Come up with justifications to take advantage of their land, services and resources.
Frankly, atomic fission poses a greater threat to end religion than most other scientific discoveries.
Ah, no. FFS, I wish I knew where this idea comes from. Thought is emphatically NOT tied to linguistics, and I don’t need social anything to do it.
I know that the idea that thought is tied to language has been around for a while, but it should be obvious that it is false. Expressing a thought to another person may well be done linguistically, but not not necessarily. I damned well don’t use words in my head when arranging rocks to build a dry stone wall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_stone)
When I write software, I don’t think the actions through in subvocalized english (or german.) I build in my mind a construct of concepts and visualizations and actions that I can translate to english or german to communicate with my coworkers, or that I can translate into blocks of computer code. The idividual parts don’t even necessarily have names until I have to tell someone about it or I have to create a variable or method name for the program.
Thinking is NOT the process of vocalization.
Have the Pope put it on twitter.
You misunderstand what I meant. Without language, humans have no means to establish intellect. All animals engage in thought to some extent or another, but abstract concepts are established by communication. Without the facility for complex language and the social wiring that compels us to use it, we would not be significantly more intelligent than baboons, because our brains are basically tabula rasa when we are born (we have to learn nearly everything).
The fact that your mental processes do not exhibit in verbal form does not alter the fact that you had to obtain those processes via learning, via language. If you had no language capability, you would have no way to grasp programming concepts in the first place, we are not hard-wired to understand these things and cannot directly inherit this understanding genetically.
Only inasmuch as it poses a threat to life.
Consider that in 1600, the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno for heresy. One of his heresies was believing in the existence of a “plurality of worlds” – a vast Cosmos of which humans are only a small part. Well, that was then, this is now, and the Church today can be expected to be much more open-minded on the point; but this does show how Church doctrine might have a problem with it.
Yo, Post #37 above. They’re not just more open-minded, they’ve reversed. Catholics themselves tend to be oddly behind the institution on the relationship with science and to believe it’s more fundamentalistic than it really is.
(OTOH, it’s a pretty sure bet that the Church would oppose sex with aliens. Just because that is still big with them).
If we discover the aliens, the proselytizing groups will race to convert them. They will point to our superior technology as proof that we are the Chosen Ones.
If the aliens discover us, they are the Debil and must be resisted at all costs. Even if it means suicide.
Well, if they’re lucky, we’d better run into them once they’ve developed at least some level of technology. If they’re just banging rocks together like we did for 90% of human existence, I think there’d be a lot of argument that they’re not really sentient and therefore we don’t need to treat them as anything more than dumb animals.
It’s also a pretty sure bet that sex between humans and ETs would be no more possible than a dog mating with a lobster.
Of course, they’re probably not edible to us and don’t have or grow anything edible, and live in air we can’t breathe and vice-versa so enslavement would be impractical, and in short entirely useless to us. They only have to worry if their planet has rich deposits of unobtanium. Likewise, if they’re more advanced and discover us first. I really don’t understand what Stephen Hawking was so worried about, when he speculated First Contact would be like that between Columbus and the Indians.
It would be interesting to see if sex is a weirdly unique Earth thing. There’s no good reason to believe that sex should arise in all life around the universe, but then there’s no good reason to believe it shouldn’t either.
So, assuming that most sapient life in the universe evolves with multiple sexes, we’d also need to be compatible with them in size. And who knows how likely that is!
No hot alien dudes for me I guess!!!
I recall a short story from the 1950s or '60s by Isaac Asimov, “Playboy and the Slime God.” An ET exploration-official from a species that reproduces asexually, by “budding,” is trying to alert his superior to the potential threat posed by humans, who reproduce sexually – they’ve never encountered sexual reproduction before, but the reshuffling of genes with each generation makes evolution go so much faster!
The humor arises from the official trying to get a man and woman he has captured to demonstrate the process for his (gotta pick a personal pronoun here) superior. Unfortunately, his understanding of sex comes from stories published in Recreationlad magazine, which, at the period, still kinda obfuscate things . . . so he’s expecting the baby to pop out right after the two humans kiss.
Sex with result - yes. But the eminent research Mr. Portnoy demonstrated that you could have sex with liver, so I wouldn’t write off this possibility too quickly.
I don’t think even Portnoy would do a lobster, alive or dead, in-the-shell or just-the-shelled-tail.
And even then, only if the unobtanium in question is some kind of petroleum-analogue, only to be found on a life-bearing planet. Otherwise, any spacefaring race would find it much easier to mine it from asteroids.
No. Religions center around their dogma, and since it is anthropocentric, it can only mean that aliens must either be treated like animals (non-human life) or they must be treated like figures mentioned in the text (a case of reading present events into old stories). In the latter case this means aliens would be considered as angels, or demons, or djinn - again, no souls.
Some new-age religions might do this. Some already have comparable mythologies. However, it would all depend upon reading current events into ancient texts’ ambiguity. Most likely they would be interpretted as demons or evil beings by old religions, or simply soulless inferiors like animals.
Let me ask you, are you an alien? When has any church ever simply admitted to being wrong (without waiting over four centuries, as in the pope’s admission that Galileo was right)?
This depends on how well religions are able to reconcile it. Nebulous religions, and religions that rely much less on strict dogma, would tend to survive.
Might I amend your last phrase as such: therefore we don’t need to treat them as anything more than dumb animals that we can exploit for our own purposes.
That is our pattern, just in general, isn’t it?
Nothing has or can end magical thinking among puny humans.