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"You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is." (Glengarry, Glen Ross) It is always better to eavesdrop on the other unknown civilization before th

by bcaulf 16y ago

"You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is." (Glengarry, Glen Ross) It is always better to eavesdrop on the other unknown civilization before they eavesdrop on you. It gives you the chance to make a decisive move: invade, cloak, whatever. Hawking is dead right.We should be expanding in a way that is as invisible as possible to the rest of the galaxy. When we do find the aliens, we should pursue a normal intelligence gathering approach, collecting lots of information about them while misrepresenting ourselves as being more primitive and harmless than we are. Self preservation dictates this sort of stuff. It could explain the Fermi Paradox.

olefoo 16y ago
So broadcasting the 1936 olympics loud enough to be picked up within a few light years might not be such a good idea? And pumping out an aggregate radio signature approximately equal to that of a small star might not be such a good idea? Ooops, too late.
- omarchowdhury 16y ago
  Thing is, with the size of the universe, our signals may only reach civilizations with sufficient technology to understand, millions of years from now. And a million light years is minuscule in itself.
Silhouette 16y ago
I find these sorts of arguments rather short-sighted. If there are aliens out there, they would have to have evolved technology at a rate within a few hundred years of our own on a scale measured in billions for this discussion to even be relevant. It seems to me that the odds of aliens existing and evolving at a rate so precisely aligned with our own are pretty slim, compared to the odds of aliens evolving somewhere at some time. If the aliens are more than a few hundred years behind us technologically, it's not likely to matter all that much what they think of us. And if they are more than a few hundred years ahead and they really do turn up on some huge nomadic spaceship that has been travelling across open space for millenia, what exactly do Hawking et al think we're going to do if they are hostile and decide they want to take over our planet? They could squash our entire civilisation as easily as we would control aggressive garden pests, and with about as much concern. What I find saddest is the assumption of hostility. If, as Hawking suggests, we look at the development of our own species, we find that where communities have formed and their members have collaborated for mutual benefit, they have typically done better in the long run than any aggressive group. You can take stuff and destroy things by force, but you advance by building new things, and sooner or later you usually advance to the point where taking the other things is no longer relevant anyway. In our case, we haven't cracked the secret to eternal life or worked out how to solve planetary overcrowding and resource shortages, but just about anything else is on the cards as technology improves. Why, then, would we assume that an alien race that has advanced sufficiently to allow serious space travel and has sufficient power to pose a threat to us if it wished would actually be hostile?

by bcaulf 16y ago

olefoo 16y ago

So broadcasting the 1936 olympics loud enough to be picked up within a few light years might not be such a good idea? And pumping out an aggregate radio signature approximately equal to that of a small star might not be such a good idea? Ooops, too late.

omarchowdhury 16y ago
Thing is, with the size of the universe, our signals may only reach civilizations with sufficient technology to understand, millions of years from now. And a million light years is minuscule in itself.

Silhouette 16y ago

I find these sorts of arguments rather short-sighted. If there are aliens out there, they would have to have evolved technology at a rate within a few hundred years of our own on a scale measured in billions for this discussion to even be relevant. It seems to me that the odds of aliens existing and evolving at a rate so precisely aligned with our own are pretty slim, compared to the odds of aliens evolving somewhere at some time. If the aliens are more than a few hundred years behind us technologically, it's not likely to matter all that much what they think of us. And if they are more than a few hundred years ahead and they really do turn up on some huge nomadic spaceship that has been travelling across open space for millenia, what exactly do Hawking et al think we're going to do if they are hostile and decide they want to take over our planet? They could squash our entire civilisation as easily as we would control aggressive garden pests, and with about as much concern. What I find saddest is the assumption of hostility. If, as Hawking suggests, we look at the development of our own species, we find that where communities have formed and their members have collaborated for mutual benefit, they have typically done better in the long run than any aggressive group. You can take stuff and destroy things by force, but you advance by building new things, and sooner or later you usually advance to the point where taking the other things is no longer relevant anyway. In our case, we haven't cracked the secret to eternal life or worked out how to solve planetary overcrowding and resource shortages, but just about anything else is on the cards as technology improves. Why, then, would we assume that an alien race that has advanced sufficiently to allow serious space travel and has sufficient power to pose a threat to us if it wished would actually be hostile?