I disagree completely. In an earlier thread I’ve already put forward a plausible way aliens could easily get rid of humans, for example.
Imagine - an alien generational ship has travelled for 1000 years at 0.1c and has arrived into the Sol system, and heads for earth. We send out communication but it is ignored. The alien craft enters Earth’s orbit. You look up in the sky, and see - a nuclear bomb going off. Thousands of nukes hit every major center. The next 5-10 years of nuclear winter wipe out the remaining humans. Another 10-20 years go by and the aliens (who may/may not have life spans far exceeding our own) leave orbit, land and begin to settle into their new home - the radiation has subsided to very reasonable levels and all the vermin are gone.
It would be so easy really -even with our ‘primitive’ weapons. And who knows what scenario’s and weapons a more advanced tech might employ. Intersteller aliens are certainly not going to come down to our planet and fight us hand to hand.
If your goal is energy efficiency, it doesn’t get any more efficient than in space. We can’t tap even a tiny portion of the sun’s energy here on Earth.
If an alien civilization built space colonies (really the same thing as a generation ships) and committed to spending the next 10,000 generations living on them, I kinda doubt they’d remember what was so great about living on planets. Planets are messy dirty places with nasty unpredictable weather, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, disease carrying bugs, animals, plants, and if a planet-killer asteroid shows up you can’t move it. At the end of the day, cosmically speaking, you still have to move again eventually.
I can certainly see why a race might want to find a new solar system, but I’m unconvinced the goal would be downgrading back to planet living.
Wow. I can’t believe people are pretty much assuming that intelligence has to be confined to the organic! Also, if travel > c is not feasible or possible, and it is so important to restart organic life around another star, its far easier to cross the void with non-organic machines that carry the instructions (e.g. DNA) for recreating that life and to resurrect it from materials found in the new star system.
I think Hawking is being incredibly naive in his statement here. If “they” are out there, they already know all about us. A bunch of von Neumann probes can explore a galaxy thoroughly in a trifling amount of time.
Entirely non-sequential posts, but they work so well together.
Point of Order: Who decides whether to respond? The U.S.? The U.N.? Each nation individually, either via cooperation or acting on their own initiative?
It’s funny that you were implying a lack of imagination on the part of other posters, and yet you’re assuming a “millions or billions” of years old species would essentially live by a slash and burn method.
The idea of scooping up H to initiate a star formation does not contravene any physical laws, neither does terraforming. They seem like plausible progressions for such an advanced species.
OTOH travelling astronomical distances to get to a tiny ball of rock is just a waste of time and resources, for this hypothetical species.
Yeah…that’s why in my last post I was talking about stellar formation.
That sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense.
But in any case, we’re not talking unlimited energy; I was just saying that there’s clearly a lot of free energy about, untapped.
Who knows what Super Advanced Race might do, once energy gets short. But we clearly are not living in such a time period.
Exactly, but I would stretch that point much further. I think most of us still think of aliens in a kind of “Star Trek” way, that is that they are basically humans with lumpy foreheads. Or fail that, like some adaption of earth animals like insects or predators, perhaps with extra limbs or teeth. Who knows if they are so small we don’t notice them or so slow we think they are rocks or so fast they think we’re plants or inorganic or something else we haven’t even conceived of?
On the level of motivation I think we have the same problem. We think everyone is like us and therefore everyone has motivations like ours. On a much smaller scale it is similar to anthropomorphising the motives of animals (“my cat likes me”) in order to ascribe feelings and sentiments similar to our own. In fact, we would have some amount of trouble truly understanding the humans of a few thousands years ago, say, the Romans who’s moral system was radically different from ours, and I think aliens would be far more, well, alien to us than we imagine. We probably wouldn’t have the slightest idea what they “want”, perhaps the idea of “want” does not even exist for them. I actually think it is more than likely we wouldn’t be able to understand each other in any meaningful way.
However, I think this doesn’t immediately invalidalates Hawking’s point in that even if a hostile race if a small risk, the potential consequences are disastrous enough to avoid them if we can. Which is, as many have pointed out, doubtful.
Weighing risk vs. benefit, hm? Going by the only experience we have to draw on:
Aztecs vs. Conquistadors ('nuff said)
North American Indians vs. European powers (benefited for a short time from being pawns in their Great Power games; long-term, not so much)
Native African peoples vs. European powers (Ethiopia and Shaka Zulu notable for being such exceptions to the utterly miserable rule)
Innumerable non-Han minorities vs. the Chinese Empire (you will be assimilated!)
Only counter-examples I can think of offhand are Japan, which hasn’t turned out all that well nonetheless, and I suppose Thailand. (Either we turn our own societies into something unrecognizable and then get our asses roundly kicked in trying to play Zorg’s own game, or maybe hope there are a rich enough colonies in Alpha Centauri that several competing alien powers decide we’re not worth the bother. But how many times did that happen in our own history?)
Yep, then they’ll clearly rape us, as rape has a long history in human conflicts.
All known cultures have music, so they’ll be some alien jazz playing as they rape us.
Next they’ll build settlements on major ports. They may bring some of their own livestock to earth, and maybe get some humans to work on their plantations.
Yep, nothing ridiculously short-sighted about this line of speculation.
Ah, drawing from the experience of human civilization is ridiculously short-sighted. So, please do enlighten me with experience you’ve drawn from non-human civilizations.:dubious:
Or, alternatively, admit this business about “weighing” any “question of risk” versus “potential benefit” is even more ridiculous, as we have no conceivable frame of reference for doing so.
Risks:
This whole thread has been about the risks (funny how everyone felt able to do that without frame of reference)- so I think that’s covered for the moment.
Benefits:
If they have already communicated with us, we know they can communicate, so they might have something to say that is interesting or profitable to us.
If they have the capacity to visit us, their means of interstellar travel could be of great interest and benefit to us, quite possibly alongside a whole bunch of attendant technologies to do with power sources, reliable machines, recycling, etc. Some of it might not apply to us because of differences in our biology and environment, but some of it might - and the plain fact they’d have solved hard problems might mean they have some transferrable methods.
WRT alien motivation, if their motivation is so frakking alien to us, we’ll probably never see them or hear them. They won’t even be space-faring, and probably won’t be communicative. Those are very human-like concepts.
Any aliens who have concepts like technology and space travel and communication are going to be similar enough for us to come to some sort of mutual understanding.
What would be their motivation for sending out a signal we can hear? To give us knowledge we don’t already have? I doubt it. It would probably more along the lines of, “if you can hear this, you aren’t alone.”
What would be their motivation for coming to our solar system? Well, they haven’t so it could very well be no such motivation exists.
Why would we travel to a new solar system? Profit? Doubtful. To escape a polluted cesspit? Greener pastures, so to speak? Possibly. But if aliens are looking for greener pastures they’re going to avoid an already occupied system well on its way to becoming a polluted cesspit, and we’d probably also avoid an already occupied cesspit.
Acknowledged: but aren’t you still projecting some implicit limitations on the aliens? What with power sources, machines, recycling, you seem to be picturing beings that are perhaps a few centuries ahead of us at most, in terms of technology and their own evolution. (Like somebody upthread pointed out: Star Trek!)
But what if they’re much more advanced, millenia ahead of us or more, in the same relationship to us as we are to chimpanzees (if not further down the evolutionary scale)? What’s the daily concerns of a chimpanzee, and what has chimp society gained from us in figuring those problems out?
And as for motivation: the chimpanzees can’t very well grasp the rubber trade, or colonialism, or whatever other motivations the Europeans had for being in Africa. But once the men in pith helmets were there, it was bang-bang time nonetheless.
You might say that they communicated with us (in the OP’s scenario), therefore they’re more on our level and have an interest in communicating with us. But what if we overheard something that wasn’t meant for us? We’d be like chimps screaming at the side of a riverbank in response to the tooting of a riverboat on the River Congo.
