Some scientists worry that beaming signals into space could lead extraterrestrials to conquer Earth, as in the TV series ‘3 Body Problem.’ But wouldn’t they be more interested in learning about us?
Thanks to the popularity of Netflix’s new series “3 Body Problem,” we have a new existential threat to worry about: humanity’s urge to blab to the cosmos. In the series, based on a trilogy of novels by the Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin, greetings naively sent into space doom the Earth to conquest by extraterrestrials. As sci-fi horror scenarios go, this one is quite respectable. Sociologists, game theorists and astrophysicists like Stephen Hawking have been warning for decades against transmitting signals that could reveal humanity’s location to interstellar predators.
The worriers argue that there’s a good reason we haven’t detected signals from any other intelligent life in the universe: The only civilizations that survive are the ones smart enough to keep quiet. A species that jabbers as soon as it learns to transmit radio signals could fatally attract the attention of an older civilization with much more advanced technology, just as the European discovery of America led to the decimation of the native population.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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John Tierney, a contributing editor for City Journal, is the co-author of “The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It.”
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