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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 tha
by 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 agoAliens 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 agoA 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 agoI dunno, a self-replicating swarm would by definition be technological superior to us, for the next few decades at least.
- kiba 10y agoYou 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 agoAutomated 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 agokiba 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 agoAn 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 agowhat if creating or displacing planets to habitable zones are possible for an intergalactic species. instead of occupying they might farm new planets.
- rebuilder 10y agoThey would do whatever was most efficient, probably.
- keenerd 10y agoAny 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 agoOr 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 agoDepends what the resource is. Maybe there's something rare here that we don't understand yet.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- spacehacker 10y agoIn 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 agoOn the other hand, since we are confined to earth, we are fighting these wars among the species and even ourselves here :(
- diminish 10y agowar 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 agoIt's funny how few people want to talk about that.
- arcticbull 10y agoWell, 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.
- weinzierl 10y agoThere'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 agoFor 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 agoSee 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 agoWithout 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 agoThe 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 agoDo 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 agoOf 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.