Open your mind. Aliens who are as much smarter than humans as humans are smarter than ants would be equally as likely to wipe out Earth as the average human is likely to wipe out an anthill. It’s not even something that we can attribute to malice. It’s just that we would be so far beneath them as to be unworthy of notice, respect, or even curiosity. There might be a few weirdo sapienologists among those aliens, just like there are a few weirdo entomologists among humans. But overall, ants simply aren’t a species of significance to humans.
I mean, ants work *really hard *on anthills. Anthills are the fucking pinnacle of archaeology, to an ant. And you’ve probably stepped on hundreds of them without noticing (and maybe even deliberately wiped out a few dozen) in your lifetime. It’s just not a big deal, because humans are so much better and more important to us than ants. Maybe if ants could talk, they would complain about the way humanity treats them. But they can’t. Just like aliens might say about us, “Maybe if those humans could glomorphogenexise, they’d complain about the way we treat them.”
I’ve heard this brought up many times in the kinds of discussions as well. And not to bring up Contact too much (I swear I didn’t just watch it!), Ellie has a line where she says, “That’s like going all the way to Africa to step on a bunch of ants” and is countered with, “and just how bad would we feel about stepping on those ants?”
But that’s missing the point. The point is why go out of your way to wipe out something insignificant to you. Also, I can’t swallow that any significantly advanced beings, bent on leaving their home system is looking to just wipe out the indigenous to set up a port-a-potty, or a Galaxon Communications Repeater. They’re either amazingly like us and can survive in our atmosphere to make themselves at home which might necessitate wiping us out or enslaving us, but could lead to just offering refuge. Or more likely they’re genuinely curious about our ecosystem, technology and evolution.
Imagine it the other way around. Humanity gets to the the point where we can achieve interstellar travel. Even if we found jelly-fish like creatures on another planet, why wipe them out? And if they’re found to be intelligent, unless they fire first, we come in peace. We wouldn’t send a military convo right out of the gate, unless we had a really desperate/unique reason.
Even well-meaning non-malicious aliens can bring hitchhikers with them: microbes. They can bring bacteria, viruses, and other critters to which they may have developed immunity (or which they may even require to survive) which when let loose on Earth will multiply unchecked and wipe out humans or other life on which we depend. It’s kind of like letting Asian carp or zebra mussels loose in the Great Lakes or bringing European viruses to the Americas a few hundred years ago.
What would happen to those jellyfish if they were on an earth-like planet, and earth was no longer capable of supporting life (say it exploded or got swallowed up by the sun), and our interstellar spaceship was about to run out of fuel? I’m pretty sure that our survival instinct would be greater than our desire to preserve the jellyfish way of life.
Why does it have to be only considered a win/lose scenario?
I feel it’s safe to assume in this order: Benevolence, indifference, then malevolence.
RE: How many square AUs of Mylar would it take to wrap a spherical diffraction pattern beyond the orbit of Earth, so when the aliens point their telescopes at our sun, they see this:
Benevolence, indifference, and malevolence can all still result in the extinction of a species. You can accidentally step on an ant because you were indifferent about its existence (or didn’t even know it existed). You can try to pick up an ant that you think is really cool, and put it in an anthill to study, but accidentally squish it.
Now that the OP has been sufficiently derailed, I’ll just roll with it.
I get it, much harm can be done by introducing different species, but I think these arguments fail at some critical points:
We know ants aren’t sapient/sentient. While certainly marvels of biology and ecology, they are acting almost 100% on instinct. To compare the complexity of ants to the intelligence of humans is apples and oranges. We weild technology, a clear sign of sentience.
Also, Don’t misunderstand advanced technology as indication of some incomprehensible intelligence that would be blind to the value we hold dear to our world. If anything, it might be the opposite. In a thousand years, or shoot, a million years, we still have the same evolutionary core desires that are hardwired into us. We understand our humble origins, and I’d wager any sufficiently advanced beings would be able to do the same and understand what we are.
It most certainly is a risk, and is a bad idea to do so, right now, as we still don’t have a good grasp on a unified picture of physics and cosmology to understand how it can be used to create interstellar shortcuts, or advanced offensive/defensive technology – but that’s not what the OP was asking. We have absolutely no idea how rare life is. It could be extremely so. It’s entirely possible we’re alone in the entire universe. Or that we’ll be the first technologically advanced beings to finally traverse the vast interstellar distances, or maybe it’ll prove impossible or completely impractical.
Every being that may come to in the universe has only the boundaries of physics themselves to work with and apply them. This levels the playing field in a lot of ways, as we’re all bound to these laws. They might have bigger guns, or colder minds, but if they find it just as difficult to traverse the gulf of space as we do, and are truly limited by c, than EM communication is by far the best option for contact, and is something I think is worth the pursuit, ala SETI. Whether or not we decide to be proactive about saying “Hey guys! We have liquid water and hot women!” is a debate for another thread.
If we were to send a signal to aliens, better to concentrate our energy into 1 electromagnetic frequency. What frequency to use? Hmm how about the hydrogen line, since H is the most abundant element in the Universe? Conversely, we could expect intelligent life to send a signal at this frequency. Wow! signal - Wikipedia
For other methods for sending messages to aliens, I find the design of the Voyager Golden Records interesting, especially how they tried to encode video and explain how to playback using general units and symbols. Voyager Golden Record - Wikipedia
I think that this is what most people miss. Yes, they may be far more advanced than we are now, but if they have found the ability to traverse space bypassing what we know about physics currently, then there is no reason to believe that we can’t eventually find the solution as well. Think about how far we’ve come in 200 years. Imagine another 200.
What any advanced civilization may well think, given human history in just the last 100 years, is that it isn’t worth the risk to let us advance further. There was a science fiction short story that I read quite a while ago on this where the aliens dropped a small black hole into our planet. Another race, who also remained hidden from us, helped some humans to escape and gave us the information on who destroyed our planet. It also answered the question why we don’t hear from others. They are hiding.
