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Michchamp
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- Aug 4, 2011
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I remember reading Stephen Hawking's warning about contacting extra terrestrial intelligent species, and thought it made a lot of sense.
There's apparently a real debate now, and to me at least, I think the naysayers make the best argument (here's their public statement). The most reasonable course of action would be to remain passive & listen, not to actively beam messages to initiate contact.
this is just dumb:
I see a Hollywood script here that just writes itself: you have the wild-eyed, New-Age-y scientist (played by some European actor, who speaks heavily accented English, or an American who can fake that, like Peter MacNicol from Ghostbusters II) launching a project to contact some passing alien ship or probe, and the hero - who has discovered the aliens will be hostile (and is a more "earthy" scientist played by an American, or at least an actor from the British Isles who can lose his English/Scottish/Irish accent) & the off-duty police detective or US Marine he teams up with have to stop him and destroy his transmitter dish, in order to save humanity.
There's apparently a real debate now, and to me at least, I think the naysayers make the best argument (here's their public statement). The most reasonable course of action would be to remain passive & listen, not to actively beam messages to initiate contact.
this is just dumb:
"Clich?d as it may be, the oft-repeated Columbus analogy sometimes feels as though it has the power to sink Active SETI. It is, however, a gross oversimplification of human history. Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Toronto, points out that not all cross-cultural contact has been harmful. Even the European arrival in the Americans wasn?t all bad. ?Many of the First Nations of the New World are very much alive, and on the ascendancy, [especially] in the Southern Hemisphere,? she told me recently. Yes, there was a period of turmoil; but later there was ?syncretism, friendship, intermarriage ? a slow merging of two societies.?"
Yes, "very much alive"... on reservations, plagued by chronic alcoholism and drug abuse, lacking basic services, and if they're lucky, have a casino nearby with enough of the profits remaining on the reservation to provide the members with some of the benefits that more advanced society that landed on them possesses.
I see a Hollywood script here that just writes itself: you have the wild-eyed, New-Age-y scientist (played by some European actor, who speaks heavily accented English, or an American who can fake that, like Peter MacNicol from Ghostbusters II) launching a project to contact some passing alien ship or probe, and the hero - who has discovered the aliens will be hostile (and is a more "earthy" scientist played by an American, or at least an actor from the British Isles who can lose his English/Scottish/Irish accent) & the off-duty police detective or US Marine he teams up with have to stop him and destroy his transmitter dish, in order to save humanity.