“It looks like something out of science fiction”

November 8, 2017 7:42 PM

What Happens If China Makes First Contact? "As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose."
posted by homunculus (51 comments total)

First Chinese restaurant on Mars!
posted by sammyo at 7:52 PM on November 8, 2017 [1 favorite]

What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

Well, let's face it, it's probably for the best.
posted by Artw at 7:53 PM on November 8, 2017 [24 favorites]

tl;dr: We're fucked.
posted by mikelieman at 7:59 PM on November 8, 2017

America would have won like 30 turns ago if they had just kept grinding the tech tree for the Space victory but then they decided to go for Cultural and now they're just sort of randomly clicking around.
posted by theodolite at 8:04 PM on November 8, 2017 [99 favorites]

The article seemed nearly as long as Moby Dick, and the only mention of the size of the big radio telescope seems to be that it is "nearly twice the diameter of the Arecibo dish." It did have a bunch of interesting stuff in it, but not of the factual variety so much.

For those interested in the telescope, Ars Technica had an article with a few facts, including the diameter of the dish: five hundred meters, and a much bigger photo.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 8:11 PM on November 8, 2017 [3 favorites]

Obligatory XKCD.
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:14 PM on November 8, 2017 [9 favorites]

Yet again I feel kind of shitty for not actually liking Three Body Problem enough to persist with it.
posted by Artw at 8:16 PM on November 8, 2017 [9 favorites]

KITZ: So I'll just come directly to the point, shall I? Your having sent this announcement all over the world may well constitute a breach of national security.
ARROWAY: Boy. This isn't a person-to-person call. You can't possibly think that a civilization sending this kind of message would,... would intend it just for Americans?.
KITZ: I'm saying you might have consulted us. Obviously the contents this message could be extremely sensitive.
ARROWAY: You want to classify prime numbers now??!!
DRUMLIN: Mike, please...because of the earth's rotation, we're only in line with Vega so many hours a day. The only way we can completely monitor the signal is to get the cooperation of other stations. If Dr. Arroway hadn't acted quickly, [raising voice over the volume of Kent's playback] we could have lost key elements...
KITZ: Okay, fine. They've got the primes, but if you're right about there being a more significant transmission still to come--
ARROWAY: Which would also still need the network's help to receive and decode, by the way...
KITZ: Doctor, do you understand that my job is to protect...
KENT: Shhhh! What's thaaat...

--Contact(1997), Carl Sagan
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:36 PM on November 8, 2017 [10 favorites]

What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

That's impossible. Science fiction has demonstrated in great volume that aliens only understand English*, duh.

Ignoring the Firefly Universe for a moment
posted by Brockles at 9:00 PM on November 8, 2017 [8 favorites]

China cannot make First Contact with the Viet and Champa without causing a dynastic crisis among the murder-ponies that rode in from the west. The Thai are straight out of the discussion when we're talking the greater Empire, as they're no-kidding nuts when it comes to their monarchy. Murder-ponies ruling China got wiped out twice by the little island shop-keepers across the Sea of Japan. Let's blame the weather! This is straight up the mightiest empire in the world. They cannot deal, yet persist. This is before world-ending weaponry, tho.

OHHHH, look. Here comes Cult Christianity landing with a light touch! That won't result with hundreds of millions dead, nope.

Believe it or not, it gets worse. Opium Wars. Boxer Rebellion (where they tried to fight armored warships with kung fu, no really.)

The history of China is made interesting by First Contacts - and by interesting I mean a litany of horror and hell. I'm kind of siding with The Mighty Steven Hawking in that maybe we better shut up and listen a bit? Read the room? Figure out why no-one else is talking?
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:05 PM on November 8, 2017 [5 favorites]

Well, we won't make "contact" with a radio telescope. If China found proof of extraterrestrial life this way, it would be at minimum thousands and more like millions of years delayed. Same for if the US built an even bigger telescope and found it first. It's not like we would pick up interstellar signals and then China would beat us to the reply button and reap all the alien technology. Unless an alien starship warps into the Solar System, any discovery of alien life has more philosophical implications than practical ones on a human timescale. You know, unless they beat us to FTL travel.
posted by T.D. Strange at 9:05 PM on November 8, 2017 [4 favorites]

The reactions in this article illustrate the sheer impossibility for humans to understand how huge the universe really is, the scale of distance and time involved. Even if the nearest civilization were extremely close, 1% of the distance across our galaxy, it would take a 2,000 years to communicate a simple message and response. We aren't talking about contact on the scale of human civilizations. Probably not even on the scale of the human species
posted by happyroach at 9:41 PM on November 8, 2017 [8 favorites]

It's not like we would pick up interstellar signals and then China would beat us to the reply button and reap all the alien technology.

Unless the signals that get picked up are the alien equivalent of "HEY GUYS HERE'S HOW TO BUILD FTL TECHNOLOGY COME OVER AND PARTY". Startegic analysis that tries to guess what an alien civilization would be up to seems to imply this wouldn't happen, but the possible benefits of having alien information nobody else has cannot really be evaluated.
posted by Dr Dracator at 9:51 PM on November 8, 2017 [3 favorites]

Yeah, the similarity to Dark Forest/ Three Body Problem Is striking in a way that... it seems like more and more we're experiencing a collapse of fiction and 'reality.' This is a little more than mildly concerning.
posted by From Bklyn at 9:55 PM on November 8, 2017 [12 favorites]

Just under 500 years ago, lenses allowed humanity to count the planets of our Solar System like a child counts blocks; 200 years, spectroscopy allowed us to remotely determine a source's constituents across spans of time/space. That means has been greatly enhanced and explored in the last one hundred years. We're not yet teenagers (to employ a weak analogy) in a span of evolution not readily given a span.

Assume a level of technology equal to our own and extend its development by, say, a thousand years, or ten. I grew up reading SETI, a juvenile's magazine and I am dismayed by the most common speculations when it comes to seeding life (meteors, as though something as substantial as a planet does not contain the sufficient internal processes to await some metaphorical sperm), what comprises life (Louis B. Young's, The Unfinished Universe), and what awaits our contact. From the get-go, it's pitiable 60s phrases like "penetrating" outer-space in a race around our moon, onto Mars and gods of war...so few antidotes to chauvinisms most macho, such as considered and critical readings of Solaris and its derivative expressions...versus the replete otherisms and curious framings of popular discourse.

GAAHHHHH
posted by lazycomputerkids at 10:41 PM on November 8, 2017 [2 favorites]

Yet again I feel kind of shitty for not actually liking Three Body Problem enough to persist with it.

Don't; we all have a list of things we feel that we should like, but that we just don't. I just made another attempt to enjoy Pat Martino's El Hombre, for example, with no success except understanding where people who hate jazz are coming from.
posted by thelonius at 11:00 PM on November 8, 2017 [4 favorites]

China gets the invasion, I suppose. I’m sure the aliens will have enough energy to attack New York in the canonical manner eventually, but Beijing and Shanghai get destroyed first. They might do a montage and throw in like, Delhi, Paris, Istanbul and London.
posted by Segundus at 11:36 PM on November 8, 2017 [8 favorites]

"他们应该派出诗人!"
posted by FJT at 12:59 AM on November 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

Who can survive everything but a misprint. _{cribbing Oscar Wilde}
posted by lazycomputerkids at 2:02 AM on November 9, 2017

It'll probably stop working when the warranty expires anyway.
posted by The Seeds of Autumn at 2:32 AM on November 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

China gets the invasion, I suppose.

Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung instead of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum. You know what? The movie I just made in my head is amaaaaaazing!
posted by Literaryhero at 3:45 AM on November 9, 2017 [8 favorites]

To build on what Dr Dracator was saying, perhaps there is a galactic kind of LTE rolling around outerspace that allows connection to the intergalactic internet and we just don't have the frequency or whatever. Whoever taps into that will suddenly have access to all the information in the universe, which would be a pretty big deal.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:57 AM on November 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

This does assume, of course, that contact hasn't already been made. Governments are surprisingly good about keeping secrets, despite the popular opinion otherwise.
posted by MikeWarot at 4:25 AM on November 9, 2017

This does assume, of course, that contact hasn't already been made. Governments are surprisingly good about keeping secrets, despite the popular opinion otherwise.

My sarcasm meter is taxed...why are those scenarios inclusive? A superior intelligence writes letters to a Senator? (Which does matter, in number, from earth-bound constituents.) Clarke and Kubrick's intelligence spurred cooperative conflict.

But, exactly! What is contact? A treaty? War? But to address the OP, scanning for signals, whether by the Chinese or not, is a matter of being left behind? Oh, we'd be in a better position to beat them had we not dropped a ball? Take me to your leader?

O Fates! O Bowie, is there life on Mars? Because life on Earth, its silver screens and beating up the wrong guy...on and on...
posted by lazycomputerkids at 5:09 AM on November 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

"And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth ."
posted by dannyboybell at 5:16 AM on November 9, 2017 [6 favorites]

...America... randomly clicking around

I like how if one squints while reading that, the "c & l" combine to look like a "d" - very clever...
posted by jkaczor at 5:29 AM on November 9, 2017 [2 favorites]

galactic kind of LTE rolling around outerspace

This is exactly why we are not hearing advanced civilizations. Because as our communications technology evolves, if you do not know the underlying algorithms - it sounds like noise.

We wanted higher-bandwidth - so, we spread the signals across higher frequencies (we can thank actress Hedy Lamarr for spread spectrum, frequency hopping/shifting) and if you were an alien, listening to only a few frequencies - the results would sound like noise. As well - we have gone with higher and higher frequencies... Which do not travel very far...

So - if this is how our technology is advancing, then... perhaps theirs went this way too.
posted by jkaczor at 5:38 AM on November 9, 2017 [5 favorites]

My sarcasm meter is taxed...why are those scenarios inclusive?

Oh my the snark does write itself, but on a much more serious track/derail, let all the countries boost their SCIENCE programs, build up STEM warriors that learn and teach and understand the details of the amazing world, solar system, galaxy and beyond. An educated enemy is our best defense. Bring everyone up and beyond our level.

Who ever gets an authentic non-noise message from another non-local entity, it'll be great, does not matter who. Even if it's from outer Whoville.
posted by sammyo at 5:47 AM on November 9, 2017

Radio-listening isn't that interesting or much of a way to have a giant leap forward. Iassic Arthur on his youtube channel points out how big space is and echos the comment of TD Strange - the time delay won't be helpful.

If one is "worried" about what China is doing - going to the moon should be a greater concern. Economic and military advantages by occupying and holding the high ground of the moon should be what one watches.

You COULD worry about what's on youtube. Because THAT arbitrator of truth says:

If one thinks Richard Hogland is correct, the Chinese will be going BACK to the moon with a rocket-powered retrieval robot (in 2017) to the landing site of Chien-3 and get some of the sweet, sweet opalescent glass from the million+ year old moon domes and return 'em to Earth. Along with the secrets of hyperspacial* torsion physics

AND the dangers of the Nazi moon bases and their influence on the returning Chinese robots should also not be overlooked.

* the spell correction was hyperventilation. I liked it better, but went with what the guy claims.
posted by rough ashlar at 5:56 AM on November 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations.

That's patronizing angle. Perhaps Ross if reconsiders an inscrutable line of inquiry, Ross may get around to investigation what else is loaded on that satellite.
posted by marycatherine at 7:12 AM on November 9, 2017

"As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence..."
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:20 AM on November 9, 2017 [5 favorites]

Thanks for this link - just the procrastination I need to indulge in. I ranted about our declining science funding in the recent POTUS45 thread - this is something I feel rather strongly about.

But it's a bit of a stretch to say that "China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose" - SETI might be one of the goals, but it is far from the only goal and not even a primary goal, really.

(Honestly, after listening to the party bosses and ministers who came out to the reception for us astronomers at FAST, the primary goal seems to be a demonstration of China's industrial and technical might, and a declaration that they intend to be a player in basic science - to which all I can say is, well done and welcome!)

To get technical about it for a second: for surveys that are constrained in some way (total time on telescope, or available number of grad student hours, or what have you), there's always a trade-off between going wide and going deep. With a big single dish, the field of view is tiny, so surveys have to scan quickly to cover a reasonable amount of the sky.

People have thought hard about this, and converged on building interferometers out of many small dishes instead. You can get the same collecting area in your light bucket from one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses, but the field of view of a small dish is much larger than the field of view of a large dish. What's the catch? The catch is, it takes an enormous amount of computing to synthesize a large telescope out of an array of small dishes - if you have N dishes, the computing cost scales as N-squared, while the collecting area grows as N.

The US SETI community started with the Allen Telescope Array, but - long, sad, complicated political story - effectively ran out of money. Modern radio astronomy is very focused on arrays - the Very Large Array, ALMA, LOFAR (Europe), ASKAP (Australia), MeerKAT (South Africa), and eventually the SKA.

Meanwhile, there are some kinds of science that are still better done with large single dishes, and we expect that FAST will clean up in those areas...

(Also, I read Three Body Problem, but had a very hard time getting into the narrative flow. Which is like, blasphemy - what can I say.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:28 AM on November 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

I got as far as the VR game and gave in to boredom, what can I say?

(Except that if you want to boot me out of an SF novel a heavily didactic VR sequence is a real good way to do it.)
posted by Artw at 9:32 AM on November 9, 2017

...and if you were an alien, listening to only a few frequencies - the results would sound like noise.

Theory without practice.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 10:40 AM on November 9, 2017

What will happen? They'll buy a whole planet for one lousy bead.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 11:00 AM on November 9, 2017

Theory without practice.

Practice
posted by jkaczor at 12:05 PM on November 9, 2017

(Also, I read Three Body Problem, but had a very hard time getting into the narrative flow. Which is like, blasphemy - what can I say.)

The problem with the Three Body Problem and its successors is that it ignores such passe western contrivances as character development and action in favour of plot delivered by vast tracts of expositional dumps, sometimes delivered by cardboard characters (curiously - many of these have the position of General) but mostly just injected directly into the reader's eyeballs.

The solution to enjoying it, then, is not to treat it as a novel, per se, but as the Wikipedia plot summary of another, depressingly larger book that the author has saved you the trouble of reading - allowing you to get to the next Quite Interesting Idea, which is the actual point of the writing, that much faster.
posted by Sparx at 12:09 PM on November 9, 2017 [2 favorites]

Any premise of were you an alien hasn't a practice...until, appropriately, contact.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 12:12 PM on November 9, 2017

The problem with the Three Body Problem and its successors is that it ignores such passe western contrivances as character development and action in favour of plot delivered by vast tracts of expositional dumps

This is pretty unfair - a lot of classic SF (Asimov, Clarke) is equally guilty of this.
posted by theodolite at 12:37 PM on November 9, 2017 [4 favorites]

Want to rewrite that to be a little less... I dunno, racist?.

Fair enough. I suppose character development and action aren't actually that passe (sorry, western lit), but I have to say that when confronted with their lack in 3-body et al I devoured it and gave copies to everybody.
posted by Sparx at 1:15 PM on November 9, 2017

Any alien life will either be far more advanced or far more primitive. If it's far more primitive, then it won't be sending radio signals unless it's biology is wildly different. If they are far more advanced, then regardless of any "prime directive" they obey their culture will eventually erode ours.

We might even be primitive enough that studying our planet's biodiversity is more interesting to them than studying our culture. I've strangely never read an "alien invasion" story that begins with tiny robots giving extremely aggressive cancer to a great many of the people who work for the fossil fuel and agriculture industries.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:36 PM on November 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

Right now, social control remains among the primary interests of China's leadership and remains deeply embedded in their culture. We believe social control leads to stagnation, culturally of course, but also scientifically and technologically. We should worry less about alien invasions, and more about our leaders copying the worst parts of ascendant Chinese culture, especially when China is mobilizing AI for social control on a massive scale.

We won't be invaded by aliens but we might be obliterated by an asteroid. It's wonderful if China invests in searching for dangerous asteroids, but.. It's also quite possible that 100 years from now we'll all still be sitting on our asses on this rock, China will be the world's only superpower, and Chinese leadership will have taken such deep control over technological advancement that better avenues to detect or avert annihilation, or settle Mars, go unexplored.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:37 PM on November 9, 2017

Atlantic doesn’t seem to like my browser but I read a similar article on a different news site. I have to ask though, I don’t understand why radio is the communication method of choice. I don’t know much about physics but it seems a little lacking. Like we’re betting on the idea that not only is there life on other planets, but that

- the life is intelligent, whereas I’d bet there are all sorts of self-replicating, external input-processing organisms that we might call ‘life’ but are perhaps no more intelligent than animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.

- the life is motivated to engineer long-distance communication. Maybe they are intelligent but not predisposed to engineering? What if they’re like super-smart whales or elephants and they already have biological means of long-distance communication and also they lack appropriate appendages to build things?

- the life has the same idea of communicating with other planets and are using light as their preferred method of communication. What if they’re blind and don’t perceive the world via light waves? What if they communicate entirely via complicated pheromones and chemical signaling like ants? Then they might reach the conclusion that interstellar communication is just impossible. What if there’s some entire branch of physics and the universe that we have no idea about yet that would allow some totally different means of communicating in and/or perceiving our surroundings? 100 years ago, did we know some animals can sense the magnetic field of earth? What if we’re the ones actually missing some form of communication being sent to us right now?

- that even if they fill out all this criteria of using radio, it would even reach us. It just seems like we’re banking on this tiny little sliver of probability to reach aliens.

I have a whole different rant about the supposed “goldilocks zone” but I’ll refrain since it’s off topic.
posted by alexlaw at 3:42 PM on November 9, 2017

China is mobilizing AI for social control on a massive scale.

So China is going to create Samaritan? That's just peachy.
posted by homunculus at 5:42 PM on November 9, 2017

Peachy!
posted by homunculus at 5:47 PM on November 9, 2017

When comparing how Chinese literature makes a readable story for western readers, I am reminded of this.

There are approaches that work, and approaches that don't.

On the gripping hand, I would not recommend East Asian readers attempt The Naked Lunch or I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream as a gentle introduction to American speculative fiction.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:09 PM on November 9, 2017 [3 favorites]

It just seems like we’re banking on this tiny little sliver of probability to reach aliens.

Well, yes. I'm a big skeptic* of this sort of project but that is pretty much what even the supporters think. Low chance of success, potentially big impact.

I would say that most of your objections would only matter if we are a unique type of life; that is a lot of life could be what you say and it would just mean that's not the life this sort of thing would detect. As long as some life if like us in certain broad categories SETI makes sense on its own terms, anyway.

As to the signal strength, the article claims that the new Chinese telescope could detect even leaking radio waves.



*to the point that I only came to the thread to hate read the article, and am consequently let down that while I didn't like the thing it has almost nothing to do with it's silly headline.

Because seriously, nothing would happen if China discovered faint alien radio signals, other than Chinese names being on the paper. Oh, that and endless sanctimonious lectures about how bad we Americans are at science.
posted by mark k at 8:22 PM on November 9, 2017 [1 favorite]

>> I don’t understand why radio is the communication method of choice.
> When you are holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Well, it's a little bit more sophisticated than that - although not by much, I'll give you that. It's more like when you've pawed through the entire toolbox and the only useful thing you've found is a hammer, you hope that the thing sticking out of the wooden block there is a nail.

alexlaw, your comment touches on several well-considered issues. And believe me, we think about them!

> We’re betting on the idea that not only is there life on other planets, but that the life is intelligent, whereas I’d bet there are all sorts of self-replicating, external input-processing organisms that we might call ‘life’ but are perhaps no more intelligent than animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.

Absolutely true. The scientific focus in the professional astronomy "search for life" community is the search for bio-signatures, this idea that if you looked for example at the spectra of Mars, Earth, and Venus, one of those things does not look like the others - and one way of getting out-of-equilibrium situations is by processes that we collectively think of as "life". (In this case, photosynthesis.)

SETI is just pushing one step further - if life emerges, might it also become intelligent, and technology-using? What if that happens 1 time in 100, but life emerges on every planet it possibly could?

> life is motivated to engineer long-distance communication. Maybe they are intelligent but not predisposed to engineering?

Right, same answer. The search for biology will only reach nearby planets and exoplanets. (I mean, we still can't say for sure that Enceladus does not harbor bacterial life.) But if technological life exists, it might be detectable a LOT further away. Assuming the existence of life, if the detection volume scales faster than the rarity of emergence of technology, then SETI is a worthwhile task.

> life has the same idea of communicating with other planets and are using light as their preferred method of communication. [...] What if we’re the ones actually missing some form of communication being sent to us right now?

Well, electromagnetic waves are damn convenient. They travel fast and go far, and are very easy to manipulate. In contrast, we need gigantic tanks to detect neutrinos, and we've only just directly detected gravitational waves from astronomical events with billion-dollar detectors. We could certainly imagine a gravity wave communication system - but mass comes with only one sign and gravity is so weak compared to electromagnetism (why? Physics would love to figure this out, but it quickly gets into 11-dimensional universes). So it's a lot harder to work with mass to generate gravity waves. I'd bet that a civilization that uses gravity waves, manipulates them using electromagnetic tools.

> even if they fill out all this criteria of using radio, it would even reach us. It just seems like we’re banking on this tiny little sliver of probability to reach aliens.

Yeah. Think about our transition from over-the-air broadcast TV - wildly inefficient - to the networks of cable TV and lower power local cellular coverage. Radiated power is inefficient. So even if an intelligent, technological, electromagnetic-wave emitting civilization exists, we might not see it. And then for perspective, look at this image. Just look at it. That's how far we've announced our presence - Hitler at the Olympics, early episodes of I Love Lucy, traveling out at the speed of light. That's less than a drop in the ocean.

But here's the flip side - if the evidence existed, wouldn't we be fools not to have at least looked?
posted by RedOrGreen at 7:28 AM on November 10, 2017 [3 favorites]

In other radio telescope news: Puerto Rico's Massive Telescope Is Still Running on Generators: The Arecibo Observatory is facing months of costly repairs after Hurricane Maria struck in September.
posted by homunculus at 9:42 AM on November 10, 2017

> In other radio telescope news: Puerto Rico's Massive Telescope Is Still Running on Generators: The Arecibo Observatory is facing months of costly repairs after Hurricane Maria struck in September.

But we took data this week! The first tracking observation since the hurricane. Of course, internet is going through microwave towers and probably someone's backyard satellite dish and unstable as hell, so we can't run the observations remotely yet - on-site operators have to run them for us. But baby steps.
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:51 AM on November 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

this thread is weird because it really seems like it's a way for a lot of westerners to let their fears about china out.... where it's a foregone conclusion that the west is best.

Of course no government is all sunshine and light, but at this moment it feels like the Chinese are the adults in the room. Forward planning and long term social stability are what the world needs right now, we are not getting that from the leaders in the West.
posted by Meatbomb at 3:09 PM on November 14, 2017