Yascha Mounk in his own Substack: No sensible physicist believes that aliens have abducted your UFO-obsessed neighbor. But most do think that the existence of intelligent life forms on other planets is a real possibility. The scale of the universe is incomprehensible. An immense number of planets fulfill the preconditions for the development of intelligent life. There is nothing peculiar about the belief that someone or something may be out there. “To my mathematical brain,” Stephen Hawking said, “the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”
This makes the question of whether we should try to locate, and contact, such lifeforms a serious concern. We do not know whether aliens exist; but if they do, the decision of whether or not to communicate with them could have momentous consequences for humanity.
So far, we humans have mostly restricted ourselves to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The SETI Institute, a private, nonprofit research organization, has built a variety of instruments designed to detect signs of extraterrestrial life. So have other institutes and universities. This activity is reasonably uncontroversial: If somebody is trying to send us a message, it would likely be beneficial to receive it; we can then figure out how, and whether, to answer.
But over the past few years, a number of scientists have proposed that we should go beyond SETI. Disappointed that we have not yet discovered any extraterrestrial life through the passive act of listening, they insist that we should take more active steps to broadcast our existence to the outside world and enter into communication with aliens.
Some believers in what has come to be known as Messaging to ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (METI) have started to take matters into their own hands. METI International, a non-profit based in San Francisco, for example, sent a message to Luyten’s Star, a red dwarf located twelve lightyears from the sun, in 2017. In so doing, these scientists seemed to harbor a hope once also held by Ye Wenjie: that aliens would be inclined to help, not to destroy, us.1
But is METI a good idea—or could it prove to be the beginning of the end for us humans?
More here.
