7 ms·

There is no reasonable reason why we should fear aliens. There is absolutely nothing present on earth that is not hyper abundant elsewhere and more conveniently

There is no reasonable reason why we should fear aliens. There is absolutely nothing present on earth that is not hyper abundant elsewhere and more conveniently harvested from a shallower gravity well. There is just nothing here that is special, especially special enough to travel many light years to get to. It is also hard to image why a species that have that capability would not be able to synthesize what they want from base materials.

rebuilder 10y ago
There's a line of thought that annihilation of one species is the only possible outcome from two spacefaring species meeting. This stems from the assumption that both are growth-seeking, which makes sense since they wouldn't be likely to meet without being expansionist. Seeking growth, they will need more and more resources. Direct competition inevitably ensues, leading to conflict and destruction either via warfare or economic means. That's all pretty theoretical, but just one example of why aliens might not be benign. I don't think it's reasonable to say we have nothing to fear.
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Aliens arriving today must be technologically superior to humans by several orders of magnitude. If they are not they would exploit their local resources first before finding need to expand. So the changes of technologically equivalent aliens arriving today is negligible. The amount of material present in Jupiter is rather large. If a species arrives that is routinely capable of converting gas giants into habitats and is currently in pressing need for housing then yes, we may be bulldozed into extinction - there might be even some poetic justice in that. But why would the Developers choose Jupiter, why not some other system with many more Gas giants or currently coalescing clouds ? Resource based arguments don't hold much water for me, not at this scale anyway.
  - kiba 10y ago
    A dyson swarm does not require any new technology to develop, only the constant churning out of satellites. They do not need to be technologically superior to us. In any case, we would still be ants compared to them.
    - ageofwant 10y ago
      I dunno, a self-replicating swarm would by definition be technological superior to us, for the next few decades at least.
      - kiba 10y ago
        You don't need a "self-replicating swarm" to build more satellites. You just need to pump out lot of satellites. There's nothing special about self-replicating "swarm", either.
        naasking 10y ago
        Automated self replication is pretty special. We don't have anything like that yet. All of our tech requires human intervention when it breaks down.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        abhishekkr 10y ago
        kiba above doesn't seem to know exponential growth. Self-replication leads to exponential growth. Creating more satellites here locally only gives you linear growth.
  - rebuilder 10y ago
    An aggressively expansionist species will always be "in need of housing". They will behave like locusts. It's not a given that most species would be like that, but if they come to us, the odds are pretty good they are aggressively expansionist. If they weren't, why would they bother to go to the trouble of space travel in the first place?
    - diminish 10y ago
      what if creating or displacing planets to habitable zones are possible for an intergalactic species. instead of occupying they might farm new planets.
      - rebuilder 10y ago
        They would do whatever was most efficient, probably.
    - keenerd 10y ago
      Any civilization that can travel between the stars will be able to build space habs more cheaply. There's no good reason to sit in the bottom of a gravity well when you can build something better yourself. Unless maybe you are losing a war, being chased relentlessly across the stars and need to make a bomb shelter under a thousand miles of rock. You could offer the natives all sorts of technology, or all the precious metals you find in exchange for a few cubic kilometers deep under ground. Whatever deals you make with them don't matter anyway. They'll all be glassed in a few years when your pursuers figure out where you're hiding and begin bombardment.
      - SCHiM 10y ago
        Or maybe they need warriors, since their race has already collectively modified itself to delete wasteful things like aggressiveness and anger. Queue the intelligent aggressive naked apes. And throw them at your problems! Or imagine making peace with the aliens, what will they think of our nearly endless collections of movies, video games and stories wherein we're slaughtering, mutilating and murdering or visitors from the sky? I wonder how _that_ is going to look once they understand what they're seeing.
  - arcticbull 10y ago
    Depends what the resource is. Maybe there's something rare here that we don't understand yet.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- spacehacker 10y ago
  In that sense the hostility of cosmic space is a feature rather than a bug. If resources were plentiful and space travel was easy, we would constantly find ourselves in intergalactic wars and life would have been wiped out over and over again by resource seeking paperclippers and crystalline entities.
  - mrich 10y ago
    On the other hand, since we are confined to earth, we are fighting these wars among the species and even ourselves here :(
    - diminish 10y ago
      war seems to be part of an evolutionary algorithm to select the best species or feature set and prune the legacy code, and then diversify again and prune again at a higher level.
      - internaut 10y ago
        It's funny how few people want to talk about that.
        arcticbull 10y ago
        Well, that's the game, though one can argue if you move beyond it you've won by definition. Just because we came from that system doesn't mean it needs to continue.
        ethbro 10y ago
        The losing end of the great filter no one sees coming: peace.
        internaut 10y ago
        Are you listening cstross? It is time to write a novel about the evils of peace among the spacefaring. Service guarantees citizenship!
- weinzierl 10y ago
  There's another line of thought that annihilation of one species is most likely by accident, like for example the demolition of a planet to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Either way there is reason for fear.
  - keenerd 10y ago
    For a more practical example, when a Type 2 suffers an industrial accident like a reactor meltdown, it would be indistinguishable from a supernova. If it happens within 1000 light years of us, we'd be just as dead. We can only take comfort that such an event would wipe out their own civilization, and they have adequate safeties in place as a result. Oh, and hopefully there isn't a galactic wide cold-war-esque standoff on the possession and use of supernova-creating bombs.
- nkzednan 10y ago
  See Dark Forest theory (spoiler warning for Dark Forest by Cixin Liu - second book after Three Body Problem): http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/18127/dark-forest-postulate-used-to-explain-the-fermi-paradox http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/18127/dark-for... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lovesick-cyborg/2015/10/31/chinas-dark-forest-answer-to-star-wars-optimism/#.WF_wC5L2zBI http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lovesick-cyborg/2015/10/31... https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Dark-Forest-Theory-of-the-cosmos-which-is-a-response-to-the-Fermi-Paradox https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Dark-Forest-Theory-of-the-... which is basically what you said - every civilization's prime directive is to survive, resources in the universe are limited, and what they call "chains of suspicion" Resources limited in universe: think about how fast we have used many of the resources on earth. The universe has a finite amount of resources. He also talks about how fast technology progresses. In just the past 100 years we've made airplane travel common, gone to the moon, launched a probe that is on the edge/outside the solar system, have self driving cars, computers, etc. Who's to say that this is fast or slow? By the time new communcation from an alien race arrives, they/we might have had that technological progress.
  - rebuilder 10y ago
    Without FTL travel, the notion of a species expanding far into sp ce becomes a little silly IMO. You'd need an enormously stable society, otherwise the best case scenario for viable colonies is that you never hear from them again. If you do hear from them, it's likely to be thousands of years since you sent them out, and they're now your competitors. Perhaps they've even speciated.
- naasking 10y ago
  The exact same argument applies to different human cultures. Clashes happened, but we're all still here. Annihilation is not inevitable.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "This stems from the assumption that both are growth-seeking" I'm really not sure how anyone can be so certain about the motives of beings that might be radically different from any life we know of. They could exterminate humans as an experiment, out of curiosity, for enjoyment, because some other species or their god wants them to, randomly, for no reason at all, or for many other reasons we can't even conceive of, because they may not think in any way relatable to us or what we know. There are an infinity of possibilities.
- greenhatman 10y ago
  Do you think if humans became space faring and we found other species we'd kill them? I seriously doubt that. We'll definitely study them and try to learn from them. Knowledge will be much more important than physical resources. Similarly, different races and nations on earth kind of decided that we're not actually going to kill each other and take each other's resources. We gain a lot more by cooperating.
  - abhishekkr 10y ago
    Of course we'd kill other species. Look at our own past, just 400 years ago FFS. What happened to the Native Americans? Then look at the species of animals that we're driving to extinction right now.
manquer 10y ago
genetic diversity may be not so common elsewhere and worth mining
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Which would involve a few abductions and/or some probing...
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  Wouldn't that be an argument that an alien race wouldn't annihilate us, rather than they would? I mean, what good is a dead planet for genetic diversity (and, I suspect that if enslavement were the goal, humans would resort to extreme lengths to try to prevent it, up to and including destruction of large swaths of our own planet)? But, I don't think enslavement or a human zoo is a very likely motivation for a species advanced enough to travel light years to get here.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
well, unless aliens are looking for trainable slaves
- ageofwant 10y ago
  He, beings capable of interstellar travel would have very little need for "slaves", I mean, even on mean old earth slaves only made sense until 1 coal joule was cheaper than 1 man joule. If you can travel over light years a joule is going to be extraordinarily cheap, or time is not relevant. Either way, very hard for me to see how human slaves would be of any use to them.
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    correct on all account but still you're applying a earthling stick to measure usefulness. maybe they need a creativity core for their warship ai.
    - arcticbull 10y ago
      Or pets! ^_^
    - wattt 10y ago
      Or snu snu
wruza 10y ago
Imagine that you are an alien. Relativity is strange thing, today you see small tribe with toy nuclear weapons, but then you turn your engines on, and tomorrow it is powerful intergalactic race. It is reasonable to take a cure before a disease makes it hard.
- rangibaby 10y ago
  I've had exactly this experience in Civilization 2. Playing at the higher difficulties, the computer cheats and swaps any knowledge it learns to all other computer players. The computer players are all hostile 100% of the time (a feature of the version that I play), so will never help you in that or any other way. It was quite a surprise after wiping out the most advanced and powerful civilzation other than me (they had 19th century riflemen, I was several tiers ahead of them so had tanks, battleships, and modern artillery) to have the other civilizations "trade up" to the same level of technology as me and have nukes flying at my cities. The best way to stop computer civilizations from becoming a threat is to capture or raze all of their cities except for a single one, which you will keep as a pet. After all, you're not a monster.
indexerror 10y ago
There is something special here, which is the unique combination of biospheres and natural processes that enable life as we know it. Maybe aliens also have the same life form as us, and they are looking for similar habitats? Our search for such habitats so far has not been very successful, which shows that we are a indeed one of a kind in the known universe. The aliens who can visit us, however, are likely to possess technologies to terraform unsuitable planets. But maybe their technological development was not well rounded and space exploration was pursued way more than other form of technologies. Remember that we went to moon before we had smartphones. Just a simple analogy, but who knows?
- ageofwant 10y ago
  Yea, reminds me of "The Road not taken" https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
icantdrive55 10y ago
What if they were like most of us, and when landed; decided we looked better on their alien plates? "Be--boop-be--boop--taste good, and so many of them. Let's call home? We now know what to serve at our hootenanny? I hope they don't give me methane?" Yes--they just happen to speak English, and Lost in Space Robot.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
"There is no reasonable reason why we should fear aliens." If you'll allow me to strawman you a bit, I've always found such arguments facile at best. They seem to reason from something akin to this "As mankind has become more advanced, he has grown from being tribalistic and violent to understanding that fear itself is more dangerous than actual external threats" Yes, but we've never actually reached such nirvana except in our imaginations. Instead, history has shown us all sort of intelligent and evolved populations both being the perpetrators and victims of indiscriminate violence. In addition, looking at how humans develop and what we know of species in general on the planet, there's never any reason to be afraid of anything -- until there is. That's the problem with induction and not knowing enough about the greater universe. Things are always fine and dandy for the turkey until Thanksgiving comes. It's extremely problematic to speculate about alien beings. I note, however, that we tend to think in terms of aliens having some sort of policy towards humans: they want to eat us, they want to conquer us, and so on. Assuming we are just a few rungs up the evolutionary ladder from pond scum, it's much more likely that we're not important at all -- and that if there were some terrible interaction with aliens, it would probably be akin to a man accidentally kicking over an anthill on his way to work than some sort of dramatic invasion or intervention. The scariest thing about potential technologically superior alien beings isn't that they are hostile. It's that they're completely apathetic and have better things to do. Which takes care of Fermi's Paradox quite nicely.
- internaut 10y ago
  > That's the problem with induction and not knowing enough about the greater universe. Things are always fine and dandy for the turkey until Thanksgiving comes. This is why the spectre of dead civilizations like Rome haunt us to this day.
- EthanHeilman 10y ago
  It seems plausible, i.e. not impossible with our current understanding of physics, that humans that could accelerate small quantities of mass to significant fractions of the speed of light (0.01-0.4c) thereby building relativistic missiles which could be launched at known planetary bodies in other star systems. The potential that humans may create and use relativistic missiles combined with the philosophy of safety first suggests that humans might be treated more like fire ants or brown recluse spiders: 1. if you see them you call pest control so they don't sting you when you aren't paying attention, 2. to get rid of the ones you can't find you leave some poison traps out, 3. and you make sure to vacuum regularly ("do you want ants this is how we get ants").
IvyMike 10y ago
"Have you heard the good news about our lord and savior K'Xthkapatykak?"
- brightsize 10y ago
  Good Dobbs, who hasn't? You can't turn on the TV without seeing K'Xthkapatykak sitting in some comfortably-furnished studio begging/shaming me to call in with my credit card number to set up a recurring donation. And then there are its minions forever banging on my door (often with a sweet- but miserable-looking tadpole in tow) seeking to waste five minutes of my time reading the Tgprglna tablets with them and of course soliciting me to attend, credit card in hand, their next coven. They've got time travel, intergalactic hyperloops, immortality, FRB franchises across the universe, monthly credit-flow in the 8 digits (at least), and who does the IRS think should be tax-exempt, them or me?
platz 10y ago
> There is just nothing here that is special Except Us. How do you know so much about alien psychology? Trying reason about what motivates aliens, their desires, or how they think, is an error in anthropomorphization.

rebuilder 10y ago

There's a line of thought that annihilation of one species is the only possible outcome from two spacefaring species meeting. This stems from the assumption that both are growth-seeking, which makes sense since they wouldn't be likely to meet without being expansionist. Seeking growth, they will need more and more resources. Direct competition inevitably ensues, leading to conflict and destruction either via warfare or economic means. That's all pretty theoretical, but just one example of why aliens might not be benign. I don't think it's reasonable to say we have nothing to fear.

ageofwant 10y ago
Aliens arriving today must be technologically superior to humans by several orders of magnitude. If they are not they would exploit their local resources first before finding need to expand. So the changes of technologically equivalent aliens arriving today is negligible. The amount of material present in Jupiter is rather large. If a species arrives that is routinely capable of converting gas giants into habitats and is currently in pressing need for housing then yes, we may be bulldozed into extinction - there might be even some poetic justice in that. But why would the Developers choose Jupiter, why not some other system with many more Gas giants or currently coalescing clouds ? Resource based arguments don't hold much water for me, not at this scale anyway.
- kiba 10y ago
  A dyson swarm does not require any new technology to develop, only the constant churning out of satellites. They do not need to be technologically superior to us. In any case, we would still be ants compared to them.
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    I dunno, a self-replicating swarm would by definition be technological superior to us, for the next few decades at least.
    - kiba 10y ago
      You don't need a "self-replicating swarm" to build more satellites. You just need to pump out lot of satellites. There's nothing special about self-replicating "swarm", either.
      - naasking 10y ago
        Automated self replication is pretty special. We don't have anything like that yet. All of our tech requires human intervention when it breaks down.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - abhishekkr 10y ago
        kiba above doesn't seem to know exponential growth. Self-replication leads to exponential growth. Creating more satellites here locally only gives you linear growth.
- rebuilder 10y ago
  An aggressively expansionist species will always be "in need of housing". They will behave like locusts. It's not a given that most species would be like that, but if they come to us, the odds are pretty good they are aggressively expansionist. If they weren't, why would they bother to go to the trouble of space travel in the first place?
  - diminish 10y ago
    what if creating or displacing planets to habitable zones are possible for an intergalactic species. instead of occupying they might farm new planets.
    - rebuilder 10y ago
      They would do whatever was most efficient, probably.
  - keenerd 10y ago
    Any civilization that can travel between the stars will be able to build space habs more cheaply. There's no good reason to sit in the bottom of a gravity well when you can build something better yourself. Unless maybe you are losing a war, being chased relentlessly across the stars and need to make a bomb shelter under a thousand miles of rock. You could offer the natives all sorts of technology, or all the precious metals you find in exchange for a few cubic kilometers deep under ground. Whatever deals you make with them don't matter anyway. They'll all be glassed in a few years when your pursuers figure out where you're hiding and begin bombardment.
    - SCHiM 10y ago
      Or maybe they need warriors, since their race has already collectively modified itself to delete wasteful things like aggressiveness and anger. Queue the intelligent aggressive naked apes. And throw them at your problems! Or imagine making peace with the aliens, what will they think of our nearly endless collections of movies, video games and stories wherein we're slaughtering, mutilating and murdering or visitors from the sky? I wonder how _that_ is going to look once they understand what they're seeing.
- arcticbull 10y ago
  Depends what the resource is. Maybe there's something rare here that we don't understand yet.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
spacehacker 10y ago
In that sense the hostility of cosmic space is a feature rather than a bug. If resources were plentiful and space travel was easy, we would constantly find ourselves in intergalactic wars and life would have been wiped out over and over again by resource seeking paperclippers and crystalline entities.
- mrich 10y ago
  On the other hand, since we are confined to earth, we are fighting these wars among the species and even ourselves here :(
  - diminish 10y ago
    war seems to be part of an evolutionary algorithm to select the best species or feature set and prune the legacy code, and then diversify again and prune again at a higher level.
    - internaut 10y ago
      It's funny how few people want to talk about that.
      - arcticbull 10y ago
        Well, that's the game, though one can argue if you move beyond it you've won by definition. Just because we came from that system doesn't mean it needs to continue.
        ethbro 10y ago
        The losing end of the great filter no one sees coming: peace.
        internaut 10y ago
        Are you listening cstross? It is time to write a novel about the evils of peace among the spacefaring. Service guarantees citizenship!
weinzierl 10y ago
There's another line of thought that annihilation of one species is most likely by accident, like for example the demolition of a planet to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Either way there is reason for fear.
- keenerd 10y ago
  For a more practical example, when a Type 2 suffers an industrial accident like a reactor meltdown, it would be indistinguishable from a supernova. If it happens within 1000 light years of us, we'd be just as dead. We can only take comfort that such an event would wipe out their own civilization, and they have adequate safeties in place as a result. Oh, and hopefully there isn't a galactic wide cold-war-esque standoff on the possession and use of supernova-creating bombs.
nkzednan 10y ago
See Dark Forest theory (spoiler warning for Dark Forest by Cixin Liu - second book after Three Body Problem): http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/18127/dark-forest-postulate-used-to-explain-the-fermi-paradox http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/18127/dark-for... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lovesick-cyborg/2015/10/31/chinas-dark-forest-answer-to-star-wars-optimism/#.WF_wC5L2zBI http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lovesick-cyborg/2015/10/31... https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Dark-Forest-Theory-of-the-cosmos-which-is-a-response-to-the-Fermi-Paradox https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Dark-Forest-Theory-of-the-... which is basically what you said - every civilization's prime directive is to survive, resources in the universe are limited, and what they call "chains of suspicion" Resources limited in universe: think about how fast we have used many of the resources on earth. The universe has a finite amount of resources. He also talks about how fast technology progresses. In just the past 100 years we've made airplane travel common, gone to the moon, launched a probe that is on the edge/outside the solar system, have self driving cars, computers, etc. Who's to say that this is fast or slow? By the time new communcation from an alien race arrives, they/we might have had that technological progress.
- rebuilder 10y ago
  Without FTL travel, the notion of a species expanding far into sp ce becomes a little silly IMO. You'd need an enormously stable society, otherwise the best case scenario for viable colonies is that you never hear from them again. If you do hear from them, it's likely to be thousands of years since you sent them out, and they're now your competitors. Perhaps they've even speciated.
naasking 10y ago
The exact same argument applies to different human cultures. Clashes happened, but we're all still here. Annihilation is not inevitable.
pmoriarty 10y ago
"This stems from the assumption that both are growth-seeking" I'm really not sure how anyone can be so certain about the motives of beings that might be radically different from any life we know of. They could exterminate humans as an experiment, out of curiosity, for enjoyment, because some other species or their god wants them to, randomly, for no reason at all, or for many other reasons we can't even conceive of, because they may not think in any way relatable to us or what we know. There are an infinity of possibilities.
greenhatman 10y ago
Do you think if humans became space faring and we found other species we'd kill them? I seriously doubt that. We'll definitely study them and try to learn from them. Knowledge will be much more important than physical resources. Similarly, different races and nations on earth kind of decided that we're not actually going to kill each other and take each other's resources. We gain a lot more by cooperating.
- abhishekkr 10y ago
  Of course we'd kill other species. Look at our own past, just 400 years ago FFS. What happened to the Native Americans? Then look at the species of animals that we're driving to extinction right now.

manquer 10y ago

genetic diversity may be not so common elsewhere and worth mining

ageofwant 10y ago
Which would involve a few abductions and/or some probing...
SwellJoe 10y ago
Wouldn't that be an argument that an alien race wouldn't annihilate us, rather than they would? I mean, what good is a dead planet for genetic diversity (and, I suspect that if enslavement were the goal, humans would resort to extreme lengths to try to prevent it, up to and including destruction of large swaths of our own planet)? But, I don't think enslavement or a human zoo is a very likely motivation for a species advanced enough to travel light years to get here.

LoSboccacc 10y ago

well, unless aliens are looking for trainable slaves

ageofwant 10y ago
He, beings capable of interstellar travel would have very little need for "slaves", I mean, even on mean old earth slaves only made sense until 1 coal joule was cheaper than 1 man joule. If you can travel over light years a joule is going to be extraordinarily cheap, or time is not relevant. Either way, very hard for me to see how human slaves would be of any use to them.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  correct on all account but still you're applying a earthling stick to measure usefulness. maybe they need a creativity core for their warship ai.
  - arcticbull 10y ago
    Or pets! ^_^
  - wattt 10y ago
    Or snu snu

wruza 10y ago

Imagine that you are an alien. Relativity is strange thing, today you see small tribe with toy nuclear weapons, but then you turn your engines on, and tomorrow it is powerful intergalactic race. It is reasonable to take a cure before a disease makes it hard.

rangibaby 10y ago
I've had exactly this experience in Civilization 2. Playing at the higher difficulties, the computer cheats and swaps any knowledge it learns to all other computer players. The computer players are all hostile 100% of the time (a feature of the version that I play), so will never help you in that or any other way. It was quite a surprise after wiping out the most advanced and powerful civilzation other than me (they had 19th century riflemen, I was several tiers ahead of them so had tanks, battleships, and modern artillery) to have the other civilizations "trade up" to the same level of technology as me and have nukes flying at my cities. The best way to stop computer civilizations from becoming a threat is to capture or raze all of their cities except for a single one, which you will keep as a pet. After all, you're not a monster.

indexerror 10y ago

There is something special here, which is the unique combination of biospheres and natural processes that enable life as we know it. Maybe aliens also have the same life form as us, and they are looking for similar habitats? Our search for such habitats so far has not been very successful, which shows that we are a indeed one of a kind in the known universe. The aliens who can visit us, however, are likely to possess technologies to terraform unsuitable planets. But maybe their technological development was not well rounded and space exploration was pursued way more than other form of technologies. Remember that we went to moon before we had smartphones. Just a simple analogy, but who knows?

ageofwant 10y ago
Yea, reminds me of "The Road not taken" https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

icantdrive55 10y ago

What if they were like most of us, and when landed; decided we looked better on their alien plates? "Be--boop-be--boop--taste good, and so many of them. Let's call home? We now know what to serve at our hootenanny? I hope they don't give me methane?" Yes--they just happen to speak English, and Lost in Space Robot.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

"There is no reasonable reason why we should fear aliens." If you'll allow me to strawman you a bit, I've always found such arguments facile at best. They seem to reason from something akin to this "As mankind has become more advanced, he has grown from being tribalistic and violent to understanding that fear itself is more dangerous than actual external threats" Yes, but we've never actually reached such nirvana except in our imaginations. Instead, history has shown us all sort of intelligent and evolved populations both being the perpetrators and victims of indiscriminate violence. In addition, looking at how humans develop and what we know of species in general on the planet, there's never any reason to be afraid of anything -- until there is. That's the problem with induction and not knowing enough about the greater universe. Things are always fine and dandy for the turkey until Thanksgiving comes. It's extremely problematic to speculate about alien beings. I note, however, that we tend to think in terms of aliens having some sort of policy towards humans: they want to eat us, they want to conquer us, and so on. Assuming we are just a few rungs up the evolutionary ladder from pond scum, it's much more likely that we're not important at all -- and that if there were some terrible interaction with aliens, it would probably be akin to a man accidentally kicking over an anthill on his way to work than some sort of dramatic invasion or intervention. The scariest thing about potential technologically superior alien beings isn't that they are hostile. It's that they're completely apathetic and have better things to do. Which takes care of Fermi's Paradox quite nicely.

internaut 10y ago
> That's the problem with induction and not knowing enough about the greater universe. Things are always fine and dandy for the turkey until Thanksgiving comes. This is why the spectre of dead civilizations like Rome haunt us to this day.
EthanHeilman 10y ago
It seems plausible, i.e. not impossible with our current understanding of physics, that humans that could accelerate small quantities of mass to significant fractions of the speed of light (0.01-0.4c) thereby building relativistic missiles which could be launched at known planetary bodies in other star systems. The potential that humans may create and use relativistic missiles combined with the philosophy of safety first suggests that humans might be treated more like fire ants or brown recluse spiders: 1. if you see them you call pest control so they don't sting you when you aren't paying attention, 2. to get rid of the ones you can't find you leave some poison traps out, 3. and you make sure to vacuum regularly ("do you want ants this is how we get ants").

IvyMike 10y ago

"Have you heard the good news about our lord and savior K'Xthkapatykak?"

brightsize 10y ago
Good Dobbs, who hasn't? You can't turn on the TV without seeing K'Xthkapatykak sitting in some comfortably-furnished studio begging/shaming me to call in with my credit card number to set up a recurring donation. And then there are its minions forever banging on my door (often with a sweet- but miserable-looking tadpole in tow) seeking to waste five minutes of my time reading the Tgprglna tablets with them and of course soliciting me to attend, credit card in hand, their next coven. They've got time travel, intergalactic hyperloops, immortality, FRB franchises across the universe, monthly credit-flow in the 8 digits (at least), and who does the IRS think should be tax-exempt, them or me?

platz 10y ago

> There is just nothing here that is special Except Us. How do you know so much about alien psychology? Trying reason about what motivates aliens, their desires, or how they think, is an error in anthropomorphization.