I’m reminded of a quote from Donald Rumsfield (of all people):
"there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. "
When comes to discussing extraterrestrial life, there are so many unknown unknowns involved it’s really hard to a definitive answer as to what it would be like. Are they pacifist? Are they aggressive? We don’t know have any reasonable way of knowing that. Even if aliens are internally pacifist among their own species, it doesn’t mean they couldn’t be aggressive to outside species.
Even using comparisons between extraterrestrial’s and Earth’s history are probably flawed. We have no idea what pressures or problems the evolutionary process of extraterrestrials faced that could influence their thinking or culture. It’s hard to know how much of how evolution worked on Earth could be applied to extraterrestrial life. There are probably some aspects of evolution that are unique to Earth.
I know your joking, but from a bio-chemical standpoint it’s very doubtful extraterrestrials would be able to digest humans or any other species on our planet.
What I DO know is it’s not about when ETs land, it’s all about where.
If they land in the Antarctic, fine. We’ll have to go to them. If they land in the Bible Belt, lynchin’ ropes will be free! “We gonna get them Grays! They’ll tuk yer ders! Yeeeee-haw!!!”
I agree that anything we think about alien life is pure speculation, and there is virtually no actual evidence to point to and show that any particular speculation is more credible than others. It is entirely possible that alien life would be so alien that they would be entirely unrelatable to us.
I do not see that as useful speculation, though. “We don’t know.” and we’re done; end thread.
While it may not be any more useful, and obviously wastes more energy then simply declaring we can’t know, speculation based on what little information that we do have is at least entertaining, and has a slight chance of being productive as well.
There is either no intelligent alien life out there, and we are it, or at least first, or there is intelligent alien life out there, and it comes in many flavors. Some of those flavors may be unrelatable, but some would be closer to us in some aspects. That the earth is unique in creating intelligent life, I can believe, that we are unique in making a form of intelligent life that is different from every other form of intelligent life is more of a stretch.
There are attributes that we can look at as being necessary to become a space fairing civilization. Maybe not all would follow this path, but at least some would. And that path would involve understanding logic, science and math. A species that can understand these things can see the earth, and understand that it is inhabited by intelligent creatures, even if not as intelligent as themselves. We look at other animals on earth, and debate whether they are intelligent, because they haven’t done much to prove their intelligence. If you go back a few thousand years before we really started using tools and modifying our environment, it may have been difficult to assess our intelligence at that time as well.
At this point, we not only have obvious signs of our intelligence, but we have developed systems to pass that intelligence onto our young. I cannot see how any alien civilization could take a look at our world, and not see that there is something that is intelligent. And if they can recognize our intelligence, they can come up with a way to communicate.
Now, if we are talking about a sentient cloud of complex chemistry that floats through interstellar space, yeah, that’s going to be somehting completely unrelatable. It probably won’t recognize us, and we will likely not recognize it, as intelligent. But any carbon and water based life could evolve in a similar enough fashion that we should at least be on the same plane of existence.
k9bfriender, that post was more insightful than anything I could have said.
I think we can reasonable speculate how humans would react to first contact.
Frankly, I think would be a massive panic if extraterrestrial spaceships showed up in Earth orbit. The stock market would probably crash. A lot of people would probably start hoarding food and supplies under the assumption the ETs were going to attack. It would interesting to see how the major religions would react. Some of the more fundamentalist groups would probably assume the ETs were agents of the devil and react accordingly. I don’t think we’re ready at all for first contact.
Aliens could certainly look at our planet and determine that we’ve altered it. And we can look at a wasp nest and determine that the wasps have altered it. Who’s to say that the aliens might not consider all of our works as insignificant as we’d consider a wasp nest?
Presumably different alien planets have different views on the matter, as do the individuals contained therein (hive minds excepted). E.O. Wilson was fascinated by ants. Some enjoy the display and preservation of hornets nests. Whether alien fanboys can secure adequate funding is another matter (what with budget cuts on B9III), as is the question whether there are cheaper and more effective methods of observation than sending in the Armada.
That would be if these solar hopping aliens don’t have the intelligence to realize that their robotic accomplices should be humanoid and wearing white luminescent robes over their bodies with the heat dissipation devices or biosensor arrays mounted in a pair of flat panels to their backs. Possibly a circular antenna around the top of the “head.”
Since your post is so over the top bigoted, I’ll respond with the aliens would be wiser to not send their robotic minions into the inner city or they will be stripped for parts and left up on cinder blocks by the curb.
From The Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski:
"We ask that you try just one more thought experiment. Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That’s when the monsters come out. There’s always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.
It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can’t read minds.
Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body.
How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, “I’m here!” The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, “I’m a friend!”
What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don’t want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out.
There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe.
Well, like I said, just more evidence that we humans would gladly sell each other out to a new major power (aliens) for any possible small benefit we could gain.
The real danger is that aliens could consider us a threat. If the technology exists to cross interstellar distances in less than a human lifetime, the technology also exists to build missiles that could slam into your planet at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light. Get 'em going fast enough, and there would be no way to defend against such an attack, because by the time you saw 'em coming they’d already be upon you – and each one would impact your world with kinetic energy comparable to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
So if the aliens thought we MIGHT build such technology, their only rational course – for the sake of their own self-preservation – might be to attack us first.
One of the suggestions for answering the paradox is that we’re just located too far from the busy parts of the universe. All the action is somewhere else.
That makes sense. I prefer that to the predator option. That is, a super society waiting to devour us once we reach a level of technology sufficient to devour.
No, society will never be ready. It will be hilarious, to the aliens, to see families lining up with their cell phones video recording every thing they do. YouTube will explode.
Well, one of the things is the sheer number of stars.
We’re currently between spiral arms, but very close to the plane of the galaxy. But there are @ 260,000 stars within 250 light years and an estimated 600 million within 1,000 light years (the huge difference being that you start to hit the arms).
An intelligent species located in the arms may not bother coming out here in the ‘void’.
If Tabby’s Star was home to a super advanced species, we’re @ 1540 light years away and they’d have > 1 billion stars within that radius. I can’t imagine there’d be a point where the Human race occupied that much distinct territory. The resources available are so vast as to dwarf any need. The only reason to go that far out* would be the equivalent of the Pilgrim’s ships, heading out into the vast distances to be far away from Earth and avoid any future encounters/relationships.
The biggest flaw in most space opera is that the clashing civilizations are close enough together technologically to even fight. The Spanish and Aztecs were much closer technologically than we would be to any alien, and look how that turned out.
They’ll kill us because of our space probes was a staple of early '50s movies (like The Day the Earth Stood Still) which suffered from not understanding interstellar distances. Our super weapons would probably be about as effective as a dart from a blow gun against a tank.
But I agree that paranoid civilizations won’t last as I said way back early in this thread.
A more formal expression of this possibility is expressed in this paper by Milan Cirkovic.
Basically the idea is that intelligence is expensive, from an evolutionary point of view; a civilisation might develop efficient, autonomous support systems (including interstellar spaceships), but all the meatbags have to do is press the button and make them go. The George Jetson model of the future.
After a while the (no-longer necessary) feature of advanced intelligence would become redundant, and humans would revert to the mammalian mean.
We can’t reject even the wildest theories until we have more data, so long as the wild theories are congruent with the facts.
This is almost exactly right. They will not contact us, probably ever. We will become aware of them around the time that we have mastered whatever type of span-drive we (theoretically) develop. By that point, we will have discovered “ansible” communication and sophisticated analysis tools that will allow us to notice the presence of their tiny vessels passing over there, Pm away from ours.
We will nod or wave to them, exchange a burst of information and go our separate ways, bemused by each other’s relative bizarreness. Chances are, if there is contact, it will be not much more than that, because, by that point, we and they will be mature enough to understand that there is nothing more to say.
This kind of thinking is just projecting your values on to the aliens, assuming that if they were truly advanced they’d think/feel just like you do.
I am reminded of a science fiction story I read years ago where the Earth received a transmission from deep in space; the aliens who created mankind a million years ago were coming back to inspect us. So we got rid of nation-states, formed a One World Government, turned the swords into plowshares, and basically got our shit together.
But when the aliens arrived, they were disappointed; they were a Galactic Empire that created species to serve as weapons in their army of conquest. Humanity was clearly too innately pacifistic to be useful, and so the planet was scoured of life so they could start over with a new experiment.
