…as many of you know, it’s a common theme in Science Fiction for aliens to come to Earth, seeking to strip our planet of all it’s precious resources. Metal ore, hydrogen, etc. But, as many critics have noted, much of those resources can be just as easily found in other places in the solar system, such as the asteroid belt, and could be taken without a fight, and without dealing with such a pesky gravity well to fire the goods out of.
So, that leaves me to wonder…are there any particular resources on Earth that can’t be found elsewhere in the solar system? Elements? Materials?
The only things I can think of, off the bat, would be manpower, and a climate to grow food. Maybe even whatever you could make from petroleum, but I imagine that a spacefaring civilization would be able to make plastic just as easily from raw elements.
So, can anyone think of anything else that could be of value, “here”?
Ranchoth
The Earth has plenty of oxygen, nitrogen and water, volatiles which are hard to find in the inner solar system…it is also close enough to the sun for slar energy to be useful.
If you arrived in our solar system from interstellar space energy and volatiles would be the first thing you would need to sustain biological life.
Of course energy and volatiles could also be extracted from the Jupiter system, where there is a powerful magnetic field and icy moons to utilise, so Earth is not indispensible in that regard.
To find something really valuable I suggest the aliens should look into the minds of the human population-
we dream, and imagine, and hope, and believe things which would be totally unique to the human species…
if the aliens could not directly access our dreams, they might make do with second best, and simply syndicate our television shows-
they will never have seen anything like the Simpsons on Alpha Centauri, for instance.
unless they have a really big tv dish
Well, aside from biological and human products (note that the Earth has the largest store in the solar system of the element plutonium, thanks to breeder reactors!), there are a few things:
Aside from the remote possibility of Europa and Callisto, we have the only known reservoir of liquid water. Granted H[sub]2[/sub]O is common in the form of ice, there are advantages to having the liquid.
21% of the Earth’s atmosphere is O[sub]2[/sub]. So far as I’m aware, elemental oxygen is available only in trace amounts elsewhere. (This is probably biogenic in origin.) We’re the second most concentrated source of argon, the Martian atmosphere being 1.5% argon to our 1.0%.
Non-aeoligenic sedimentary rocks – where else are they to be found?
I don’t know enough about cosmic abundances of them to be certain, but I have a strong hunch that many of the heavy metals (past iron on the periodic table) are more common on Earth’s surface than they are on accessible elsewheres, thanks to the fact that we have active mantle convection, plate tectonics, and such that encourage active vulcanism thrusting concentrations of them to the surface.
Hmm…Maybe natural silk, honey, ivory or any other Earth animal products. (That is, if there isn’t a Martian Honey Toad, Venusian Silk Tree or the Mammoth Tusked Uraniian Burrowing Shrew.) Just a thought.
-M
Life as a resource for aliens. hmmm. The battery idea is so laughably absurd, it makes me want to start a thread about what annoy me in the Matrix- (or is there one already?)
But like on Earth could be a resource in a positive way… the animals, plants, monera and so on of our world contain DNA patterns which have evolved spontaneously over a billion years or more-
this represents a billion years of spontaneous information processing.
Earth’s DNA could be nondestructively harvested, and used to create ecosystems all over the galaxy.
Given the chance, that is what I would do, both with Earth’s DNA and that of any other lifebearing planet discovered in the exploration of the galaxy.
Freeman Dyson has called it the ‘greening of the galaxy’.
‘sentience’ is probably the best answer - if we ever make contact with a sentient extraterrestrial race (and I suspect it will be radio contact, if anything ever at all, which rather limits the options), it is the exchange of ideas that will be most valued, in my opinion.
To expand on Mangetout’s post, I agree, life or ideas.
I’ve always wondered, in a limited way, about advanced civilizations “losing” technology. The common joke is how in the future of Star Trek, they’ve forgotten how to put a circuit breaker in line between the main systems and the bridge consoles.
I can easily see some hugely advanced race having, say, some difficulty with mild background radiation degrading their opto-holo data matrix or something, looking at a CD for example, and thinking “hey, we don’t have to have the lasers continually rewriting the information, we can encode it on a substrate for later reading!”
Or the race having Borg-like personal sheilds that will repel or absorb any known form of weapon energy… “But sir, they have something that fires bits of actual matter at high speeds! They go through the sheilds like they weren’t even there!”
I know various books have explored that. I just find it interesting, since we’ve seen limited versions of the same thing happen here and now. (Old ‘technologies’ being lost or abandoned as obsolete.)
Although there is evidence that Martian volcanic rocks may be as highly evolved as Andesite, there is no evidence that igneous rocks more strongly differentiated than this (e.g., granite, rhyolite, pegmatite, dacite, trachyte, phonolite, etc.) exist anywhere in the solar system except Earth.
Which is No Big Deal unless you consider that it is in these strongly differentiated rocks where many economically important elements are concentrated (e.g., Au, Ag, Nb, Ta, Zr, F, REE, Cu, Mo, Rb, U, Th)!
This isn’t to say that these elements don’t exist elsewhere–they do, but they are dissimiated and although certainly present in the bulk of the planet in chondritic abundances similar to the Earth, are probably nowhere else concentrated because geologic mechanisms that would concentrate them (and create the above mentioned rocks) simply haven’t had the opportunity to do so as they have had on Earth.
Not to be a party pooper, but a lot of the stuff people are mentioning can be easily manufactured. Grab some ice, apply energy (a lot less energy than it would take to descend deep into the Sun’s gravity well and climb back out again) and you get liquid water. Perform electrolysis on yer liquid water, and you get all the oxygen that an alien race bent on conquering the Galaxy could hope for.
Pantellerite, I am intrigued! What geological mechanisms concentrate those valuable elements? Something to do with plate tectonics (something that doesn’t happen on any other plant in the Solar System.)
