We would be completely at the mercy and good-will of any interstellar travelers that arrived anytime soon. They could probably put a little chip in your head that made you automatically sing kum bai yah everytime you saw the number 30, there wouldn’t be any need to give you a choice in the matter.
Given the 13.7 billion year old age of the universe, the odds of meeting another species even remotely at the same level of advancement as us are not even worth mentioning. It’s not like some weird event triggered simultaneous evolution of intelligent beings across the universe. SImply put, if something comes to us, it will be orders of magnitude over us…if we go meet something else, likely we’ll be orders of magnitude over them.
Immagine where we’d be after a million…or anther billion years of steady development-likely discrepancies in civilization age between species evolved on other planets. And while we might not make it to advance that far ourselves…we know that any civilization that visits us did infact make it.
Ahh yes, an advanced race will come thousands or millions of light years, implant “chips” in 6 billion unfamiliar brains to do a specific response to a stimulus. There would be no complications, because we will automatically assume that any advanced race will never run into any logicstics problems or design flaws. Oh, and the aliens will just magically transport a chip in everybodies brain instantly so there will be no resistance. No complications will arise, because the aliens will be so “advanced” that they will instantly know how our brain works and be able to design so specific a chip for them, that we will sing an earth song they do not know of.
I think the odds of finding a race at or near our level of advancement are greater than finding one older than us, and probably less than our being older than them. Take for example that much of life need specific qualifications, such as a second or third generation star, which means that we are at the right time frame to be the oldest. I think it would be safe to assume that we are the oldest race. 13.7 billion years isn’t really that long when you look at it that way.
However, there is nothing that dictates that cultural advancement has to come at the same overall time mark. We came along only in the last couple hundred thousand years, and for most of that time were just banging rocks together like the guys that had been here the previous couple of million. So even under equal initial conditions we could have cultures with significant gaps in technological development in either direction.
But yes, the presumption that the technology gap would be such that one of the encounterers would be near-divine relative to the others is just speculative. A more determinant element would be whether one or the other culture has the means and animus to do something about the gap (to take advantage, adapt or overcome).
Oops, that was an oversight on my part. Never thought about cultural advancement. It would be hard to measure if we advanced fast or slow, what with no standard to compare. The other guys may still be banging rocks together.
I blame the type of rocks we were banging together. Black basalt mini monoliths.
Discovering the ‘new world’ was just as mind-boggling a few hundred years ago as discovering extra-terrestrial life would be today, and all that did was give humans more things to fight over.
You’re right about the odds of us finding one younger than us, we’re on the level of toddler in our space advancement. We can walk, but barely.
We’re much more likely to find one way more advanced than us because to become noticeable they have to both take the time to make the technology to let us know they exist (this doesn’t have to be intentional, our own TV signals are a good example of this) and add to that is the time it takes for that information to reach us and for us to get together enough effort to realize those signals are there you have a civilization at least several hundred years ahead of us. But then in the grand scheme of things several hundred years is nothing, so these civlilizations would almost certainly be MANY thousands of years ahead of us, if they exist at all or if they care enough to let us know they exist.
I’ve noticed that in the various Star Trek series, the various ET races the Federation explorers encounter are either (1) technologically and culturally primitive, compared to the Federation (and therefore the Prime Directive applies, except when it doesn’t); (2) at about the same level of development (and therefore, they are potential partners, like the Vulcans, or potential enemies, like the Klingons, Romulans and Cardassians); or (3) so much more advanced that they’re not even matter-based lifeforms any more, they’re superevolved godlike beings (like the Organians, the Metrons, and the Q). But they rarely consider the possibility of a race which is, say, a few thousand years ahead of the Federation, so its technology is superior but its people are still people. So far as I can recall, the ST franchise has only done that once: There was a Voyager episode where the explorers encounter a race of sentient humanoid reptiles, who turn out to be the descendants of sentient dinosaurs who fled Earth to escape the great extinction, gradually journeyed to the other side of the galaxy and founded a great civilization – which, having so much of a head start on the humans, has technology capable of grabbing hold of the Voyager like a rabbit in a trap.
Y’all nutz to assume an alien race that has attained interstelar travel must necessarily be older and more advance socially than we. You are basing this on the assumption that they evolved in the same way as we did: from highly competetive predators; and that socially they evolved the same way: with numerous cultural collapses.
There is always the possibility that they happen to be a species that a) got it right the first time and since they eat rocks there was no fierce competition for food and all the strife that entails or b) they are a feral race (ala Shofixti) who were given a few shortcuts by another interstellar race. In the latter case, they could well be easily duped by an ape-man race that has been around the block a few times, socially speaking.
In any case, should they turn out to be vastly superior to us mentally, they would quickly learn that humans are best led and dominated by exercizing deceit and duplicty thereby guaranteeing no human unification; or should they turn out inferior to us mentally, humans would attempt to pirate their craft and remain the divided opportunists that we have always been.
So, short of presenting us with a “kum bai yah” mindcontrol wave (let’s not get hung up on distributing computer hardware when there’s plent of scalar mind control waves to be exploited!) I can see no reason why humanity would unite if presented with a crisis or a uniqu opportunity requiring human unity. Given those 2 choices I would always bet on Man to factionalize and create options #3, 4 & 5 and then seeing a free-for-all to capitalize on the newcomers.
The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Let us imagine an alien race that is a miniscule 1% of the age of the universe older than us. That is, they reached our current level of technological development 1% of the age of the universe ago.
That’s 13.7 million years!
Since intelligent life could likely have evolved anytime in the last 4 billion years or so ( time enough for the first 3rd generation solar systems to already be a few billion years old), the odds are very high that it is millions of years older than us ( or is still banging rocks). Even a tiny amount of difference makes a huge difference down the line. Throw in the fact that technological progress builds on itself, and the reasonable assumtion that once attained, all such progress would be exponential as ours has been, the odds of any other civilization we find being remotely near our level are just rediculously low.
You don’t even need exponential progress for an alien civilization that is say 100 million years older than us to be god-like in comparison to us. If you fail to understand the immense lengths of time being discussed here, you aren’t going to realize the true odds against meeting another civilization at a similar level to us.
In order for another civilization to be counted as remotely near our current level, it would likely have to be within a few thousand years of age as ours, and more likely, since we’re talking about civilizations that proved smart enough to visit us, within 100 years. (We can rule out the dullards that are content to farm alien wheat forever, they won’t be visiting us.) Such a civilizaton will have to be within 0.000007% of the age of the universe of our age and/or level of progress. If you only assume that an intelligent civ could have arisen in the last 3-4 billion years, the odds go up a bit, but only a bit.
I fail to see how you can recalculate the odds to give a high change of meeting an equal civilization, especially when we are talking about ones that came and met us.
Then, on the other hand, there is the possibility that Frank Tippler raised. Assume that nanotechnology becomes a useful tool in many respects that can work on macro scales, and that it proves to be a true Von Nuemann machine which can automatically replicate. These are machines that build bigger machines starting from the molecular level. Assume developing an artificial intelligence that can use this nanotechnology and is smart enough to run complex programs independently, learn from its errors and grow still smarter. A civilization builds small probes that can travel at least 10 percent the speed of light and are chock full of this high tech nano as well as a lot of stored DNA and incubation tools. It sends a number of these probes off to some local star systems.
The probes would essentially establish themselves where they could, using chemicals and materials found there to survey and set up communications stations to beam word of their status back home. They would also exponentially create more probes to heading off to other star systems.
Best of all, upon finding agreeable environments, they set up shop and start to boot up the DNA they carry, assisted by nanotechnology, to seed the environment with life. These smart machines provide shelter for protection of the fledgling DNA until it adapts to the environment creating some replications of their local flora and fauna. Or the DNA might be manipulated or engineered to be endlessly adaptable until it takes hold in one form or another. If the DNA successfully takes root, perhaps by supplanting an original form of life, a message would ultimately be sent back stating so and if the civilization is so inclined, there should be a relatively habitable world waiting for them if they feel it is worth the trip. If not, they don’t.
My point is, our contact with alien intelligence could turn out to be a matter of dealing with very smart automations that have no real sentience. We’d face a very sophisticated seeding program with some very sophisticated tools that won’t necessarily be able to communicate with us, but can carry out extremely complex routines growing life forms and who knows what else for someone’s future colonization, or simply to spread their seed. And it’s likely we might not even know they had arrived until they became too prolific to stop. It would be an invasion at the molecular and cellular level.
This method would be fast, cheap, and efficient, making it a likely scenario if the necessary technologies can be made to work. Although I think some of Tippler’s ideas are kind of bizarre, this would actually be a relatively inexpensive way for a civilization perhaps a few centuries more advanced than ours to colonize the galaxy using small unmanned vehicles that could begin terraforming worlds for them. Or at least leaving some sort of progeny behind.
But the good news is, I suppose it would unite people if it turned out to be a last stand.
I think some of the hypotheses here are a bit far-fetched and y’all been watching too much Star Trek.
I believe that we will eventually discover that intelligent life is a rarity in the universe, an accident that happens very infrequently. We may be the only sentient race in this galaxy. And unless we discover how to travel through black holes, vortexes or whatever, I’m not sure that even traveling anywhere near the speed of life is feasible.
So that leaves two possibilities. One, I’m wrong and there are a whole lot of other races out there in the big U, but since travel is impossible, everyone is basically confined to their own solar systems. Or two, it is possible to travel faster than light (or though vortexes, etc.) but there isn’t anyone out there to do this.
Which, in either case, would explain why we are not being inundated with alien visitors, whether to bring us into the vast galactic union or eat us.
I agree that intelligent life is probably rare in the universe, sometimes it’s rare here on Earth, but it doesn’t hurt to assume the possibility. Actually, according to Frank Tippler and my previous post, he states that this method of intersteller influence, if successfully sent out by only one civilization, would spread across the galaxy in only a few million years. In fact, he was arguing that there are no other intelligences in the galaxy because if there were, they’d have done this by now.
I could think of at least a dozen reasons why that argument doesn’t hold water, including the simple fact that they simply may not have gotten here yet.
Again, I argue that long lifetimes and longer lived civilizations would be necessary to make successful physical contact. The galaxy is a very large place, and we have to think on scales of thousands of years to do it at all.
Two races with individual lifetimes that long, or societies that maintain steady purposes for that length of time might, eventually communicate in a meaningful way.
