Could First Contact with Aliens Be Unsettling? with Author Trevor Williams

what would you think if you woke up one day to news that we had discovered an alien civilization over the years many have speculated about the effects of such a discovery on human civilization what would such a discovery mean for us no doubt some would simply not believe it others might not care and still others might panic and the context will be important if it's a distant signal from a civilization in some other part of the galaxy that would be one thing but if it were close it would be another my guest today is a fellow science-fiction author who has done extensive research into the psychology of first contact for his word and we dig directly into what might happen if and when we discover evidence of an alien civilization welcome to event horizon with John Michael Gaudi a [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Jonah's joined today by Trevor B Williams Trevor is a science fiction author whose novel eternal shadow was recently published his passion in the sciences were driven by his love of fiction novels and TV shows alike both of which received equal billing during his formative years in Brooklyn New York Trevor Williams welcome to the program thank you so much John is a pleasure no Trevor you have a book out eternal shadow fall of gods and the overall overarching premise of this book is first contact can you give us a little spoiler free synopsis of the story here sure so in 2014 a signal of undeniable alien origin is detected over the surface of Pluto three days later the source of that signal an object of unimaginable size destroys Pluto Neptune and Uranus scientists determine that this object will take about ten years to reach Earth and our protagonists to study researchers and the CEO of a large corporation find themselves as unlikely allies and the race to determine what if anything can be done to save us now you did a lot of research this is a hard sci-fi book which are particularly close to my heart what sort of research did you put in just to even write this no that's a great question and the research cover is a variety of different fields one big area that I really wanted to nail down was how humanity as a species would react to something of this magnitude occurring within our own solar system and and grasping with the idea that within a certain amount of time we may not exist anymore this kind of led me to a variety of different paths in the fields of psychology there is one paper that I found online by dr. Michael chechi which kind of talks about talks about first contact and and depending on what that contact looks like be kind of explores different directions in which humanity may may respond and it's not just about you know like ships coming to earth but you know covers the more nuanced forms of contact such as radio contact from light-years away how would people react would they crawl under their beds and pray or will they just keep on going as if you know nothing actually changed in their lives and there were several different conclusions that he's drew in terms of how humanity as a species should proceed given that we haven't yet made first contact with anything he showed there are three distinct directions the first was protective isolationism where humanity would basically cease attempting to make contact with anyone like and study research and blatant broadcasts of our existence due to the cosmos the second Direction was concerted global preparations so essentially preparing mankind for the day that we make first contact whether that's radio contact from a species like many light-years away or aliens coming to us physically basically you know preparing humanity psychological social and religion like religious and socio-economic levels like basically you know preparing us as best as we can without actually knowing whether or not something will happen and in the last position that that he said we could potentially go is enlargement of our metaphorical coastal strip so basically you know settling our solar system expanding beyond the earth leaving the cradle in which we're currently in because right now in the grand scheme of things all of our eggs are in one basket and that is and if anything were to come to us whether is biological or chemical or in Spore has some other form of nature that we just cannot understand or fathom and we're just and if we're not prepared you know we could very well just see ourselves regress significantly and so a large enlarging our coastal strip expanding beyond Earth would be another more permanent long-term solution towards how he would handle first contact there are also some articles that I've picked up from Psychology Today which also spoke a lot about how people respond to different kinds of external stressors and the idea of territoriality so taking this to a discussion of first contact if it were if we ever discovered that something that something or something came within our own solar system and we identified it as as extraterrestrial and origin what could that mean for Humanity as a whole and the answer largely like and the answer is that's all over the place I mean even if they don't do anything just the sheer just the evidence that they exist could completely change how people behave like UPS wells in people attending churches or people choosing not pay their taxes nice it seems to me that this would be very situational though because if you get just some distant steady signal you know just a just a signal let's say 1420 megahertz hydrogen line so that's gonna be different and have a different social impact then i if i annoy minh probe radioing us from the orbit of mars or something would so it would seem to me that it just depends on what form this takes what was the how did they deal with that you know did they look through any sort of scenarios and say well this is gonna be worse than this yeah so so they were different that words directions that first contact was explored in the case of something like radio contact for example especially in modern day where there's so many ways in which people can simply tune out something as momentous as first contact I mean there's it would be entirely plausible that you know like SETI and other institutions you know have processes and protocols that are supposedly in place to kind of deal with the eventualities that we make radio contact with uh with another species however if it's radio contact you know there may be a very large amounts of news coverage for a short period of time but in the end it's nothing that outside of the scientific community a majority would likely kind of stick themselves to in terms of a truly life-changing event now if it's something that's physical in nature as you said like a like a von neumann probe slowly converting the matter of a nearby planet that we could see with our telescopes with like you know just store-bought telescopes that's something that on the other hands could have a profound impact on how we ultimately respond to it it could be something as like I guess I guess the main difference is something that is physical that we can actually see that really can that really changes the game when compared to something that is more abstract like a radio signal if it's something that that we're able to actually see with our eyes to an extent that would be a very profound difference in in response I think it's also going to depend to you on what we actually know about it because if we if we get a SETI signal you know radio signal that's from I know 500 light years away so some distance and we just look at it and we see it and it's just a signal and there's no information it's just somebody's radar you know something like that that we've just inadvertently intercepted that's gonna be a lot different of a story than if we run across something that we do have information about for example say we come across a machine civilization one could say the reapers from Mass Effect and that we see this terrifying machine civilization doing things in the Milky Way that's a lot different than if it's just some signal that we accidentally picked up and all we can say is well those aliens have radar you know so bright would have a very different psychological effect because of those wouldn't you think absolutely similar to eternal shadow losing to gas giants in our own galactic backyard as it were is would have a very profound sociological impact that's something that I feel is this really fascinating especially if I think the biggest thing is whether or not there's any kind of threat to us you know people can certainly perceive that oh you've detected radio signals from another world what does that mean and people can immediately start dropping their own hypotheses as to the intentions of the originators of that signal however if it's something like the Reapers or like the object in my book then that kind of changes that can potentially change everything again I think then it's just a matter of time you know is there any amount is there a significant gap of time between anything physical or tangible that we see happening and that happening coming to earth or like is it five years a thousand years and that was an area that I also found very interesting regarding humanity in terms of attention and attention versus our own sense of like self-preservation like what like what does it take to keep an individual sufficiently you know happy or content with their life and when you look at things you know like what does it take for someone to really want to survive and once I think and this is something where I kind of think about Maslow's hierarchy to it to an extent or is pyramid where you kind of this the bases like if they have the food and food water and everything but if they if what is coming to us or what may or may not be coming to us takes a very long time who's gonna be paying who and if there's nothing that's actually changing for the masses who will be paying attention to this threat so essentially if the threat is coming the if it's coming from something that we can never have any interaction with or it if we do have interaction it's gonna be in five thousand years then people just go back to their normal regular lives and they just say well we'll deal with that when it comes but if it's something that's immediate then that's when you know something that just say something comes and enters orbit of Earth one day then that's different that's an immediate threat or a perceived threat anyway so people I guess would react completely differently in that case and basically freak out right yeah so that's taking it to the extreme so something like in district nine where I mean although I feel like the overall response in that was probably not as dramatic as I would have imagined but something like if they come literally to us you know there are spaceships that come to our planet Pippi any there's so many different movies that explore different avenues of this you know then even if they don't do anything them being that can cause an incredible impact on us not and like probably large even first world countries like we're talking you know potential for anarchy or collapse of less stable nations in the world just by an alien presence just being a great analogy to this would be something akin to Christopher Columbus and it's the idea of not just a technological disparity between two parties but sociological as well you know when the Spaniards and soon after you know like Western Europe started coming over across the Atlantic to what we now call the Americas natives you know were completely at of every of like in many ways were in awe of what they were seeing like horses like giant ships and you know it's like it was just completely baffling to them that this technology even existed but more but also on top of that their societies were just not prepared and there and there were many cases throughout that period of time when entire smaller civilizations in South America just simply collapsed over the years set like following the Spaniards like like exposing themselves and within the Americas was also I mean of course disease was a big factor and a lot of that too though right hey disease definitely was a factor but then it's also you know it's like even with disease being present there's also the question of just people's because of the fact that the Europeans were far more advanced in terms of their own the technologies and everything it was something that people certainly would have changed in terms of just seeing what was possible the idea of the discoverers meeting the discovered so is essentially going back to to sci-fi it's what Arthur Clarke mentioned that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic so when we if we were to see something like that there's no guarantee we'd even understand it that is right I do feel that there would be certainly a point where our underst our understanding of how the universe works would certainly come into conflict with what we may inevitably discover as time as time goes on and especially if something was it sufficiently advanced enough to come to us in one form or another whether it's just several probes that are just purely robotic in nature or something more grandiose like an actual interstellar spacefaring vessel so yeah so you would you would I guess the way to put it is that if it was so advanced that you couldn't recognize it then you wouldn't see it so if you do see something you're gonna understand it at least a little bit of it maybe not certain aspects of it but you're gonna understand something because you're you have obviously recognized it as an object right right you know at minimum we're no we're certainly not certainly not stupid that species we're certainly able to make a lot we're able to draw apply a few conclusions from just from what we see then it's just a matter of time you know how much time we have to try to understand what is in front of us if we saw something no such as of an object larger than entire planets coming towards us I like to think that you know given enough time we would be able to crack a little bit of what was you know under that galactic curtain in terms of how that object propels and how that object manages to traverse interstellar distances and we have to take a break we're doing today by Trevor beat Williams author of eternal shadow fall of Cod's and we're back with Trevor Williams now Trevor interdiscipline science is very important would be very important if we discover an object like what is in your book Leviathan they're gonna have to come together and they're gonna have to figure out you know what is this object what's you know what makes it tick how would that what would that look like so in my mind given the circumstances presented in in the book and given I think the key thing is time frame but even if we had like a period of years to figure something out one area that one thing I think would certainly happen behind the scenes is a lot of to an extent I wouldn't I wouldn't call it entirely global cooperation but certainly a level of partnerships and setting aside certain socio-economic concerns if it means we could come like different parties can combine their resources there are scientific aptitudes for the sake of understanding what it's coming towards them for the sake of sake of humanity in in many ways and this can be everything from joint partnerships between government and court and corporations between public and private sector to make this happen and that's something that I am very I do feel very strongly about it's something that we've seen in the past in terms of like major projects that like our own like the US government has taken on for example such as the interstate highway system which I feel is a very large undertaking now and of course the Apollo program and sending first satellites and in the first people on the moon significant amount of funds and resources and manpower were put towards programs like that and of course you know and that was just for I can in the case of the Apollo program you know that was largely in part competing with the Soviet Union and for not just technological supremacy but philosophical supremacy in terms of which ideology is right if something extraterrestrial were to make a very tangible presence within our lifetimes and that presence this was something that was in one form or another was coming to earth in a period of time that would be manageable for governments to react then I think we would certainly see a fair amount of cooperation some a lot of which I feel would be behind the scenes in part because even though and again that would also depend on whether or not the news of this extraterrestrial presence was made public this would this could go back to something like the radio signal granted it may be possible for people to miss up using their own store-bought store-bought mint possibly but if it's something that could be concealed is it worth concealing you know that particular event from the public for the sake of societal cought continuity while behind the scenes major partnerships are made government's pool funds and people and may be publicly we start see a sudden shift in global space programs and you know a lot more efforts being put towards businesses like SpaceX and ad astra you know it's interesting to think about it there's also just to go Douglas Adams on it there's also the possibility of the alien contact being innocuous and almost funny such as we discover a large piece of alien rebar concrete passing through the solar system it's just their trash you know and essentially if you were to walk around on parts of Earth that would be the way that you need that humans were here was because you would see plastic Pepsi bottles yes I do feel that if in the event we do start exploring the stars and we find evidence of extraterrestrial life trash space trash is certainly something that I would not be surprised would be is something up that we would that we would discover and it may not even be you know a giant piece of flying rebar it could be something as innocent as species first moon landing and their equipment just kind of frozen in time over eons whereas the home planet might have been completely blasted away one reason or another but I do think that is that is certainly a possibility but then when or if we make those kind of discoveries it's like what do we do with that information essentially it would be the it would be you know that would be something that again would cause an incredible wave of interest in the scientific community but the public in large part I feel would not be either made aware of it or would care yeah at least in the longtime een if it's something that's like I said just a piece of trash of some sort and it has no no value other than to say this came from an alien civilization but other than that it's just a piece of concrete that's going to be different than if it's a derelict ship or something like that where you're gonna have governments that want it and you probably aren't going to find out about it but given that we have zones in the solar system where Jupiter could be collecting you know various flotsam from around the galaxy it's an interesting idea to think about that that may be the first contact will be finding someone's trash yes and with the Voyager probe now slowly but surely exploring the outer confines of our solar system is going to be very interesting to see what we end up discovering out there not that we'll be able to pick up too much with it in terms of physical objects but I think it would be very interesting to see what happens but yeah it's like going back to the the example of the rebar or even better a derelict ship if it's something if it's an object that has value but there's no evidence of life that's where I think the idea of global cooperation would not be as present so there's a um there's another book that I've read that is very very much tackles this idea called Saturn run by John Sanford which covers the idea of finding an alien ship that made a stop near the planet Saturn and then it suddenly and that and something is left behind and that's pretty much it as far as contact goes and what happens without spoiling anything in the book what what you do see is instead of global cooperation or people realizing that oh wow we got a no get we have to band together and find out what's happening out there instead what we see are superpowers of that book they look like the global superpowers of that book competing to get there first and furthermore kind of sowing even more dissent and stress with between those two powers relationships now with your book eternal shadow fall of gods what motivated you to write this in the first place and how long did it take the more I think about it the more I realized I was likely motivated by old Star Trek episodes I'm a very huge fan of Gene Roddenberry's creations and notably the next generation but there are some old original series Star Trek episodes that I really loved - one of which involved a doomsday machine and I think that was a name of the episode - which basically was a planet-sized ship that destroyed planets by way hurry I remember the episode well yes so you know in retrospect I feel there is certainly a level of subconscious influence there but also then you know you have your Star Wars you know and the Death Star and other an idea of something so large that it just can't be processed by a human mind I even like the like I had a had a picture an art piece commissioned for my novel I never used it in the book but it's it kind of I had to have it created because it kind of encapsulates just the scale of something as large as a Leviathan like what something I'm just seeing this thing consuming or destroying a gas giant it's just hard like even I'm looking at it now it's hard to imagine like that really being a thing until it's right in front of you and even then I think a lot of people would have a hard time believing it it's interesting because I mean as a hypothetical mega-structure a planet destroyer is actually a while enormous you could go much further you could build a catalyst or something like that that's even bigger and it's just mind-boggling the scales that it's at least in principle possible to build on within this universe but and the universe generally does that stars are big you know most of them most of the things the universe does that are huge and what what the reality of it is is that we're just so small and insignificant that it's just hard to fathom the it's just the scale of everything whether it's the size of the universe or what's possible to be you know we exist within it yeah I totally agree and it's that level of fascination and wonder that I really kind of embodied here just taking this what if you know the fiction in hard sight and in the hard science where I wanted to just explore how we would respond how different types of technologies might be utilized whether they are currently in existence today or are in various stages of research or have been mothballed and suddenly arbois are brought back from just being a of text on a dusty shelf in a lab somewhere and bringing all that to life for the sake of learning and discovery just simply fascinating to me where can people get eternal shadow fall of gods it can't is available through Amazon Barnes and Noble certainly Google Play and those are the big three and it is available as an e-book and paperback and time for a question out of left field favorite solution to the Fermi paradox whoo okay gut gut response we're in a zoo the the so the idea where we haven't detected anything because other species are preventing us from discovering anything for the sake for our own sakes the idea that that other species know that we exist and they are either choosing to not respond or they are hiding evidence of their existence or they are manipulating what our own technology could potentially see for the sake of either isolating us or simply using us as a control against other kind of experiments and they don't want us to know that they are there it's interesting it could be incremental contact in such a situation so that you don't get contacted for example until you try to make advanced artificial intelligence then you become a threat to everybody in the galaxy because you could lose control over it so it's sort of one of those things where you're in a zoo up until you get to a certain point then you find out there's alien life everywhere I kind of find that one of the more terrifying scenarios don't you I think it says a lot about they can say a lot about the state of the universe in terms of how civilizations can potentially advance or it could say a lot about humanity and how we are just so like at a base level so territorial where we would rather either prevent others from advancing for our benefit or if we met something that was that suddenly became our equal we would want to do everything we can to understand it before unleashing it to the greater world as as a whole I do think it's quite they can't the implications of the zoo hypothesis I think are very interesting and scary they are and then the variance of it you know for example that they're simply even worrying us you know they're not hiding from us they're just ignoring us and it sort of evokes actually by fit one of my favorite sci-fi novels rendezvous with Rama where aliens simply didn't care about us and we just weren't interesting enough and that you got to wonder what the psychology that would be what if we saw an alien probe passed through the solar system and kept going would the psychology then be everybody was disappointed or what why didn't they give us any attention type of thing it could go that way or it could be if it was something that we knew or identified as truly artificial and it came and went even coming as as far as you know within our own solar system it could also be a trigger for inspiration driving people to want to find out where it was going and to do whatever it took to get us going in that direction which I think could go it could cause more harm than good but it could also be very beneficial for mankind a sense of kick in the pants from his plactic standpoint to get our act together and not focus inward so much do you expect that we will see some evidence of intelligent alien life anytime within the next 100 years do you think we're close to that or do you think that's just not likely to happen in reality or what do you think in my heart I would love to be there if we made any kind of contact or something made contact with us but at the same time I can't help but feel we're at it like we're at a point in history where humanity can take such incredible strides forward but at the same time we haven't crossed that a maturity threshold that that another answer to the Fermi paradox where we haven't crossed a point where we won't potentially destroy ourselves or this or sufficiently damaged our civilization to the point where we just regress hundreds of years backwards so I mean I feel like we are at a point we can make many decisions that could take us main different directions but I guess the single side of me says that no we likely won't see anything happen but at the same time I just America dinh me is holding out hope oh yeah I'm sort of the same way I I don't know that we'll ever tell ever see it but I would like to see it and I hope it's nice when it happens and I hope it doesn't involve the loss of two gas giants all right Trevor it was a pleasure talking to you today this was this was great thank you so much for having me out here today yep and we'll have you back next uh for the next book you do oh thank you so much I look forward to uh bringing more of this universe of mine into your hands there are some indicators of what might happen if a radio signal or some evidence of an alien civilization or surfaces on the one hand there was Orson Welles and the War of the Worlds though it's often overstated what the effect of that actually was if you really thought that Martians were invading but at the time the idea that Mars had a civilization living on it was rather widespread in the West due to talk of canals being visible on its surface which really turned out just to be an optical effect from the telescope and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking and then there is the opposite side of the coin which is more disconcerting finding evidence of an alien civilization or never finding it at all are we alone John what is the a person holding that's the carburetor from the LeBaron we'll have to have that recycled the possums building a rocket the a possum is no it's building a rocket John the heck it's not for corns sake the possums gonna do a launch from the backyard you had something to do with this didn't you no John not a fool [Music]

Channel: Event Horizon

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Keywords: Could First Contact be Unsettling?, alien civilizations, alien, first contact, intelligent life, SETI, comet borisov, oumuamua, John Michael Godier, Event Horizon, ASMR, Event Horizon Godier, Sci-fi, science fiction, science, space, universe, fermi paradox, drake equation, documentary, interview, von neumann probe, alien invasion, Eternal Shadow, Trevor Williams, Trevor B Williams

Id: 8vnlat2stYM

Length: 37min 44sec (2264 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020