40 years after Vincent Chin’s murder, the struggle against anti-Asian hate continues.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the brutal killing of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man in Detroit whose murder sparked a reckoning over anti-Asian discrimination and spurred a surge in Asian American activism.
The anniversary comes as Asian Americans in the US face an uptick in violence, driven by the same xenophobia that fueled Chin’s killing. In 1982, Chin was killed by two white men upset about the competition US companies faced from Japanese automakers, who sought to pin the blame on him. Since March 2020, there have been more than 10,900 hate incidents reported to the advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate, including physical attacks and verbal abuse that put the blame on Asian Americans for the spread of Covid-19.
Other sources have found similar trends. According to the FBI, hate crimes toward Asian Americans increased 76 percent in 2020 compared to the year before, with another report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism finding an even larger jump in many large cities in 2021.
Like with Chin’s killing, recent anti-Asian hate crimes reflect a willingness to conflate individual Asian people and US tensions with Asian countries. As Americans — including politicians — looked for someone to hold responsible for Covid-19, Asian Americans were targeted given the virus’s origins in China. And since the US is now locked in economic competition with China, experts anticipate that anti-Asian sentiment will endure.
“The parallels between Vincent Chin’s murder and what we see today is striking and disturbing,” says John Yang, the executive director of the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “It is frankly what we’ve seen throughout history, that when there are issues involving a foreign nation, there’s a backlash against the Asian American community in the United States.”
What happened to Vincent Chin
In 1982, Chin, then 27 and a draftsman, was beaten to death by Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, two white autoworkers.
That June, Chin was celebrating his bachelor party at a strip club when he first ran into Ebens and Nitz. “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work,” Ebens said, according to a witness to the encounter.
The men got into a physical altercation and were removed from the club as a result. Ebens and Nitz, however, followed Chin to a different location, beating him with a baseball bat and ultimately cracking his skull. Four days later, Chin died from the injuries he had sustained.
The attack took place as the US was facing stiff economic competition from Japan, particularly when it came to auto manufacturing, fueling tensions between the two countries. Ebens and Nitz apparently assumed that Chin was Japanese and blamed him for the layoffs and closures US companies were experiencing.
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Richard Sheinwald/AP
Initially, Chin’s killing was treated as a random act of violence, according to activist and journalist Helen Zia. It wasn’t until after Ebens and Nitz took a second-degree manslaughter plea deal, and were sentenced to three years of probation and a $3,000 fine, that Chin’s death prompted a massive outcry. Neither received any jail time, despite the maximum 15-year sentence associated with the offense. They “weren’t the kind of men you send to jail,” the judge said.
“In March of 1983, when the judge sentenced the two white killers to probation, that triggered the alarm,” says Zia. “You can kill an Asian American and get off scot-free? That made everyone think, well, that could be my brother, my cousin, my father.”
After the verdict was announced, Asian Americans around the country mobilized to protest and raise awareness about the case, calling on the Justice Department to investigate the killing as a civil rights violation. This marked a huge inflection point for pan-Asian activism, as people of different ethnic groups came together to demonstrate as part of a broader Asian American movement.
“If you think about how Asian Americans were organized before his murder, we often saw ourself in our own ethnicities, but after his murder we recognized even more so that we had to come together as a community,” says Yang. These efforts built on the work of activists in the 1960s, who first embraced the term “Asian American” as they worked with Black Americans and Latino Americans to push for ethnic studies on college campuses.
The protests following Chin’s death were so effective that the DOJ did in fact investigate the attack as a civil rights violation, marking the first time discrimination against an Asian American person was treated as a civil rights offense. A district court judge wound up sentencing Ebens to 25 years in jail, though he was later cleared of charges on appeal. Both Ebens and Nitz also agreed to separate civil settlements, which required Nitz to pay $50,000 to the Chin estate and Ebens to pay $1.5 million. (Nitz has completed the payment, while Ebens has not.)
The success of the protests, Zia notes, came about in part because of the work led by Black activists during the civil rights movement, which forced conversations about racial justice and discrimination. Similarly, the current Asian American protest movement draws on the blueprint organizers established during the Chin demonstrations and in the years since.
There’s a lot that hasn’t changed
Although 40 years have passed since Chin’s murder, there’s a lot that hasn’t changed.
Today, the “forever foreigner” stereotype — the idea that Asian people aren’t truly Americans — is still pervasive, and a major reason Asian people are targeted when conflicts arise with Asian countries.
This trope is deeply rooted in US history and has been activated many times, including when Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps during World War II, when South Asian Americans and Arab Americans were racially profiled in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and when the coronavirus’s origins in China were weaponized against those perceived to be East Asian and Southeast Asian.
In addition to Chin’s murder, there have been numerous instances of attacks and discrimination toward Asian Americans motivated by this idea. In 1981, members of the Ku Klux Klan threatened Vietnamese refugees in Texas, describing them as an extension of the enemy the US military was fighting in Asia. In 1999, scientist Wen Ho Lee was arrested due to concerns that he was a Chinese spy, though the government ultimately had to drop most charges because it didn’t have sufficient grounds for its case. In 2003, Avtar Singh, a Sikh immigrant and Phoenix truck driver, was shot by a bystander who told him to “go back to where you belong.”
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Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Today’s surge of anti-Asian violence has its roots in the “forever foreigner” stereotype as well, and has been spurred by anti-China backlash during the pandemic as well as geopolitical trade conflicts. The latter issue is of particular concern: As US economic competition with China grows, many activists and experts fear that xenophobia and anti-Asian sentiment will only worsen.
These concerns are tied to how political leaders of both parties have often talked about China, including the framing of the country as an “existential threat” and descriptions of any type of economic conflict as “us versus them.” For example, activists have flagged prior comments made by FBI Director Christopher Wray, who has said that the challenges posed by China are a “whole of society” problem, a statement that seemed to imply that Chinese people overall were broadly to blame for national security threats. Many lawmakers also use generalizations, casting “China” and “the Chinese” as a monolithic enemy, rather than calling out the Chinese government in particular.
There are worries that such aggressive and sweeping language will fuel the same xenophobia that’s triggered anti-Asian violence — including Chin’s murder — in the past. And it’s led some groups, like the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, to release recommendations for how policymakers can talk about geopolitical tension and put the focus on the Chinese government, rather than Chinese people.
“It is an existential threat to Asian Americans,” says Zia. “This constant theme that when America is having trouble, it becomes a convenient pivot to blame an outside threat.”
A path forward
Chin’s murder was a huge turning point for Asian American activism, underscoring the group’s political power and prompting the creation of more pan-Asian advocacy groups like American Citizens for Justice and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
That infrastructure and energy has carried on to this day, as #StopAsianHate protests erupted around the country in 2021, once again spurred by violence, including a series of brutal attacks on Asian American elders and a mass shooting in Georgia that killed six Asian women.
The shooting in particular spurred significant action. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of thousands of people participated in rallies, trainings, and crowdfunding efforts that sought to provide redress for victims or push back on anti-Asian violence. Now, as in the wake of Chin’s killing, activists are looking for ways to combat longstanding biases.
Part of that has involved greater documentation, like Stop AAPI Hate’s reports on violent incidents. The goal of this data gathering has been to provide visibility, support, and financial compensation for victims.
“That’s a reason we started Stop AAPI Hate. We did not want this to be minimized, we wanted to have the numbers. We didn’t want there to be denialism,” Cynthia Choi, the co-director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, previously told Vox. Having this data to point to has allowed activists to emphasize the scale of the problem and its ubiquitous nature. And that’s led to a growing belief among Americans of all backgrounds that Asian Americans face significant discrimination.
There’s also been an outpouring of activism that’s further strengthened the pan-Asian American movement developed in the 1980s: Recent attacks have activated a new generation of activists and created a focus on bolstering solidarity among East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian people as well as Pacific Islanders, and other communities of color, including Black Americans and Latino Americans. Over the past few years, there’s been serious reflection, too, about what can be done to address the root causes of anti-Asian violence, including more education to combat biases and mental health resources.
Activists hope that one part of the solution is in continuing to raise awareness about the stereotypes that are used against Asian American people, by bolstering history education in schools. In multiple states including Illinois and Connecticut, legislators have passed bills that require the teaching of Asian American history in grades K-12. These bills strive to push schools to provide more complicated and nuanced portrayals of Asian Americans that go beyond the framing of Asian American people as victims — and highlight their agency as activists and policymakers.
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Jessica Hill/AP
“We have to educate — and we also have to decolonize the things that have been absorbed by all Americans,” says Zia.
These efforts represent marked progress. Overall, activists note that while the causes of anti-Asian discrimination are enduring and as tenacious today as in the 1980s, thanks to continued activism, awareness about these biases has also increased and improved significantly. Continuing to grow this understanding, and maintaining the willingness to fight back against it, is central to moving forward, they say.
“One thing I would ask people to reflect on is the amount of work we have in front of us while recognizing that progress,” says Yang.
Michael Ian Black on how to raise better men.
As Father’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about my experiences as a dad and how rewarding — and confounding — they can be. Which is why a recent book by Michael Ian Black, called A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son, captured my attention.
Black is a comedian, writer, and actor who you likely know from his roles in Wet Hot American Summer, The State, and Stella. His book — published in 2020 and now out in paperback — is a revealing piece of writing, one that walks the line between funny and serious and never strays too far from its core purpose: Black’s attempt to talk to his college-age son about what it means to be a good man in a culture that seems very confused about masculinity.
A month ago, I invited Black onto Vox Conversations to talk about his book and many other things. But then a few days before we recorded, 19 children and two teachers were gunned down in yet another mass shooting by a young man in Uvalde, Texas.
Michael’s son was a student at an elementary school right by Sandy Hook when that massacre happened in 2012. After the Parkland shooting in 2018, Black decided to write this book and explore why boys — and it’s almost entirely boys — are committing these acts of mass violence.
For obvious reasons, the tragedy in Texas loomed over the entire conversation. But we also tried to step back and reflect on a bigger question: What the hell is going on with young men in America? We discuss our own struggles to define masculinity, why so many American men have such a hard time asking for help, and how we, as fathers of boys, can be better examples for our sons.
Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Sean Illing
So I had a vague idea of what this conversation would be like, and then the shooting in Texas happened. This is obviously something you’ve dealt with and, well, here we are again. What do you make of it?
Michael Ian Black
I’m not surprised that this happened. I’m not surprised that there was another shooting at an elementary school. Just as I wasn’t surprised when there was a shooting at a grocery store the week before, and at a church a few days before that. These events no longer surprise me. They continue to outrage me. Because we’re not doing anything about it.
We’re debating doors today. I don’t feel like doors are the problem. I feel like I’m okay with doors. In fact, I’ll go even further: I’ll say the more doors, the better. I’m willing to go all-in for doors.
What I’m not willing to do is go all-in for guns and this insane weaponry that we just make available to whoever wants it. Now, I understand that there are certain restrictions on quickly acquiring weaponry in some parts of the country. Not in Texas, where the governor signed a bill saying, Hey, if you’re 18, you want to buy a weapon of war, go ahead. We’re not gonna throw up any roadblocks to impede your progress on your journey to a massacre. We’re Texas. We want you to have as many guns and ammunition as you wish.
So I’m sick of talking about guns. And I feel like I would be talking about them a lot less if fewer people were getting shot by them.
Sean Illing
There are so many conversations happening now — about gun control, about the Second Amendment, about congressional inaction — but I want to focus on boys and fatherhood and why these kinds of shootings seem to be the exclusive work of men, often young men. You say in the book that you can see how a certain kind of masculinity “can nudge a teetering psyche toward violence.” What do you mean?
Michael Ian Black
It is true that these acts are committed almost exclusively by boys and young men. Off the top of my head, I can think of none that have been committed by women. There may be some examples of that, but I certainly can’t think of any. Why is that? It’s obviously a complicated question.
The first thing you have to do is break it down into two categories. Is there something biological that impels boys to commit violence? And is there something sociological that compels boys to commit violence?
The answer to the first question is, I think, yes. I think there is something biological. I think we understand that testosterone does in fact lead toward more aggression. It doesn’t necessarily follow that because you have more testosterone in your body, you’re going to commit acts of violence. And in fact, so much of our culture is organized around trying to control aggression. That’s maybe what culture is in some ways.
I think it gets very nuanced when we get into the sociological question. And this is why we have to take a deep dive into what it means to be a man in the culture.
Sean Illing
What it often means to be a man, in our culture at least, is to bury our feelings, to not admit vulnerability. We live in such a hollow society, where so many of us don’t have real community. We live in our heads, we live in the virtual world, and there’s so much resentment that just build and builds and we have all these young men exploding in slow-motion and their inner turmoil is hidden and probably inexpressible for a lot of them and we just keep paying the price for it with the blood of children.
Michael Ian Black
So much of what it means to be a guy historically has been about never admitting weakness, never admitting fear, never admitting vulnerability. And not having the tools or the vocabulary to open up.
Generally, there are two acceptable emotional reactions for a lot of guys: anger and withdrawal. And I think we see that in so many of these shooters. You hear people say, “Oh, he was a quiet kid. He was so quiet.” Well, yeah. What do you think that is? That’s somebody retreating into themselves because they don’t know how to ask for help. They don’t know how to communicate. They don’t know how to receive or express empathy.
Yet there’s clearly something broken with these dudes. That’s why so many politicians go, “Whoa, he was crazy. This is just a lone wolf.” So we can write off all the mass shooters as crazy and just dismiss them. Fine, go ahead. But they’re not the problem. It’s the day-to-day gun violence. It is the domestic violence. It is the suicides. It is the accidental discharges. It’s the easy access to firearms. It’s the family disputes. It’s the retaliatory gunfire when somebody feels dissed — it’s all this bullshit.
So we have to look at how we’re raising boys. What you said is right, they don’t know how to express themselves. And one easy way to do it is with a gun. The lack of community is a big part of it, too, which ties into lack of purpose, which ties into lack of self-identity.
Sean Illing
Partly because of where I grew up, there’s something deep in me that balks at some of this talk about toxic masculinity. And this question of vulnerability and toughness is such a hard one for me. I have to say, you made me think about my own father, who I love dearly and who is still a very huge part of my life.
He’s a product of that “army of one” mentality you talk about, where toughness is almost by definition the opposite of vulnerability. I’ve probably internalized a ton of that; it’s part of me. There’s something noble in the idea of self-reliance and we’ll get to it, but I do think the discomfort a lot of us have with vulnerability can be a real handicap.
Michael Ian Black
I understand why a lot of men recoil from thinking too deeply about their own masculinity. They recoil from the term “toxic masculinity.” And it’s because toxic masculinity in some ways has become a catchall phrase that just sometimes means masculinity. And masculinity isn’t toxic. There’s so much about what men have historically done that’s great. There’s a lot that’s great about being strong and being tough and enduring tough times and keeping a stiff upper lip. There’s a lot that’s awesome about that. We need that and we should celebrate it.
However, there are times in everybody’s life when being an army of one isn’t particularly constructive. There’s a reason that armies, when they train, they don’t train you to be an army of one. They train you to work as a cohesive unit. It’s because you rely on each other to get shit done. You need to rely on each other to get shit done.
So, absolutely, be tough, but there are going to be moments where you’re going to need help. And it requires a lot of self-confidence and toughness to say, “I need help in this moment.”
There’s a flip side to this. I feel like men are romantic in lots of ways. We have romantic ideas about our solitude. We have romantic ideas about going off to fight battles. We have romantic ideas about love. I don’t think it’s hard for men to give love. I think we come up short when it comes to receiving love. To receive love, you have to let down your guard. You have to be vulnerable.
Sean Illing
I’ll read a quote from your book if you don’t mind: “Men feel isolated, confused, and conflicted about our own natures. Many feel that the very qualities that used to define men — strength, aggression, and independence — are no longer wanted or needed. Many others never felt strong or aggressive or independent to begin with. We don’t know how to be, and we’re terrified.”
There’s a lot going on there, and I’m not entirely sure what I think about it. There are definitely dueling pressures for men today to be both assertive and confident and also sensitive and empathetic, and while I do think those are mutually compatible, I know that you think that the confusion here is harmful.
Michael Ian Black
Fifty years ago, if you talked about a girl or a woman as being strong or independent or tough, you’d have thought of her in some ways as being less feminine because of those attributes. But we don’t think of girls that way anymore. In fact, we celebrate their strength. We celebrate their independence. We celebrate their toughness. Because we understand that in elevating those parts of their personalities, we are not diminishing the other parts of their personalities that are more traditionally feminine.
There’s no reason we can’t expand the definition of masculinity the same way we have with femininity. The conversations about what it means to be a woman have yielded tremendous results. We see women entering all facets of society. It has not meant that they can’t be wives and mothers as well, if that’s what they choose to be. We’ve seen how girls are just thriving as a result of these conversations, these generational conversations. And we applaud it, rightly.
Well, it’s time to have those same conversations with boys. And again, they’re generational conversations. This isn’t shit that’s just going to change overnight. They don’t know what their place is. And I’m saying there are ways to lift men and boys up. And to give them a renewed sense of purpose in the culture.
That purpose can involve all of the traditional attributes that men have. It can involve their strength and their toughness and their pride and their aggression and their endurance. And it can also involve their compassion, their natural empathy, their vulnerability, their creativity — all of it.
There is not one set of characteristics that make a girl, nor is there one set of characteristics that make a boy. But there are a certain set of characteristics that make a human and we all share them.
Sean Illing
You tell your son that one of the greatest gifts he gave you was “coming to you for comfort.” That resonates so much with my experience. The act of caring for my son, who’s about to turn 3, changing his diapers, rocking him to sleep, taking baths with him — I don’t think I’ve ever felt more satisfied as a man as I feel in those moments. I mean, I feel more manly than I would wrestling a fucking alligator. And I never would have imagined that before I became a dad.
You don’t have to become a dad to have that revelation, but it was a revelation for me. I learned that I could find such joy and pride in caring for another human being. And I needed the experience of being a dad to have that — maybe other people don’t, but I needed it.
Michael Ian Black
The thing that made you feel most paternal was performing the acts that are most traditionally maternal. The thing that made you feel most like a man are the things that are most commonly associated with being a woman. Why is that? I would argue that it’s because it allowed you to open a door into the fullness of who you are as a person.
People want to give comfort. People want to give aid. People want to give love and compassion. And as a parent, that suddenly that becomes your job. You realize, “Holy shit, this was a part of me all along and I needed this. I needed this — for lack of a better word — excuse to just be a human being.” And it feels great. It feels great when you’re finally able to do that. And to do it without apology, without self-consciousness. And don’t feel yourself diminished in any way as a man, because you’re performing your job as a father.
Well, you can apply that to the rest of your life. How good does it feel when you help somebody across the street? It feels fucking great. How good does it feel when you help somebody dig their car out of a snowbank? It’s awesome. We’re made to help other people. That’s a big part of who we all are.
To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Receiving signals from extraterrestrial civilizations could pose an existential risk. Really.
Humans have invented a rogue’s gallery of nightmarish fictional aliens over the decades: acid-blooded xenomorphs who want to eat us and lay their eggs in our chest cavities; Twilight Zone Kanamits who want to fatten us up like cows and eat us; those lizard creatures in the 1980s miniseries V who want to harvest us for food. (You may be sensing a theme here.)
But the most frightening vision isn’t an alien being at all — it’s a computer program.
In the 1961 sci-fi drama A for Andromeda, written by the British cosmologist Fred Hoyle, a group of scientists running a radio telescope receive a signal originating from the Andromeda Nebula in outer space. They realize the message contains blueprints for the development of a highly advanced computer that generates a living organism called Andromeda.
Andromeda is quickly co-opted by the military for its technological skills, but the scientists discover that its true purpose — and that of the computer and the original signal from space — is to subjugate humanity and prepare the way for alien colonization.
No one gets eaten in A for Andromeda, but it’s chilling precisely because it outlines a scenario that some scientists believe could represent a real existential threat from outer space, one that takes advantage of the very curiosity that leads us to look to the stars. If highly advanced aliens really wanted to conquer Earth, the most effective way likely wouldn’t be through fleets of warships crossing the stellar vastness. It would be through information that could be sent far faster. Call it “cosmic malware.”
Phoning ET
To discuss the possibility of alien life seriously is to embark upon an uncharted sea of hypotheses. Personally, I fall on the Agent Scully end of the alien believer spectrum. The revelation of intelligent extraterrestrials would be an extraordinary event, and as SETI pioneer Carl Sagan himself once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Intelligent extraterrestrials who also want to hack our planet would be even more extraordinary. But this scenario became a bit easier to envision this week.
On Wednesday, a story published in China’s state-backed Science and Technology Daily reported that the country’s giant Sky Eye radio telescope had picked up unusual signals from space. According to the piece, which cited the head of an extraterrestrial civilization search team that was launched in China in 2020, narrowband electromagnetic signals detected by the telescope differed from previous signals, and were in the process of being investigated.
The story was apparently deleted from the internet for unknown reasons, though not before it was picked up by other outlets. At this point it’s difficult to know what, if anything, to make of the story or its disappearance. It wouldn’t be the first time an extraterrestrial search team found a signal that appeared notable, only to dismiss it after further research. But the news is a reminder that there is little in the way of clear agreement about how the world should handle an authenticated message from an apparent alien civilization, or whether it can even be done safely.
For all the recent interest in UFO sightings — including NASA’s surprising announcement last week that it would launch a study team to investigate what it calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” — the chance that aliens would be physically visiting Earth is vanishingly small. The reason is simple: Space is big. Like, really, really, really big. And the idea that after decades of searching for ET with no success, there could be alien civilizations capable of crossing interstellar distances and showing up on our planetary doorstep beggars belief.
But transmitting gigabytes of data across those vast interstellar distances would be comparatively easy. After all, human beings have been doing a variation of that for decades through what is known as active messaging.
In 1974, the astronomer Frank Drake used the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to blast 168 seconds of two-tone sound toward the star system M13. It sounded like noise, but any aliens listening might have noticed a clear, repetitive structure indicating its origin was non-natural — precisely the kind of signal that radio telescopes like China’s Sky Eye are listening for here on Earth.
Such active messaging efforts were controversial from the start. Beyond the debate about who exactly should get to decide on behalf of the Earth when we try to say “hello” to aliens and what that message should be, transmitting our existence and location to unknown denizens of the cosmos could be inherently dangerous.
“For all we know,” wrote then-Astronomer Royal Martin Ryle shortly after the Arecibo message, “any creatures out there might be malevolent — and hungry.”
Those concerns haven’t put an end to efforts to actively signal to alien civilizations that are “very likely to be older and more technologically advanced than we are,” as Sigal Samuel wrote in a 2019 story about a crowdsourced contest to update the Arecibo message. But we shouldn’t be so sure that simply listening quietly for messages from space is a safer method of extraterrestrial discovery.
Cosmic malware
In a 2012 paper, the Russian transhumanist Alexey Turchin described what he called “global catastrophic risks of finding an extraterrestrial AI message” during the search for intelligent life. The scenario unfolds similarly to the plot of A for Andromeda. An alien civilization creates a signal beacon in space of clearly non-natural origin that draws our attention. A nearby radio transmitter sends a message containing instructions for how to build an impossibly advanced computer that could create an alien AI.
The result is a phishing attempt on a cosmic scale. Just like a malware attack that takes over a user’s computer, the advanced alien AI could quickly take over the Earth’s infrastructure — and us with it. (Others in the broader existential risk community have raised similar concerns that hostile aliens could target us with malicious information.)
What can we do to protect ourselves? Well, we could simply choose not to build the alien computer. But Turchin assumes that the message would also contain “bait” in the form of promises that the computer could, for example, solve our biggest existential challenges or provide unlimited power to those who control it.
Geopolitics would play a role as well. Just as international competition has led nations in the past to embrace dangerous technologies — like nuclear weapons — out of fear that their adversaries would do so first, the same could happen again in the event of a message from space. How confident would policymakers in Washington be that China would safely handle such a signal if it received one first — or vice versa?
As existential risks go, cosmic malware doesn’t compare to out-of-control climate change or engineered pandemics. Someone or something would have to be out there to send that malicious message, and the more exoplanets we discover that could plausibly support life, the odder it is that we have yet to see any concrete evidence of that life.
One day in 1950, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question to his lunch companions. Given the vast size and age of the universe, which should have allowed plenty of room and time for alien life to arise, why haven’t we seen them? In other words: “Where is everybody?”
Scientists have posited dozens of answers to his question, which became known as the “Fermi paradox.” But perhaps the right answer is the simplest one: No one’s home. It would be a lonely answer, but at least it would be a safe one.
A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!