5 ms·

If the aliens see us the way we see cattle it won't matter that they are altruistic.

• kjs3 7y ago
  If they've actually solved crossing the distances required, we're probably more like bugs or bacteria.
  • vl 7y ago
    There is nothing magic about crossing these distances, we can do it right now. It’s just very expensive and nobody wants to spend the money.
    • kjs3 7y ago
      "I read sci-fi in my moms basement and because I want it to be true it is!" No, we can't. So let's ingore the whole "we don't live long enough to make the trip". Because we don't. So if we're going to go, it's a generation ship. Which is currently magic. Our MVP experiments trying to do this on earth have failed, not in space with all the crazy complications that incurs. So there's no reason to think our meatbags can go at any price. So.... We've never built a machine that can work for a 1000 years. That's a fraction of what you need to go to another star. So the fact that there is nothing magic about crossing these distances is exactly the reason we can't do it right now. And probably never can.
      • vl 7y ago
        Flight to the moon was beyond reach in 1943, but it was clear that it’s possible to do and what technologies need to be developed. This later was done at great expense. We are in the similar situation now, we know what needs to be developed, it’s just very expensive and we can’t (and should not) mobilize entire earth population to pay for it. If we do, we can colonize nearest star systems in few thousand years and Milky Way in couple million.
        • kjs3 7y ago
          The next star is a trillion some odd times farther away than the moon. You're trying to draw a linear relationship that's equivalent to "I stepped off my porch" and "I went to the moon". It's fantasy.
• bduerst 7y ago
  I have a hypothesis that technological progress and egalitarianism are correlated, but it's not provable.