But what of the Buddha?
From Nautil.us, October 3, 2024:
Should an alien species resist, we will have discovered life.
If we ever contact extraterrestrials, we’ll have to find a way to understand them. Who are they? What are their intentions? What have they discovered that we haven’t? Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin that dialogue is to try and kill them.
Clearly, there are going to be major differences between us and them. Biological, technological, and cultural gaps are likely to be as wide as interstellar space itself. “The only way to communicate with a creature that is very different from you, and you can make no assumptions at all about how they encode language or meaning, is just killing them,” Witkowski says.
He argues that the only universal basis of communication, the sole feature that all life shares, whatever its form—because it is built into the very definition of life—is that life wants to live. It strives to maintain itself, because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t survive the depredations of the world.Living entities have to be “replicating or maintaining themselves in a homeostatic loop,” Witkowski says. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.” They will be experts at detecting threats to survival. “So, you try to hurt them. Then they will understand.”
Witkowski hasn’t worked out how threatening ET would open a door to communication rather than shut it rather firmly. In Stanislaw Lem’s final novel, Fiasco, humans (spoiler alert) send a ship to contact aliens on a distant planet and, when they don’t respond to radio messages, attack. That does get the aliens to answer, but the consequences are evident from the book title.
the sole feature that all life shares,
is that life wants to live.
Still, in Witkowski’s scenario, ET’s instinct to survive tells us it’s a form of life, something we share. Perhaps, then, we could turn around and help it survive. “Now we can start from something they value,” Witkowski says. “So they will hear us.” And that could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
A soft-spoken researcher on artificial life and intelligence, Witkowski is an unlikely advocate for a warmongering view of interstellar interchange. He is monk-like in his serenity and once considered taking his vows. “I even joined some religious communities as a teenager and have sometimes considered a monastic life,” he says.
Born to a Vietnamese mother and Polish father, growing up in Belgium, studying in Spain, now living in Japan, Witkowski speaks six languages fluently and can get by in another six. For his dissertation, he analyzed how communication enables cooperation among AIs or other cognitive systems. Yet despite his linguistic superpowers, Witkowski feels that communication is such a fraught act, presupposing a background of shared knowledge and motivations, that we might scarcely even recognize a message from beyond Earth, let alone decipher it. Humans can often barely communicate among themselves.
Pioneers of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence recognized the challenge, but many assumed that mathematics and physics could serve as a cosmic lingua franca. Our radio signals or laser pulses might tap out a sequence of prime numbers, for example—a prime on Earth is a prime on Alpha Centauri Ca—and build up from there.
In 1966, Carl Sagan wrote about the tests of this principle which he and Frank Drake had conducted. Once he gave a sample message to eminent scientists at a party in Cambridge, Mass., and asked them to figure it out. They couldn’t. (He does not mention whether those scientists ever came back to one of his parties.)....
....MUCH MORE
Related:
"This is What Game Theory Tells Us About Messaging Aliens"
The prime directive from my mother if she was feuding with a neighbor: "Ignore them, do not wave back."*
She meant it and so do I....
"Classifying alien civilizations: The Kardashev scale is based on how much energy a civilization uses"
And many more including:
No.
This is a bad, bad, very bad idea.
There is no reason to think space aliens would be favorably disposed toward humans....
