Would an alien race necessarily be pro-social

Great Debates
81

Yes, it does - in the sense that you haven’t responded to my point that we have at least the technological means for a form of interstellar travel right now (via Orion) but are nowhere near “general AI” (by which I take it you mean Strong AI - note that the usual term of art is “Artificial General Intelligence”).

Then what was all that crap about “crosslinking” and “pushing many separate strands … together”?

I’ll respond how I choose, thanks. If your point doesn’t make any sense in its component parts, perhaps you should get better at one-sentence summaries.

I can think of many reasons why at least the local stellar neighbourhood might have the same rough timeline as us rather than the universal one - gamma ray bursters could reset the clock for everyone in the path, for instance. Other galactic mechanisms for the same effects exist.

Nope - there’s a lot left out of that reasoning - such as what the density of intelligences is, what mechanisms are used for evolution by each species, what measure you’re using for “advancement”, what absolute physical limits there are to technological advancement… the list goes on.

But the basic problem remains - you’re still viewing tech “advancement” as some sort of Manifest Destiny affair when we don’t have enough evidence for that.

Speak for yourself - I consider it already solved, just not in a way that matches our cultural expectations.

And my point is that you’re basing this on a big assumption - that interstellar travel is necessarily something beyond our current tech level rather than something on a different path altogether.

The differences are likely to be fairly large, but you can’t assume what tech the aliens have or don’t have. You can’t assume their possession of travel says anything else about them - you need to state your reasons for the assumption. In point of fact, you can’t assume that they use recognisable tech at all.

And you can’t just keep posting to complain about the quality of the replies to you when you, yourself, fail to address most of the points your debate opponents make - for instance, again, where is the hardship in interstellar travel at Voyager-like speeds for a species that has a metabolic timescale several orders of magnitude slower than ours? Hell, such a species could be interstellar with 1930s tech.

82

Doesn’t work at all, and I think you know that. You’re just throwing out anything now to deflect from the point.

First of all, what do you even mean by reset the clock? Wipe out complex life? Civilization? Think it through – either way it doesn’t work as a synchronizing mechanism.
Secondly, no two star systems are going to have exactly the same history of GRBs; a GRB close enough to affect life in one star system may not be close enough to affect life in another star system.

Finally and most importantly though, it doesn’t even affect my point even if true. The window size for a species to become sentient is still millions of years wide.
For example on Earth, the most recent candidate for a significant, nearby GRB is almost half a billion years ago.

Not at all.
For the sake of the OP we have to assume that some advancements in technology are possible wrt space travel. And, I have assumed that things like advancements to genetic engineering are possible, which I don’t think anyone would seriously dispute.

But, when Mnemnosyne suggested upthread that perhaps tech will “top out” at that point, he/she made a good point, and I was happy to explore that possibility. I am not claiming to know the future.

And you can speak for yourself.
I think for the purposes of this thread though, you have to entertain the possibility that space travel might be cheaper and/or faster in the future. The premise is based on the idea of easy space travel.

For the 50th time, I am not making any such assumption, I am just saying what is more likely.

Put it this way; say we have an extraterrestrial species. I know nothing about them, but I have access to their wikipedia, and I get to see one random fact about them. The random fact is that this species can routinely make carbon nanotube bundles that are metres thick and kilometres long.
Now, knowing nothing else about them, if I had to guess, I’d say they are likely to be a more advanced species (IOW they are likely to have better tech than us overall), because the one thing I know about them is that they have better tech in this particular area.

This could be wrong, obviously. But it’s a straightforward application of probability.

No hardship, it’s just not really relevant to the OP. If space travel is as costly and as slow as it is for us, forever, then not only are we unlikely to get Star Wars, we’re unlikely to get ET.

83

Yes - the effect being to put everyone on the same 3.5 Bya footing, not the age-of-the-universe one

Of course it does.

The extragalactic GRBs we’re seeing are energetic enough to sterilize entire galactic arms. Close enough, I’d say.

Moving goalposts - first you were concerned with the billions of years difference between age of Earth and age of Universe - now it’s millions of years. What’s next - concern about the thousands of year gaps?

All this without yet providing metrics for tech levels.

We don’t have to assume any such thing. Like I said, “different path, no advancements”, could also be a mechanism.

Possible, sure, if you assume a human-like physiology.

No, it isn’t. It only postulates extraterrestrials. The “simple, cheap, fast” gloss is your own. Space travel may be, in fact, quite hard for the aliens, but they do it anyway for their own reasons. See what I mean about your unstated assumptions?

Without reasoning for your likelihood, it’s effectively the same thing.

…completely skipping over the idea, in no way negated by what you know, that they may make the tubes by their own biological processes. You automatically went with assigning a technological superiority to these nanocarbon-excreting organisms, when the one fact you have (and it’s a fact you yourself invented) says no such thing. See what I mean about assumptions?

You have no basis for assigning probability when your control sample size is 1.

This is your human bias talking - to the aliens, it’s not costly or slow. And it’s their possible character we’re examining in this debate, something I think you’re losing sight of.

84

No, I have been consistent throughout. Because the universe is billions of years old, even adding constraints such as a third-generation star being a requirement, the difference in development time between two random species is, at the least, many millions of years.
Look through the thread, I’ve said this over and over. No goalposts have moved.

No such metric is possible, or necessary.

Huh? You think GE will only be possible if they have human-like physiology?

No, I did not, and you are clearly being obtuse at this point, as my point clearly included the words “if I had to guess”, “I’d say they are likely” and “This could be wrong, obviously”.

This is very different to making an assumption. I’m making a best-guess based on what is known.

We have to be consistent here. If we’re saying all bets are off then whatever ridiculous scenario we postulate is as likely as anything else (including candy floss ships). OTOH if we’re saying we can in some cases assign broad probabilities then I think my analysis is sound. See what you think when you can be bothered to actually read what I’m saying.

85

So it wasn’t you who said

My emphasis? Seems like you were making a big deal of the differences there.

Huh? How on earth is it possible to say, as you repeatedly have, that a species could have “much better tech” if you don’t have metrics to say what’s “better”. You’re obviously not just judging by shinier here. Is it energy efficiency? I think you’ll find Kardashev doesn’t give sufficient granularity there. Some other measure? Please, enlighten me.

In as much as that means “Have genes like us”, then yes, yes I do.

No - you are also basing your guesses on things which are NOT known, where you insert your own interpretation (like your own nanotube example) - that’s what makes it assumption on your part.

There’s a vast difference between “don’t make unfounded assumptions” and “all bets are off” - I’m not postulating energy beings or other dimensions or anything as outré here. I’m saying that thinking extraterrestrials have to play by the same historical rules as us, in anything, is not justified in any way. Especially when you have a misunderstanding of those rules - see my wheel-less culture example, one of many you’ve not responded at all.to

Well, we’re not saying that. We’re saying you have nothing to base your “broad probabilities” on. Unless you’re making the whole exercise trivial by saying “The ETs have to be roughly similar to humans both physiologically and psychologically”, which, yes, reduces the probability space so you can make your case as you’ve done, but no, isn’t justified at all from the framing argument. You seem not to like that, because it makes it harder for you to justify your hidden assumptions about the nature of ETs. Well, tough. That’s not the “candy floss spaceship” arena, but it is the arena of a whole lot of SF - hibernating silicon life, interstellar gaseous life, external evolutionary inheritance, very different timescales of living, wholly biological “technology” bases, cultural stultification or regression, hive-minds - these are not so unimaginable and they all mess with your assumptions about how “advanced” a species has to be to achieve interstellar travel, and how they might otherwise interact with us.

86

Ooh - that sounds interesting, and extremely unlikely; could we have a cite, please?

87

With respect to the ‘wheel-less culture’; the emergence of cities in both the Old World and the New World suggests that a remarkable amount of parallel or convergent civilisational evolution has occurred over the last ten thousand years.

And the New World was not entirely without wheels - see here
http://www.precolumbianwheels.com/

Given another few millennia those toys could have become Cadillacs…

88

My first impressions of the OP (title) was that “necessarily pro-social” was in reference to the aliens and each other to which I thought “absolutely!” I saw then it was in reference to the aliens and us, to which I thought “absolutely not!”

I thought most of the argument was flowing towards the 2nd until I saw the “suck information through their teeth” post.

Pro-social to each other? Absolutely. Language is probably the most obvious barrier.

Pro-social to us? The odds are definitely against us. They would have to be either respectful of personal rights to an unfathomable extreme or live in a post-scarcity world and are just jetting around the universe for the hell of it. Possible, but to me improbable.

I’m also not subscribing to the “if they’re smart enough for FTL, they’re smart enough for…” line of induction. That’s just assumptions upon assumptions upon assumptions. Squared.

89

Right, MrDibble, I’m done. I have better things to do than firefight your nonsense.

Anyone reading the whole thread will know you don’t have an argument. But for anyone skimming, here’s one example exchange:

(The exchange about whether species will be millions of years separated involves similar weaseling by you, but the longer I make this post, the more it looks like you have something I need to respond to, and you don’t).

90

As you’ll note from the post above, several attempts to point out assumptions that have been made have failed.
I have only made very broad assumptions, the same as you just did in your analysis.

And my analysis is not based on the idea that FTL means pacifist society, say. I’m not coupling anything with FTL.

Here it is again:

If all we know about a species is that they can routinely travel to other star systems, then that gives us some reason to suspect they may be more technologically advanced.
Perhaps they are not; perhaps they have lucked out in some way and the rest of their world is similar to medieval europe. But, given that the only fact we know about them is that they can do something significant we cannot, we have some reason to suspect they may be more advanced.

And, given the age of the universe, we do not expect small technological differences to be the norm. We expect species to typically be many millions of years separated in development time.

Now, we can go on to why I think that it is unlikely they will come here and pillage. But do you agree with this so far? If not, where do you disagree and what assumption (“squared”) am I making?

91

Incidentally my colleague Radtech at OA has attempted to imagine a species with genetic material which is completely different in nature to our own nucleic acid;

it is possible to imagine biota with genetics so complicated and sensitive or resistant to mutation that no genetic engineering would be possible, but it seems likely that any organism which has a genetic mechanism for evolution can also be hacked somehow by a sufficiently smart geneticist.

92

I can’t figure out how to parse this sentence so the first half of it doesn’t flatly contradict the second half. Little help?

93

Sure. When assigning probabilities, of course we are making some assumptions.
However that doesn’t mean that the conclusion, the thing we are saying is more likely, is an assumption.

For example:
If I say that when you roll a die, to roll a 6 is less likely than rolling a 1-5, I have made some assumptions about the die; that it’s got 6 sides, marked 1-6, it’s evenly weighted, etc.
But it would be wrong to say “You’re assuming that a 6 is less likely than the other numbers combined! Someone might roll a 6…”. I’m assuming no such thing, and that the possibility of a 6 does not change what is more likely anyway.

As is the case with the accusation that was being thrown at me – that interstellar travel is something ETs will discover after much of their equivalent of modern-day human tech. Most people would say that’s a pretty safe assumption, but I didn’t make it. Interstellar travel is suggestive here, not proof they are more advanced. I think this is the fifth time I’ve said this now.

94

Except, to extend the metaphor, we don’t know how many sides are on the die, what numbers are on each side, and even whether those markings are numbers in the first place. When literally every single factor you’re weighing in coming up with a conclusion is an assumption, it’s kind of ridiculous to insist your conclusion is not also an assumption.

95

No-one has come up with a good argument against this one, not even the hypothetical massive galactic-arm-busting gamma-ray-burst.

Since there is no evidence for any such gamma ray burst in the last few hundred million years, we can’t expect the development of any technological civilisation to be constrained by any such burst within the past. In any case, many if not most of the stars in our immediate vicinity were not in our immediate vicinity hundreds of millions of years ago, so any localised effect would only affect a few stars which are now our neighbours.

So- no reset button.

96

OK, exactly why do we need a gamma ray burst to reset evolution or technological advancement? Why not a comet or asteroid impact, or massive volcanic events, or severe global warming, or even an attack from a violent alien civilization?

97

Actually, no, that’s not how arguments work. A questionable premise doesn’t mean the conclusion to the argument is a premise.

But anyway, in this thread several people have accused me of making assumptions that I did not make, with MrDibble making the most desperate attempts to do this.

But I’ve spelled out my argument very clearly several times (most recently Post #90), and you will note that none of the assumptions I’ve been accused of making are contained in it*.
If you think my argument’s flawed, show me. Again I say it: I would like to know if my argument is flawed. Which premise is questionable? What error in logic have I made?

I am bit puzzled really why this is happening; given that we’ve had threads just like this before, where I’ve argued the same position I’m holding here, and we’ve had a mature debate.
I think it’s come from the thread title. Some people are diving into this thread thinking my position is the same as the OP. It is not, and I would not use the word “necessarily” about any feature of ETs, except for the most obvious tautologies.
In terms of what can be argued from an analysis like mine, you can only go so far, not as far as the questions the OP asks.

98

The first four are local effects, so would not work if we want to synchronise development across a large number of stars.

The last one (an attack from a violent alien civ) *would *work, and is one of the few effects that might reset development on several different worlds at once. The only question that would remain is ‘where are they now?’

99

Technological advancements and unequal tech levels are a given - an actual given. It’s predicated by the OP. They have FTL travel. However, to go into the specifics citing genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, etc. imo is a bridge too far.

100

Thanks, but having read this thread, you’re not exactly my go-to guy on how to construct an argument.