- The artifact scenario assumes that at some point, somewhere in our solar system (and even on Earth itself), we are going to come across the fabric stays — equivalent to an area probe — of an extraterrestrial civilization.
- The encounter scenarioinvolves the looks of an alien spacecraft in near-Earth space that will be assumed, based on its flight maneuvers or other actions, to be controlled by intelligence, either biological or artificial.
Biological beings or artificial intelligence?
The prospect of an encounter scenario, the paper points out, raises a very important query: Whether the alien technology is controlled by a biological life form or a synthetic intelligence.
“A biological life form, we suspect, could potentially cause greater anxiety, because the immediate query can be what ‘they’ want here. It also has an inbuilt assumption that they’ve a comparatively nearby base or have superfast travel (perhaps faster than light) and would thus be very far ahead of us technologically,” Anton and co-authors write of their paper.
“Nonetheless, the query of whether the encounter is with a biological life form or the emissaries of a machine civilization could remain unresolved for a very long time,” they add.
Be prepared
The paper concludes by acknowledging that the more we all know in regards to the universe and the further we penetrate into the cosmos through our own research activities, “the more likely it’s that we can be confronted with alien civilizations, their signals or their legacies.”
That being the case, the researchers suggest, humanity must be prepared as a world society for this scenario.
“Within the political sphere, the query of easy methods to take care of this discovery and possible communication with extraterrestrial civilizations would result in a world discourse,” they write within the paper. “International cooperation can be essential to develop a unified approach to coping with this latest reality.”
This research paper, titled “Meeting extraterrestrials: Scenarios of first contact from the angle of exosociology,” is on the market here.