For “resources” that are just chemical in nature, no. Given access to asteroids and comets, you could synthesize almost anything given sufficient energy and the appropriate technology.
But what about biological life? There may be something unique on the planet that they consider valuable, and that may not be us. In John Varley’s “Eight Worlds” series, humanity was forced off Earth by Invaders who:
classify living beings in one of three categories: those such as themselves, who arise in gas giant planets everywhere, cetaceans such as dolphins and whales, and vermin, the last category including all sentient beings other than Invaders and cetaceans
The Invasion of Earth was carried out to protect cetaceans from the effects of human civilization. Although no humans were directly killed, billions died as the Invaders dismantled all the infrastructure needed to support human civilization on Earth. The human population remaining on Earth after the Invasion is about the same as in prehistory, living in tribes without access to technology.
Well yes, we consumers of fiction need to have some empathy for the characters, even the villains, and some understanding of what motivates them. They ultimately have to share enough of how our minds work that such can occur. Including when they exist to serve as reflections of some aspects of humanity.
Which brings up, not for the first time in these fora, the question of whether or not we’d recognize a truly alien intelligence of similar or greater degree than ours if we met it.
Well, there are always the aliens portrayed in The Arrival, who perceive time in the same way we perceive space.
And, on a more ironic note, there are the space faring aliens of the recent Landscape with Invisible Hand, for whom the entire civilization of Earth exists solely for the purpose of cultural appropriation.
Which is why I mentioned the Amnion in my post as being impressively alien — they are sufficiently strange in both biology and psychology that you never quite get a handle on why they do what they do, or what they will do next.
Though it’s notable that throughout the story you are never asked to empathize with or understand them in any serious way. They are never centered in the narrative and do not function as either protagonist or antagonist. They are a presence in the plot, but in parallel to the central spine of the story, operating primarily as catalysts to the various conflicts between human characters. They are clearly a sapient species, but plot-wise they function more like a non-sentient force of nature.
It’s really well done, and the Amnion have stuck with me over the years. But again, as noted, I am extremely cautious about recommending the Gap books because they are so misanthropically unpleasant.
Which is what must happen if we, the readers/viewers, cannot get in their heads. OTOH I suspect our actual future possible contact with sentience other than our own is more likely to be that at best, again the more probable being that it will be, or is, alien enough that we do not recognize it as sentient.
Not sure if I am up for a miserably misanthropic read. I’m about to start the book that was being mentioned in the podcast with the offhand comment: Queen of Angels by Greg Bear.
It’s a not-uncommon trope in SF for there to be some biologically produced sustance that’s unique to a given planet and thus valuable because of scarcity. I don’t think I’m convinced though: ever since vitalism was disproved, more and more complex molecules are being synthesized by laboratory techniques.
Something artistic or cultural, though… perhaps? Imagining what values an alien culture might have is much more speculative.
Whereas for science and technology, we can be ‘reasonably’ sure that the well-established laws of nature are universal. That doesn’t rule out massively more advanced science, of course, but I’d say we can be fairly confident that basic math, electromagnetism, the periodic table etc are not going to be overthrown.
Though there might be some neat shortcuts or tricks we haven’t found yet?
Chiang’s The Story of Your Life made into the movie Arrival has been brought up more than once already, but the premise of thinking about the math from different perspectives can alter our, or minimally reflect a different, view of the reality is a star of that story.
I wasn’t really talking about “biological substances”, though. We can already synthesize a lot of those, and there’s no reason to think we won’t be able to make any of them, given enough time.
I was thinking about species themselves, and even individual members of such species. Copying a whole being is much less likely to be possible, and making an entire species is even worse. It would be much easier to just let them have their original biosphere to live in. Thus, the example I cited. The aliens didn’t care a whit about humanity, but did want to make sure the Earth could support cetacean life. So they removed everything that was damaging the seas, which just happened to be all of humanity’s stuff.
It’s no different than a human plowing a field. They destroy the habitat of everything naturally living on the field, because they care more about growing a wheat crop than they do about anything else growing there.
Ah yes, I remember that book now. And Greg Egan has some explorations in short stories of how math could be quite different from what we think it is.
Still, I’m a logical positivist, not a post-modernist. I suspect, for example, that pi and e are going to come up and be the same values wherever and whoever (whatever?) is doing math?
Of course, you can call that a sort of ‘faith’, I guess…
As I said, hard to predict alien value systems!
I do find it a bit far-fetched that they would go on an interstellar ecological crusade?
But hey, it’s fiction…
A sentience that shares more in common with cetacean thought processes? Can understand whale language easily and appreciates it for complexity and beauty, similar to their own, but hears human languages as basically tool related grunting?
They may want to protect that which they identify with as brothers born of different mothers. Only see the sentience that is similar to their own as “real” intelligence and consciousness.
But of course, that’s kind of the point of the thread. Sure, WE might not care if some alien dolphins were oppressing some alien monkeys, but who are we to say the dolphins would agree with us?
Yeah, this. One theme in science fiction is the “Elder Races” protecting and uplifting lesser species. But that relies on the Elder Races recognizing some level of potential for sentience in the lesser species, and that more often than not will be something they can at least conceive of as intelligence. Would we bother trying to uplift a pile of rocks, just on the outside chance that there might be some kind of rock-related intelligence in there somewhere? Where would we even start to look for such a thing?
Science fiction stories may be set in the future or some alien locale, but they are ultimately about humanity. Having the aliens be like us makes it easy to use them to tell those stories Having them be unlike us can also be done, but it tends to lean more in a horror direction, where the story about us is about how we screw up nature or similar.
I find the latter type of story less interesting. I find it more fun when we see the commonalities with life, pushing the anti-racism angle. I even prefer the Planet of Hats to anything truly alien.
The few times I’ve enjoyed the other, it’s been a one-off, where I would not want to watch anything similar for a long time. Like that movie where Keanu Reeves almost lets the world be destroyed because we’re too violent a species. And, even then, it was less enjoyable than, say, a simple episode of Star Trek to me.
