Can we understand aliens?

Knowledge about aliens can be just as dangerous as aliens themselves.

Imagine that you have lived all your life in a small village located in the wilds of the continental wilderness. This community has been isolated from the world for centuries. One day you go to explore the world around it, bypassing the borders of the known territory. Suddenly and unexpectedly you stumble upon a pillar with a sign. The font on it seems unfamiliar to you, a stranger, but the text is quite clear. It says: "We are here."

What's next?
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Happiness and celebration of the end of isolation? A simple shrug? But human nature suggests that this meeting is most likely to trigger a chain of events leading to a catastrophe.

Suddenly, your shelter is under threat from “them,” unknown to you. The time-tested principles of governance and social order will come under pressure. Rumors, gossip and speculation will spread throughout your home. Inhuman efforts will be spent on the erection of barricades, the harvest and repair of property will be postponed. The community will move towards destruction. But this ad on the post is more than a half-understood idea, an elusive subtext that infects the world with its ambiguity.

This story is not the beginning of the “B” film, but an allegory of what can happen after we solve one of the oldest scientific and philosophical mysteries - whether we have “neighbors” in space.

Today, the prospect of finding evidence of life beyond Earth falls into one of three known categories. The first is the study of the solar system. Mars can be called one of the main goals, since this planet, although alien to us, falls under a certain pattern that corresponds to the usual earthly environment, and is also available for visiting. At the moment, robots on wheels are plying the Martian regolith, and keen eyes are looking at it from orbit. The following Mars missions are being prepared in the near future: the launch of the InSight robotic probe, the rover Mars 2020 , the return of soil samples to Earth, and the constantly discussed possibility of a manned mission are being prepared in 2018.

But Mars is not the only possibility. The icy moons Enceladus and Europe are showing signs of the presence of liquid water beneath the surface. Europe has an ocean that is twice the size of all the surface oceans of the Earth, and it comes into contact with the rocky core of the moon - there may be a deep-water hydrothermal oasis. Geyser-like emissions of matter into space give hope for a mission that can take samples and look for signs of life.

In the second category, located far away from us, are exoplanets. Now we know that their number is enormous - tens of billions of planets at different stages, from geophysical youth, to the venerable age. Some of them may be analogues of the Earth. We try to determine the chemical composition of the atmosphere at least the closest of the planets in order to find signs of the existence of the biosphere. The James Webb telescope and the next generation of 30-meter ground-based telescopes will be able to carry out rough measurements of the parameters of interest to us.

The third category is the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the SETI project. In attempts to find structured, artificial signals, combing the radio wave and optical spectrum, there is both the greatest risk and the greatest possible reward. Success will mean not only that life is somewhere else, but that in addition to our technologically developed intelligence in the Universe there are others.

But the knowledge in search of which these projects are being conducted can change not only our scientific understanding of the world. Just like a post with a sign off the beaten path, new information can infect our collective consciousness before we have time to understand what is happening. It can settle ideas in our minds, which in themselves will fight for life, challenge the status quo, penetrate our thoughts and behavior. We already have a name for this type of self-propagating and evolving pieces of information — we call them memes.

In 1976, in his book, The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins proposed the term meme to describe a phenomenon that is transmitted within a culture. Whether it’s a catchy phrase, four-legged chairs, a style of clothing, or a belief system. In this sense, a memorizing and reproducible piece of human cultural evolution is a viral entity.

We, as creatures of high socialization, obsessed with information, are especially exposed to memes. And not all memes are safe - some of them become toxic when confronted with other, well-established memes. As an example, we can take the clash of Western morals and conservative Islam.

What if we find that chemically incompatible aliens surrounded us, and find out that everything that we thought was inevitable and optimal in our biology and evolution is just a random deviation? Such a discovery will go against the Copernican ideals and reverse the beautiful rationalization of the deep connections between life and the fundamental components of the cosmos.

Or what if we find an extraterrestrial signal with the message “you will all die”? Even if it is a translation error or a wrong perception of the existential brotherhood of aliens, our creatures will quickly plunge into chaos, and destroy civilization no worse than an effective weapon.

A message containing a description of more straightforward intentions can have the same destructive consequences. It may be a new scientific insight or a technology drawing sent for the purpose of interstellar trade or defusing diplomatic relations, but it may also destabilize the economy of the Earth. Or the message may turn out to be a philosophical statement, the religious meaning of which may lead to conflict and unrest. Even “is there anybody there?” Can become a problem - the decision whether to respond to it or not can provoke not only verbal disputes among us.

We can also agree to sending messages to aliens, to the detriment of ourselves. If we determine the chemical composition of the biosphere of the nearest exoplanets, we will be tempted to send a message there - an attempt to establish communication with small chances of success. We are so impatient that we have already made such attempts. In 1974, the Arecibo radio observatory sent a memes-loaded message of 1,679 binary digits towards the remote globular cluster. It contained a set of numbers, the simplest DNA scheme, a drawn human figure and the scheme of our solar system. We also spent decades talking loudly about ourselves through broadband radio and television broadcasts, until we turned into a digit. If we have a real goal, we will try to send a probe to it, especially if we develop a method for crossing the interstellar space with a speed close enough to the light one.

But such behavior is terribly dangerous for us if it triggers the response of our cosmic neighbors, or any intelligent inhabitants of other worlds. By sending memes back and forth through cosmic voids, you can get into trouble.



What do we do? We need to know if we are alone. Scientific curiosity and logic require this from any rational being. This is the central part of the puzzle of knowing our origins and our nature, our place in the Universe.

The answer can be found in the construction of a planetary firewall, a “mem-shield” that protects us from the pernicious knowledge of extraterrestrial life, but allows us to explore space. It can be an artificial autonomous design that takes on the SETI task, and even the tasks of astronomers who hunt for exoplanets. By providing an algorithmic or physical barrier between us and the rest of the Universe, it would help control and filter out the flow of information — much like an Internet firewall protects a computer from viruses by studying the source and intent of data packets.

This armor may include a ban on private telescopes or radio antennas, sensitive enough to stumble upon extraterrestrial "pillars with tablets." It can be equipped with automatic listening stations and telescopes that transmit disinfected results to their owners. The most risky data can be stored in case of an existential disaster — when an extraterrestrial meme cannot do more harm than it already does — in the form of a library of last resort funds, an extreme example of the measure “break glass in case of fire”.

Such armor could serve as a camouflage for everyone who looks outside, block attempts to discern the presence or nature of life on Earth, just as computer addresses are hidden behind host addresses. Or, for a more sinister scenario, she might try to actively infect other worlds with destructive memes to reduce the potential threat to the Earth.

Just as the computer systems with the highest security requirements are disconnected from the Internet, ambitious armor could hide the Earth from the rest of the Universe. The giant high-tech Faraday cage with optical elements that precisely control everything that passes through them is an information version of air filtration and containment for a laboratory dealing with a biological hazard. A more radical measure will be the complete abandonment of our planet exposed to memes. We can build the Dyson sphere , this major milestone in futurology and science fiction, and live inside it, turning to our star, closed from the contagious cosmos.

These ideas, of course, are purely speculative, in some ways even bizarre. Perhaps our kind of intellect is immune to alien meme infection. Indeed, after we realized that we inhabited one microscopic part of a huge Universe that does not possess a physical center, we did not destroy ourselves — at least for now. What is important, I do not think that we should be discouraged from searching for fertile places of space, and we hardly need to shield ourselves from the splendor of the firmament.

But as they say, it is worth fearing our desires.