>It would be most appropriate to allocate taxpayer funds to the search for our cosmic neighbors
I think this is the main focus of this opinion piece. I don't know who the author is, but I wouldn't be surprised that he would be someone writing grant proposals to get a piece of these funds.
First thing is stop all grants to existing physicists. The law of relativity would have to be so wrong that we ccouldn't even trust our ability to turn on a light anymore.
The speed of light is far too slow. If they exist (might or might not, either way is extraordinary), they are probably too far away to even know we are here (100 lightyears at the most, and probably less considering how fast radio weakens ), and then even longer to get here.
In short they can't get here in anyone's lifetime.
Sure, but the number of possible stars within 100 light years is pretty small. The argument that there must be life all rest on the total number of stars within the universe, but the relevant life to humans communication needs to be within 10 light years (even then a 20 year round trip gives good odds we have figured out the answer to our question before we get their reply)
Solar system escape velocity is about 5.5% of c according to a quick web search. So ca. 3000 years for 100 ly, allowing for acceleration and deceleration. The aliens would be fanatics to still be interested after that time.
But in order to come to rest here, they'll have got around the laws of thermodynamics and the momentum-kinetic energy relation to produce engines with impossibly high specific impulse, thrust and efficiency.
>3000 years for 100 ly,
allowing for acceleration and
deceleration. The aliens would be
fanatics to still be interested after that time.
Have you taken into account the relativity of time? If i've understood it correctly, time stops at the speed of light. For an alien travelling at that velocity, moving from one end of the universe to the other will take no time at all! No fanaticism required. How will they have time to stop? Also, does anyone know if an object with mass even move at the speed of light?
First they would observe and they would learn that humans are fiercely bigoted and largely dependent on mythology, religion.
Unless earth has something they want or need I doubt they would bother with us.
If we did have something they needed a warlike, or non-peaceful race of aliens would come down and declare themselves as our God and creator, and after some advanced science demonstrations, all of the religious people of the world would fall in line.
A peaceful or benevolent race of aliens would still probably avoid us unless it was absolutely necessary to contact us, and then I’m still not sure we’d be smart enough to understand everything that was happening.
I like to imagine they've mastered FTL travel and adminstration of their vast empire by enslaving some other interstellar species and having them quite literally man the space sails and push space paper. Then they come to trade with us for our computer tech and food, in exhange for how they acheived FTL tech with nothing but prison labor.
There's an old short story by Alan Dean Foster touching on that idea. Earth is isolated behind a force field because it's considered so dangerous until an alien empire under pressure from an undefeatable foe has no option but to ask for help. No spoilers but it's a good story...
Hard agree on both counts. I think people on the internet tend to underestimate how religious most people on earth still are. I know a person that's convinced that ufo sighting could potentially be "angels." And this is a fairly intelligent person with a first world education. I can only I imagine the havoc that an alien encounter would wreak on other parts of the world...
I think you are extrapolating from your personal experience.
If I were to to do the same I'd be saying that there are no religious people around anymore and the church's only exist to interfere in politics, the people involved only having "faith" in as far as it justifies there actions.
If we had a large and verifiable alien encounter, there would be three types of reaction.
Denial - it's a fake,
Panic - Run for the hills,
Acceptance - Ok, it's what it is, how do we move forward with it.
There would be of course be people from each of these groups trying to profit from the event in whatever manner is possible.
I think the reaction to the pandemic shows how communities react to uncomfortable events, and I think the difference in reactions from different communities/countries give a pretty good indication on how they would react to an alien encounter. Some countries would react well, others would just dissolve into chaos.
eye roll ugh I am SO sick of this bizarre prevailing narrative that religiousness and spirituality is like some sort of unintellectual defect present only in inferior humans. Step off your high horse for a second a realize that you have absolutely no clue about what lies beyond human cognition.
You realize that anything that a human believes to be true is rooted, fundamentally, in a faith-based assumption, right? science is faith in the human ability to percieve; religion is when this faith is based on the ineffible.
Science is good for practical matters. Religion is good for moral matters.
They are not at odds. The human connection to the logical and their connection to the spiritual have walked hand in hand throughout history. Our spirituality has guided our science, and vice versa. To lose our religiousness would be to lose a full half of our capability for reasoning.
Why is it that many highly innovative and prolific scientists throughout history have been deeply religious?
Furthermore, EVEN IF religion was complete fiction, which I believe it is not, it is so very obviously a useful and deeply insightful fiction. It allows us to interrogate the inner workings of the human psyche, the natural moral law, gives us a sense of purpose, motivates charity and kindness, creates community and social trust. Abd you cab miss me with that Sam Harris, "but we can do all that without religion, cause ultimately religion also causes problems of bigotry" - Bo, we cannot, it is precisely the illogucal nature of religion that makes it useful for moral reasoning. Logical deduction about morality leads to highly undesirable consequences. And yes, sone religions propogate bigotry : not all, though. For example, Christianity does not promote any sort of judgement of others. While there are christians who do so, they do it in spite of the word of the bible, not because of it.
Okay, hopping off my soapbox now, but really guys, you ought to be more sympathetic to the religious among us, you might learn something and become a better person in the process.
I find it interesting (and a bit sad) that there is a common belief that Humans as a whole would be considered by alien intelligence to be are violent and unworthy of contact. I think partially this is because it makes for a good story prop, but I think it also reflects many peoples lack of self worth.
I like to see the flip side of this, and look at the amazing achievements that the species have achieved in a little under 100000 years.
We've gone from intelligent animals living lives a little different from any of the other intelligent animals to creating a civilisation that has a rich culture. We've created art that expands upon our physical experience, have developed science that is asking (and answering) questions that delve into the intimate workings of the universe, have perused and created challenging answers that address "why we are here" and are on the cusp of becoming a multi planetary species. All the while we have battled our animal natures and so far, seem to be doing a pretty good job of surviving the worst we can create. Not perfect by any measure, but we're doing a damn good job for a bunch of naked apes that on cosmic timescales just crawled out of the sludge.
So lets challenge ourselves, when asked how we would react to an encounter with alien civilisations, instead of putting up the "danger, stay away" sign, how about we roll out the best our species has achieved and take some pride in what so far has been an amazing ride.
Fast forward maybe another 2-5k years in human progress and let’s make the humans the aliens and some creatures perhaps like dinosaurs or maybe early intelligent like pre-historic cave men but “beneath” human progress on a habitable planet somewhere within a 100ish light years from earth.
What would happen? We will have sent our automated probes to their planet, programmed to find moving objects, large/small and observe them. We will measure all aspects of their habitat.
Then what? We will sit down for tea and compare our feelings of pride? We will attempt to teach them something they don’t know?
I don’t get it. It seems super binary to me, alien life will either be so advanced they are tourists or scientists observing us on our “nature preserve” ... or they will have eyes on our real estate. I don’t see romantic in-betweens as remotely realistic and never have.
Lets freak out in cable news networks and social media until we reach a fever pitch of cultural overheating where all rationality collapses and we lose our ability to function as a civilization.
> The outer limit of the Oort cloud defines the cosmographic boundary of the Solar System
> The Oort cloud...is a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals proposed to surround the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 au (0.03 to 3.2 light-years).
That explains it. I always forget the orders of magnitude involved between the smallest colloquial definitions of "the solar system" and the largest technical definitions. It looks like it was only in the planetary region for under a decade.
Who knows what a million or billion year old civilization looks like, but there might be a decent chance that the first sign of extraterrestrial life is really mundane like some alien tardigrades floating through space inhabiting an asteroid. Or a small alien space probe with little to no identifying features of the civilization that built it or where it was launched from.
If we’re talking about advanced aliens showing up in person, then we probably just acquiesce to whatever they want, or die resisting.
Your last paragraph is assuming they'd be interested in imposing their will upon us. They may simply not care. Meeting us may just be an interesting diversion or pure curiosity.
Or they may be reluctant to get involved but sympathetic enough to offer a select few technological advances, if we want them.
There are a lot of possibilities which don't result in full surrender or a fight to the death.
Earth is likely very very valuable galactic real estate. Terraforming barren planets or moons is incredibly energy intensive. Assembling habitats in space also potentially quite frustratingly complex. Earth from a technical perspective has incredible resources. Aren’t we already pointing our latest telescopes at nearby solar systems looking for “habitable” planets? They are gonna want your planet sorry. Maybe they will work out an Indian reservation like proposal because the guilt is hard for them.
They can do that at home with all the resources available to them. Beside, why the heck would you transform an entire planet when you can build your own custom made space habitats?
Anyway, we're looking for habitable planets not to colonize them but to find signs of life elsewhere in the universe.
I don’t agree with any of what you conjecture. Assume you have much better technology as ours but we roughly correct in our current understandings of physics and energy. So let’s try building space habitats with square foot like our planet’s surface that can accommodate exponential growth in demand, really? Before you say well they will have a different habitat, that’s easy, we can even almost solve that, little DNA programming we can likely adjust our DNA to incorporate features that make earth’s atmosphere habital. Now the “incredible” resources to get here. It’s nonsense, the first arrivals will be automated probes, lightweight. Again we can almost easily do this and we just got started.
Lastly, the idea we aren’t looking for habitable planets with in the back of our minds colonies is silly, of course we actually are, we can make all the excuses we want to try and justify our real intentions.
We are on exactly the path I suggest they are likely on. Find planets, send probes, sample lifeforms if found. Send seeds. It’s the universal life force that makes us do it. It’s what life does, expand, replicate, grow, spread.
Why would they let us do our thing? Given enough time we might become just as advanced and resource hungry as them.
Who knows what trouble we may cause them in the future, or rare resources that we might currently not even know exist we might steal.
The time to place place mouse traps is long before there's an entire family of them living in your shed.
It'll be either extermination, or - best case scenario - capture/trap and possibly study. Any characteristics or capabilities we humans poses that they find interesting/funny/useful will be catalogued and copied. No need to keep us around.
There was one Babylon 5 episode where an alien probe approaches the station and broadcasts a bunch of scientific questions that if we answer correctly, they will grant us knowledge beyond our dreams.
The final decision was to move the probe far enough from the station, broadcast the data, and watch as it predictably self-destructed in an explosion that would have taken out the station itself and all surrounding ships.
In USENET, the showrunner said that he based this idea on a US Military recommendation that if aliens try to contact us we should ignore them, basically play dumb so we don't seem advanced enough to bother with, just in case they ARE seeking potentially dangerous civilizations to destroy before they get too far...
In the short term they might not care, and for an old civilization the short term might be a few hundred years. If they are anything like current day humanity, we would end up interacting with a tiny portion of their population like some middle manager at an interstellar mega corp or xenology students on a grant from their nearest university.
We won’t be important, and certainly won’t be making any appreciable difference good or bad to their civilazation as whole.
Worst case scenario that I think is plausible is that they are so decentralized that one of their warlords would come over and set up an empire on top of us for a few hundred years before the central authority realizes anything.
It’s interesting that you automatically assume they are hungry for scarce or rare resources. It is possible they live in a post scarcity society, but as a member of the human society you still automatically go to the thing that causes most of the wars and conflicts on this world.
A resource does not have to be material. It can be something made up, perhaps their version of an ever watching ghost in the sky, something that gives them purpose and motivates to continue on even though they already have everything.
But yes, slightly biased. No real reference material to speak of though :P
The outer space medium (with radiation and low temperature) coupled with interstellar distances acts as a very effective biocide, even against something very resistant as tardigrades. The way I see it, about encountering free floating extraterrestrial life, either sole or riding an asteroid, the most we can realistically expect is for complex organic matter, remains of once functional biological mechanisms, that would present in itself definitive evidence. The aforementioned natural barrier is a bit to high and too unrewarding for unguided evolution to address (regardless of allotted time). For something to be able to traverse long distance in outer space medium and avoid degeneration, the destructive factors need to be actively countered, therefore the other kind of evidence must be something undoubtedly engineered by an intelligent creatures, be it probes or vessels preserving organic matter.
To paraphrase Caliban's War: The binder for what we do if something [extraterrestrial] comes up? It's three pages long, and it begins Step One: Find God.
> If we’re talking about advanced aliens showing up in person, then we probably just acquiesce to whatever they want, or die resisting.
I don't get this, our history indicates this but at the same vein as we have grown in empathy. Why wouldn't an advanced civilisation also not grow in empathy? They'd have already solved the energy problem so their needs should be about understanding different perspectives.
I've always found curious that we think extraterrestrials must be a civilization.
If we define life as an entity that strives to perpetuate itself, then the fact that we are separate individuals is just a hack to make us evolve and survive in a harsh environment. After some level of technological advancement, a futurist civilization might simply converge into a sole being, an unified intelligence.
I'll wait for the science fiction experts to point me to some books exploring this idea :)
Star Trek's Borg are an interesting step along this line of thought. They are a collective intelligence, described as a collection of individual consciousnesses, which may or may not count as a "sole being". But how their collection is unified and organized is interesting to think about.
The Borg are much easier to imagine today than they were in the 90s. Incredibly prescient bit of sci-fi.
How does the collective work?
They’re all jacked into the boards constantly meme-ing each other.
That’s how the whole thing got started in the first place too. You had a weird cult like Qanon get memed into existence and then they got Neuralink. Then the cult became a malignant superintelligence that set about conquering the universe to exterminate the Satanic pedophiles.
“We are Borg! Resistance is futile! Where we go one we go all!”
Something like that... very easy to imagine. We are close.
Charles Stross has a short story called "Missile Gap", which I heartily recommend. Just mentioning it relating to this topic is a bit of a spoiler; it contains the line "Humans are not useful. The future belongs to ensemble intelligences, hive minds". It appears to be online here: https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/spring_2007/fiction_m...
I can't think of any where a civilization coalesces or evolves into one being and that gets explored in depth; only where it happens briefly "and then they uploaded/transcended/melded with the God-entity, the end" style. I suspect it would be hard to imagine being in a single superintelligence, I can only think of them seen from outside by ordinary humans. There are a few I can think of which have one-mind/hive-mind ideas on the small scale:
Starship Troopers, the enemy bugs are insect-style intelligences where only the queen is really sentient and the rest are worker-drones.
Joe Haldeman's Forever War ends with a reveal of the enemy being a hive mind of some kind, and it was all a mistake. Seen from the human side with no exploration of the enemy except that they exist.
Peter F. Hamilton has this idea in a couple of his books; one is Morning-Light-Mountain[1] which is an alien hive-intelligence which outcompeted all others in its solar system. The other is a trans-human faction starting to go the same way, "multiple-people" who clone themselves and have brain implants to sync their brain state into one mind shared between all their clones. Only on the small scale of a few dozen bodies, not a competitive intelligence. They're smaller plot parts in large space operas.
John Windham's Midwitch Cuckoos, the alien children are believed to be a hive mind, as teaching something to one of them turns into something all of them can do. Also seen from the outside, we never find out about their origins or the adult aliens.
(In the film Avatar, the aliens have a tree where they can tap into the wisdom of their ancestors, it turns out to be a kind of hive-mind of the dead).
Intelligent life might show up on a ship of some kind, perhaps in a desperate last attempt to outlast the techno-eco disaster that destroyed their ecosphere.
Then, of course, they'd be weak from the journey, and we'd kill them and find a reason to ignore the obvious lesson.
> Then, of course, they'd be weak from the journey, and we'd kill them...
Are there any examples from
human history where explorers have arrived on “new” land and have then been defeated by those already inhabiting it? It seems like those arriving tend to have more advanced technology and even when they’re starving and weak manage to conquer. For humans, at least, I suspect “victory” goes to the visitors far more often.
But if, by some miracle, the humans prevailed I think you’re unfortunately correct about us conveniently ignoring the lesson.
> Are there any examples from human history where explorers have arrived on “new” land and have then been defeated by those already inhabiting it?
Europeans in North America. For a long time any colony that was founded only survived if the natives allowed it. Yes, the Europeans had guns vs. bows and arrows, but the guns at the time sucked. Bows and arrows were faster to fire, faster to reload, and had better accuracy.
It wasn't until some tribes that were not doing well in wars with other tribes made alliances with the Europeans that Europeans really started to get established.
Later the diseases that came with the Europeans tore through the whole continent, rapidly reducing the native population by over 90% and then Europeans could pretty much take over anything they wanted to.
We'd ignore them, and a bunch of people on HN would militantly deny that they couldn't possibly have navigated the vast distances across space to get here.
>and a bunch of people on HN would militantly deny that they couldn't possibly have navigated the vast distances across space to get here.
This is a mischaracterization of their position. What those people probably meant is that given an unexplained phenomena, the chances that an alien involved is small, therefore we should look for more benign and more likely explanations. It doesn't mean that if an unambiguously alien ship showed up on earth that they'll deny its existence.
Unlikely we will die from their version of smallpox, because they aren't likely to share human DNA.
Remember, we are literally surrounded by viruses. We eat them all the time. The vast majority are completely harmless anyway. They have their specific targets.
I don’t share your confidence. We’d be exposed to multitudes of new viruses any one of which could potentially find a host in us. We’d have no specific defenses and they may have novel (to Earth life) means of infecting hosts.
Don’t forget the part where instead of trying to create something useful from the vast technological advances that they’d provide, we instead use it to compute cryptographic hashes slightly faster than the week prior.
The things that would necessarily be true would be that, they would have superior weapons and tech, they would both arrive and reveal their presence (generally) on purpose, the outcomes are pretty binary where it's either to elevate our species or suppress it, they are somewhat like us (as to huge ones we might as well be bacteria, and to microscopic ones, we're monsters) and there would need to be some condition they were waiting for that made revealing themselves both economical and necessary. Mere benevolent altruism doesn't justify the energy costs to travel space, there has to be something else they need from us.
The discipline that has the most predictive power about their intentions is likely economics. Maybe they want to use us as an expendable species of space-apes for further colonization of new planets. It's an upgrade the same way being a research chimp is an upgrade.
However, given the time/distance they've traveled they'd be adapted for space faring, and not planet dwelling, so in terms of their deficits, muscles developed under gravity aren't their specialty. Their bodies would be the absolute minimum necessary to contain and sustain their minds, reproduce, and operate their tech, to where what we encounter or perceive would likely be exoskeletons. What minerals are unique to a planet like ours (other than life) that can't be found with less hassle than getting here, elsewere in the universe?
What should we do? Listen. Learn. Then negotiate. They need us for something, and anything less than the fairest possible terms is going to be very bad for our species.
I always felt that the alternative version of Vulcan contact is more true to life. After all we've successfully dealt with other human species, and the highly developed aliens who probably overcame their anger, violence, etc. may be in for a surprise.
If a civilization is so advanced that it can reach us, then we have to assume that they are here to take our resources. We can take a peaceful approach but we should have our finger on a nuclear arsenal in case they decide they are bored with us and want our water and minerals. But chances are they would know everything about us already and would anticipate that as well.
Here is my thesis by which humans can never be exterminated by an aggresive alien race directly via attack:
For a universe that is infinite and provided there are no aggressive alien races within our inmediate stellar neighborhood, it would break the rules of economics for humans to be attacked, whether for resources or for sport.
This is because for any alien to actually visit us, they would need FTL travel tech. If they do have FTL, then such tech would dramatically reduce the cost of travel to nil. This would make any point in the galaxy reachable inmediately at almost no cost.
Therefore, at that point, any valuable resource of earth... would also be reachable at the same cost at another earth-like planet. Except the latter would be without pesky humans on it.
Or, if you had infinite kit Kat bars in front of you, you would always pick the one without any ants on it.
Similarly, any aggressive alien race with FTL would not exterminate humans for sport. They may kill some similar to how you handle a roach, but any species unrestrained by resource limits (again, FTL) the tendencies for conflict will have naturally died out of the gene pool.
You also don't know for sure (or have not explained) the rationale for saying that:
- a society (really ? Do they also have city halls and a bi-party congress?)
- unrestrained by resource limits (that you understand, because I can tell you that when you swallow suns you possibly have a limit eventually you wouldn't want to run out of)
- lost its tendency for conflict
- front the gene pool (that's very optimistic to think they would have genes, working like ours, in a context of natural selection similar to ours: with a bit of luck, we could have had 2 intelligent, non-sexually compatible, species of hominids, and I suspect things would have been very different in term of what sport-killing means).
Me I can absolutely imagine a species of metallic robots created by a far away biologic equivalent who are so absolutely bored that reducing biological life to ashes became a way to escape, to feel something. They can switch off time perceptions, travel everywhere at whatever speed, reproduce programmatically and don't suffer from maternal instinct or mirror neuron empathy. Their vast intelligence does generates curiosity, which in turn generates boredom when there's nothing new to do or see. We became their latest weekend sport event, and they'll move on as fast as they've exterminated us, on to the next surprise of life.
Resource limits:
If the universe is infitine there are infinite suns to use. And energy doesnt disappear. It just transforms.
Genes: i think you are caught up in semantics. Any alien race will follow the same building blocks of the universe. They may not be carbon, they may not be bipeds, they may not have sexes, but they cant skip evolution. Every planet every sun every organism follows an interative pattern. Thats a basic block of the universe we reside. You start from something, creator or not. And your race then is to survive period. Those are the 2 rules. If your survival is guaranteed because you have access to infinite resources and infinite escape routes, then over time, your race reflects that condition.
You can imagine killer robots. But everything comes from something. For creators to "escape", that implies they are trapped somwhere. And if they are trapped, that means they dont really have the means to move about freely. Perhaps the killer robots do exist, but they are just as constrained as we are by our tech.
But considering out failure to chemically get anything other than carbon to form the long chains of double bonds that carbon does, along with the fact that carbon is common unlike most of the other proposed choices (that seem like they should work but don't) they probably will be. Same applies to needing water. Other chemicals could substitute, but water is common unlike the rest.
This is the feel-good version that someone wanting to prevent widespread panic may attempt to sell to the public. However, considering that our defining ability, the intelligence, evolved as a tool to anticipate and address our potential problems, I think it would be better to let the situation into public attention as is, and let people worry, because this is how we may tap into what could be a collective thought effort. Aggression may be removed from genes, but it is not the same as conflict. Conflict by its nature is the result of changing force collision, something that may happen for rational enough reasons. Now, considering our cosmic-scale context, I wouldn't bet for all extant creature in the universe to be like-minded, which in itself is a strong factor for potential conflict, even for mature space faring civilizations. Once paid the price for one conflict instance, the intelligence (as ability) dictates preventive actions against another costly conflict. Yes, aliens may indeed ignore us like we ignore ants, but that works only as long as the ants don't proliferate to become a real nuisance for us. I for one, am not thrilled to be in ants' condition in the humans-ants power relationship. That for us, in relation to a technologically-superior alien civilization, would mean and act as a set of hard limits: on space we'd allowed to extend into, on resources (and by extension - on our magnitude as human species), and (probably most importantly) on our technological evolution (i.e. to stay harmless).
Impossible to say in general. It depends on how they got here, what kind of beings they are, what their intentions are, etc. Could be ignore, cooperate, bend over and kiss your ass goodbye, or any number of other things.
Chances are they came to visit with the sequoia redwood trees, and will be very upset to find them all cut down. Then we will have about a decade until they notice and react.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadI think this is the main focus of this opinion piece. I don't know who the author is, but I wouldn't be surprised that he would be someone writing grant proposals to get a piece of these funds.
Aka the guy that proposed that the ʻOumuamua is a solar sail.
(IIRC he is a good astrophysicist, but he is pushing the idea of the alien solar sail too hard.)
The speed of light is far too slow. If they exist (might or might not, either way is extraordinary), they are probably too far away to even know we are here (100 lightyears at the most, and probably less considering how fast radio weakens ), and then even longer to get here.
In short they can't get here in anyone's lifetime.
Solar system escape velocity is about 5.5% of c according to a quick web search. So ca. 3000 years for 100 ly, allowing for acceleration and deceleration. The aliens would be fanatics to still be interested after that time.
But in order to come to rest here, they'll have got around the laws of thermodynamics and the momentum-kinetic energy relation to produce engines with impossibly high specific impulse, thrust and efficiency.
What we'd do is watch them whizz past.
Have you taken into account the relativity of time? If i've understood it correctly, time stops at the speed of light. For an alien travelling at that velocity, moving from one end of the universe to the other will take no time at all! No fanaticism required. How will they have time to stop? Also, does anyone know if an object with mass even move at the speed of light?
Unless earth has something they want or need I doubt they would bother with us.
If we did have something they needed a warlike, or non-peaceful race of aliens would come down and declare themselves as our God and creator, and after some advanced science demonstrations, all of the religious people of the world would fall in line.
A peaceful or benevolent race of aliens would still probably avoid us unless it was absolutely necessary to contact us, and then I’m still not sure we’d be smart enough to understand everything that was happening.
With Friends Like These
https://archive.org/details/withfriendsliket00fost
Another great story from that collection inspired the board game "Car Wars".
If I were to to do the same I'd be saying that there are no religious people around anymore and the church's only exist to interfere in politics, the people involved only having "faith" in as far as it justifies there actions.
If we had a large and verifiable alien encounter, there would be three types of reaction.
Denial - it's a fake, Panic - Run for the hills, Acceptance - Ok, it's what it is, how do we move forward with it.
There would be of course be people from each of these groups trying to profit from the event in whatever manner is possible.
I think the reaction to the pandemic shows how communities react to uncomfortable events, and I think the difference in reactions from different communities/countries give a pretty good indication on how they would react to an alien encounter. Some countries would react well, others would just dissolve into chaos.
You realize that anything that a human believes to be true is rooted, fundamentally, in a faith-based assumption, right? science is faith in the human ability to percieve; religion is when this faith is based on the ineffible.
Science is good for practical matters. Religion is good for moral matters.
They are not at odds. The human connection to the logical and their connection to the spiritual have walked hand in hand throughout history. Our spirituality has guided our science, and vice versa. To lose our religiousness would be to lose a full half of our capability for reasoning.
Why is it that many highly innovative and prolific scientists throughout history have been deeply religious?
Furthermore, EVEN IF religion was complete fiction, which I believe it is not, it is so very obviously a useful and deeply insightful fiction. It allows us to interrogate the inner workings of the human psyche, the natural moral law, gives us a sense of purpose, motivates charity and kindness, creates community and social trust. Abd you cab miss me with that Sam Harris, "but we can do all that without religion, cause ultimately religion also causes problems of bigotry" - Bo, we cannot, it is precisely the illogucal nature of religion that makes it useful for moral reasoning. Logical deduction about morality leads to highly undesirable consequences. And yes, sone religions propogate bigotry : not all, though. For example, Christianity does not promote any sort of judgement of others. While there are christians who do so, they do it in spite of the word of the bible, not because of it.
Okay, hopping off my soapbox now, but really guys, you ought to be more sympathetic to the religious among us, you might learn something and become a better person in the process.
I like to see the flip side of this, and look at the amazing achievements that the species have achieved in a little under 100000 years.
We've gone from intelligent animals living lives a little different from any of the other intelligent animals to creating a civilisation that has a rich culture. We've created art that expands upon our physical experience, have developed science that is asking (and answering) questions that delve into the intimate workings of the universe, have perused and created challenging answers that address "why we are here" and are on the cusp of becoming a multi planetary species. All the while we have battled our animal natures and so far, seem to be doing a pretty good job of surviving the worst we can create. Not perfect by any measure, but we're doing a damn good job for a bunch of naked apes that on cosmic timescales just crawled out of the sludge.
So lets challenge ourselves, when asked how we would react to an encounter with alien civilisations, instead of putting up the "danger, stay away" sign, how about we roll out the best our species has achieved and take some pride in what so far has been an amazing ride.
What would happen? We will have sent our automated probes to their planet, programmed to find moving objects, large/small and observe them. We will measure all aspects of their habitat.
Then what? We will sit down for tea and compare our feelings of pride? We will attempt to teach them something they don’t know?
I don’t get it. It seems super binary to me, alien life will either be so advanced they are tourists or scientists observing us on our “nature preserve” ... or they will have eyes on our real estate. I don’t see romantic in-betweens as remotely realistic and never have.
Lets freak out in cable news networks and social media until we reach a fever pitch of cultural overheating where all rationality collapses and we lose our ability to function as a civilization.
Is there an error in this sentence or is the popular understanding (that it passed through briefly, for some definition of brief) incorrect?
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud
> The outer limit of the Oort cloud defines the cosmographic boundary of the Solar System
> The Oort cloud...is a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals proposed to surround the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 au (0.03 to 3.2 light-years).
What if man is like a virus to the universe and the answer to fermi paradox is that other life forms are intentionally distancing from us?
I mean, just look at us.
We are non-aware and so we take limits lightly and act like there won't be consequences.
Also I don't hate us. I just think we can do a lot better :)
And hopefully we will.
you can say human beings or men, it's okay
If we’re talking about advanced aliens showing up in person, then we probably just acquiesce to whatever they want, or die resisting.
Or they may be reluctant to get involved but sympathetic enough to offer a select few technological advances, if we want them.
There are a lot of possibilities which don't result in full surrender or a fight to the death.
They can do that at home with all the resources available to them. Beside, why the heck would you transform an entire planet when you can build your own custom made space habitats?
Anyway, we're looking for habitable planets not to colonize them but to find signs of life elsewhere in the universe.
Lastly, the idea we aren’t looking for habitable planets with in the back of our minds colonies is silly, of course we actually are, we can make all the excuses we want to try and justify our real intentions.
We are on exactly the path I suggest they are likely on. Find planets, send probes, sample lifeforms if found. Send seeds. It’s the universal life force that makes us do it. It’s what life does, expand, replicate, grow, spread.
That's our assumption using technology we are already familiar with.
Who knows what trouble we may cause them in the future, or rare resources that we might currently not even know exist we might steal.
The time to place place mouse traps is long before there's an entire family of them living in your shed.
It'll be either extermination, or - best case scenario - capture/trap and possibly study. Any characteristics or capabilities we humans poses that they find interesting/funny/useful will be catalogued and copied. No need to keep us around.
The final decision was to move the probe far enough from the station, broadcast the data, and watch as it predictably self-destructed in an explosion that would have taken out the station itself and all surrounding ships.
In USENET, the showrunner said that he based this idea on a US Military recommendation that if aliens try to contact us we should ignore them, basically play dumb so we don't seem advanced enough to bother with, just in case they ARE seeking potentially dangerous civilizations to destroy before they get too far...
We won’t be important, and certainly won’t be making any appreciable difference good or bad to their civilazation as whole.
Worst case scenario that I think is plausible is that they are so decentralized that one of their warlords would come over and set up an empire on top of us for a few hundred years before the central authority realizes anything.
But yes, slightly biased. No real reference material to speak of though :P
I don't get this, our history indicates this but at the same vein as we have grown in empathy. Why wouldn't an advanced civilisation also not grow in empathy? They'd have already solved the energy problem so their needs should be about understanding different perspectives.
If we define life as an entity that strives to perpetuate itself, then the fact that we are separate individuals is just a hack to make us evolve and survive in a harsh environment. After some level of technological advancement, a futurist civilization might simply converge into a sole being, an unified intelligence.
I'll wait for the science fiction experts to point me to some books exploring this idea :)
How does the collective work?
They’re all jacked into the boards constantly meme-ing each other.
That’s how the whole thing got started in the first place too. You had a weird cult like Qanon get memed into existence and then they got Neuralink. Then the cult became a malignant superintelligence that set about conquering the universe to exterminate the Satanic pedophiles.
“We are Borg! Resistance is futile! Where we go one we go all!”
Something like that... very easy to imagine. We are close.
Seriously though... take an online cult and add Neuralink and something like the Borg could actually happen.
I can't think of any where a civilization coalesces or evolves into one being and that gets explored in depth; only where it happens briefly "and then they uploaded/transcended/melded with the God-entity, the end" style. I suspect it would be hard to imagine being in a single superintelligence, I can only think of them seen from outside by ordinary humans. There are a few I can think of which have one-mind/hive-mind ideas on the small scale:
Starship Troopers, the enemy bugs are insect-style intelligences where only the queen is really sentient and the rest are worker-drones.
Joe Haldeman's Forever War ends with a reveal of the enemy being a hive mind of some kind, and it was all a mistake. Seen from the human side with no exploration of the enemy except that they exist.
Peter F. Hamilton has this idea in a couple of his books; one is Morning-Light-Mountain[1] which is an alien hive-intelligence which outcompeted all others in its solar system. The other is a trans-human faction starting to go the same way, "multiple-people" who clone themselves and have brain implants to sync their brain state into one mind shared between all their clones. Only on the small scale of a few dozen bodies, not a competitive intelligence. They're smaller plot parts in large space operas.
John Windham's Midwitch Cuckoos, the alien children are believed to be a hive mind, as teaching something to one of them turns into something all of them can do. Also seen from the outside, we never find out about their origins or the adult aliens.
(In the film Avatar, the aliens have a tree where they can tap into the wisdom of their ancestors, it turns out to be a kind of hive-mind of the dead).
[1] https://peterfhamilton.fandom.com/wiki/Morning-Light-Mountai...
[2] https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2019/03/01/rogue-farm-b...
Then, of course, they'd be weak from the journey, and we'd kill them and find a reason to ignore the obvious lesson.
Are there any examples from human history where explorers have arrived on “new” land and have then been defeated by those already inhabiting it? It seems like those arriving tend to have more advanced technology and even when they’re starving and weak manage to conquer. For humans, at least, I suspect “victory” goes to the visitors far more often.
But if, by some miracle, the humans prevailed I think you’re unfortunately correct about us conveniently ignoring the lesson.
Europeans in North America. For a long time any colony that was founded only survived if the natives allowed it. Yes, the Europeans had guns vs. bows and arrows, but the guns at the time sucked. Bows and arrows were faster to fire, faster to reload, and had better accuracy.
It wasn't until some tribes that were not doing well in wars with other tribes made alliances with the Europeans that Europeans really started to get established.
Later the diseases that came with the Europeans tore through the whole continent, rapidly reducing the native population by over 90% and then Europeans could pretty much take over anything they wanted to.
The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove
(It's a great, short sci-fi story for anyone that may be interested. It should be pretty easy to find the PDF.)
Then we die from their space smallpox.
This is a mischaracterization of their position. What those people probably meant is that given an unexplained phenomena, the chances that an alien involved is small, therefore we should look for more benign and more likely explanations. It doesn't mean that if an unambiguously alien ship showed up on earth that they'll deny its existence.
Unlikely we will die from their version of smallpox, because they aren't likely to share human DNA.
Remember, we are literally surrounded by viruses. We eat them all the time. The vast majority are completely harmless anyway. They have their specific targets.
"Don't be snarky."
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The discipline that has the most predictive power about their intentions is likely economics. Maybe they want to use us as an expendable species of space-apes for further colonization of new planets. It's an upgrade the same way being a research chimp is an upgrade.
However, given the time/distance they've traveled they'd be adapted for space faring, and not planet dwelling, so in terms of their deficits, muscles developed under gravity aren't their specialty. Their bodies would be the absolute minimum necessary to contain and sustain their minds, reproduce, and operate their tech, to where what we encounter or perceive would likely be exoskeletons. What minerals are unique to a planet like ours (other than life) that can't be found with less hassle than getting here, elsewere in the universe?
What should we do? Listen. Learn. Then negotiate. They need us for something, and anything less than the fairest possible terms is going to be very bad for our species.
For a universe that is infinite and provided there are no aggressive alien races within our inmediate stellar neighborhood, it would break the rules of economics for humans to be attacked, whether for resources or for sport.
This is because for any alien to actually visit us, they would need FTL travel tech. If they do have FTL, then such tech would dramatically reduce the cost of travel to nil. This would make any point in the galaxy reachable inmediately at almost no cost.
Therefore, at that point, any valuable resource of earth... would also be reachable at the same cost at another earth-like planet. Except the latter would be without pesky humans on it.
Or, if you had infinite kit Kat bars in front of you, you would always pick the one without any ants on it.
Similarly, any aggressive alien race with FTL would not exterminate humans for sport. They may kill some similar to how you handle a roach, but any species unrestrained by resource limits (again, FTL) the tendencies for conflict will have naturally died out of the gene pool.
Also, even if space was infinite, that doesn't mean that low-entropy energy/matter (to extract energy/work from) is also infinite.
A word i like for that is exergy. Energy you can extract.
- a society (really ? Do they also have city halls and a bi-party congress?) - unrestrained by resource limits (that you understand, because I can tell you that when you swallow suns you possibly have a limit eventually you wouldn't want to run out of) - lost its tendency for conflict - front the gene pool (that's very optimistic to think they would have genes, working like ours, in a context of natural selection similar to ours: with a bit of luck, we could have had 2 intelligent, non-sexually compatible, species of hominids, and I suspect things would have been very different in term of what sport-killing means).
Me I can absolutely imagine a species of metallic robots created by a far away biologic equivalent who are so absolutely bored that reducing biological life to ashes became a way to escape, to feel something. They can switch off time perceptions, travel everywhere at whatever speed, reproduce programmatically and don't suffer from maternal instinct or mirror neuron empathy. Their vast intelligence does generates curiosity, which in turn generates boredom when there's nothing new to do or see. We became their latest weekend sport event, and they'll move on as fast as they've exterminated us, on to the next surprise of life.
Resource limits: If the universe is infitine there are infinite suns to use. And energy doesnt disappear. It just transforms.
Genes: i think you are caught up in semantics. Any alien race will follow the same building blocks of the universe. They may not be carbon, they may not be bipeds, they may not have sexes, but they cant skip evolution. Every planet every sun every organism follows an interative pattern. Thats a basic block of the universe we reside. You start from something, creator or not. And your race then is to survive period. Those are the 2 rules. If your survival is guaranteed because you have access to infinite resources and infinite escape routes, then over time, your race reflects that condition.
You can imagine killer robots. But everything comes from something. For creators to "escape", that implies they are trapped somwhere. And if they are trapped, that means they dont really have the means to move about freely. Perhaps the killer robots do exist, but they are just as constrained as we are by our tech.
But considering out failure to chemically get anything other than carbon to form the long chains of double bonds that carbon does, along with the fact that carbon is common unlike most of the other proposed choices (that seem like they should work but don't) they probably will be. Same applies to needing water. Other chemicals could substitute, but water is common unlike the rest.
spoilers = we cant handle (arent ready for) the truth
http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf