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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
by 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 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]