What Would Happen If China Made First Contact With Extraterrestrials?

from
https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/what-would-happen-if-china-made-first-contact-with-extraterrestrials/

What Would Happen If China Made First Contact With Extraterrestrials?

What would it mean if China were to make the greatest discovery in human 
history?

Abhijnan Rej
By Abhijnan Rej
March 11, 2020
What Would Happen If China Made First Contact With Extraterrestrials?
Credit: CC0 image via Pixabay
In January, the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope was declared 
fully operational in China’s Guizhou province. Beijing’s steadfast 
commitment to improving the nation’s position as a leader in the basic 
sciences can be gleaned from the fact that the construction of the 
Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) was completed in 
five years, a remarkable achievement for a project of its technical 
complexity. The scientific mandate of FAST is many ways quite 
conventional for a telescope of its size, including detection of “fast 
radio bursts” – bursts of extremely powerful radio-waves from deep space 
of varying duration whose origins remains a mystery. (In September last 
year, FAST detected a significant number of such bursts from a single 
source, a feat that could only be achieved due to the telescope’s 
sensitivity.)

It is, however, the inclusion of the search for extraterrestrial 
intelligence (SETI) in FAST’s scientific agenda that has attracted the 
most media attention, not always savory. A February 2016 New York Times 
article on FAST, for example, was headlined “China Telescope to Displace 
9,000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials.” Other media reporting 
emphasized the inclusion of SETI in the telescope’s research mandate at 
the expense of commenting on its potentially path-breaking use to study 
natural cosmic phenomena such as pulsars (distant geriatric stars made 
of exotic nuclear matter).

There is also no fundamental reason, as astronomers has now come to see, 
why detection of alien life may always need radio astronomy. 
Increasingly, search for “techno-signatures” – signs of advanced alien 
intelligence – now includes scanning other bands of the electromagnetic 
spectrum, predominantly infrared waves. But that said, recent revisions 
of the estimates of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our 
galaxy alone (up to 300,000) – sharpened by recent advances in 
exoplanetology – points to the increasing probability of their detection.

China’s SETI road

It is interesting to think of how China and the rest of the world would 
react if – and this is a mighty “if” – China’s new mega radio telescope 
manages to detect an alien signal. What immediate steps would Beijing 
take if this were to happen during Xi Jinping’s (indefinite) tenure? As 
strategic competition between Washington and Beijing heats up and talks 
of a new Cold War abound, how would the United States and other allied 
powers react to the fact that the greatest discovery in human history 
was made possible through the efforts of an authoritarian, repressive 
regime? Would this mark an intensification of the rivalry between the 
China and the West, or lead to its decline?

Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 
a month.

The irony of this thought experiment of course is in the fact that we 
are now forced to contemplate the possibility that it is China and not 
the United States that is in the pole position to detect a signal from 
an extraterrestrial intelligence. And in many ways, this was in the 
making for some time.

While the American radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico – the 
second-largest of its kind, after the Chinese dish – became iconic in 
the public’s imagination when it came to SETI, in 1993 the U.S. Congress 
terminated all research funding for what one American senator famously 
described as “Martian hunting season at the taxpayer’s expense.” (The 
SETI program at Arecibo, which lasted for a year till federal funding 
for it was stopped, was pioneered by astronomer Jill Tarter, widely 
assumed to be model for the character of Ellie Arroway, the protagonist 
of the movie and novel Contact. Early on in the movie version, Arroway’s 
SETI time on the Arecibo telescope is cancelled by a dismissive federal 
science administrator.)

This is not to say that American astronomers have stopped SETI research: 
substantial funding has since flowed from private sources. Most 
significantly, in 2015 Russian Silicon Valley billionaire (with serious 
Kremlin links) Yuri Milner announced a $100 million “Breakthrough 
Listen” initiative to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Milner’s 
funding continues to help the SETI program through the U.S. National 
Science Foundation-supported Green Bank Telescope, for example.

But private initiatives like Milner’s are international in character. 
For example, Breakthrough Listen is actively collaborating with the FAST 
project. While China has advertised FAST as an integral part of 
international collaborative efforts, it is controlled by the Chinese 
state directly. The ultimate arbiter of how of the new telescope’s time 
will go into the search for SETI is Beijing’s prerogative.

If directing state resources toward SETI is not an obstacle for China, 
could state ideology be so? Marxism-Leninism, the liturgy of the Chinese 
Communist Party (CCP), has no problems imagining the existence of 
intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Writing in 1980, Soviet 
astronomer Boris A. Voronstov-Vel’yaminov noted the broad congruence 
between SETI and his state religion: “Dialectical materialism teaches 
that the infinite universe harbors an infinite number of inhabited 
worlds and that life will unfailing spring up where favorable 
opportunities present themselves.” (While doing so he also took a swipe 
at the Russian Orthodox Church, remarking that it was, on the other 
hand, altogether not comfortable with speculations about 
extraterrestrial life.) At a more concrete level, Soviet astronomers 
like Nikolai Kardashev were pioneers in detailed theoretical models of 
extraterrestrial civilizations.

Could there be other reasons why the Chinese may not be comfortable with 
idea of extraterrestrial intelligence? On this point many have drawn 
from the writings of Chinese science-fiction phenomena Liu Cixin. In 
Liu’s telling, the search for SETI may not be such a good thing after 
all. Based on China’s historical experience – and the “century of 
humiliation” narrative that finds such a significant place in Xi’s China 
– he has argued that humanity’s relationship with a sufficiently 
advanced extraterrestrial civilization may be fundamentally adversarial, 
resembling that of the hunter and the hunted. (Liu serves as an adviser 
of sorts to the FAST project.)

The Days After First Contact

Irrespective of the beliefs the leadership in Zhongnanhai holds when it 
comes to extraterrestrial civilizations, what happens if the FAST dish 
does receive a signal that, after processing, is determined not to have 
been generated by any natural astrophysical process?

As SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak points out, there are no 
binding international protocols that would require Beijing to make the 
discovery internationally known. But if China were to keep the option of 
non-disclosure open, its astronomical community must analyze the signal 
and definitely rule out any natural origins of the signal by itself. 
(Note that, as with recent claims around an unusual star or an 
interstellar rock that was found in our solar system , the majority of 
the international astronomical community would vastly prefer natural 
over artificial explanations.)

Following this, based on China’s recent domestic political behavior and 
the international environment, one can plausibly posit the following 
chain of events.

Leading Small Groups (LSGs) – “coordinating bodies that address 
important policy areas that involve several different (and occasionally 
competing) parts of the bureaucracy” – are a Chinese governance 
mechanism that have grown in importance under Xi Jinping. Given that 
dealing with the aftermath of the discovery of an extraterrestrial 
intelligence signal is likely to involve getting the science and 
technology, as well as the national-security bureaucracies to work 
together, it quite likely that Xi will form one exclusively to deal with 
it, just as he did for the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

While Xi has personally led key LSGs in the past, whether he himself 
oversees this one will depend on whether he sees a personal risk in 
doing so. (For the coronavirus LSG, Xi has let Premier Li Keqiang lead 
it, perhaps as a way to insure himself should the crisis prove to 
unmanageable.)

It is highly unlikely that news of this discovery – if not precise 
details such as its coordinates or content – can be confined to a few in 
the scientific and political leadership, and impossible if it is a 
result of an international collaboration using FAST, say with Milner’s 
Breakthrough Initiative. As soon as words gets out, the CCP will attempt 
to milk the discovery domestically, arguing that it proves superiority 
of the Chinese model. This signaling through state-controlled social 
media such as the microblogging site Weibo will be a further attempt at 
regime consolidation, especially if the discovery comes at a time when 
Xi assesses that the Party’s grip over power is slipping. It will be 
accompanied by aggressive perception-shaping exercise along the line on 
the discovery the CCP sets.

What about the reaction from the rest of the world? If the details of 
the FAST signal are not released publicly, there is bound to be Western 
skepticism – “fake news,” some could exclaim. This reaction will partly 
be because of the culture of secrecy that permeates Chinese science, 
leading to an understandable hesitance on the part of many to accept 
claims from Chinese scientists at face value.

This comes on top of the fact that any suggestions that an astronomical 
event or object may be artificial is inevitably met with serious 
skepticism and the discoverer(s) subject to personal attack at times 
irrespective of their scientific credentials. For Chinese scientists, 
such attacks may have serious professional and even personal costs, as 
biophysicist He Jiankui discovered after his claims about the world’s 
first gene-edited babies were met with international skepticism as well 
as outrage.

But it could also be due to an ideological backlash: many Western 
governments may not be readily willing to concede that an authoritarian 
rival may succeed where they have failed. At a time when the U.S.-China 
relationship is increasingly acquiring a zero-sum character across the 
spectrum – political, economic, scientific-technological – and at least 
one leading American expert has endorsed the clash-of-civilization 
thesis when it comes to her country’s relationship with China, conceding 
to the Chinese claim may indeed prove to be politically difficult.

Of course, China’s own stance when it comes to releasing the details of 
the signal – the coordinates of the source as well as the content of the 
signal if it was a nonrecurring one-time-only event – will determine 
much of the international response. Here, the People’s Republic will 
have two choices, assuming that the discovery was the result of sole 
efforts of Chinese scientists: release the details to bolster its own 
credibility (knowing that if the claim was to be dismissed it would do 
serious damage to China’s international reputation) or keep it a secret. 
What may ultimately determine Beijing’s choice?

To understand it, note that the ETI signal could be of two different 
type: a “directed” signal that carries a message (a broadcast, if you 
wish) or an “undirected” one that could originate from an artificial 
source but not carry an meaningful information content (for example, 
energy remnant from some advanced technology of a civilization that 
harnesses the energy of an entire star or even an entire galaxy – a 
“Type II” or “Type III” civilization in the Kardashev scale). The 
difference between the two – whether a signal is part of intelligent 
communication or simply a technological artifact of alien origin – can 
be estimated by measuring its Shannon entropy, for example.

If China determines that not only is the signal directed but it has the 
potential to carry significant amount of information, it may weigh the 
benefits of keeping the signal secret versus revealing it more carefully 
for the simple reason that such a message may potentially carry 
information about very advanced (and therefore useful) technologies. (An 
advanced technology-blueprint bearing signal was the premise of 
Contact.) However, note that Chinese scientific achievements are still 
quite uneven – for example, the People’s Republic was unable to find 
enough researchers to analyze the FAST data a couple of years ago. It 
may very well determine that deciphering the message will require 
coordinated international effort.

Should China indeed release the details of the signal – thereby 
establishing conclusively that there is intelligent life outside Earth – 
what would the long-term American reaction be? Just as the Soviet 
Union’s success in launching the world’s first artificial satellite in 
1957 caused the United States to dramatically increase its investment in 
science and technology, a FAST signal is likely to provoke a similar 
response especially at a time when American leaders are openly competing 
with Beijing for technological dominance. But the flip side to this 
otherwise happy development – just as during the original Cold War – 
would be the resulting military-technological contest exacerbating 
already deteriorating US-China relations.

In the 2016 movie Arrival, the worldwide detection of messages from an 
extraterrestrial intelligence forces the United States, China, and 
Russia to cooperate despite their individual misgivings – about each 
other’s as well as the aliens’ intention. The reality, if and when such 
a time comes, may unfortunately be much more complex.

AUTHORS
Abhijnan Rej
STAFF AUTHOR
Abhijnan Rej
Abhijnan Rej is Security & Defense Editor at The Diplomat and Director 
of Research at Diplomat Risk Intelligence.

VIEW PROFILE
TAGS
FeaturesSecurityEast AsiaChinaAliensChinese space policyExtraterrestrial 
lifeSETIXi Jinping
COVID-19
IN ASIA