Should Humans Communicate with Aliens?
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2018
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For years, Shane Harris of The Washington Post has been fascinated with the search for extraterrestrial life in the universe. But that search raises a profound question: Should we try to communicate with aliens? Is there a risk to alerting a potentially hostile species to our presence? On July 12, Shane moderated a conversation hosted by Future Tense with Lucianne Walkowicz, the Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress, and NASA astrophysicist Elisa Quintana, to talk about the ethics of the search for ETs and the associated risks with trying to make contact.
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| 1:08.0 | One of the challenges is that space is really big. |
| 1:11.0 | And so, you know, to be able to travel even within our solar system is very challenging. |
| 1:16.0 | And outside of our solar system is essentially like impossible with a new human lifetime. |
| 1:21.0 | And so, you know, for like crafts to show up here, |
| 1:25.0 | one thing that we'd be assured of essentially is that they'd be from outside the solar system. |
| 1:30.0 | Otherwise, we wouldn't have actually detected them already. |
| 1:33.0 | Which means that they have solved like a major challenge in propulsion. |
| 1:39.0 | Which probably also means that they've solved them to energy challenges too. |
| 1:43.0 | Right? Because you don't like spend a whole lot of your resources going out into space |
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