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Unfortunately, yes. The first thing we’re going to do as soon as we fine intelligent alien life is figure out how to kill it. And sadly we’ll have to assume the
by sudhirj 6y ago
Unfortunately, yes. The first thing we’re going to do as soon as we fine intelligent alien life is figure out how to kill it. And sadly we’ll have to assume they’re doing the same.
An no, settling Mars won’t help. If someone / something can launch an interstellar attack it can certainly attack more than one planet and moon.
- Pulcinella 6y agoI have a far more charitable theory. The vast majority of human and alien life would want to be friends (or at least just leave their neighbors alone). It’s the elites who desire to destroy each other. I also have a less charitable theory: intelligent life just doesn’t exist. A thousand years from now we will have met dozens of sentient species, but the search for intelligent life continues :P
- prox 6y agoIt’s also about how you define intelligence: >“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- me_me_me 6y agoAre we though? Universe is huge. Wars on earth are waged over scares resources. If we are capable of reaching aliens would we really be incentivized to fight them while there are so many resources available elsewhere?
- ThalesX 6y agoWhat if wars were waged for ideological reasons also? Beliefs, cultures etc.
- sudhirj 6y agoOr just defensively. The US invaded Iraq because they might have had WMDs. Other planets might have WMDs too. And they might think we have WMDs. Doesn’t matter if any of the sides actually do.
- ceejayoz 6y ago> The US invaded Iraq because they might have had WMDs. Be careful not to conflate public justifications with actual motivations.
- sudhirj 6y agoThe point is that public justifications are more important than actual motivations. Actual motivations can be enslaving other beings, ruling / mining an extra planet or just wanting to watch the universe burn. Motivations are already present because there are millions of motivations that map on to the same result - destruction of another group of living things. I'm pointing out that it's easy to find public justification as well. It's also possible to do this unilaterally. China or any other country could also unilaterally decide to destroy another planet. And same possibility on the other side.
- ceejayoz 6y agoMotivations lead to the justifications. The problem with interstellar warfare is, outside the "Dark Forest" concept of "kill everyone just in case", there aren't all that many motivations that seem to make sense. Any interstellar species probably doesn't really need to steal planets, resources, etc.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoIf planets in the “goldilocks zone” are extremely rare and they want to “terraform” (xenoform?) those planets then thats a motivation.
- sudhirj 6y agoHabitable planets are the ultimate scarce resource. Once the earth is full we’ll have to find a way to move and there’s less than 5 good options in this solar system. In time they’ll be full too.
- ls612 6y agoWho says habitable to us == habitable to hypothetical aliens?
- ceejayoz 6y agoIf we've got the technology to travel between stars, we've probably also got the tech to leave planets behind entirely, or to terraform, or to adapt ourselves to conditions.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoThe only logical path is to download our brains onto computers, which will happen before that point. Once that technology exists, that's the only form of life that will dominate. Robots, nano-machines and hyper-intelligences will blow easily damaged flesh with finite lifespans. Habitable regions would be massively expanded.
- LocalH 6y agoWhen you can figure out how to physically attach consciousness to a machine, get back to me
- jcelerier 6y agothe only thing that matters is for it to look like the consciousness has been attached.
- jessaustin 6y agoI've never forgotten the scene in the OSC short story "Fat Farm", in which the protagonist's mind has been copied to his clone, which clone has left the facility to "continue" to enjoy his fine life, and the protagonist realizes he hasn't thought about what comes next. The answer is grim. A consciousness might awake in the machine, but it won't be my consciousness.
- Enginerrrd 6y agoI think it's a cold war situation. In the early years, sure, no problem. But conceivably the pace of resource utilization will increase as well. Eventually they will conflict. Worse, greedy civilizations would probably be selected for. And how long before random differences and exponential growth mean the other side gets an overwhelming power advantage? Historically in human societies, that is essentially never a good thing.
- chess_buster 6y agoMaybe civilisations will merge. I just had my double LOR'xin with extra pumpkin spice. Later I will resume work on my ansible station for the Y'norxa-Wallmart Corporation… hopefully I can push some lines of lox-lang to production today.
- marcosdumay 6y agoThe amount of resources some society can gather increases with the square of time and linearly to its expansion speed. But life around here has an habit of expanding everything (including resource usage) exponentially with time. There is a mismatch here that you are implicitly claiming that is solved for every space-faring civilization. Many people explicitly make this claim, what is reasonable, but it's not good to keep it implicit.