That’s basically the premise of Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
32 flavors.
The asari from Mass Effect. Green (well, blue) skinned space babes who everyone finds attractive and whose society places undue emphasis on reproduction with humans. Embrace eternity.
- They have a quick fix for the planet - can suck some of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and show us how to control weather. They also have a plant that tastes great, is healthy for you, easy to grow in any environment, and will ensure nobody ever goes hungry again.
- They have some basic medication that would cure 99.9% of all diseases and illnesses on this planet. That common cold will still be a mystery.
- They have the technology to increase brain power, making humans far more intelligent in one fell swoop, removing needless aggression and putting everyone on a level playing field in terms of basic intelligence. After this procedure, even the Pope would admit religion is sort of silly and all of the other religions would fold up their tents and pack it away as well.
- They would show how easy it is to travel to different planets for work/science/travel and soon 2/3 of our planet would be roaming the universe, learning and experiencing even more wonders.
- The aliens would, however, be perplexed at the fascination we have for the Kardashians and study this in depth.
Oh - they also can teach us something that is better than sex! Thus, the “old fashioned” sex with humans will be solely one method to use for having children, but otherwise will no longer be of interest to anyone.
No it doesn’t. They just crossed interstellar space. If their technology is sufficient to solve the problems inherent in that, there wouldn’t be a war, just an eradication. We’d never be able to fight back; I doubt there’s be even a single alien casualty. Of course, if that was their intent, why bother announcing themselves at all? We’d probably just die out without knowing what killed us.
To cross interstellar space in something like a generational ship (that’s a ship people just live in thousands of years while it goes a tiny fraction of the speed of light) you don’t NEED superdupper advanced technology. It would make the process easier no doubt and they could have all kinds of amazing cool shit but I don’t think its a given.
All you need is the ability to build a pretty big spaceship (which is more a problem of how big your total economy is so you can afford to do it) and the ability to build/engineer stuff that can last a long damn time.
So, if the aliens do show up in a generational ship there is the possibility that the best they might be able to do is put our car manufacturers out business by selling us their everlasting cars.
Heh. We won’t be able to check for a few centuries at least, but I’d be willing to bet that building a multi-thousand-year generation vessel turns out to be harder than bending space to sidestep the light-speed limit, technologically. We’ve been building things for ten thousand years here, and none of it’s come anywhere close to lasting that long in anything like pristine condition. And even a generation ship has to have shielding that would stop anything we could throw at it, while dropping rocks on us from orbit until everything stops moving on the surface. I still maintain that if they’re capable of getting here at all, we don’t have a chance.
But to the OP: best case? They just want companionship and/or vacation spots with exotic locals. They drop off a boatload of knowledge to advance us to their level, and stop by occasionally to say “hi” until we’re ready to join them in the exploration of the galaxy.
Mind you, I think the best case is more likely than the worst one: I can’t imagine an economic scenario in which crossing intersteller distances to “plunder” inhabited worlds makes sense. Which leaves insanity or religious zealotry, neither of which are prone to producing advanced technological results.
And I maintain you could be wrong ( I still allow for the possibility of the aliens being damn advanced).
We’ve had this discussion in a recent related thread. More than one person wasn’t too worried about a generational ship hitting stuff on the journey (long story short space is amazingly empty). So some ubber advanced shield technology is not needed.
But back to the advanced aliens. Yes, in some ways they would have engineering that we can’t do right now for them to get here. But that doesn’t mean they can kick our ass. Like I said the big thing is being able to build stuff that doesn’t wear out.
So what? So, they can make a water pump last a thousand years. Metal that doesn’t corrode very fast. Stuff like that. That’s all nice and it can save you some money in the long run but that doesn’t mean your everlasting tank can blow the crap out of our wears out in a couple years tank.
And for that matter, if they don’t have some kind of robots that can swam the solar system making all kinds of cool high tech space stuff out of basic resources when they get there its gonna IMO be more like a bunch of smart hippies that show up in your driveway in a VW van going “thank God we made it”.
It’s possible, but extremely unlikely, that we would encounter the Mark I generational starship.
It’s like saying if they have guns they may be simple muskets because, you know, you don’t need to know about rifling, ballistics or aerodynamics to make a basic gun.
Again, given the Universe’s long age the odds of two sentient species meeting who’s technology is only different by < 1 million years is remote. In most encounters one species will be unimaginably more advanced than the other.
If a generational spaceship comes here, it’s a pretty safe bet it won’t be one that could only barely make the journey, and have little to no resources for when it gets here.
Why would they bring lots of extra stuff if they did not need too? Any reasonable society will do the minimum they need to get “here”. Unless generational ships are a dime a dozen where they come from. And given what it would take to make and a fuel one that seems unlikely.
You guys are making the assumption that technology way older than ours will be amazingly more advanced. It may not be. There well could be limits to science and engineering. And we could be closer to them than we would wish.
Heck, I bet our new pale gray neighbors show up bitching that they still don’t have flying cars.
“Congratulations, Earth! You’re the 1,000th world we’ve contacted, and that means you win our Big Prize. Let’s step over here and see what yopu’ve won…”
Why would they come “here”? Did they pick up Ozzie and Harriet broadcasts in outer space? If they came to Earth specifically, meaning this is their final and only destination, then we are in deep deep shit if we end up not liking each other.
Even the best case scenario is such circumstances would make them akin to in-laws whose house burned down and want to move in with you … forever.
I contend the best-case scenario simply precludes this possibility. They have to be able to go back home, or onward to someplace else.
Because when they sent that probe 30,000 years ago they found a nice planet that had oxygen and some big monkeys that seemed okay.
And Penguins. Everybody loves penguins.
I was responding initially to comments such as this:
I can think of lots of reasons why they would want to have sufficient resources such that they are not stranded and helpless when they reach their target, like a beached whale.
And it is not as though such resources need to be brought with them, even in the generational starship scenario (which I think is unlikely in itself).
I’m making no assumptions; I’m simply saying I think it is unlikely that the limits of what a sentient species is capable of achieving, given millions of years, exactly corresponds with the specific scenario you have in mind.
So they can make generational starships, but to pack enough equipment to dominate a primitive species when they get here (if they wanted to), is impossible.
Except that we have no experience writing code for computers with 65536 bit processors and corresponding instruction sets.
Best case? Whatever flavor of ship shows up, FTL or generation, has had a catastrophic failure in life support so everyone on board is mummified and the ship enters a parking orbit on autopilot.
After a few months of watching this thing go round with no communication we send up a multinational survey crew to see what’s going on. Or a few years if it’s far enough out we have to build something from scratch to get there.
Cool! Now I have a new book to read.
Thanks.
The best case scenario is that the aliens are The Culture, and they’re willing to let us join. They cure all forms of death from natural causes, and provide us with virtually unlimited material wealth. Everyone spends as long as they want making art, enjoying art, getting high, getting laid, and generally having fun, as much as they want to.
Agreed, that was kind of what I was thinking of with the OP (its my favourite sci-fi series) but its unfortunately a bit unlikely in the ‘real world’ as shown by several posts in this thread.
Banks invented the concept of ancient civilisations ‘subliming’ out of physical reality precisely so the galaxy wouldn’t get cluttered up by incredibly advanced civilisations and new species not having a chance. In our universe there isn’t (as far as we’re aware!) any such mechanism, so contacting species probably would be far more advanced than us.
Though I’m also sympathetic to billfish678’s scenarios, they may well not be. District 9 had an interesting premise somewhat like that, though humans were depicted as being fairly unpleasant towards the aliens I’m not really sure what i]could* have been done with them.
However even in the Culture scenario such contact would mean that human progress and advancement is now taken out of our own hands, a lot of people (and I’m one of them to a certain extent) wouldn’t like that.
I propose the search party split up when searching the darker areas of the vessel - also, it helps to keep things interesting if a few members of the search party are jumpy/trigger-happy/sociopathic.