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Could Terrorist Aliens Cyberattack Us? Could Terrorist Aliens to blow through the latest Microsoft security Cyberattack Us? update. More fundamentally, why would an THE Analysis by Ray Villard advanced civilization waste the time and `X` ZONE APP resources to go to the effort of undermining our comparatively primitive technology? IS NOW AVAILABLE All I can imagine -- and it would make a FOR fun science fiction story -- is if an alien computer virus took over an automated military APPLE weapons factory (as was done by hackers in the 1983 film "Brainstorm") and reprogrammed the AND assembly robots to crank out an army of killer ANDROID androids that looked like the The Terminator. DEVICES www.xzoneapps.com Ever since H.G. Wells' 1898 classic novel "The War of the Worlds," science fiction books, movies, and even video games have had fun portraying alien invasion fleets pillaging Earth. Even the esteemed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has speculated about space invaders conquering Earth. But maybe any bellicose Equally implausible, as dramatized in extraterrestrials prefer to attack us at the speed Carl Sagan's 1985 novel "Contact," is the worry that aliens send us blueprints for constructing a of light, literally. high-tech Trojan Horse. "The transport theory is In an article posted on io9.com, contributor George Dvorsky asked a couple only one hypothesis, ... and in my view a rather SETI scientists if an alien radio transmission naive one," warns the U.S. President's nation security adviser, "We build it [the alien could contain a virus designed to infect our machine] and out pours the entire Vegan [from computers and carry out untold mischief. They said that the odds were pretty low, but not the star Vega] army." Just imagine if we had some sort of time impossible. machine where we could communicate with the The phrase "not impossible" is fundamental to any speculation about the future. ancient Romans and teleport to them blueprints for making a Predator drone or even a machine Any imagined events that obey our present laws of physics are possible, no matter how unlikely. gun. Time travel paradoxes aside, it would be This is best described in one of Arthur utterly impossible for the Romans to fabricate C. Clarke's three laws of prediction: "When a such devices. And, they are only separated from distinguished but elderly scientist states that us by 2,000 years -- not 10,000, 100,000, or 1 something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is million years. This is more likely the evolutionary gap between us and science savvy impossible, he is very probably wrong." extraterrestrials, given the age of our galaxy. That caution aside, speculation about So if you’re using SETI@Home or alien cyberwars takes gigantic leaps in logic that Astropulse to hunt for E.T. don't remove it from push at the boundary of plausibility. your computer. The odds of alien viruses getting The aliens would somehow have to glean an intimate knowledge of our computer into your hard drive are as close to impossible as I can imagine. [] technology. That's no small trick, unless they can teleport one of our personal computers to their home planet. NEW FROM What's more, only civilizations orbiting TED UNARCE stars within 90 light-years of Earth would even suspect we had a SETI program. That's because it has been less than a century since artificially produced electromagnetic radiation has been leaking off into space from our society. If we assume that one of these hypothetical nearby civilizations is bent on pulling off an interstellar cyber-terror attack, it could take dozens of years for their signal to reach our radio telescopes at the speed of light. By the time the transmission arrived our computer technology would have substantially evolved from what it is today. The barriers of time and space ensure a cosmic firewall from cyberattacks. That is unless the extraterrestrials developed some sort of quantum faster-that- AMAZON. COM light eavesdropping capability that would allow for their malware to be instantaneously adjusted