here's a very popular science-fiction book out there titled The Three-Body
Problem in which a secret Chinese military lab—always a bad
sign—starts sending out messages to extraterrestrials.
The first reply they get is “Do not answer! Your world will be conquered!”
In the story, the woman receiving it happens to be an environmentalist nut whose father was murdered by the Red Guards, so she hates mankind and invites the aliens to conquer this world. Things go downhill for humanity after that, as it turns out that there are powerful extraterrestrials who will not just invade you but will exterminate any form of intelligent life. Their reasoning is that they have no way of knowing whether we are malevolent, so why take a chance? Wipe them out before they turn into a threat. The author calls this the Dark Forest theory, as in a jungle where we have to assume any animal we encounter could be dangerous.
Everybody who has a cell phone knows this advice: if you answer, you'll be bombarded with messages saying that you've won a free luxury vacation on Neptune and you must send them a few little numbers to prove you're you. Or they'll ask us to answer just one little question on their survey about which candidate you support. We all know what that one question will be: “How much money can you give us?”
A section of the Veil Nebula, the remnant of a star that was destroyed, along with any of its planets, in a supernova
If you send them money hoping they'll go away, they'll use every cent of it to call you again and again. It's like those websites that complain that Google is censoring them, so they need us to send money. What will they do with it? Simple: spend it on more Google ads and then complain about being deplatformed even more.
Sagan help us if we answer the aliens' question: they'll start sending us messages that our radioastronomy antenna software has a virus and they need remote access to fix it.
I mention Carl Sagan, whose annoying upstate New York accent was itself a threat to humanity, because this astronomy popularizer tried to convince us the universe was benevolent. If we could talk to the aliens, as Rex Harrison might say, what a lovely place the world would be. We could set up a United Nations of Space where everyone lives in harmony and we'd skip through fields of daisies together, arm in tentacle, smiling insipidly at each other knowing our Space Taxes are all paid up and we won't get blown up this year.
The writer, Cixin Liu, knows from experience in China that powerful organizations have no qualms about slaughtering vast numbers of people. Their only goal is to hold on to their power. Our own country invaded and destroyed Iraq because our government thought they might become a threat. And of course, some in Washington are now saying the same about Iran.
But we individuals do the same thing on a smaller scale. If a bug gets inside my house and it's buzzing against the window, it clearly wants to escape so I'll usually open it to let him out. But what if the bug is a threat? Yellowjacket traps which kill hundreds of these creatures indiscriminately are top sellers in hardware stores because yellowjackets are a threat to us. They'll dive bomb us if they think we're invading their space. If we happen to run over them with a lawnmower, they'll swarm and try to sting us.
Incidentally, bees might not be able to count as scientists claim, but they aren't as dumb as people think. One time I sprayed Windex at one in my garage. He disappeared, but it turned out he was clinging to my back. When I went outside, he flew off, almost as if he knew I was his only means of escape from that awful cluttered room full of lawnmowers, fly swatters, cans of DEET, and other scary human technology.
As the Jewish philosophers say, each individual human is an entire universe. So every bee is also a universe, a small one I suppose, but real to them. And most of the ones in the trap never stung anybody. (However, unlike honeybees, they don't necessarily die after stinging you.)
So maybe the aliens would spray the universe with a kind of cosmic DEET to keep us away. Or maybe those gamma ray bursts we keep seeing aren't collisions between neutron stars as we think, but evidence of one species murdering another. In the book, the aliens exterminate every species they can find by blowing up their sun. If that doesn't work, they use a weapon that reduces the number of dimensions in their space, which kills them in a pretty horrifying way. In the story, space is filled with the remains of advanced civilizations murdered that way. It's why (in the story) most of the universe as we see it is actually a vast tombstone and we are like ants crawling on it, not understanding what the numbers mean.
If they've studied mankind, they know how annoying we can be. Why would they take a chance that we'd start texting them that we're from the IRS and they have billions of dollars in unpaid taxes? Think the IRS wouldn't go after them if they could? If I were an alien I wouldn't take the chance.
oct 22 2024, 7:52 am
