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Here is my thesis by which humans can never be exterminated by an aggresive alien race directly via attack: For a universe that is infinite and provided there

Here is my thesis by which humans can never be exterminated by an aggresive alien race directly via attack: For a universe that is infinite and provided there are no aggressive alien races within our inmediate stellar neighborhood, it would break the rules of economics for humans to be attacked, whether for resources or for sport. This is because for any alien to actually visit us, they would need FTL travel tech. If they do have FTL, then such tech would dramatically reduce the cost of travel to nil. This would make any point in the galaxy reachable inmediately at almost no cost. Therefore, at that point, any valuable resource of earth... would also be reachable at the same cost at another earth-like planet. Except the latter would be without pesky humans on it. Or, if you had infinite kit Kat bars in front of you, you would always pick the one without any ants on it. Similarly, any aggressive alien race with FTL would not exterminate humans for sport. They may kill some similar to how you handle a roach, but any species unrestrained by resource limits (again, FTL) the tendencies for conflict will have naturally died out of the gene pool.

platz 6y ago
We don't know that the universe is infinite. Also, even if space was infinite, that doesn't mean that low-entropy energy/matter (to extract energy/work from) is also infinite.
- orwin 6y ago
  > low-entropy energy/matter (to extract energy/work from) A word i like for that is exergy. Energy you can extract.
xwolfi 6y ago
You also don't know for sure (or have not explained) the rationale for saying that: - a society (really ? Do they also have city halls and a bi-party congress?) - unrestrained by resource limits (that you understand, because I can tell you that when you swallow suns you possibly have a limit eventually you wouldn't want to run out of) - lost its tendency for conflict - front the gene pool (that's very optimistic to think they would have genes, working like ours, in a context of natural selection similar to ours: with a bit of luck, we could have had 2 intelligent, non-sexually compatible, species of hominids, and I suspect things would have been very different in term of what sport-killing means). Me I can absolutely imagine a species of metallic robots created by a far away biologic equivalent who are so absolutely bored that reducing biological life to ashes became a way to escape, to feel something. They can switch off time perceptions, travel everywhere at whatever speed, reproduce programmatically and don't suffer from maternal instinct or mirror neuron empathy. Their vast intelligence does generates curiosity, which in turn generates boredom when there's nothing new to do or see. We became their latest weekend sport event, and they'll move on as fast as they've exterminated us, on to the next surprise of life.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  Edited for clarity. Resource limits: If the universe is infitine there are infinite suns to use. And energy doesnt disappear. It just transforms. Genes: i think you are caught up in semantics. Any alien race will follow the same building blocks of the universe. They may not be carbon, they may not be bipeds, they may not have sexes, but they cant skip evolution. Every planet every sun every organism follows an interative pattern. Thats a basic block of the universe we reside. You start from something, creator or not. And your race then is to survive period. Those are the 2 rules. If your survival is guaranteed because you have access to infinite resources and infinite escape routes, then over time, your race reflects that condition. You can imagine killer robots. But everything comes from something. For creators to "escape", that implies they are trapped somwhere. And if they are trapped, that means they dont really have the means to move about freely. Perhaps the killer robots do exist, but they are just as constrained as we are by our tech.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    > They may not be carbon But considering out failure to chemically get anything other than carbon to form the long chains of double bonds that carbon does, along with the fact that carbon is common unlike most of the other proposed choices (that seem like they should work but don't) they probably will be. Same applies to needing water. Other chemicals could substitute, but water is common unlike the rest.
userulluipeste 6y ago
This is the feel-good version that someone wanting to prevent widespread panic may attempt to sell to the public. However, considering that our defining ability, the intelligence, evolved as a tool to anticipate and address our potential problems, I think it would be better to let the situation into public attention as is, and let people worry, because this is how we may tap into what could be a collective thought effort. Aggression may be removed from genes, but it is not the same as conflict. Conflict by its nature is the result of changing force collision, something that may happen for rational enough reasons. Now, considering our cosmic-scale context, I wouldn't bet for all extant creature in the universe to be like-minded, which in itself is a strong factor for potential conflict, even for mature space faring civilizations. Once paid the price for one conflict instance, the intelligence (as ability) dictates preventive actions against another costly conflict. Yes, aliens may indeed ignore us like we ignore ants, but that works only as long as the ants don't proliferate to become a real nuisance for us. I for one, am not thrilled to be in ants' condition in the humans-ants power relationship. That for us, in relation to a technologically-superior alien civilization, would mean and act as a set of hard limits: on space we'd allowed to extend into, on resources (and by extension - on our magnitude as human species), and (probably most importantly) on our technological evolution (i.e. to stay harmless).

platz 6y ago

We don't know that the universe is infinite. Also, even if space was infinite, that doesn't mean that low-entropy energy/matter (to extract energy/work from) is also infinite.

orwin 6y ago
> low-entropy energy/matter (to extract energy/work from) A word i like for that is exergy. Energy you can extract.

xwolfi 6y ago

You also don't know for sure (or have not explained) the rationale for saying that: - a society (really ? Do they also have city halls and a bi-party congress?) - unrestrained by resource limits (that you understand, because I can tell you that when you swallow suns you possibly have a limit eventually you wouldn't want to run out of) - lost its tendency for conflict - front the gene pool (that's very optimistic to think they would have genes, working like ours, in a context of natural selection similar to ours: with a bit of luck, we could have had 2 intelligent, non-sexually compatible, species of hominids, and I suspect things would have been very different in term of what sport-killing means). Me I can absolutely imagine a species of metallic robots created by a far away biologic equivalent who are so absolutely bored that reducing biological life to ashes became a way to escape, to feel something. They can switch off time perceptions, travel everywhere at whatever speed, reproduce programmatically and don't suffer from maternal instinct or mirror neuron empathy. Their vast intelligence does generates curiosity, which in turn generates boredom when there's nothing new to do or see. We became their latest weekend sport event, and they'll move on as fast as they've exterminated us, on to the next surprise of life.

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
Edited for clarity. Resource limits: If the universe is infitine there are infinite suns to use. And energy doesnt disappear. It just transforms. Genes: i think you are caught up in semantics. Any alien race will follow the same building blocks of the universe. They may not be carbon, they may not be bipeds, they may not have sexes, but they cant skip evolution. Every planet every sun every organism follows an interative pattern. Thats a basic block of the universe we reside. You start from something, creator or not. And your race then is to survive period. Those are the 2 rules. If your survival is guaranteed because you have access to infinite resources and infinite escape routes, then over time, your race reflects that condition. You can imagine killer robots. But everything comes from something. For creators to "escape", that implies they are trapped somwhere. And if they are trapped, that means they dont really have the means to move about freely. Perhaps the killer robots do exist, but they are just as constrained as we are by our tech.
- bluGill 6y ago
  > They may not be carbon But considering out failure to chemically get anything other than carbon to form the long chains of double bonds that carbon does, along with the fact that carbon is common unlike most of the other proposed choices (that seem like they should work but don't) they probably will be. Same applies to needing water. Other chemicals could substitute, but water is common unlike the rest.

userulluipeste 6y ago

This is the feel-good version that someone wanting to prevent widespread panic may attempt to sell to the public. However, considering that our defining ability, the intelligence, evolved as a tool to anticipate and address our potential problems, I think it would be better to let the situation into public attention as is, and let people worry, because this is how we may tap into what could be a collective thought effort. Aggression may be removed from genes, but it is not the same as conflict. Conflict by its nature is the result of changing force collision, something that may happen for rational enough reasons. Now, considering our cosmic-scale context, I wouldn't bet for all extant creature in the universe to be like-minded, which in itself is a strong factor for potential conflict, even for mature space faring civilizations. Once paid the price for one conflict instance, the intelligence (as ability) dictates preventive actions against another costly conflict. Yes, aliens may indeed ignore us like we ignore ants, but that works only as long as the ants don't proliferate to become a real nuisance for us. I for one, am not thrilled to be in ants' condition in the humans-ants power relationship. That for us, in relation to a technologically-superior alien civilization, would mean and act as a set of hard limits: on space we'd allowed to extend into, on resources (and by extension - on our magnitude as human species), and (probably most importantly) on our technological evolution (i.e. to stay harmless).