Will An Alien Understand ‘Hello’ If I Just Wave At It? Physicist Says Talking To ETs Might Be Easier Than Expected
I’m sure most of us have seen at least one movie about aliens, right? And let’s be real, they’re usually not portrayed in the best way – all mutated and with huge heads, ready to invade Earth or just the United States.
But here’s the thing: despite all the talk about UFO sightings and the possibility of alien life, we hardly ever discuss what we’d actually do if an alien showed up at our door tomorrow.
In the movies, the first instinct is always to scream for help. But what if aliens aren’t as scary as they’re made out to be? What if we could actually talk to them and find some common ground?
American theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll recently sat across Lex Fridman to discuss aliens among other topics of science.
Carroll’s take on alien life or a civilization beyond that of human beings was quite interesting.
“I think we should be very humble about these things we know so little about,” he said.
Carroll, “a sucker for in-person conversations versus remote” (as Fridman puts it), also thinks that we will be able to figure out how to talk to aliens if they ever happen to knock on our doors or fall through the roof.
“I think we would figure out that language thing pretty quickly. I mean, maybe not as quickly as we do when different human tribes find each other because obviously there are a lot of commonalities in humanity. But there is logic in math, and there is the physical world. You can point to a rock and go ‘rock.’ I don’t think it would take that long,” Carroll said.
2023 was a gala time for UFO mongers and alien advocates. A whistleblower’s allegations that the U.S. was holding alien spacecraft and running secret tests added fuel to the fire that has been burning for decades. Thanks to H.G. Wells’ “The War Of The Worlds” which instilled the fear of alien invasions.
While scientists (both from research organizations and the backyard ones) peer through their telescopes each night to catch an Extra-Terrestrial (ET) waving at them, Carroll thinks it is “not a very promising way” to find otherworldly civilizations.
“Why in the world would a super-intelligent alien civilization waste all of its energy by beaming it in random directions into the sky?” he asked.
“If an intelligent alien civilization exists for a billion years, they have to pinpoint exactly the right time to send us this signal. It is much, much more efficient to send probes and to park, to go to the other solar systems, just sit there and wait for an intelligent civilization to arise in that solar system.”
Human beings have yet to develop such probes. But I will be pretty excited to hop on one of them, land on a different planet and wave “hello” to the first watermelon-headed creature I see.
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