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Your last paragraph is assuming they'd be interested in imposing their will upon us. They may simply not care. Meeting us may just be an interesting diversion o

Your last paragraph is assuming they'd be interested in imposing their will upon us. They may simply not care. Meeting us may just be an interesting diversion or pure curiosity. Or they may be reluctant to get involved but sympathetic enough to offer a select few technological advances, if we want them. There are a lot of possibilities which don't result in full surrender or a fight to the death.

dsyrk 5y ago
Earth is likely very very valuable galactic real estate. Terraforming barren planets or moons is incredibly energy intensive. Assembling habitats in space also potentially quite frustratingly complex. Earth from a technical perspective has incredible resources. Aren’t we already pointing our latest telescopes at nearby solar systems looking for “habitable” planets? They are gonna want your planet sorry. Maybe they will work out an Indian reservation like proposal because the guilt is hard for them.
- kiba 5y ago
  It takes ridiculous energy to get here. They can do that at home with all the resources available to them. Beside, why the heck would you transform an entire planet when you can build your own custom made space habitats? Anyway, we're looking for habitable planets not to colonize them but to find signs of life elsewhere in the universe.
  - dsyrk 5y ago
    I don’t agree with any of what you conjecture. Assume you have much better technology as ours but we roughly correct in our current understandings of physics and energy. So let’s try building space habitats with square foot like our planet’s surface that can accommodate exponential growth in demand, really? Before you say well they will have a different habitat, that’s easy, we can even almost solve that, little DNA programming we can likely adjust our DNA to incorporate features that make earth’s atmosphere habital. Now the “incredible” resources to get here. It’s nonsense, the first arrivals will be automated probes, lightweight. Again we can almost easily do this and we just got started. Lastly, the idea we aren’t looking for habitable planets with in the back of our minds colonies is silly, of course we actually are, we can make all the excuses we want to try and justify our real intentions. We are on exactly the path I suggest they are likely on. Find planets, send probes, sample lifeforms if found. Send seeds. It’s the universal life force that makes us do it. It’s what life does, expand, replicate, grow, spread.
    - kiba 5y ago
      A planet is not the most efficient design for a habitat. That's why O'Neill cylinders are favored.
  - meowster 5y ago
    > It takes ridiculous energy to get here. That's our assumption using technology we are already familiar with.
krono 5y ago
Why would they let us do our thing? Given enough time we might become just as advanced and resource hungry as them. Who knows what trouble we may cause them in the future, or rare resources that we might currently not even know exist we might steal. The time to place place mouse traps is long before there's an entire family of them living in your shed. It'll be either extermination, or - best case scenario - capture/trap and possibly study. Any characteristics or capabilities we humans poses that they find interesting/funny/useful will be catalogued and copied. No need to keep us around.
- weikju 5y ago
  There was one Babylon 5 episode where an alien probe approaches the station and broadcasts a bunch of scientific questions that if we answer correctly, they will grant us knowledge beyond our dreams. The final decision was to move the probe far enough from the station, broadcast the data, and watch as it predictably self-destructed in an explosion that would have taken out the station itself and all surrounding ships. In USENET, the showrunner said that he based this idea on a US Military recommendation that if aliens try to contact us we should ignore them, basically play dumb so we don't seem advanced enough to bother with, just in case they ARE seeking potentially dangerous civilizations to destroy before they get too far...
- true_religion 5y ago
  In the short term they might not care, and for an old civilization the short term might be a few hundred years. If they are anything like current day humanity, we would end up interacting with a tiny portion of their population like some middle manager at an interstellar mega corp or xenology students on a grant from their nearest university. We won’t be important, and certainly won’t be making any appreciable difference good or bad to their civilazation as whole. Worst case scenario that I think is plausible is that they are so decentralized that one of their warlords would come over and set up an empire on top of us for a few hundred years before the central authority realizes anything.
- irrational 5y ago
  It’s interesting that you automatically assume they are hungry for scarce or rare resources. It is possible they live in a post scarcity society, but as a member of the human society you still automatically go to the thing that causes most of the wars and conflicts on this world.

dsyrk 5y ago

Earth is likely very very valuable galactic real estate. Terraforming barren planets or moons is incredibly energy intensive. Assembling habitats in space also potentially quite frustratingly complex. Earth from a technical perspective has incredible resources. Aren’t we already pointing our latest telescopes at nearby solar systems looking for “habitable” planets? They are gonna want your planet sorry. Maybe they will work out an Indian reservation like proposal because the guilt is hard for them.

kiba 5y ago
It takes ridiculous energy to get here. They can do that at home with all the resources available to them. Beside, why the heck would you transform an entire planet when you can build your own custom made space habitats? Anyway, we're looking for habitable planets not to colonize them but to find signs of life elsewhere in the universe.
- dsyrk 5y ago
  I don’t agree with any of what you conjecture. Assume you have much better technology as ours but we roughly correct in our current understandings of physics and energy. So let’s try building space habitats with square foot like our planet’s surface that can accommodate exponential growth in demand, really? Before you say well they will have a different habitat, that’s easy, we can even almost solve that, little DNA programming we can likely adjust our DNA to incorporate features that make earth’s atmosphere habital. Now the “incredible” resources to get here. It’s nonsense, the first arrivals will be automated probes, lightweight. Again we can almost easily do this and we just got started. Lastly, the idea we aren’t looking for habitable planets with in the back of our minds colonies is silly, of course we actually are, we can make all the excuses we want to try and justify our real intentions. We are on exactly the path I suggest they are likely on. Find planets, send probes, sample lifeforms if found. Send seeds. It’s the universal life force that makes us do it. It’s what life does, expand, replicate, grow, spread.
  - kiba 5y ago
    A planet is not the most efficient design for a habitat. That's why O'Neill cylinders are favored.
- meowster 5y ago
  > It takes ridiculous energy to get here. That's our assumption using technology we are already familiar with.

krono 5y ago

Why would they let us do our thing? Given enough time we might become just as advanced and resource hungry as them. Who knows what trouble we may cause them in the future, or rare resources that we might currently not even know exist we might steal. The time to place place mouse traps is long before there's an entire family of them living in your shed. It'll be either extermination, or - best case scenario - capture/trap and possibly study. Any characteristics or capabilities we humans poses that they find interesting/funny/useful will be catalogued and copied. No need to keep us around.

weikju 5y ago
There was one Babylon 5 episode where an alien probe approaches the station and broadcasts a bunch of scientific questions that if we answer correctly, they will grant us knowledge beyond our dreams. The final decision was to move the probe far enough from the station, broadcast the data, and watch as it predictably self-destructed in an explosion that would have taken out the station itself and all surrounding ships. In USENET, the showrunner said that he based this idea on a US Military recommendation that if aliens try to contact us we should ignore them, basically play dumb so we don't seem advanced enough to bother with, just in case they ARE seeking potentially dangerous civilizations to destroy before they get too far...
true_religion 5y ago
In the short term they might not care, and for an old civilization the short term might be a few hundred years. If they are anything like current day humanity, we would end up interacting with a tiny portion of their population like some middle manager at an interstellar mega corp or xenology students on a grant from their nearest university. We won’t be important, and certainly won’t be making any appreciable difference good or bad to their civilazation as whole. Worst case scenario that I think is plausible is that they are so decentralized that one of their warlords would come over and set up an empire on top of us for a few hundred years before the central authority realizes anything.
irrational 5y ago
It’s interesting that you automatically assume they are hungry for scarce or rare resources. It is possible they live in a post scarcity society, but as a member of the human society you still automatically go to the thing that causes most of the wars and conflicts on this world.