First contact with aliens is coming soon – but will the aliens care? Not according to famed physicist Michio Kaku who said, during a recent Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) which focused mostly around his new book The Future of Humanity, that any extraterrestrial life form that we encounter probably won’t view us as anything more than forest animals. Like chipmunks. Or bears, maybe.
Contact
Humanity’s immediate future, in the mind of Kaku, and the minds of the eager amateur scientists asking him questions, certainly involves aliens. But while many have worried that our first contact with extraterrestrial life will be devastating to humans, a la Alien, Independence Day, or The Day the Earth Stood Still, others have speculated that a more peaceful, and mutually beneficial first meet, a la Arrival, or even 2001: A Space Odyssey, is likely.
Although something like E.T. probably won’t be the case, as chances are these life forms will be considerably more advanced than we are. They certainly won’t need a rotary phone to “phone home,” or really have much interest in us lower life-forms at all.
This is Kaku’s theory at least, as he said,
“…talking to them will be difficult, since they could be tens of light years away. So, in the meantime, we must decipher their language to understand their level of technology. Are they Type I, II, or III??? And what are their intentions. Are they expansive and aggressive, or peaceful. Another possibility is that they land on the White House lawn and announce their existence. But I think that is unlikely, since we would be like forest animals to them, i.e. not worth communicating with.”
Aliens will be much, much smarter than we are
And Elon Musk sending his luxury automobile out into outer space with a “Made on Earth by humans” stamp probably won’t impress them much either.
Figuring out their level of technological sophistication will come, namely, through the Kardashev Scale; what Kaku was describing. Type 1 will have all of the energy of their closest star for use and storage at their (hypothetical) fingertips (and we still quibble here about using solar power simply to heat our homes…).
A civilization at Type IV, something Kaku believes to be a likely first-contact scenario, is a civilization able to utilize the energy/power of the entire universe, and potentially some from beyond it.
And us humans? We rank at measly 0.7.
An extraterrestrial civilization would have to be at least a Type I to be able to make contact with us from outside our solar system.
So they won’t want to kill us?
Probably not.
As Kaku theorizes, an advanced civilization like one that could make contact would have had “…thousands of years to resolve sectarian, fundamentalist, nationalist questions,” meaning, basically, that they won’t be as primitive and warmongering as we are.
But that doesn’t leave us completely in the clear, either:
“However, they still might be dangerous if they simply don’t care about us and we get in the way. In War of the Worlds, the aliens did not hate us. We were simply in the way. In the same way that a developer is a threat to forest animals because he can pave the first, the danger there is from someone who sees that we are just in the way. But for the most part, I think they will be peaceful, but view us like we view forest animals.”
Which is the second time that he compared us to chipmunks. Though, as he also mentions, if they do arrive here, curious, looking to hunt, camp etc. as we do when we step into a forest, better to be something innocent, like a chipmunk, than something draws their attention negatively, like a bear – in which case action might be taken after all.
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