12 ms·

In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat co

by habosa 9y ago

In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!

tempay 9y ago
That would be nice, it's a shame it could just as easily result in an increase of military spending to fund a space program to come invade.
- ComodoHacker 9y ago
  Let me anthropomorphically assume there will always be a closer target to spend excess planetary resources on.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Yes, but the closer target doesn't look alien. How often do countries go to war with people who are similar to them? Now how often with people who are the other? (Whatever definition fits)
    - ItsDeathball 9y ago
      Well, 1930s Germans were pretty similar to Poles and the Dutch, and even more similar to German Jews. Indians and Pakistanis are also not exactly space aliens to each other, nor are Iraqis and Iranians, Russians and Ukrainians, or Syrians and other Syrians. I'd say the historical rule for warfare is that the belligerents are so similar that tiny differences seem irreconcilable. Proximity and competition for resources also seem more important that otherness.
      - gorkonsine 9y ago
        Exactly. I can't think of many wars where the belligerents were really different from each other. American Civil War: many were actual relatives! ("brother vs. brother") WWI: English are descended from Germanic tribes, French are closely related to Germans too. WWII: Same as WWI mainly; Italians aren't very different from French/English/Americans. Americans/Japanese were a pretty big difference though. But Japanese/Chinese isn't that big a difference, relative to non-easterners. The people who promote wars frequently try to cast the enemy as alien, in order to rile up support for the war and to get soldiers to participate.
        ethbro 9y ago
        > The people who promote wars frequently try to cast the enemy as alien, in order to rile up support for the war and to get soldiers to participate. I'd argue that the cultural perception of the belligerent humans towards their targets is far more important than objective differences. And you and parent are certainly being overly-reductive compared to the context of the times. What would a 1930s German have said about being compared to a Polish or Dutch person? Would they have seen themselves as "pretty similar"? And I'm not sure how many Indians and Pakistanis you've talked to, but they're pretty close to space aliens to each other. Same with Shia Iraqis and Sunni Iraqis, and both with Kurds. Etc etc. I don't see how you can say "these peoples are the same" across any modern ethnic or national boundaries without a lot more support without it coming across as "those people all look alike." Hell, I can localize most folks in the US within five sentences or so. And yes, there were states that straddled the Mason-Dixon line (and states like Virginia that were shattered because of it), but outside of those limited cases I'm sure the majority of the people involved could have identified "the other" pretty easily. Point being that if we're finely tuned enough to physical and cultural differences amongst our own species, yet still war on those we can perceive as different... imagine how much stronger that impulse would be against something that didn't even look like us.
        ItsDeathball 9y ago
        My point was as a direct counter to your assertion that warfare increases with degree of difference between peoples. That would predict that the Germans would prefer to ally with other Europeans against people like the Japanese, who they are maximally different from. Historically this did not happen. Yes, there are clear conflicts between each of the groups named, but they are more similar to each other than they are to most other populations of humans. Let's say an alien combat spacecraft crash-lands in the middle of ISIS-controlled territory. Would you expect ISIS to immediately declare a cease-fire and surrender the craft and its weaponry to the UN so that humanity can work together to face this new threat, or do you think they would immediately go about using it as a tool to better murder their fellow humans?
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Historically countries make war on their apparently-similar neighbors quite frequently. Antagonists that look very similar to outsiders denounce each other as irreconcilably different, sometimes for centuries or even millennia. Loss of ego (qua individual identity) is equated with loss of consciousness and thus loss of life. I'd argue that the process of deliberate othering (semantic maximization of difference) is a precursor to aggression. Establishment, maintenance, or expansion of a differential gap is a fundamental process in biology. Unfortunately we're now at or rapidly approaching the culmination of such a process: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0123507 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... It's interesting to consider figure 3 as an example of meiosis in a social meta-organism.
    - ComodoHacker 9y ago
      Well, this have stirred up interesting discussion. Ironically, I initially didn't mean war, but some project that requires concerted effort of all the population. Like colonizing nearby uninhabited planets or improving life conditions on their home one. Turns out I wasn't thinking anthropomorphically enough.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
pier25 9y ago
That would explain the Fermi paradox
- Pxtl 9y ago
  The Fermi Paradox is different. It's really about interstellar colonization, not just travel. It's basic geometric growth: the Universe is old-enough and geometric growth is fast-enough that, if interstellar colonization is possible, aliens would have spread across every habitable planet in the galaxy, just as all life does. They would already be here. Therefore, there is some filter that prevents the vast majority of life from achieving interstellar colonization. Either the filter is behind us and we're the lucky first ones, or the filter is ahead of us and we are almost certainly doomed to stay trapped in our solar system until it is no longer habitable.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway91111 9y ago
    Maybe humans are just early in general. Who knows, maybe intelligent life evolution will peak in several billion years and we were just ahead of the curve.
    - Pxtl 9y ago
      That is incredibly unlikely. Let's assume that aliens had a 1% head start on us. They were 1% faster at evolving. That's not a crazy idea - Earth spent 2 billion years going from photosynthesis to multi-cellular life. The cretaceous extinction could've been a 50 million year setback, how close were Dinosaurs to getting sentience? We're at 13 billion years on the global clock right now, so 1% of that is 130 million years. An alien with a 130 million year head start on us. Imagine that. Now let's assume there are 40 billion habitable planets in the galaxy. That seems like a lot. And let's assume it takes a really long time for a planet to go from "just colonized" to "ready to produce more interstellar colonies". Say 100,000 years - longer than recorded human civilization. We'll make a vague approximation - every inhabited planet can colonize another planet once per 100,000 years. That seems conservative. It takes about 35 generations for a doubling population to reach 40,000,000,000. 35 generations. So with a generation taking 100,000 years, that means 3.5 million years. In 3.5 million years we see a species go from "sentient" to "every habitable planet in the galaxy". You can play with the numbers, but the result speaks volumes: geometric growth is fast, and the universe is old. It is highly unlikely that we're the first. And if we're not the first, and interstellar colonization is possible, then every planet in the galaxy should already be colonized, because it would take a blink of an eye in galactic timescales.
vlunkr 9y ago
This is one of the answers to the Fermi paradox.
- pklausler 9y ago
  Only if it would apply to all alien civilizations. The thing about Fermi's paradox is that the Universe is old and the local galaxy is big, so any explanation for the apparent absence of ETI has to cover all ETIs. It just takes one species in galactic history to reach the point of launching a self-replicating interstellar probe to produce a galaxy permanently aswarm with them. Heck, we're not that far away from being able to do so ourselves. And any explanation of the form "the ETIs wouldn't do that because reasons" just fails, because it just takes one event, over a very long time and large number of systems.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    "in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." — Benjamin Franklin So I guess Ben just knew that aliens would never be a problem because Death and Taxes. Apparently the IRS is more powerful than Statistics and Physics.
    - qbrass 9y ago
      He just assumed the aliens would either kill or tax us.
  - throwaway91111 9y ago
    It's not clear how old life is, though. Are we early to hitting intra-planetary communications or late?
melling 9y ago
It’s not just politics, it’s the entire human race. For example, we are spending $45 billion in our healthcare bill to fight the opioid epidemic. Imagine if we were able to avoid such problems in the first place.
- Theodores 9y ago
  It is not a problem though. My friends in big pharma did better than me - big houses, cars, holidays, money in bank. I guess they will be on the Narcan gravy train too. Doctors have to drive fast Porsches too, don't they?
bluGill 9y ago
Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit. At this time we have every reason to believe that it is a limit. Our theories also say that if you were to go faster than light (which you cannot) it implies time dilation and time travel - again science fiction just assumes a loop hole so that doesn't happen. Many talk about travel at 10 times the speed of light (warp-10) as if that is fast, but if you actually notice that lack of aging during travel they have to be traveling much faster than that. (at 10 times the speed of light the nearest star to earth is just under a 1 year round trip - your kids would not remember you very well when you return) Which is to say that any aliens with space travel that discovers us now will not be making the journey because the length of time it would take.
- datr 9y ago
  Just an FYI. In Star Trek at least the warp system works like this: warp-1 is the speed of light and it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity. Source: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor
  - tgb 9y ago
    Doesn't sound exponential to me!
    - datr 9y ago
      Ha good point. Should have said hyperbolic growth.
      - summadat 9y ago
        If memory serves me right, Warp speeds are x^3 faster for each step. Warp 1 is 3x faster than light, Warp 2 is 27x faster, etc
        jsight 9y ago
        It actually varies from series to series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive#Warp_velocities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive#Warp_velocities
squarefoot 9y ago
"Politics could save us from an alien invasion!" I'd rather hope in the opposite.
- gnode 9y ago
  Politics could resign us to an alien invasion?
  - kchoudhu 9y ago
    An alien invasion could fix our politics.
    - squarefoot 9y ago
      This. If they come from a distant star/galaxy to a place where we let a rotten economic system be the hardest obstacle preventing us to go to a nearby planet, a contact with them would become a damn opportunity to learn something good.
srtjstjsj 9y ago
if we got a whiff of intelligent life on mars, funding would appear
- throwaway91111 9y ago
  I mean, cash could also appear from thin air on NASA's front lawn.
- rasz 9y ago
  a shred of ancient spacecraft wreck would suffice
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Shortest sci-fi book ever!
- ethbro 9y ago
  Back cover: Picking up where the last novel concluded, Grogdar continues negotiations to amass the requisite votes for an invasion. Plutar, still with a majority in the Dkystfit's upper chamber, seeks to block her. Spoiler: Not much happens in this book. But maybe in the next!
okreallywtf 9y ago
The reality could be a lot more melancholy. The universe is so vast and intelligent life so rare, countless species could evolve to space faring too far away from each other to ever have a chance to meet. Faint wisps of eons old radio chatter or long dead ruins might be the best we ever get but even that would be life changing.
- ethbro 9y ago
  It's inarguable that the final probability of contact is the product of a large number of non-certain events. By that metric alone, and given that the probability of each of realistically pretty small... contact doesn't seem too likely.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Why is it always an alien invasion and not just alien curiosity or scientific interest? I'm sick of this trope that all alien species must be like the worst demographic of humanity.
- vermontdevil 9y ago
  Reflects on how we see ourselves doesn't it?
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    In a distorted way. Alien invasion movies (or demons escaping from hell or any of many similar narrative tropes) are basically stories where our worst characteristics are projected onto ugly analogues of ourselves which are then heroically defeated by the cooperative effort of various good characteristics. The problem is that by placing the origin of evil on the far side of some liminal threshold (species, space, stargates, hell) we generally fail to engage with it and so perpetuate the existence of an epistemological gap. It's interesting to consider genre tropes as analogues of Kubler-Ross' stages of grief. Viewed in this light, Europa Report gains considerably.
- qbrass 9y ago
  It won't be scientists because they won't want to alter what they're studying by revealing themselves.
- rasz 9y ago
  like that time I investigated ant hill with my magnifying glass

by habosa 9y ago

tempay 9y ago

That would be nice, it's a shame it could just as easily result in an increase of military spending to fund a space program to come invade.

ComodoHacker 9y ago
Let me anthropomorphically assume there will always be a closer target to spend excess planetary resources on.
- ethbro 9y ago
  Yes, but the closer target doesn't look alien. How often do countries go to war with people who are similar to them? Now how often with people who are the other? (Whatever definition fits)
  - ItsDeathball 9y ago
    Well, 1930s Germans were pretty similar to Poles and the Dutch, and even more similar to German Jews. Indians and Pakistanis are also not exactly space aliens to each other, nor are Iraqis and Iranians, Russians and Ukrainians, or Syrians and other Syrians. I'd say the historical rule for warfare is that the belligerents are so similar that tiny differences seem irreconcilable. Proximity and competition for resources also seem more important that otherness.
    - gorkonsine 9y ago
      Exactly. I can't think of many wars where the belligerents were really different from each other. American Civil War: many were actual relatives! ("brother vs. brother") WWI: English are descended from Germanic tribes, French are closely related to Germans too. WWII: Same as WWI mainly; Italians aren't very different from French/English/Americans. Americans/Japanese were a pretty big difference though. But Japanese/Chinese isn't that big a difference, relative to non-easterners. The people who promote wars frequently try to cast the enemy as alien, in order to rile up support for the war and to get soldiers to participate.
      - ethbro 9y ago
        > The people who promote wars frequently try to cast the enemy as alien, in order to rile up support for the war and to get soldiers to participate. I'd argue that the cultural perception of the belligerent humans towards their targets is far more important than objective differences. And you and parent are certainly being overly-reductive compared to the context of the times. What would a 1930s German have said about being compared to a Polish or Dutch person? Would they have seen themselves as "pretty similar"? And I'm not sure how many Indians and Pakistanis you've talked to, but they're pretty close to space aliens to each other. Same with Shia Iraqis and Sunni Iraqis, and both with Kurds. Etc etc. I don't see how you can say "these peoples are the same" across any modern ethnic or national boundaries without a lot more support without it coming across as "those people all look alike." Hell, I can localize most folks in the US within five sentences or so. And yes, there were states that straddled the Mason-Dixon line (and states like Virginia that were shattered because of it), but outside of those limited cases I'm sure the majority of the people involved could have identified "the other" pretty easily. Point being that if we're finely tuned enough to physical and cultural differences amongst our own species, yet still war on those we can perceive as different... imagine how much stronger that impulse would be against something that didn't even look like us.
        ItsDeathball 9y ago
        My point was as a direct counter to your assertion that warfare increases with degree of difference between peoples. That would predict that the Germans would prefer to ally with other Europeans against people like the Japanese, who they are maximally different from. Historically this did not happen. Yes, there are clear conflicts between each of the groups named, but they are more similar to each other than they are to most other populations of humans. Let's say an alien combat spacecraft crash-lands in the middle of ISIS-controlled territory. Would you expect ISIS to immediately declare a cease-fire and surrender the craft and its weaponry to the UN so that humanity can work together to face this new threat, or do you think they would immediately go about using it as a tool to better murder their fellow humans?
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Historically countries make war on their apparently-similar neighbors quite frequently. Antagonists that look very similar to outsiders denounce each other as irreconcilably different, sometimes for centuries or even millennia. Loss of ego (qua individual identity) is equated with loss of consciousness and thus loss of life. I'd argue that the process of deliberate othering (semantic maximization of difference) is a precursor to aggression. Establishment, maintenance, or expansion of a differential gap is a fundamental process in biology. Unfortunately we're now at or rapidly approaching the culmination of such a process: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0123507 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... It's interesting to consider figure 3 as an example of meiosis in a social meta-organism.
  - ComodoHacker 9y ago
    Well, this have stirred up interesting discussion. Ironically, I initially didn't mean war, but some project that requires concerted effort of all the population. Like colonizing nearby uninhabited planets or improving life conditions on their home one. Turns out I wasn't thinking anthropomorphically enough.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

pier25 9y ago

That would explain the Fermi paradox

Pxtl 9y ago
The Fermi Paradox is different. It's really about interstellar colonization, not just travel. It's basic geometric growth: the Universe is old-enough and geometric growth is fast-enough that, if interstellar colonization is possible, aliens would have spread across every habitable planet in the galaxy, just as all life does. They would already be here. Therefore, there is some filter that prevents the vast majority of life from achieving interstellar colonization. Either the filter is behind us and we're the lucky first ones, or the filter is ahead of us and we are almost certainly doomed to stay trapped in our solar system until it is no longer habitable.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway91111 9y ago
  Maybe humans are just early in general. Who knows, maybe intelligent life evolution will peak in several billion years and we were just ahead of the curve.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    That is incredibly unlikely. Let's assume that aliens had a 1% head start on us. They were 1% faster at evolving. That's not a crazy idea - Earth spent 2 billion years going from photosynthesis to multi-cellular life. The cretaceous extinction could've been a 50 million year setback, how close were Dinosaurs to getting sentience? We're at 13 billion years on the global clock right now, so 1% of that is 130 million years. An alien with a 130 million year head start on us. Imagine that. Now let's assume there are 40 billion habitable planets in the galaxy. That seems like a lot. And let's assume it takes a really long time for a planet to go from "just colonized" to "ready to produce more interstellar colonies". Say 100,000 years - longer than recorded human civilization. We'll make a vague approximation - every inhabited planet can colonize another planet once per 100,000 years. That seems conservative. It takes about 35 generations for a doubling population to reach 40,000,000,000. 35 generations. So with a generation taking 100,000 years, that means 3.5 million years. In 3.5 million years we see a species go from "sentient" to "every habitable planet in the galaxy". You can play with the numbers, but the result speaks volumes: geometric growth is fast, and the universe is old. It is highly unlikely that we're the first. And if we're not the first, and interstellar colonization is possible, then every planet in the galaxy should already be colonized, because it would take a blink of an eye in galactic timescales.

vlunkr 9y ago

This is one of the answers to the Fermi paradox.

pklausler 9y ago
Only if it would apply to all alien civilizations. The thing about Fermi's paradox is that the Universe is old and the local galaxy is big, so any explanation for the apparent absence of ETI has to cover all ETIs. It just takes one species in galactic history to reach the point of launching a self-replicating interstellar probe to produce a galaxy permanently aswarm with them. Heck, we're not that far away from being able to do so ourselves. And any explanation of the form "the ETIs wouldn't do that because reasons" just fails, because it just takes one event, over a very long time and large number of systems.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  "in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." — Benjamin Franklin So I guess Ben just knew that aliens would never be a problem because Death and Taxes. Apparently the IRS is more powerful than Statistics and Physics.
  - qbrass 9y ago
    He just assumed the aliens would either kill or tax us.
- throwaway91111 9y ago
  It's not clear how old life is, though. Are we early to hitting intra-planetary communications or late?

melling 9y ago

It’s not just politics, it’s the entire human race. For example, we are spending $45 billion in our healthcare bill to fight the opioid epidemic. Imagine if we were able to avoid such problems in the first place.

Theodores 9y ago
It is not a problem though. My friends in big pharma did better than me - big houses, cars, holidays, money in bank. I guess they will be on the Narcan gravy train too. Doctors have to drive fast Porsches too, don't they?

bluGill 9y ago

Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit. At this time we have every reason to believe that it is a limit. Our theories also say that if you were to go faster than light (which you cannot) it implies time dilation and time travel - again science fiction just assumes a loop hole so that doesn't happen. Many talk about travel at 10 times the speed of light (warp-10) as if that is fast, but if you actually notice that lack of aging during travel they have to be traveling much faster than that. (at 10 times the speed of light the nearest star to earth is just under a 1 year round trip - your kids would not remember you very well when you return) Which is to say that any aliens with space travel that discovers us now will not be making the journey because the length of time it would take.

datr 9y ago
Just an FYI. In Star Trek at least the warp system works like this: warp-1 is the speed of light and it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity. Source: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor
- tgb 9y ago
  Doesn't sound exponential to me!
  - datr 9y ago
    Ha good point. Should have said hyperbolic growth.
    - summadat 9y ago
      If memory serves me right, Warp speeds are x^3 faster for each step. Warp 1 is 3x faster than light, Warp 2 is 27x faster, etc
      - jsight 9y ago
        It actually varies from series to series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive#Warp_velocities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive#Warp_velocities

squarefoot 9y ago

"Politics could save us from an alien invasion!" I'd rather hope in the opposite.

gnode 9y ago
Politics could resign us to an alien invasion?
- kchoudhu 9y ago
  An alien invasion could fix our politics.
  - squarefoot 9y ago
    This. If they come from a distant star/galaxy to a place where we let a rotten economic system be the hardest obstacle preventing us to go to a nearby planet, a contact with them would become a damn opportunity to learn something good.

srtjstjsj 9y ago

if we got a whiff of intelligent life on mars, funding would appear

throwaway91111 9y ago
I mean, cash could also appear from thin air on NASA's front lawn.
rasz 9y ago
a shred of ancient spacecraft wreck would suffice

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

Shortest sci-fi book ever!

ethbro 9y ago
Back cover: Picking up where the last novel concluded, Grogdar continues negotiations to amass the requisite votes for an invasion. Plutar, still with a majority in the Dkystfit's upper chamber, seeks to block her. Spoiler: Not much happens in this book. But maybe in the next!

okreallywtf 9y ago

The reality could be a lot more melancholy. The universe is so vast and intelligent life so rare, countless species could evolve to space faring too far away from each other to ever have a chance to meet. Faint wisps of eons old radio chatter or long dead ruins might be the best we ever get but even that would be life changing.

ethbro 9y ago
It's inarguable that the final probability of contact is the product of a large number of non-certain events. By that metric alone, and given that the probability of each of realistically pretty small... contact doesn't seem too likely.

anigbrowl 9y ago

Why is it always an alien invasion and not just alien curiosity or scientific interest? I'm sick of this trope that all alien species must be like the worst demographic of humanity.

vermontdevil 9y ago
Reflects on how we see ourselves doesn't it?
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  In a distorted way. Alien invasion movies (or demons escaping from hell or any of many similar narrative tropes) are basically stories where our worst characteristics are projected onto ugly analogues of ourselves which are then heroically defeated by the cooperative effort of various good characteristics. The problem is that by placing the origin of evil on the far side of some liminal threshold (species, space, stargates, hell) we generally fail to engage with it and so perpetuate the existence of an epistemological gap. It's interesting to consider genre tropes as analogues of Kubler-Ross' stages of grief. Viewed in this light, Europa Report gains considerably.
qbrass 9y ago
It won't be scientists because they won't want to alter what they're studying by revealing themselves.
rasz 9y ago
like that time I investigated ant hill with my magnifying glass