If you want to experience the feeling of being completely free in today’s society, one of the few ways to do this is to become a hacker. Thus it is no surprise that even astrophysicists are thinking about hackers.
By Yasir999 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Michael Hippke from Germany and John Learned from Hawaii are worried that our civilization might be hacked by an unfriendly alien civilization. Some people think that aggressive aliens are unlikely but honestly, it’s just their opinion. Some alien civilizations might be completely pragmatic and just want all the resources for themselves. And to go further with this pragmatic line of thinking, why send a fleet of armed spaceships if you can just send a few easy to make viruses.
Hippke and Learned say that the alien hack could take many different forms. It could be just a simple message that would create global panic, likely setting our civilization thousands of years behind, like a message that they will destroy our sun very soon. Or it could be a message that would appear to be one thing but would be something else, like a guide to creating artificial intelligence or nano-bots that once created would destroy Earth, strip it of its valuable materials and ship them back to the aliens.
And although it is almost impossible that such an attack would be specifically targeted at our civilization many of the “hacks” could be created in a general enough way to destroy a majority of civilizations that receive them. And it could even potentially be a series of “hacks” each with a different kind of attack increases the chance of success significantly.
Hippke and Learned also don’t forget to add that while the possibility of danger certainly exists and thus if we ever receive a message from space we should be very careful with how we deal with it the fact is the probability of that is pretty low and we should definitely try to decode it. Now only to receive such a message.
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