There is another elephant in this room, by the way. All legal negotiations will come to a dead stop if said aliens are superior to us. While it is next to impossible to negotiate human rights to a non-human species, there is absolutely no way acknowledgement of superiority is going to happen.
Maybe. I like to think humans are enlightened enough, at least in the West, to give an intelligent species its due, especially if they got here before we got there.
This seems to be a hijack, but it seems that it’d be trivially easy (well, not trivial, but certainly doable) to program a robot to type up some papers suing for recognition, print them out, roll down to the courthouse, take the handicapped ramp, push open the door, go to the clerk of court’s office, and file a lawsuit. It’d be even easier to program an AI to spam courts with emailed lawsuits, claiming that the AI only exists online and so is filing in the appropriate venue :). I think the mere ability to file a lawsuit isn’t going to be enough to receive citizenship.
That said, while Gleep might not be able to buy elections, I wouldn’t count on it. Gleep could easily say, “I’ve got these technological miracles available, but I’ve no interest in fighting a war. Y’all get your shit together and be sure my rights are safe somewhere on your planet, and when I’m convinced there’s a safe place on your planet where I won’t need to vaporize any attackers, I’ll land in that place and start passing out alien super magic.”
You can bet Norway is gonna have some alien supermagic pretty soon.
I was thinking of AI filing suits, and I do think that will be the first case, and it will probably be a fraud, some company trying to get cute and saying their operating system has rights.
However, I think judges will know sentience when they see it, and while it might be hard for a machine or hologram to prove it is sentient, I don’t think they’ll have much doubt about a real life form, whether created in a lab here on Earth, or coming from another planet.
If you think Earthers, especially Western Earthers, are going to admit that anyone or anything is superior, you’ve been living in a padded cave.
Oh, I think we’ll know they are superior. And I think we’ll hate them for it and demand protection from their culture and imports.
I believe humans are enlightened enough to deal with equals. Superiors though, humanity would have a problem with that. A big problem.
Try to imagine the chaos when aliens land and tell us that they trying to determine if we have any rights!
I dunno. I suspect that the first AI to pass the Turing test will touch off a firestorm of legal controversy if it asks for rights–especially if its request can be traced back to some deliberate programming, as it almost certainly will be.
Well, there is that. The name “The Culture” was intended as a pun, wasn’t it?
As an amateur programmer, my own standard would be that the being has to a) create its own code as it learns, and b) never get stuck on a question or say nonsense in response.
It turns out there are good reasons for weak aliens.
For starters, the contact window is smaller than it’s normally given. It is somewhat curious that all aliens are carbon-based and exist in the same rough temperature range. Colder reactions happen too slowly for life to develop, and hotter reactions destroy too many interesting chemicals. In the middle, carbon provides the backbone. Nuclear life is unknown; it seems that there is just not enough variety or stability in that family of reactions.
As such, all known life depends on third generation stars (to provide enough interesting elements), and goes through a similar evolutionary path (a long period of unicellular life, and then a relatively quick jump to multicellular and then intelligent life). Most intelligent life has popped up in the same window of a few hundred million years.
Of course, all alien contact is rare, and the typical answers to the Fermi paradox all happen: some civilizations destroy themselves, others immerse themselves in strong VR, others experience environmental catastrophe and their species evolves away from intelligence.
But there is another common scenario, which is that most intelligences don’t get that much farther than the current human level. They reach a peak, and then drop back again, and cycle. Subsequent cycles often take much more time than previous ones; the current level of human technology has largely been driven by a windfall of buried energy and minerals. If humans regressed, it would be a much slower recovery, since we would have to make use of less dense energy/material sources. Some aliens never got this windfall (oil production and metal availability were low); others got it, as we did, but squandered it and lived at a stone age level for many millions of years at a stretch.
Only on rare occasions does a civilization really reach a tall peak capable of launching even something straightforward like a generation ship. And it’s much rarer yet to go significantly farther than that. Many civilizations lack much in the way of harvestable minerals in their solar system as well; not all solar systems have the wealth of moons and asteroids that humans do.
And so, when civilizations do send out interstellar ships, they are almost always crude generation ships. There are also practical reasons for this: even a civilization capable of using antimatter will likely take a step back to (say) fusion if they need to build a reliable craft. Furthermore, the advanced technologies aren’t always what they cracked up to be; for instance, antimatter wastes a large amount of energy in the form of neutrinos, which aren’t usefully recoverable by any technology.
That’s all hypothetical though. We won’t know more until we’ve found other civilizations.
It could also be possible that a civilization breaks out at some point and keeps on advancing. Perhaps when they colonize another planet and thus diversify their environment.
Shit, I knew I was a machine. I can’t pass a test like that.
“All known life” is on one planet remember, we don’t know how representative it is.
In terms of my opinion, sure, I think ETs will probably require at least a second-generation star. But even if we say 3rd generation only, I think you’d have a hard time getting the window down to under 1 billion years.
And with a window like that, it’s still, like I said, extremely unlikely that we will encounter an ET merely thousands of years more advanced than us. Within 1 million years of progress of us is pretty damn unlikely.
Before evolution, the earth had to wait billions of years for a set of chance events to happen. Who knows how typical it is for those events to take that long?
What would stretch credulity however, would be to suggest they take some specific number like 3,276,873,000 years, such that when we encounter ETs their progress will be within mere thousands of years of ours.
All of this is speculation, and additionally, I don’t find the hypothesis of “cycles” very likely. Nuking ourselves back to the stone age is a romantic idea for some people, but it’s actually difficult to conceive of scenarios where all knowledge of the modern world is lost but humans survive.
Alternatively, in a “mad max” style scenario, it would not take many artifacts of the modern world to survive for the whole shebang to be restored in short order (in historical terms).
Remember of course that I’m inventing a fictional “best case” scenario for the OP. I think it’s plausible, but one of many possible options. I could equally invent a scenario on the total opposite end of the spectrum, but that’s not what the OP asked for.
In other words, my answer to “what the best case scenario?” is “we’re at a similar tech level”, and my answer to “how could that possibly happen?” is what I’ve written.
We don’t. But for the sake of the OP, it turns out that evolution is actually remarkably deterministic. Not to parts-per-million, but perhaps a few percent (even today, we can look at mutation rates to determine evolutionary timelines to high precision–the same principle is at work here). Of course, the end results are quite different. At any rate, there is still a window of hundreds of millions of years to explain.
The cycles generally don’t come about from “nuking ourselves back to the stone age” (that was a separate path that I mentioned). Instead, they come about because a high-tech society is actually fairly hard to sustain. You need a very large population that is free from the burdens of survival and can spend time doing things like designing computers.
Furthermore, the development of high-tech is very dependent on available hydrocarbons and metals. We could, today, just barely transition to a non-hydrocarbon economy. But if we fell to the point where we could not produce solar panels, wind turbines, etc., it would be a very tough recovery. The easily available hydrocarbons are gone, and it requires high-tech equipment to extract the oil that we do use. Any recovery within the next tens of millions of years could not be dependent on oil.
And so the artifacts are somewhat irrelevant–you can’t produce microchips in a wood-fired furnace, even if you have otherwise perfect instructions. Societies tend to lift themselves out of the stone age eventually, due to chance combinations of events; a higher-than-usual concentration of key resources; a societal arrangement uniquely suited to the development of high-tech; etc. But it may only happen for a couple thousand years at a time in intervals of a few million years. And so the overlaps with other societies actually happen to be at similar tech levels, even if one of them has been around for hundreds of millions of years longer than another.
So why did you correct me? All I was saying was that the chance of meeting a species only a little more advanced than us was remote (and note that upthread I did acknowledge that since we’re discussing “best case” it’s OK to talk about remote possibilities).
You then “corrected” me, with “It turns out there are good reasons for weak aliens”.
It’s an interesting bit of speculation, but I don’t see it particularly helping the Fermi paradox. It might mean very slow progress for a few centuries, or even millennia before they find alternative energy sources, or have the ability to mine much deeper, or whatever. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing.
Best Case?
- They aren’t interested in building an intergalactic bypass.
B. They aren’t interested in eating us.
iii. They don’t take us prisoner, tie us down, and read poetry at us.
4th. They aren’t pissed off because of what we did to the whales. - A Spielberg “Close Encounters” sort of thing maybe.
||||| |. If necessary, they have very bad reactions to Indian Love Call.
Sorry, it wasn’t really intended as a correction. I’m just speaking as if a character in a book was presenting information that was factual in their (fictional) universe. Obviously, none of us have the slightest idea what aliens are like. We can only make plausible speculation.
I think it could be much longer than a few centuries–it could require geologic time for a reboot, so that organic decomposition produces more oil and plate tectonics moves fresh minerals to the surface.
Take an extreme case: a planet that never had metals on the surface. They’re all buried miles down. There’s no reason you can’t have intelligent life on such a planet, but they’re stuck, because you need metals to build the drills and tools to get at the resources. I’m sure they’ll develop fantastic wood frame houses and concrete buildings, but they’ll never build a rocket.
Unless a nice iron asteroid hits them, of course. That tiny chunk of metal may be just the “prybar” they need to get at the other resources. They needed to be bootstrapped.
I posit that this can happen to a civilization that uses up all their natural resources. They collapse… and then have to be very lucky or patient to rise again.
Well, let’s think about what chemistry we’re talking about here.
On earth, brains make use of elements such as iron and calcium.
Now, if the intelligence on our hypothetical planet doesn’t require such elements, then your earlier restriction that they require a 3rd generation star is gone, and the window is back to being billions of years wide.
OTOH, if they do need those elements then they would not evolve on a planet that does not have significant deposits of such elements in its crust.
Which we’d expect to happen many times after such a planet forms around a 3rd generation star.