Alien Civilization, A perspective.

When showing for the first time a couple of years ago, the movie Independence Day sure had captured the heart of millions of people with its thrilling plot and stunning computer graphic effects. It’s a movie stuffed with alien spacecrafts and actions, so to speak. After such a long time, the exhilaration should have all lost in the void that embeds planet earth. But one question lingers: how likely is an advance alien civilization visiting earth to be combative in nature, eager to fight and conquer anything that stands in the paths of their spaceships? My guess is, we are not likely to come across an alien civilization bound on conquest and annihilation.

Let’s look at some facts first; manned space travel is no ordinary feat, at least in our terms. The vast amount of resources, energy, and technology needed to build a spaceship, to cater for people (I mean aliens) who travel with it, to avoid any potential danger, to power it and the time needed to traverse celestial distances is simply unimaginable to any of us. It may sound ignominious, but our current scientific knowledge and technology is so limited that we cannot even overcome the technical difficulties at theoretical level. The sheer amount of cost spent just to escape the confines of our home planet is a testimony of our primitiveness.

In 1964, astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed a general method to classify how technologically advanced a civilization is by measuring (I shall omit all the technicalities here) the total amount of energy a civilization could utilize. By the Kardashev scale, a type I civilization is able to harness all the power available on a planet. A type II civilization is able to harness all the power available from a star and finally a type III civilization would be able to harness all the power of a galaxy, which, in the case of our galaxy, the Milky Way, equals to about 10^36 Watt (1 followed by 36 zeroes). Currently, our civilization is a type 0.7, which consumes 10^13 (10 trillion) Watt. By extrapolation, it’s estimated that the earth will reach type I sometime around 23rd century.

Naturally, an alien who comes knocking at our doors must have belonged to at least a type II civilization and as a corollary of that, they must at least be several millennia ahead of us in terms of science and technology. At the same time, one should always keep in mind that despite how advance our alien friends might be, there must have been a time when their ancestors were living a savage lifestyle, much like how our ancestors lived theirs dozens of millennia ago. And as a life form, they need energy to keep things going around. In order to secure access to certain resources, some sort of nation states could have been formed to protect them from others.

There have been many occasions, whether on TVs, books or games which feature aggressive and combative alien races, yet these alien races have somehow managed to rally themselves under a single planetary government. Given their combativeness, it makes one wonders how they could reconcile with one another in the very first place! My point is, throughout the course of history, an alien civilization which is combative in nature would have fought so many wars with one another that they are likely to have destroyed themselves before they even have a chance to colonize other planets. Even if they managed to escape the fate of self-annihilation, constant wars and conflicts would have hindered progress significantly if not totally. In addition, unless they learn how to live with each other peacefully, more wars will eventually break out. The more advance the civilization becomes, the more deadly the weapons deployed and the direr the consequences will be.

On the other hand, civilizations which have come to realize the importance of sharing resources and working together would have a better chance to become a space faring species. Not only due to the fact that they could avoid any potentially devastating conflict, but cooperation would have allowed them to do just about anything more efficiently, from scientific researches to dealing with planetary issues.

As a conclusion, instead of worrying about being exterminated by some alien civilizations, we should instead worry about ourselves. Whether we will become a space faring species in the next few millennia or we will destroy ourselves would largely depend on how good we could reconcile with each other, and how willing we are to set aside all our differences and work together for the sake of our children.