Let’s say it was announced tomorrow that we’d discovered evidence of an alien species. For this purpose I’ll consider “now” to be whenever the signals were created, not right now, so if they’re 600 light-years away and the signals travelled at lightspeed “now” is the 1400s.
It’s not clear whether they deliberately signalled us or we just intercepted some noise, but it is clear that they are bipeds who are more or less as functional as humans and that their tech level is pretty much the same as ours, with some things we developed early they never discovered and some stuff that they discovered early we never did, but more or less the same.
Just based on this info what does your gut say to “Do they play ball games for recreation?” For this purpose a ball game is any game where players try to control and manipulate a spherical/ellipsoid object and for recreation means that groups or individuals of them regularly play for no reason other than the enjoyment of it.
If they’re anything like us, then it’s highly likely that they’d throw things, highly likely that they’d have a concept of “recreation”, and fairly likely that they’d throw things for recreation.
Whether any of the the things they’d throw would be roughly spherical, I don’t know. But something like darts or javelins, probably.
This bit made me laugh because the question is so straightforward, yet this is the dope, and it is absolutely necessary to disinfect any thread against the scourge of the pedantic nitpickers. But as sure as water will eventually breach any dam given enough time, they will find a way in.
To answer the question: I think our love of games and sport is very much connected with an evolutionary propensity to hunt for food. Sport replaces this. In fact sport itself seems to have evolved from the hunting of and working with animals.
A herbivore may work with animals but certainly wouldn’t hunt them except in extremis for religious purposes.
How many non-meat eating creatures on Earth toy around with objects? I’m not claiming it’s none BTW - it’s an open question.
The next question I guess might be: can a herbivorous, non-game playing, creature evolve to high intelligence? I’d wager that playing with objects is a part of the curiosity a species needs in order to get to high intelligence. At least quickly.
My wag is that only a meat eating player of games can evolve to intelligence and they would therefore play ball games. I think it’s maybe possible for a herbivorous non-gaming species to reach that level over a much longer period of time but considering the lack of alien presence in the galaxy in the manner described by the Fermi Paradox I would say such an alien species would be rare amongst possible alien species and therefore extremely unlikely to exist.
I don’t know if they play with toys in the wild, but elephants in captivity certainly seem to enjoy toys given to them by humans. Some have even played soccer.
And an herbivorous species might well develop weapons to defend themselves against predators.
Not even all humans are interested in ball games. It’s widespread in humans, but it doesn’t get everybody. If not even all humans are interested, why assume that all intelligent species would be interested?
Intelligent aliens might play ball games. Or they might not. If we ever meet any, I suspect they’re going to think differently than we do in ways we can’t well imagine, because we’re not them.
That’s a good question - my own question would be, could playing with the capabilities of your own body ‘count’ here? Thinking about goats and their propensity to have fun jumping on things.
I suppose that a highly advanced goat-like alien race would be playing World Series Parkour as their major sport of choice
