Scientists Say Space Aliens Could Hack Our Planet (nbcnews.com) 293
Scientists are worried that space aliens might send messages that worm their way into human society -- not to steal our passwords but to bring down our culture. "Astrophysicists Michael Hippke and John Learned argue in a recent paper that our telescopes might pick up hazardous messages sent our way -- a virus that shuts down our computers, for example, or something a bit like cosmic blackmail: 'Do this for us, or we'll make your sun go supernova and destroy Earth,'" reports NBC News. "Or perhaps the cosmic hackers could trick us into building self-replicating nanobots, and then arrange for them to be let loose to chew up our planet or its inhabitants." From the report: The astrophysicists also suggest that the extraterrestrials could show their displeasure (what did we do?) by launching a cyberattack. Maybe you've seen the 1996 film "Independence Day," in which odious aliens are vanquished by a computer virus uploaded into their machinery. That's about as realistic as sabotaging your neighbor's new laptop by feeding it programs written for the Commodore 64. In other words, aliens that could muster the transmitter power (not to mention the budget) to try wiping us out with code are going to have a real compatibility problem.
Yet there is a way that messages from space might be disruptive. Extraterrestrials could simply give us some advanced knowledge -- not as a trade, but as a gift. How could that possibly be a downer? Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, aliens weigh in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose. If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate. In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Yet there is a way that messages from space might be disruptive. Extraterrestrials could simply give us some advanced knowledge -- not as a trade, but as a gift. How could that possibly be a downer? Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, aliens weigh in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose. If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate. In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
This is dumb. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoever wrote this, should be ashamed of themselves. The paper is chicken-little trash of the highest order.
TL;DR Anything can happen, so be wary of space aliens.
Re:This is dumb. (Score:4, Funny)
Hit the space road, alien shill.
Science fiction (Score:2)
This is a science fiction plot. It's been used more than once in a few fun story arcs.
I hope this wasn't a peer-reviewed paper. It would suck if we're sunk so low as to publish science fiction plot studies as peer-reviewed science.
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Obligatory Futurama: President Nixon proposes building a Dyson Fence [imgur.com] around the southern border of the Solar System.
...and Scientifically Wrong (Score:3)
The result is that this paper reads more like the plot of a second-rate Hollywood science-fiction movie where they get the science horribly wrong.
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Yup. Two additional things.
1) Any sort of language translation between us and Aliens I have to imagine to be incredibly hard. I mean it is hard to translation between us and us for Christ stakes. Additionally now add the complexity of some made up languages used to control "computers" to which may or may not exist in any sort of resembling form for aliens. At any rate of all the things to be "scared" about from aliens, them hacking our computers is probably way down the list.
2) But but, magical alien AI co
Re: This is dumb. (Score:2)
not to steal our passwords but to bring down our culture
They state this as though:
A) Aliens give two fucks about our culture
B) As if that would even be a bad thing
Alien or AI, Tomato-TomaHHHto. Superintelligence. (Score:3)
After all, there could be any number of friendly alien species, but it only takes ONE malevolent species. We very likely don't get a do-over.
Yup, and every bit the same thing can be said about an AI Superintelligence.
While I look forward to both self-aware AI (I believe it will love us, after all, we love machines - how many of us have pictures of cars?) and intelligent alien life (which would have wiped us out by now if it wanted to), we're going to be dealing with similar consequences and societal upheaval.
Modified from the article:
Yet there is a way that messages from silicon might be disruptive. Computers could simply give us some advanced knowledge -- not as a trade, but as a gift. How could that possibly be a downer? Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, IBM Watson weighs in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose. If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate. In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Physicists getting replaced by technology as surely as cabbies will be replaced by autonomous cars? Why not?
Hey,
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This... is a joke right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This... is a joke right? (Score:5, Interesting)
Physicists often have no idea how malware actually works. Arthur C. Clarke's 3001 had a plot line that involved throwing a logic bomb at the monolith to break it and described a vault on the moon where samples of the most dangerous malware were contained for future study. It made no sense. All malware is similar to biological viruses in one respect: it is highly specific to the host organism and the host organism adapts via intelligent design, not evolution. Some of the most successful malware spreads with the aid of human interaction, because it's much harder to patch the users than the system.
The problem for an alien trying to write malware is that they would also need examples of our technology to study to find the vulnerabilities. Imagine trying to write macOS malware if you have only a Windows machine (and not even a Mac VM). You might be able to guess some similarities from the way that system calls work on x86, but it would be really hard and you'd probably need a lot of tries before you got something that even vaguely worked (and with no feedback until you got one that worked then you'd be sending out a load of code before you got anything working). This example is a bit easier, because you might try targeting something like WebAssembly or JavaScript to explore the target system. Aliens wouldn't have this option. If they needed human intervention, then they'd need to understand human psychology, which is about as difficult to learn remotely as human technology.
There's also the problem of latency. If they're sending out signals that we can detect with existing telescopes, then they're limited by the speed of light. If they're trying to do this from home, then at best they're looking at 8-10 year round trip times. One or two attempts gets you from DOS to Windows 7. Trying to develop malware with that kind of moving target is insanely difficult. Alternatively, if they're close enough that the latency isn't an issue then we probably don't have to worry about information attacks: if they are able to sit above our planet and control enough energy to reach here from another star, then 'do what we say or we will drop large rocks on you until you're all dead' would work fine as a threat. Sure, it lacks subtlety, but then it's far less likely to be mistranslated...
Re:This... is a joke right? (Score:5, Interesting)
Too complex. Let's use Occam's razor...
The first test virus was called "MySpace".
The first production virus was called "FaceBook".
We're up to version 2.2 or so, with the latest being "SnapChat".
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Got drunk with some friends and "Hey you know what I bet we could get some idiot to print?"
Got drunk with some friends and "Hey you know what I bet we could get some idiot to fund?"
No joke. It's a request for government funding proposal. Being that we Americans are working ourselves up to a McCarthy frenzy about Russian hackers stealing our elections, Congress will be willing to fund any anti-foreigner hacking protection. The Congress Critters are afraid of losing their seats to Russian hackers!
However, to combat Russian hackers, you don't need an Astrophysicist. Thus, create a hacking thre
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Haha guys very funny. Hopefully it's a joke some astrophyscist played on whoever wrote this story.
Perhaps it's the aliens trying to figure out if we are assholes? If your came 300Billion light years you would want to make sure you steer clear of the assholes and hang out with the cool people, wouldn't you?
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I've always thought that "Through the Wormhole" was conceived as a dare to get Morgan Freeman to say bat-shit crazy stuff.
And they were massively successful.
He is awesome of course.
Agreed (Score:2)
"Do this for us or we'll make your star go supernova."
Let's see here. After 2 seconds of critical thinking, I'm going to conclude that there's absolutely nothing we possibly could do for a species with that level of technology. It's as if we (human beings) came up with a plan to blackmail chimpanzees. Even if they understood the concept of blackmail, what could they possibly do for us, and what could we possibly want from them?
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"Do this for us or we'll make your star go supernova."
Build a launching laser.
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Exactly. A lot of this kind of science fiction plot falls down on basic economics. Oh no, aliens have come to steal our water! Wait, they've invested vast amounts of energy to cross interstellar spaces to get two of the most common elements in the universe from the bottom of a gravity well? They've come to enslave us... so that we can work orders of magnitude less efficiently than their machines. They've come to steal or planet almost makes sense, though unless they evolved on a very similar one they c
Imagine: You're a RUSSIAN physicist... (Score:2)
Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, aliens weigh in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose. If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate. In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Suddenly, SPIES give you that whole atomic bomb thing on a silver platter. So much for your job and your sense of purpose.
Oh... wait... No... That's not how that happened.
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Just as unlikely, but lads more fun!
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You may have not gotten the point there... [wikipedia.org]
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Haha guys very funny. Hopefully it's a joke some astrophyscist played on whoever wrote this story.
Actually this submission is an alien AI trolling us, generating amusing ironies for the Aliens watching us.
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HUH? Isn't that the primary 'news' source for /. ? ? ?
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Hey. Crazier things have happened.
Don't forget, Trump apparently DID get elected President !
Only because Democrats ran "Muh Vagina!" as their candidate.
Re: This... is a joke right? (Score:2)
what a bizarre piece... (Score:2)
They make the claim then refute its possibility further down the page....
ID4 (Score:2)
No, it's "Contact" ala Rick and Morty (Score:2)
Wow, it's pretty much the exact plot of Contact, only destructive. Which is how Rick and Morty played it a few years ago.
Best hack (Score:4, Insightful)
The best hack the aliens could possibly do is give us plans that LOOK like they'll create something we really want, like an interstellar warp drive, infinite clean energy or the like, but once turned on it actually blows up the planet.
I can imagine the equivalent of drunk frat boys doing that for the lulz.
Even more insidious ... (Score:3)
Even more insidious: They could give use plans to something that actually works as advertised, as long as is is built with eight sigma accuracy. Anything worse, and it'll blow up the solar system.
In a few years, they'll know whether we are worthy as manufacturing contracto
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The best hack the aliens could possibly do is give us plans that LOOK like they'll create something we really want, like an interstellar warp drive, infinite clean energy or the like, but once turned on it actually blows up the planet.
Even better if it actually did nothing and humanity spent the next 200 years trying to get it to work. Seriously, the galaxy could be filled not with malicious conquering species, but with a bunch of pranksters who are going to haze us into the Galactic community. Hey guys that was a good one eh? And after 200 years... here are the real plans which work nothing like that.
Re:Maybe it already happened (Score:4, Informative)
We got applied nuclear fission (and fusion soon after) at almost exactly the same time we got long-range rocketry working. Coincidence?
I enjoy this kind of conspiracy theory, but unfortunately it doesn't really stand up. Getting a working nuclear bomb requires high explosives (in shaped charges) to achieve the critical mass at a density that maintains a chain reaction for long enough. This is basically the same sort of chemistry that you need for rocket propellants. Nuclear fission reactors require materials science able to build the containment vessels, which are very similar to rocket exhaust jets in requirements.
Rockets are very old, it's only the advances in materials sciences that made large human-carrying ones possible. There's a long chain of discoveries going back to the 19th century the led to the discovery of fission, which is easy to achieve (though not to very useful degrees) once you can refine uranium. Refining uranium requires centrifuges that, again, depend on the materials technology to be able to build rapidly spinning things that don't fly apart.
Without the advances in alloys during the first world war, we probably wouldn't have had either rockets or fission in the second world war. As to fusion, once you discover fission is possible then fusion is pretty obvious and a Farnsworth Fusor is fairly easy to build (though building one that's energy positive is, so far, not possible).
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Umm, no. It's not. Rocket propellants BURN, they don't explode.
Umm, no. For one thing, rocket exhaust jet
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I'm not sure you have the history of isotopic separation quite right. The Manhattan Project used cyclotronic separation (calutrons) and gaseous diffusion separation (uranium hexafluoride). According to Wikipedia, centrifugal separation was tried for the Manhattan Project but wasn't successful at the time. The maraging steels that are used for gas centrifuges weren't developed until the 1950s.
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Speaking of that, maybe they're not monolithic and another faction is feeding Elon Musk tech now. Solar cells and Mars colonization.
Perhaps it's a board game and we are the pieces. Perhaps our species was planted here and then populations or environment were guided in subtle ways by different players.
I wonder what "winning" would look like.
Star Ocean 4 (Score:4, Insightful)
(Spoilers for 10 year old game)
In Star Ocean 4, the protagonist gives the secret of Antimatter reactors to an alternate-universe earlier Earth (IIRC). This is done in order to skip over nuclear power, and the problems of nuclear proliferation. The prototype reactor goes out of control, and blows up the entire planet.
I wonder if alien hackers will get us to destroy ourselves 'for the lulz', that's probably more plausible than a supposedly logical reason. However, as anyone who's seen Contact will point out, there will be MUCH skepticism about any device/tech that aliens send us.
Actually... you know whenever a cosmic ray flips a bit? Alien hackers. That's my explanation from now on.
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Actually... you know whenever a cosmic ray flips a bit? Alien hackers. That's my explanation from now on.
I'm sold. Screw solar flares, it's all alien hackers. Letting my other IT buddies know of this new amazing updated information!
I wrote a story about that (Score:2)
Well, not only about hacking. An invasion by hostile aliens only takes 3 days because of their superior electronic warfare capabilities. Shameless self-slashvertising for anyone who is interested and can read German (sorry, no English!): Invasion der Ausserirdischen in Berlin-Mitte [amazon.de].
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I know because I've seen the movie!
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Or South Africa.
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John Ringo covered this in Live Free or Die, the first book of the Troy Rising series. When the Glatun just give the President and several other heads of state a phone call because our systems are so weak even a poor tramp freighter has the ability to just stroll through our networks and security with ease.
Many others have done it as well in one way or another, that one's just fresh in my mind from my latest re-read of the series.
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Of course, I'm not the first one. I'm a Science Fiction fan since I was seven years old and read several invasion stories as a preparation before I wrote my own account of how it could happen. :)
Bring down our culture? (Score:2)
Is there any way to help them?
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Is there any way to help them?
You could join their false flag army of "Russian" Twitter and Facebook trolls.
Nothing New Here Anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
These ideas were quite thoroughly explored around 1960 by Fred Hoyle and others. Hoyle's novel "A for Andromeda" and the associated BBC series describe events following the reception of a coherent set of messages apparently from a distant alien species. The messages contain detailed information - including the complete recipe for creating an intelligent (apparently) human individual. Then the question arises: who is she really, where do her loyalties lie, and since she may be far cleverer than any human being, how can we trust her?
Hoyle had also presented similar ideas in a slightly less extreme format in his novel "Ossian's Ride", in which a mysterious entity called the Industrial Corporation of Eire (ICE) buys up and cordons off the whole south-west tip of Ireland, establishing a futuristic city with amazingly advanced technology. Where did the knowledge come from?
Of course such stories skate lightly over the practical difficulties of decoding complex alien messages, but the core dilemma is very real. It is similar to the problem posed in James P Hogan's "Two Faces of Tomorrow" - arguably essential reading for anyone interested in AI - which asks, "if a computer system is clever enough to solve problems human beings can't, could they afford to trust it?"
Think on... (Score:2)
"Imagine: You're a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, aliens weigh in with knowledge that's a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose".
While this is a very plausible scenario, isn't it really an indictment of the stupid, irrational way we run our society? Any system t
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Interstellar travel through DNA hacking (Score:5, Insightful)
The 1995 movie Species (as bad as it was) had an interesting take on this.
In it, aliens broadcast a DNA recipe in the hope that a receiving civilization will cook that up in the flesh out of curiosity. The result then of course turns into a bloodthirsty monster ready to take over the planet. This seems like a clever solution to the difficulty of moving over interstellar distances. Why bother creating an entire fleet of Independence Day style spaceships to carry your civilization to new planets if a few megabytes of biological data could do the same.
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While the difference between individuals may only be a couple megabytes, the human genome is around a terabyte (able to fit on one of those quartz discs...). Over a long enough distance, that much data (sent via radio waves) is likely to get corrupted, and a receiver is unlikely to successfully be in place long enough to receive all that data. Also, if we replicate only one alien individual, there'd be diversity problems... and unless they were genetically engineered to have no negative recessive traits , t
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I remembered the size wrongly, I thought it was about 20MB but apparently it's about 800MB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
3 billion genes at 2 bits per gene.
It's a lot of data, but it's not like you're in a hurry, you can take an entire year to transmit that. And a science fictiony super-high-gain antenna that takes up the area of half a moon and uses up terawatts of solar power is still a whole lot easier to build than an interstellar spaceship.
Slow day at Slashdot? (Score:2)
Yep (Score:2)
Little wonder they don't want to come anywhere near us.
Trojan (horse) virus (Score:2)
So basically, a Trojan, nothing new really, just from a difference source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Or alternatively, they could run for president (Score:2)
Some say this has already happened.
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Found the "moron of the day". Think of me when you realize (very late, doubtlessly) what you voted for.
Maybe their hearts are in the right place (Score:2)
I'm no psychologist but... as a species we tend to delight in dividing into 'them' and 'us'. and then projecting onto the other one all of our own fears, failings and foibles. If there isn't a convenient bogeyman to blame, never mind we'll invent one; if the other side starts to appear reasonable, then it's a trick. Paranoia and propaganda is everywhere - and it serves the interests of the leaders(overt and hidden) to keep it stoked up [never mind truth or facts - broadcast the news we want people to want
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Somebody famous mentioned something like that a few years back. I can't remember what field he was in. They he said something to the effect, "Well now I've let the cat out of the bag, it won't work".
Or will it? (Cue Twilight Zone riff)
Oh please ... (Score:2)
If there are aliens that have developed feasible interstellar travel, our planet probably will be as interesting to them as a culture of common bacteria is to us. If someone has FTL, they are likely to be able to find and visit countless intelligent lifeforms in the universe. One resolution to the fermi paradox is that life in the universe is sort of a banality. While FTL travel might be not, I doubt a civilisation advanced enough would be interested in teasing/torturing us. Some alien kids, like in Steven
Things humans have already done to each other (Score:2)
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Ha! Somebody had to say it.
We need a new term like "to godwin a thread". To putin a thread? Pootin'? The kids like that one.
I too watched independence day (Score:2)
Really, a virus from a telescope???????
Build a roof (Score:2)
Of course paid for by these aliens.
Been there, done that (Score:2)
Pretty sure the Zuckerbergonians sent us the seeds of our doom back in 2004.
Ever since then, humanity appears to have been on an ever accelerating descent into imbecilic click-trollishness.
Sounds nuts to me... (Score:2)
While I don't doubt it could happen (just witness what Russia has been doing around the world), I think any alien race with the technology to do such a thing could easily be much more forceful and simply impose their will on us or destroy us.
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While I don't doubt it could happen (just witness what Russia has been doing around the world), I think any alien race with the technology to do such a thing could easily be much more forceful and simply impose their will on us or destroy us.
I'm more concerned about a Zombie Apocalypse or an AI singularity.
Not most scientists (Score:2)
Scientists are worried that space aliens might send messages that worm their way into human society -- not to steal our passwords but to bring down our culture.
Why is this written as if to imply that all scientists everywhere are worried about this? Just because a few people who are scientists have an idea doesn't make it wide spread or accepted. That's a really shady tactic used by journalists and politicians.
"Astrophysicists Michael Hippke and John Learned argue in a recent paper that our telescopes might pick up hazardous messages sent our way
So these two specific scientists have a theory. Why lead off with the idiotic implication that this idea is more widespread than it really is. It's the same tactic Trump uses when he says "people are saying..." when it's really one guy's drunken twitter
Pseudo-Science (Score:2)
Religions (Score:3)
Are trojan horses made to slow down our technical evolution and scientific recherches!
How far-fetched? (Score:2)
Maybe you've seen the 1996 film "Independence Day," in which odious aliens are vanquished by a computer virus uploaded into their machinery. That's about as realistic as sabotaging your neighbor's new laptop by feeding it programs written for the Commodore 64.
One can crash a smartphone with an emoji. I'm sure dumb coders exists everywhere in the Universe.
This story is bullshit (Score:2)
written by paranoiacs.
This is an old hard SF trope. (Score:2)
Many examples of this abound in various incarnations - Battlestar Galactica, The Killing Star, Species...
A common phenomenon (Score:2)
Aliens wouldn't hack our internet (Score:2)
They'd hack our minds.
The AI would hack our internet. Alien's only work on complex problems.
Wow Dooood (Score:3)
Being hacked by space aliens usually comes up right after deep discussions of whether God can create a burrito so hot that he couldn't handle it
Silly (Score:2)
Stupid story of the day . . . .
Utter Lack of Imagination (Score:2)
Imagine: You're a physicist... In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Who the hell is going to understand this alien "gift"? Who is going to figure out how these new equations relate to the physical world? Who is going to design materials and tools to use this new knowledge? Who is going to develop the next set of theories once we find the limits of this new science?
We might get answers to a lot of our outstanding questions, but we will not end up with fewer questions.
Religion pretending to be science. (Score:2)
This pseudo scientist, probably a cargo cultist, postulates a civilization powerful enough to make our sun go super nova, but petty enough to demand some things from us. What. could. they. possibly. want.? Unobtainium? Vibranium?
All they have to do (Score:2)
Standard Alien Stuff (Score:2)
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alien smart people vs. ancestral smart people (Score:2)
I think this already happens to all of us when we use knowledge from all the smart *people* before us. Would it be good to isolate a group of people and see if they could rediscover math and science "for themselves"? I think not. If the aliens understand the un
i'm an alien! (Score:2)
i'm an alien, and i got a disruptive particle physics theory - no really! http://erm.lkcl.net/ [lkcl.net] - proving the point that you don't have to be an alien to be completely ignored for introducing disruptive theories of physics...
but seriously, much of this is covered in numerous sci-fi books. and also in star trek ("the prime directive"). ian banks "the culture" series was the most noteworthy set of books that explored the introduction (discovery or theft) of technology above the level / maturity of the speci
I see where this is going ... (Score:2)
Alpha Centauri 419... (Score:3, Funny)
Mostly likely the message would just be:
Applicable greetings of the local stellar cycle to you! My name is Prince Xyzzy of the planet Grpwhvn in the Glubber system (known to you as Alpha Centauri). I have recently come into the possession of approximately 3.4x10^10 Qwatloos, and political necessity requires that I move them off-planet as soon as possible...
Thinking too hard I see (Score:2)
Why hack when some simple tricks like dropping a mountain sized piece of rock from orbit would likely end our civilization faster. Any alien race that has mastered Interstellar travel is already dealing with power levels that could blow our planet into dust if they really wanted to. If you really wanted to think this way how do we know that it wasn't aliens that dropped the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs off the planet and left mammals behind as a chance to reshape the planet!? Maybe we're the virus?
the alien shills are here on slashdot (Score:2)
Already happened, the shoe-shop ray (Score:2)
The good package or the big gun? (Score:2)
So maybe the plot of "Real Men" isn't as far-fetched as it appeared back in the eighties?
Illustrations missing from this story! (Score:2)
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So it's the Aliens now, is it? The story gets more credible by the day...
It's Russians *and* Aliens. He still denies the Russians, of course, yet he did acknowledge that the Aliens voted for Hillary.
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Did russia planted the other idiot too? Because without her, the idiot that got elected would be crushed by literally everyone else.
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Comprehension fail. He says that someone else claimed to have passed one, so it's that someone who thinks it.
Imagine I say that my science teacher told me had a bottle of phlogiston in the storeroom. It says nothing at all about my opinions on it.
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It's more likely that this is case of bored geeks than paranoia.
The two astrophysicists who wrote the paper probably started with a half-drunk discussion of the virus scene in Independence Day which mutated into a discussion of whether aliens could do the same to us. Being geeks, the logical thing was to write it up as a humorous paper positing an alien AI bent on the destruction of humanity and use some hand-wavy math to make it sound possible.
Unfortunately, there are stupid people who don't recognize hum
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Indeed. The least of which being that any alien species capable of destroying our sun, or even traveling to us, would be so uninterested in *anything* we could possibly offer them as to us not being worth their time.
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Way simpler than that...
"The attached message describes the method for total conversion of matter to energy, as well as the techniques necessary to limit the process to the small scales necessary for powering devices such as communications, computing, food synthesis, and transport. Simply decompress the attached message."
Human translation, "Whoever decompresses this message WINS. Get our guys in the bunker decompressing, and let the nukes fly to stop everyone else."
Aliens' secret, there is nothing in the