On Friday, April 12, 2002, a handful of leading social scientists will gather for the first international workshop on the societal impact of a large asteroid or comet colliding with Earth. Held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association in Irvine, California, this full-day session on Managing Global-Scale Disasters will help psychologists, sociologists, and management specialists play catch-up in an area that has gotten increasing attention in the physical sciences in recent years.
While the social sciences have given attention to the societal aftermath of disasters of both local and regional scales, far less work has been done to anticipate global disasters. Perhaps the most extensive discussions about widespread devastation have focused on scenarios related to nuclear winter, in which global climate change could result from large-scale nuclear war.
But is this attempt to plan for an event that may not occur for thousands of years a peculiarly human preoccupation? If some day beings beyond Earth are detected by SETI experiments, will their anthropologists and psychiatrists have held similar workshops?
Probably.
As SETI scientists have often discussed, if we detect an extraterrestrial civilization, it will likely be much older than we are. The reasoning is simple. If civilizations are capable of interstellar communication for only a few decades before they self-destruct, then its very unlikely that extraterrestrial and human civilizations will exist at the same time, given the billions of years during which life has had to emerge in our galaxy. If, however, ET is much, much older than we are, we still have a chance of making contact even if intelligent life is quite rare in our galaxy.
In short, if we do detect ET, its likely that well find ourselves making contact with a civilization much older than ours. That point alone may be enough to help us anticipate something about how extraterrestrial societies make decisions about events that could some day happen, but that are unlikely in the short run.
Specifically, an extraterrestrial civilization much older than we are may well have gotten to that level of maturity only by taking a long-term view of its own future. That is, if extraterrestrial civilizations succeed in remaining intact for thousands or millions of years, that may in part be due to avoiding catastrophes that are unlikely during any particular year, but very likely eventually.
A prime example of an event that is very unlikely in the near future, but that could be devastating if it occurs, is the impact of a sufficiently large asteroid or comet with Earth. Many generations of humans may be completely unaffected by such a large-scale disaster. And yet, unless some generation begins serious planning to avert such a catastrophe, an impact with global repercussions will eventually take place.
Its very fitting that surveillance technology that would allow us to detect oncoming asteroids and comets is based on the same principles as the radio and optical telescopes that may some day allow us to establish contact with other civilizationscivilizations that would likely be much older, and perhaps also wiser, than we are.
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