If you watched the 1951 science fiction classic, “The Day the Earth Stopped,” you remember the scene when a flying saucer lands in Washington and an alien Klaatu leaves it. In his hand is something resembling an earthly weapon. After the soldier shoots at Klaatu, a robot comes out of the plate, easily deals with the soldiers and turns the tank into scrap metal. The wounded Klaatu rises to show that he had in his hand a miniature telescope capable of peering into space further than Earth observatories. According to the text:
“It was a gift. For your president. (He looks sadly at the broken object). With his help, he could observe life on other planets. "
Stop. Well, this is just a movie. The paradox is that the scene could very well be real if we came into contact with aliens, who are likely to be much more developed than we are. We are afraid of aliens, rightly believing that they can conquer us or completely destroy us, and to the lesser extent believe that they are friendly and just want to share their knowledge with us.
In 1995, Stephen J. Dick of the United States Marine Observatory wrote that the discovery of extraterrestrial civilization would have the same breathtaking impact on science and our understanding of reality as the discovery by Europe of Greek science in the 12th-13th centuries or the discovery of Copernicus in the early 1500s, which The sun, not the earth, is at the center of our solar system.
Many scientists, however, believe that there is no reason for extra-developed type aliens to conquer us. A civilization of this type is unlikely to want to visit or conquer us, as in the film "Independence Day", where such a civilization spreads across the galaxy like locusts, capturing planets one by one and sucking out resources from them dry. In fact, in space there are countless dead planets with the richest reserves of mineral resources, and they can be freely collected without contacting the stubborn local population. The attitude of a civilization of this type towards us could be compared with our attitude towards ants and anthill. We will not bend over the anthill and offer its inhabitants beads and other trinkets; rather, we simply will not pay attention to them.
“For ants, the main danger is not that people suddenly want to invade the anthill or destroy the ant family. The main danger is that the anthill will interfere with people, and it will simply be demolished. Do not forget that when it comes to energy consumption, the distance between this type of civilization and our zero type civilization is much greater than between us and ants. ”
The Physics of the Impossible, Michio Kaku
There are several areas of our development that can significantly progress as a result of contact with extraterrestrial civilization:
1. The secret of traveling faster than the speed of light will be revealed . It is assumed that aliens who visit our planet will come from anywhere, covering a huge distance. The nearest potentially inhabited planet is located at least 13 light years from us. It can be assumed that the aliens will use technologies similar to the warp engine that Miguel Alcubierre predicted and which is being developed at the NASA laboratory, or something else that is beyond the scope of the human imagination. Aliens can also have anti-gravity technology, if you believe that flying saucers can perform impossible aerobatics (well, let’s omit that their existence has not been proved). Of course, alien guests will be happy to share new technologies with us.
2. Freedom from the limitations of our biology . People are gradually starting to get used to the ideas of transhumanism - they are developing exoskeletons and electronic devices, such as implantable microchips that improve vision. But if a rational extraterrestrial species has existed longer than us even by several thousand years, they could very well become completely post-biological creatures whose brains represent a fusion of natural and artificial intelligence. Perhaps they don’t even need bodies - they live in cars of their own design (let's hope that they do not look like the “terminator” Arnold Schwarzenegger - that would be too strange). The same NASA scientist Stephen Dick spoke about this in 2006. We could make a qualitative transition to the future with the help of transhuman devices of aliens.
3. Compensation for environmental damage . It is likely that aliens with a much more advanced civilization have mastered planetary design - the ability to make important and special changes to the environment. They could help us patch holes in our atmosphere and reverse the destructive process of climate change.
4. Conflict resolution . International conflicts kill people far less than in the past - each year until 2010, approximately 55,000 people died from wars. This is a third of accident deaths in the 1980s. But people still want to kill each other: according to various estimates and according to the UN, in 2011, 468,000 murders were committed worldwide. If a reasonable extraterrestrial species lives longer than us, they must have created a deadly technology at least as powerful as ours, or built a "Death Star" for which earthlings lack money . However, the further development of civilization should have led to the settlement of conflicts without the use of violence. We could ask them to share this method with us, or to make us stop killing our own kind.
It is noteworthy that many theorists of extraterrestrial life agree on one thing: if there is a coalition of intelligent aliens of different races in space, civilizations that have reached a certain level of technical development, world outlook and, most importantly, have stopped internecine wars are accepted into this coalition for its harmonious existence. What we, in the near future, does not shine.
The article is based on materials .
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