Please show me where I have posted ad hominem in any thread on this board.
As far as you can tell, you mean.
Your arguments are fantasies created from your imagination. Either we compare alien motivations to what we know … Human or animal motives, or we are just making up science fiction. Aliens are no more likely to selectively abhor illogic or violence than they are likely to augment their minds with Artificial Intelligence or genetics.
You can suggest such things, but it doesn’t amount to an argument, and you don’t really have any evidence or data to support your claims except randomly picking conditions that may or may not exist.
I suggest aliens are xenophobic, and as it’s an evolutionary trait they value, and as they are bred for exterminating strange lifeforms, they see killing us as imperative.
Stephen Hawking is a pretty bright fellow. We all probably know his view on the subject, but I’m posting it as the closest thing to a cite I can find.
Ok. If we are going to pull in all qualia into what we call “instinct”, then sure, we cannot disable such instincts.
However, there is no doubt a species could make itself less violent without turning off all qualia.
Like I said, a trivial example would be to make male humans as predisposed towards violence as female humans.
I have assumed nothing. I’ve talked about what is more likely and what is less likely.
Either all bets are off and we are saying we cannot estimate the likelihood of anything, or we can say what things seem more likely.
You, and some other posters here, seem to want to have your cake and eat it. Claim we can say nothing about what may be likely, yet in the same breath say there is a good chance that they will be hostile.
What faith? I have said several times now that I don’t claim to know what will happen. Maybe the first species we encounter will be the daleks.
What I have said is what I think is more likely.
Your constant attempts to reframe this as “faith” are getting very tiresome. Stick to the discussion.
First of all, I have not made such an assertion.
Secondly, I haven’t said benevolent at any point. Lack of aggressive behaviours =/= benevolent.
Well, I said “your side” because your comparison with religion followed others that were trying the same trick, though others were also accusing me of having a liberal agenda or whatever.
But yeah, labelling an argument, with accompanying reasoning religion I do consider an ad hominem here.
No, I mean as far as we can tell, at this time.
Aggression means a species would spend time taking on species that are no threat, or attacking species that could retaliate and destroy them. Meanwhile raw aggression is even more dangerous as it would mean infighting within the species.
Again though, there are some things which are very likely to be different about the future than the past.
For example, I would not expect ET to still hunt food by chasing after it until it dies of exhaustion. This may be something humans did in the past, but it is extremely unlikely an interstellar species would still have need or desire of that hunting technique. I don’t claim to know they would not do it, just that it seems rather unlikely.
The other cases presented in this thread are similar to this.
Well the latter seems very likely for any sentient species. So…I agree.
Again, in the same breath you say I am not allowed to speculate, but you are.
Stephen Hawking, being a bright fellow, would also know that appeals to authority don’t work when the person in question is speaking about something outside of their field of expertise.
To me it is laughable to imagine a species probably more advanced than we could hope to imagine, acting like ignorant humans did centuries ago. It really is as absurd as 1950s aliens trying to take our finest dames.
Unfortunately, that’s not what the term means.
You are stating a belief founded on nothing but your own feelings.
Calling that religion is charitable. Calling it absurdly nonrational would be correct as well.
In neither case am I attacking you, I am describing the logical content of your discussion (it’s null).
Firstly, by the time a species is interstellar it’s likely they will have full mastery of genetic engineering and/or AI (these look like far more tractable problems that FTL). I don’t think we’ll be encountering an organism acting largely instinctively. Why keep behaviours that are a hindrance in the current environment?
A species could usurp the FTL technology of a peaceful race by eating them and stealing their ships. Instinct could be a matter of pride with our new alien overlords … it might even be holy to them. What evidence do you have to offer that genetic engineering is likely among aliens, or that they might consider instinctual behavior to be a hindrance?
So, we can look at things logically, and doing that it’s hard to see the rationale for “Exterminate! Exterminate!”.
Given how long the universe has been around for, every species the romulans will encounter will be either vastly more advanced, or vastly less advanced.
Exterminating potential competitors, or organisms that may be considered dangerous or infectious, seems like a survival mechanism. And how do you support the hypothesis that the age of the Universe implies that spacefarers are more likely to encounter vastly more (or less) advanced species?
**Wiping out the latter is just a waste of time and energy: there’s plenty of space to go round, and the primitive species are no threat. Of course maybe they know better than me. But at this time, I see no more reason for them to do that than go from planet to planet painting every blue object yellow.
OTOH attacking a vastly more advanced species will be suicide. Or at the least utterly futile.
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The aliens may not need “space”, they may want land, so to speak. We don’t know that there are plenty of habitable planets to go around. They may enjoy hunting or dissection. They may like to mount our heads in their alien dens.
Vira and bacteria are certainly primitive compared to humans, but these tiny organisms kill millions of us … who’s to say that an alien race would presume that we (or our ideas) are no threat to them?
Attacking a superior lifeform may not be suicide or futile … The Mouse That Roared.
The OP has easily assembled the backdrop for a speculative-fiction tale. The alien species look kind of like smilodons, but some quirky mutation has given them the unique ability to suck knowledge out of their prey. This is useful for honing hunting abilities – you learn about the behavior of the other things like the one you just ate and hence can get more of them with greater ease.
Naturally, this makes it into the only intra-species social behavior, breeding. Individuals either breed with another of their species or they learn from them, suck out their knowledge, killing them (their sexual biology would probably be rather different from what we are familiar with). They would not build a civilization such as we would recognize but would advance technologically through a form of collaboration that would involve a minimum of inter-personal contact (like passing notes in petroglyphs).
If these creatures could get together enough to form a space fleet to visit Terra, it would be more than a little obvious what they might want from us. Clearly, draining humans for knowledge would better for their species than draining each other, but on the other hand, it is not entirely obvious that they would have a tremendous interest in preserving their own kind.
From OP:
If a species was productive enough to master neuroscience in this way, it would be likely that what that species views as productive would be what they had been doing up until that period. For example, if the advancement of the species really flourished when the rights of the individual were paramount, why would they change the programming of their brains to develop a collectivist outlook? Likewise, if a species was most productive when the rights of the individual were sacrificed for the needs of the group, why would they program their brains in ways different from the prevailing view?
And I believe you have no basis to make such an assessment. Even concerning the future of the human race, let alone for an hypothetical alien race.
Precisely, I think we cannot estimate the likelihood of what you’re advancing.
I’m just proposing scenarios that contradict yours and stating thay they are equally plausible and make sense too.
Without, IMO, any evidences.
I wrote “benevolent” to simplify. Change it to “without agressive behaviours” if you prefer. It doesn’t change my point.
Give an example of where I have stated a belief.
All I have done is speculate on what is probable, the same as you have done (except I’ve also provided arguments to support my position).
And yet you and others seem fine with the assessment that hostility is likely.
No, there is not going to be “evidences” for something like this, it’s essentially a philosophical debate. I’ve argued my case, and frankly no-one addressed my actual arguments. They have just asserted that they don’t work.
What sentient races have in common, at least those that create interstellar ships, is problem solving. They make their environment better for themselves.
And their environment includes their own bodies: for example, I’m sure you would agree with me that medical care among sentient species is probably very common. A species that allowed infected wounds to just kill the host, despite a knowledge of how to prevent that death, would likely be atypical.
Now for humans right now, we haven’t done very much to change our psychology apart from a few prototype neural implants. But that’s just because we can’t do it yet. When we can do it, and we know the full side-effects, it will be like solving any other problem in our environment.
To suggest that an extraterrestrial species will be psychologically exactly the product of evolution, with no self-modification or augmentation I find unlikely.
Because it is not just saying they eschew GE at some point in their history.
It is saying they will reject many technologies: GE, neural implants, AI, nanotechnology etc…and their culture will steadfastly reject these things for millions of years.
I’ll answer the second point first.
There is no reason to suppose biogenesis and evolution on two far away planets will be synchronized. While there may be some constraints on when life could first start – it may require a third-generation star for example – you’d have a hard time trying to prove that the window is less than, say, 3 billion years wide.
That means, the probability of two sentient species meeting where they have technology a few thousand years apart is extremely unlikely.
Imagine I have a database of driving licenses. The issue dates and times are spread throughout a 50 year period. If I were to randomly pick two records from the database, there is a low probability they will have the same issue date and time to the second, right? That is all I am saying.
And now, in terms of your first point that’s why when species meet there is virtually no chance of “competition”: one species would simply be no threat to the other.
This is also why scenarios of a primitive race becoming interstellar by “eating” the ships of a more advanced race is very unlikely also.
Here’s the thing … Clairobscur and I have been offering our own fiction to the thread to point out (I’ll speak for myself here) that when you make things up about imaginary aliens, any sci-fi type scenario is as good as another. You seem to think that your particular flavor of human logic and predictive abilities is superior to ours. I can’t imagine exactly why you think your logic is so sound that only your vision of alien visitors is acceptable.
Furthermore, since alien beings may not necessarily employ logic and eschew instinct, but may rely on instinct … they may not function as individuals but be parts of a hive mind … they may be the Borg, they may be insects. They may be religious and they may have a God that actually visits them, and brings candy. I reject the suggestion that your logical process is superior to ours.
OOps
I think, in general, you are on the right track. A species that hasn’t developed the ability to get along with its own members is going to have trouble advancing far out into space. There are some possible exceptions though.
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The idea of an interstellar manifest destiny becomes hard wired in the early myths of the species long before any technological development.
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They could be social among themselves but still very speciest. Or they could consider us to be primitive or animals.
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They could happen upon the right technology by chance before they have developed socially. Or be forced to develop it because of a looming disaster like an approaching asteroid.
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They might happen upon the technology of a more advanced race.
But yes, interstellar travel probably acts as a natural filter for extreme aggression. But it is not a total panacea.
It is more likely that we would encounter unintentional or intentional exploitation.
Mijin is right, in most of what he says. We can make certain logical deductions about interstellar aliens. Their civilisation is likely to be much older than ours, for the reasons he has deliniated. Similarly they are quite likely to have at least some other forms of advanced information technology, simply because it is so useful.
Other deductions are a little less certain. If an alien civilisation develops faster-than-light travel, it could conceivably spread through the universe quickly without changing its psychological mindset very much. If aggressive the species might remain aggressive, and if peaceful, the species might spread peace and love rapidly through the universe.
But FTL is almost certainly a fantasy; in reality, an interstellar species will need fantastically powerful motors of some kind to accelerate to interstellar speeds. As Larry Niven pointed out in his story The Warriors, any fantastically powerful motor makes a really good weapon. Whether it uses a fusion or antimatter rocket, or a particle-beam driven sail, an interstellar ship can kill entire cities with a few seconds of thrust.
Interstellar civilisations have to exist with the constant threat of annihilation from their own craft - how do you suppose they deal with the constant threat of rebel city-killing ships? One likely option is the development of peaceful ways of settling disputes. One hopes that the threat of rebel city-killing ships would lead to the evolution of a peaceful, diplomatic interstellar society, since the non-peaceful factions would tend to destroy one another.
There are other options, but they are less efficient. If a civilisation regulates behavior so strictly that a rebel city-killing ship is immediately annihilated by the others, that would also work; but by restricting freedom within their civilisation they are also limiting their options. Freedom seems to be preferable to strict regulation, at least from our limited human viewpoint.
I think it would be a horrible misunderstanding of the nature of uncertainty to declare “all bets are off” here. We can obviously speculate on what is likely and what is less likely.
I don’t know whether the aliens will have ships made of candy floss.
But for various reasons it seems unlikely.
I haven’t suggested that “my logic” is better than anyone else’s. All I’ve done is stated an opinion and given the reasoning why I have that opinion. If that reasoning is flawed, I’d be the first to want to know that. Really.
But I haven’t read anything in this thread to suggest that, and it doesn’t help that so many posts have been about trying to label positions as “religion” or “liberalism” and just haven’t addressed the topic at all.