6 ms·

A trap for what exactly? By the time your society can do this to a star, you're not exactly fighting others for resources. You're very much into post-scarcity t

A trap for what exactly? By the time your society can do this to a star, you're not exactly fighting others for resources. You're very much into post-scarcity territory and the traditional motivations for conflict are long gone. I never understood the scarcity mentality we apply to hypothetical super-advanced civilizations. This is like expecting Jesus to take your wallet or the Buddha to kick you down the stairs. If there are other advanced societies out there I seriously doubt war is their main motivator in space exploration, the same way Voyager and Curiosity are unarmed. Sure, that makes for fun sci-fi stories, but real life is governed by fairly simplistic game theory rules, at least from a high-level perspective. The motivators we have been given through evolution will be the motivators they have as well. Unless we're dismissing evolution as only a local phenomenon, we should expect similar beings to ourselves. I think the 'hostile alien' scenario shouldn't be our default. Sadly, that approach sells ad impressions and schlocky futurist books and influences a lot of people to believe things that are pretty questionable. If we discovered a primitive species in the European seas we'd be tripping over ourselves to preserve them and study them and to make sure they never, ever get hurt by us (or a stray asteroid or anything we could prevent). We wouldn't be conquering them with robot subs for their pretty coral jewellery or sub-surface oil or whatever. We have enough pretty things and energy here on Earth and in unihabited places if need be. Life is rare enough that we don't need to attack other life for resources, assuming we ever find any.

thaw13579 10y ago
Haven't atrocious things been done during "exploration" on Earth, e.g. European imperialism and colonization? I'd like to think humanity has moved past that, but there currently seem to be enough war torn areas to show otherwise...
- Xixi 10y ago
  European imperialism and colonization was pretty much not done in a post-scarcity area: we [1] needed all these resources so we took them. There were also ideological reasons involved in colonization ("I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races" [2]). Humanity still very much depends on various resources today: fossil fuels, uranium, metals, fish stocks, etc. So wars over resources still very much exist. The sense of "duty to civilize the inferior races" is also alive and maybe even stronger than ever, though expressed with less offensive words. I would expect a civilization sufficiently advanced to build a Dyson sphere to have reached some sort of sustainability with regard to resources. But what about ideology? What if they deem us barbarians that need to be civilized? [1] I'm French, hence the "we". [2] In Jules Ferry speech before the French Chamber of Deputies: http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1884ferry.asp http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1884ferry.asp
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    I would argue that the political/race/religious reasons are just cultural cover for resource stealing. Example, Russia just stole Crimea because a warm weather port is a rare resource in their region and benefits their various military strategies. Everything about "history justifies it," "Ukrainian Nazis were planning on killing everyone," and "they wanted us to liberate them" is propaganda. Once you are post-scarcity, this kind of propaganda will be much less effective. It'll be more obvious its bullshit.
  - thaw13579 10y ago
    Interesting points. But while such a civilization would be energy rich, wouldn't planets in the habitable zone still be scarce? There are experiments showing a "behavioral sink" in mice when given everything needed but space. And who knows, humans could even be of interest as a "model organism" for scientifically inclined alien species... [1] http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/ http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      > But while such a civilization would be energy rich, wouldn't planets in the habitable zone still be scarce? Probably not. There's around a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and even more in nearby Andromeda. If some civilization has the technology to travel to our system (which is likely tens of light-years away if not much farther), then it'll also have the tech to go to many, many, many other systems other than ours, which also have habitable-zone planets, and are probably more conveniently-located. The only real exception is if there's a race that's not all that advanced, and is located very, very close to us, such as in the Alpha Centauri system, 4ly away, so that we're just close enough to make travel here feasible for them, but other habitable-zone planets are significantly farther so that it makes more sense for them to attack us rather than just find someplace else. But as we're already figuring out now, a mere 4ly is already a really, really long distance with our technology. Our longest-range probes have only gone a small fraction of that distance, and they've just about left the system. It'll be tens of thousands of years for them to go that distance at their current speed. So traveling that distance is already rather unimaginable for us without something like a generation ship or cryo-storage ("suspended animation"), and when you have that, why bother fighting a war if you can just continue on? Finally, if you have the technology to build a generation ship that can work reliably for 10,000+ years supporting life, you probably have the technology to mine asteroids, build habitats on the Moon and Mars, build large habitats with artificial gravity (by spinning) in Lagrangian points, etc. In short, you already have the technology to make habitats perfectly suited for your species, and there's a whole solar system full of building materials at your disposal. If you have that, why would you want to travel such a long distance just so you can steal a planet from some other race, when it's very unlikely that planet will even be suitable for your biology without significant terraforming? In a nutshell, the problem with this kind of thinking, and a lot of sci-fi in general, is that it assumes that interstellar space travel is much cheaper and easier than artificial habitat construction, when in fact the reverse is true. This is not to say that artificial habitat construction is that easy either; we still haven't perfected that for really long-term applications. But interstellar travel is really, really hard. Now, of course, it is possible that we've completely overlooked some fundamental physics and it's actually not that hard to travel light-years very quickly; this would change the equation entirely. There's a Neal Stephenson short story about this, where some warlike and somewhat primitive aliens attack Earth, and are easily defeated by our far-superior weaponry (they basically had 19th-century cannon technology). So the humans get their technology and figure out that faster-than-light travel is actually really easy, we had just overlooked something simple all this time; at the end, the aliens are crying about what they've done, because then the humans set out to become galactic conquerors.
amelius 10y ago
What makes you think that our energy needs will not grow as well?
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Lets say they will. How is conquering a far off enemy worth it economically? It would be easier from a resource, political, technical, and moral perspective to build out large solar arrays or build more nuclear plants (or more fantastically, build out a Dyson sphere) than a space war. We're not post-scarcity, nor even close to it, but we certainly have better options than mindless destruction for energy. Now imagine us 5,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 years from now. Why would we fly to some far off planet to murder everyone for their resources? The universe is teeming with energy and resources. Its simpler and more ethical to just tap local-ish uninhabited resources. Arguably, if your species is mind-mindbogglingly stupid enough to declare war constantly and against the basic rules of game-theory then I doubt your society will survive the nuclear weapons stage anyway and won't ever be in the stars. The nice thing about the Drake equation is that it suggests that Klingon-esque societies don't make it to the space-faring stage, which is nice.
  - jerry40 10y ago
    We can't predict motivations of other forms of life, can we? They are completely different (in theory). They even can build a trap to make evevryone who will get there happy. Or to hear their story. I dont know.
    - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
      > They are completely different (in theory). They are products of evolution and, in theory, we'll be very alike in many ways.
      - mikeash 10y ago
        I don't think we currently have a very good idea of how much of what we're like is due to universal properties, and how much is path dependent and wouldn't show up in a completely independently evolved ecosystem.
neals 10y ago
Scarcity might go away, but religion might not. Imagine a fanatically religious and advanced civilization. Their book tells them to eradicate all non believers from the universe.
- blackflame7000 10y ago
  Basically the Ori from Stargate SG1.
joeclark77 10y ago
You might enjoy reading John C. Wright's "Count to a Trillion" series, which does some thinking about how starfaring alien races, governed by game theory, might actually operate. I don't think there's ever going to be a point when a race has "enough" and doesn't want to explore or build any more. Our ambition should grow with our capabilities. Once you can control a star, why not work on a galaxy?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The big reason is that you'd need a brand new physics to project power over interstellar distances. Every outpost of the empire will essentially have unlimited manufacturing capability and it will take decades to project force, decades the outpost can spend making sure the amount of matter they have devoted to war exceeds the tiny amount of war matter the central empire threw out into space.
  - joeclark77 10y ago
    The series of novels specifically deals with time frames much longer than "decades". The first book spans a few centuries, the second and third span millenia, the fourth spans tens of millennia, and the fifth and sixth (not out yet) are supposed to reach much farther. The big idea of the book is that Einstein isn't wrong about C being the speed limit. Therefore, to be a starfaring race requires the ability to make commitments and hold to them over extremely long timespans. The connection to game theory is that, as in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the only way you can really make predictably right decisions in cooperation with other entities is if your decision-making formulas are spelled out mathematically in advance; so all can predict how you will act. The first book begins with mankind discovering the galaxy's "rules" on a kind of signpost at a nearby star. Read the books!
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Maybe I will, I'm kind of burnt out on scifi. My point is that the very concept of an interstellar resource war, and thus the concept of interstellar control, is incoherent given our present physics. You can take over a system that isn't technologically enabled, but that's it, the resources available to a technologically enabled system are greater than the resources that can be sent into the system.
marcosdumay 10y ago
> A trap for what exactly? For aliens. Just like we make traps for birds, so we can tag and study them.
Roboprog 10y ago
It only takes one "sociapath". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star Warning: the "Plot Threads" section has spoilers.
jack9 10y ago
> make sure they never, ever get hurt by us That's a "current thinking" issue. Prior to industrialization, humanity (statistically per capita) didn't care about preservation. In search or resources you get marginalized conservation thinking. Never-ever is a fantasy, because over a long enough period of time every priority can and will change.

thaw13579 10y ago

Haven't atrocious things been done during "exploration" on Earth, e.g. European imperialism and colonization? I'd like to think humanity has moved past that, but there currently seem to be enough war torn areas to show otherwise...

Xixi 10y ago
European imperialism and colonization was pretty much not done in a post-scarcity area: we [1] needed all these resources so we took them. There were also ideological reasons involved in colonization ("I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races" [2]). Humanity still very much depends on various resources today: fossil fuels, uranium, metals, fish stocks, etc. So wars over resources still very much exist. The sense of "duty to civilize the inferior races" is also alive and maybe even stronger than ever, though expressed with less offensive words. I would expect a civilization sufficiently advanced to build a Dyson sphere to have reached some sort of sustainability with regard to resources. But what about ideology? What if they deem us barbarians that need to be civilized? [1] I'm French, hence the "we". [2] In Jules Ferry speech before the French Chamber of Deputies: http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1884ferry.asp http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1884ferry.asp
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  I would argue that the political/race/religious reasons are just cultural cover for resource stealing. Example, Russia just stole Crimea because a warm weather port is a rare resource in their region and benefits their various military strategies. Everything about "history justifies it," "Ukrainian Nazis were planning on killing everyone," and "they wanted us to liberate them" is propaganda. Once you are post-scarcity, this kind of propaganda will be much less effective. It'll be more obvious its bullshit.
- thaw13579 10y ago
  Interesting points. But while such a civilization would be energy rich, wouldn't planets in the habitable zone still be scarce? There are experiments showing a "behavioral sink" in mice when given everything needed but space. And who knows, humans could even be of interest as a "model organism" for scientifically inclined alien species... [1] http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/ http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    > But while such a civilization would be energy rich, wouldn't planets in the habitable zone still be scarce? Probably not. There's around a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and even more in nearby Andromeda. If some civilization has the technology to travel to our system (which is likely tens of light-years away if not much farther), then it'll also have the tech to go to many, many, many other systems other than ours, which also have habitable-zone planets, and are probably more conveniently-located. The only real exception is if there's a race that's not all that advanced, and is located very, very close to us, such as in the Alpha Centauri system, 4ly away, so that we're just close enough to make travel here feasible for them, but other habitable-zone planets are significantly farther so that it makes more sense for them to attack us rather than just find someplace else. But as we're already figuring out now, a mere 4ly is already a really, really long distance with our technology. Our longest-range probes have only gone a small fraction of that distance, and they've just about left the system. It'll be tens of thousands of years for them to go that distance at their current speed. So traveling that distance is already rather unimaginable for us without something like a generation ship or cryo-storage ("suspended animation"), and when you have that, why bother fighting a war if you can just continue on? Finally, if you have the technology to build a generation ship that can work reliably for 10,000+ years supporting life, you probably have the technology to mine asteroids, build habitats on the Moon and Mars, build large habitats with artificial gravity (by spinning) in Lagrangian points, etc. In short, you already have the technology to make habitats perfectly suited for your species, and there's a whole solar system full of building materials at your disposal. If you have that, why would you want to travel such a long distance just so you can steal a planet from some other race, when it's very unlikely that planet will even be suitable for your biology without significant terraforming? In a nutshell, the problem with this kind of thinking, and a lot of sci-fi in general, is that it assumes that interstellar space travel is much cheaper and easier than artificial habitat construction, when in fact the reverse is true. This is not to say that artificial habitat construction is that easy either; we still haven't perfected that for really long-term applications. But interstellar travel is really, really hard. Now, of course, it is possible that we've completely overlooked some fundamental physics and it's actually not that hard to travel light-years very quickly; this would change the equation entirely. There's a Neal Stephenson short story about this, where some warlike and somewhat primitive aliens attack Earth, and are easily defeated by our far-superior weaponry (they basically had 19th-century cannon technology). So the humans get their technology and figure out that faster-than-light travel is actually really easy, we had just overlooked something simple all this time; at the end, the aliens are crying about what they've done, because then the humans set out to become galactic conquerors.

amelius 10y ago

What makes you think that our energy needs will not grow as well?

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Lets say they will. How is conquering a far off enemy worth it economically? It would be easier from a resource, political, technical, and moral perspective to build out large solar arrays or build more nuclear plants (or more fantastically, build out a Dyson sphere) than a space war. We're not post-scarcity, nor even close to it, but we certainly have better options than mindless destruction for energy. Now imagine us 5,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 years from now. Why would we fly to some far off planet to murder everyone for their resources? The universe is teeming with energy and resources. Its simpler and more ethical to just tap local-ish uninhabited resources. Arguably, if your species is mind-mindbogglingly stupid enough to declare war constantly and against the basic rules of game-theory then I doubt your society will survive the nuclear weapons stage anyway and won't ever be in the stars. The nice thing about the Drake equation is that it suggests that Klingon-esque societies don't make it to the space-faring stage, which is nice.
- jerry40 10y ago
  We can't predict motivations of other forms of life, can we? They are completely different (in theory). They even can build a trap to make evevryone who will get there happy. Or to hear their story. I dont know.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    > They are completely different (in theory). They are products of evolution and, in theory, we'll be very alike in many ways.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      I don't think we currently have a very good idea of how much of what we're like is due to universal properties, and how much is path dependent and wouldn't show up in a completely independently evolved ecosystem.

neals 10y ago

Scarcity might go away, but religion might not. Imagine a fanatically religious and advanced civilization. Their book tells them to eradicate all non believers from the universe.

blackflame7000 10y ago
Basically the Ori from Stargate SG1.

joeclark77 10y ago

You might enjoy reading John C. Wright's "Count to a Trillion" series, which does some thinking about how starfaring alien races, governed by game theory, might actually operate. I don't think there's ever going to be a point when a race has "enough" and doesn't want to explore or build any more. Our ambition should grow with our capabilities. Once you can control a star, why not work on a galaxy?

maxerickson 10y ago
The big reason is that you'd need a brand new physics to project power over interstellar distances. Every outpost of the empire will essentially have unlimited manufacturing capability and it will take decades to project force, decades the outpost can spend making sure the amount of matter they have devoted to war exceeds the tiny amount of war matter the central empire threw out into space.
- joeclark77 10y ago
  The series of novels specifically deals with time frames much longer than "decades". The first book spans a few centuries, the second and third span millenia, the fourth spans tens of millennia, and the fifth and sixth (not out yet) are supposed to reach much farther. The big idea of the book is that Einstein isn't wrong about C being the speed limit. Therefore, to be a starfaring race requires the ability to make commitments and hold to them over extremely long timespans. The connection to game theory is that, as in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the only way you can really make predictably right decisions in cooperation with other entities is if your decision-making formulas are spelled out mathematically in advance; so all can predict how you will act. The first book begins with mankind discovering the galaxy's "rules" on a kind of signpost at a nearby star. Read the books!
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Maybe I will, I'm kind of burnt out on scifi. My point is that the very concept of an interstellar resource war, and thus the concept of interstellar control, is incoherent given our present physics. You can take over a system that isn't technologically enabled, but that's it, the resources available to a technologically enabled system are greater than the resources that can be sent into the system.

marcosdumay 10y ago

> A trap for what exactly? For aliens. Just like we make traps for birds, so we can tag and study them.

Roboprog 10y ago

It only takes one "sociapath". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star Warning: the "Plot Threads" section has spoilers.

jack9 10y ago

> make sure they never, ever get hurt by us That's a "current thinking" issue. Prior to industrialization, humanity (statistically per capita) didn't care about preservation. In search or resources you get marginalized conservation thinking. Never-ever is a fantasy, because over a long enough period of time every priority can and will change.