CT Blue

Maybe I’m getting to be a curmudgeon in my old age. Maybe I’ve always been a curmudgeon, but this non-political article I just read sure got me into high curmudgeon. It’s about some scientists who have developed a “language” that they hope will be easily interpreted by the aliens to whom they intend to beam insterstellar messages. I’ve got no problem with doing this, but this got me scratching my head:

Humans have sent many messages intended for aliens to outer space over the years, including the physical Golden Records onboard NASA’s Voyager probes, which, like BITG, also carry images of the naked human form. However, these attempts to establish contact with an alien race are not without controversy. Some experts have warned that broadcasting Earth’s position in the galaxy could be an invitation for a potentially hostile species to do damage to our world. Jiang and his colleagues acknowledge this risk, but ultimately counter that any aliens capable of deciphering the BITG message are not likely to be aggressive conquerors.

“Logic suggests a species which has reached sufficient complexity to achieve communication through the cosmos would also very likely have attained high levels of cooperation amongst themselves and thus will know the importance of peace and collaboration,” the team said.

(Emphasis added)

I would really like to know where the “team” studied logic. Homo Sapiens has “reached sufficient complexity to achieve communication through the cosmos” a fact proven by the very team making this logical assertion, and hasn’t, so far as I’m aware, “attained high levels of cooperation amongst themselves” nor does it seem to know the “importance of peace and collaboration”. Or, to put it another way, for every example of cooperation one might cite, there is a counter-example, else there would have been no Hitlers, no Stalins, no Putins, no Trumps, etc., etc., etc. I don’t expect us to be attacked by aliens in the near future, but logic suggests that the history of humanity establishes as a near certainty that any aliens that have reached sufficient complexity to achieve communications through the cosmos might very well pose a threat somewhat akin to the threat that Columbus posed to the inhabitants of the Americas.