The time is the near future. What appears to be some kind of spacecraft appears in orbit above the Earth.
Putting aside reasons why ET would want to travel trillions of miles to get to our little insignificant ball of dust and gases, how do we go about making first contact?
Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin the attempt to communicate is to try and kill them.
“The only way to communicate with a creature that is very different from you, and you can make no assumptions at all about how they encode language or meaning, is just killing them,” Witkowski says.
Witkowski is a researcher on AI and intelligence and speaks six languages. Product of a Vietnamese mother and a Polish father, he grew up in Belgium and studied in Spain. For his dissertation, "he analyzed how communication enables cooperation among AIs or other cognitive systems," as Nautilus explains.
"Communication is such a fraught act, presupposing a background of shared knowledge and motivations, that we might scarcely even recognize a message from beyond Earth, let alone decipher it," he says. But the one thing that every kind of lifeform in the universe shares is a desire to continue living. Beyond anything, the instinct to survive is the one universal language we would share with ET.
Living beings have to be “replicating or maintaining themselves in a homeostatic loop,” Witkowski says. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.” They would be experts at knowing how to survive. “So, you try to hurt them. Then they will understand," says Witkowski.
To be sure, it's counterintuitive to try to communicate with a new life form by attacking it. But the more you think about it, the more sense it makes.
We've got silly, unrealistic ideas about what other intelligent life forms might look like or act like. They are going to think differently from us. Communicating with them may be impossible. The only sure thing we know for sure is they are going to be so radically different that we may not even see them as being alive.
Still, in Witkowski’s scenario, ET’s instinct to survive tells us it’s a form of life, something we share. Perhaps, then, we could turn around and help it survive. “Now we can start from something they value,” Witkowski says. “So they will hear us.” And that could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Forget the idea of using math or science to communicate, says Witkowski. What's missing is emotion. Communication isn't "only, or even primarily, about information. It is about emotion, about establishing our presence and developing or reinforcing a connection," says Witkowski.
Some wonder whether the inherent difficulties of communication explain the Great Silence—the failure, apart from a few tantalizing but equivocal hints, to detect alien signals or Galactic empire-building. Maybe we are in fact surrounded by aliens or their artifacts and don’t recognize them. They might elude us because they think a billion times faster or slower, are tucked into nanometer-level structures, or do not have bodies but exist as diffuse patterns. Commenting on this possibility in this same volume as Finney’s paper, archaeologist Paul Wason noted that we routinely misinterpret human creations as natural phenomena. An untrained eye takes a Paleolithic tool for an ordinary rock.
We humans perceive the world, the universe, and everything in it, alive or not, through the lens of our conscious mind. Aliens are going to have their own perceptions shaped by whatever metaphysical process their intelligence is based on. Tomislav Janović, a philosophy professor at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, believes that any civilization with "a reasonably high degree of cooperation among its members" would necessarily possess the "ability to understand and express emotions and intentions—ability indispensable for setting off a communication process, even in the absence of a common code."
“For it is much more likely that they will be able to empathically recognize such an intention than to interpret a signal embodying an explicit representational content.”
The fact that the aliens have organized themselves into a cooperative society able to construct an interstellar spacecraft is proof that they have an emotional intelligence that can be reached.
Perhaps we wouldn't have to try and kill them to open a dialog.
