This is about as scientific as the Drake equation.
Invading across terrestrial or maritime borders != invading across light years of space. Invading a fellow homo-sapiens nation whose infrastructure, natural and human resources are perfectly compatible with your own is not the same as invading an alien species on an exo-planet across the galaxy.
Sadly that has been the norm for most of recorded history. Slavery and human trading has been practiced by cultures and codified in cultures i.e. religions. Most religions [implicitly] sanction slavery and human trading.
I have always felt like the enslavement concern of extraterrestrial contact is somewhat disingenuous because it stems from our historic treatment of one another due to resource scarcity.
In my humble and unscientific opinion, a race capable of creating ships big enough for intergenerational travel or capable of speeds that would make such travel feasible would have command over technology that would make scarcity a thing of the past. The universe is full of stuff (atoms) we can use to make other stuff, so why would we want to travel so far just to subjugate another species?
I think enslaving people is unlikely as well... We have stepped beyond that for more stable and effective methods of exploiting others like capitalism and globalism. Where we pay people just enough for them not to starve to produce economic output for others. Lesser civilizations would be like new third world countries, exploited for their labour.
Agreed, there is no objective benefit to an (otherwise) advanced society in keeping slaves. But it is easy to imagine one that does because they like to.
When the Maori in New Zealand heard from the English about a peaceful society on Chatham Island, 800 miles east, before two weeks had passed they set out on an expedition to exterminate all the men and enslave all the women there.
> command over technology that would make scarcity a thing of the past
For everyone? Humanity today produces more than enough food to fatten everyone, yet we still have regions which suffer famine and lack basic services and education. On a interstellar scale, if aliens are like us, they will have outcasts who wouldn't hesitate to conquer a planet if their technology is advanced enough. If post-scarcity can't produce enough rare or expensive materials, slave labor could do it almost free.
Revealing your existence to alien species could be one of the dumbest mistakes you could make in the universe. Especially when our technology is not even capable of interstellar travel. Thus any species that comes to visit us will be more technologically advanced. If they are more advanced it likely won't be by 10 or 100 years, but possibly one million years or more.
We would be sitting ducks. There are many ways this could go badly:
- They could be so advanced as to consider us a useless nuisance. They could treat us the way we treat ants.
- They could be inherently nice and rational (by our standards) but correctly see us as a threat to them as our technology advances in the future. Our tribal tendencies (culminating in war) are on display constantly. At best they would just keep their distance. At worst they might wipe us out for their own self preservation.
- Even a benevolent species could be disastrous for us if they transferred technology before we were ready for it.
Assuming travelling faster than light remains impossible. Theres the advantage that there are significantly less stars in the range of 0 to 100 lightyears than there are stars between 100 and 200 lightyears away. This means even if theres an alien civilisation, All the advanced ones must be far away and therefore our technosignature will never be exposed for XXXX years.
Our biggest signature/threat is that alien civilisations are receiving signals from our planet as it was thousands or millions of years ago and have send out a capable ship. But we still have the advantage of time. even travelling at near light speed, we might notice their technological attainment far before their ship can arrive. And thanks to einstein, the time dilation they experience at light speed means they dont have time to develop further during their travel. so an alien ship arriving is not game over as we have the space-time advantage. Therefore, military forces a few hundred years from now could be interested in defensive technosignature detection.
There could be. There absolutely will be pretenses of it if the slavers think it will work to herd us in the direction they want us to go.
Slavers don't have points or principles, only pretenses meant to enable their crimes.
Freedom is for the brave. There are only individual rights. They want you frightened collectivists, so you can be divided, and conquered, and you will forfeit essential liberty for the illusion of security.
Just remember, safety is not possible without freedom. Whatever their pretense, assure them you won't be willing slaves, and then sit back and enjoy the show.
Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.
Here's the thing about freedom, Earth, and humanity.. there is only nation that exists for the sole purpose of protecting the inalienable rights of the individual. The brave who would be free should live only there. The cowards who would be slaves should live literally anywhere else. As long as slaves don't go to the lone place for those who would be free, and try to eliminate the option, then time will tell whether or not it is a good idea.
Putting all of your eggs in one basket is dumb. Let the cowboys ignore the slavers' pretenses, and the fearful surrender for what at first seems like a less frightening fiction if they insist.
Should the aliens come, and there is resisting to be done, it would be done best by free men and women.. though, like a supernova, or Persians at the hot gates, someday our days are up. We can betray ourselves, or not. As always, the issue is force. Make your choice, and don't force others to go along with it.
Individualism is an illusion enabled by capitalism. Humans are hive animals, a truly independent person would be dead in days; no heat, no shelter, no servants. Instead, people play independent with pockets and bank accounts stuffed with government promises.
Tell that to the animals we raise and cage for food. They'll likely take the first opportunity to be free, but it's not in their hands to decide that. They're completely in our hands, no matter if they like it or not. Humans have only traveled to the moon, yet in a few century developed weapons that would wipe an entire city. A civilization that has achieved interstellar travel could be advanced enough to blow up Mercury to send a message: "Do you want to be our slaves, or do you want humanity to end?".
Good luck getting every "free man" to agree, or even everyone in your immediate circle. Real life is not an X-Men issue where Captain America is unwavering, uncompromising and always victorious; sometimes good generals call for strategic retreats, sometimes the sensible option is living to fight another day.
You don't know how true is your manly bravado until your life, and the lives of those you love, are on the line and defenseless. I say that as someone who has lived in cities of Mexico where organized crime rules with impunity, but anyone who has seen war, not from the drone cameras or humvees but from their own homes, would tear you a new one for being so naive.
Individuals decide for one. It's the slavers/slaves that want to decide for, & force, other people. If individuals decide to work together, or not, that is their right.
>You don't know how true is your manly bravado until your life, and the lives of those you love, are on the line and defenseless.
Freedom is the only possible security. Everything else is a fantasy. Sincerely, good luck with your principles. Please allow for others who think/believe differently, and do not try to sabotage them. As always, force is the issue. You're welcome to persuade, not to coerce.
At this point of history I doubt anyone would think humanity would be benevolent in a first contact. Humans are bastards and the only things that contains us are other bastards. We have both angels and demons inside.
We have to assume that every civilization in the universe is hostile in absolute terms. We just have to look at ourselves if there is any doubt.
However, it is likely that some civilizations may not be hostile towards us if they are either much more advanced than us to care about us for our resources or much less advanced than us to be of any threat. Of course in the latter case, it is we who may be hostile to them.
Obviously these themes have been explored plenty in SF, personally I would tend to expect any civilization that could manage interstellar travel would have also made enough social / moral progress to not be ruthless. That doesn't rule out some kind of total mismatch between understandings that could be dangerous, but I'd still be cautiously optimistic.
My take is that only a civilization advanced enough to program their own genome at will would be truly moral. Natural genomes have grown out of a ruthless fight for resources, and we can't truly educate out our natural tendencies.
Maybe also any civilization that evolved in an environment where there wasn't competition for resources, but that would likely stall evolution because there is no genetic arms race. I doubt such environment exists anyway, reproduction means competition for resources.
That leads to question would such civilization even attempt to expand or balance their growth and resource use in their local system? As colonization is inherently hostile and greedy action.
Just as we're worried about being a single planet civilization that could be wiped by an asteroid, maybe they'd worry about being a single star system civilization that could be wiped out by a single disaster. So far it seems like life is not everywhere, so there should be many uninhabited planets for the taking.
> My take is that only a civilization advanced enough to program their own genome at will would be truly moral. Natural genomes have grown out of a ruthless fight for resources, and we can't truly educate out our natural tendencies.
John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes still speak, even if coached in neo-Darwinian language.
But this is not how Aristotle saw human nature. Humans have to be given habits to live in accordance with reason, but that is their nature. According to him, bad habits ruin humans. And the main source of bad habits is bad laws, so it all depends on the kind of society you are born into.
That would simplify things, but clearly humans have made some moral progress (even if we may have some ways yet to go...) without anything quite that drastic?
The best humans wear a moral suit, attained trough intense education and effort. Humans don't overcome their instincts, we keep them in check either by conviction, or by fear of the consequences. Humanity is ridiculously far from enlightenment yet.
I would expect that, or at lean toward the idea that, any interstellar civilization is no longer ruthless for internal conflict with their own species, but I wouldn't rule out the idea of them being ruthless toward other species.
45 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 56.4 ms ] threadInvading across terrestrial or maritime borders != invading across light years of space. Invading a fellow homo-sapiens nation whose infrastructure, natural and human resources are perfectly compatible with your own is not the same as invading an alien species on an exo-planet across the galaxy.
In my humble and unscientific opinion, a race capable of creating ships big enough for intergenerational travel or capable of speeds that would make such travel feasible would have command over technology that would make scarcity a thing of the past. The universe is full of stuff (atoms) we can use to make other stuff, so why would we want to travel so far just to subjugate another species?
When the Maori in New Zealand heard from the English about a peaceful society on Chatham Island, 800 miles east, before two weeks had passed they set out on an expedition to exterminate all the men and enslave all the women there.
For everyone? Humanity today produces more than enough food to fatten everyone, yet we still have regions which suffer famine and lack basic services and education. On a interstellar scale, if aliens are like us, they will have outcasts who wouldn't hesitate to conquer a planet if their technology is advanced enough. If post-scarcity can't produce enough rare or expensive materials, slave labor could do it almost free.
[Dwight Shrute: “That’s a very real possibility.”]
Revealing your existence to alien species could be one of the dumbest mistakes you could make in the universe. Especially when our technology is not even capable of interstellar travel. Thus any species that comes to visit us will be more technologically advanced. If they are more advanced it likely won't be by 10 or 100 years, but possibly one million years or more.
We would be sitting ducks. There are many ways this could go badly:
- They could be so advanced as to consider us a useless nuisance. They could treat us the way we treat ants.
- They could be inherently nice and rational (by our standards) but correctly see us as a threat to them as our technology advances in the future. Our tribal tendencies (culminating in war) are on display constantly. At best they would just keep their distance. At worst they might wipe us out for their own self preservation.
- Even a benevolent species could be disastrous for us if they transferred technology before we were ready for it.
Our biggest signature/threat is that alien civilisations are receiving signals from our planet as it was thousands or millions of years ago and have send out a capable ship. But we still have the advantage of time. even travelling at near light speed, we might notice their technological attainment far before their ship can arrive. And thanks to einstein, the time dilation they experience at light speed means they dont have time to develop further during their travel. so an alien ship arriving is not game over as we have the space-time advantage. Therefore, military forces a few hundred years from now could be interested in defensive technosignature detection.
Slavers don't have points or principles, only pretenses meant to enable their crimes.
Freedom is for the brave. There are only individual rights. They want you frightened collectivists, so you can be divided, and conquered, and you will forfeit essential liberty for the illusion of security.
Just remember, safety is not possible without freedom. Whatever their pretense, assure them you won't be willing slaves, and then sit back and enjoy the show.
I fear the same would happen, and the graveyard would be filled with the brave, while the ones who gave in would continue to live as slaves.
Here's the thing about freedom, Earth, and humanity.. there is only nation that exists for the sole purpose of protecting the inalienable rights of the individual. The brave who would be free should live only there. The cowards who would be slaves should live literally anywhere else. As long as slaves don't go to the lone place for those who would be free, and try to eliminate the option, then time will tell whether or not it is a good idea.
Putting all of your eggs in one basket is dumb. Let the cowboys ignore the slavers' pretenses, and the fearful surrender for what at first seems like a less frightening fiction if they insist.
Should the aliens come, and there is resisting to be done, it would be done best by free men and women.. though, like a supernova, or Persians at the hot gates, someday our days are up. We can betray ourselves, or not. As always, the issue is force. Make your choice, and don't force others to go along with it.
I didn't know we were talking about France here :D
If not, why not?
You don't know how true is your manly bravado until your life, and the lives of those you love, are on the line and defenseless. I say that as someone who has lived in cities of Mexico where organized crime rules with impunity, but anyone who has seen war, not from the drone cameras or humvees but from their own homes, would tear you a new one for being so naive.
>You don't know how true is your manly bravado until your life, and the lives of those you love, are on the line and defenseless.
Freedom is the only possible security. Everything else is a fantasy. Sincerely, good luck with your principles. Please allow for others who think/believe differently, and do not try to sabotage them. As always, force is the issue. You're welcome to persuade, not to coerce.
Remember, it's not scientists who will control our interstellar diplomacy, it will be politicians and generals.
However, it is likely that some civilizations may not be hostile towards us if they are either much more advanced than us to care about us for our resources or much less advanced than us to be of any threat. Of course in the latter case, it is we who may be hostile to them.
Maybe also any civilization that evolved in an environment where there wasn't competition for resources, but that would likely stall evolution because there is no genetic arms race. I doubt such environment exists anyway, reproduction means competition for resources.
John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes still speak, even if coached in neo-Darwinian language.
But this is not how Aristotle saw human nature. Humans have to be given habits to live in accordance with reason, but that is their nature. According to him, bad habits ruin humans. And the main source of bad habits is bad laws, so it all depends on the kind of society you are born into.
2. China
3. North Korea
4. Iran
Seems legit. [X]