14 ms·

I firmly believe that we're not alone in the universe, but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at

I firmly believe that we're not alone in the universe, but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold - at best, with indifference and at worst, something to remove. But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up if scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an interstellar probe ("Rendezvous with Rama" anybody?)

xmonkee 4y ago
>but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold Why? An advanced civilization wouldn't have cultural curiosity? They wouldn't want to study us from all the different perspectives we study people and literature and philosophy and even biology and neurology etc etc?
- simonh 4y ago
  Bear in mind we study mould. It’s some people’s life’s work.
  - Karawebnetwork 4y ago
    We even use slime mold on representations of maps to see if it would have done things the same way we do. For all we know, perhaps we are in a galactic petri dish and the entire point of our existence is to test out the growth of life for some great universal scientist! (tongue in cheek comment) https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-perfecting-traffic-networks.html https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-per...
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      It would be sort of funny. So we put some humans on this planet. Now, keep in mind, they don’t possess any group consciousness — they have some limited ability to communicate information by vibrating the air around them, but they don’t have anything like the globalmindnetwork that we experience. But look: over many generations they create these little pathways, to ship goods from population center to population center. It isn’t obvious how, somehow despite lacking any overall coordination, they manage to perform these complex emergent behaviors…
      - Karawebnetwork 4y ago
        Worst... "They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "Meat. They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat." https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
        bee_rider 4y ago
        A classic. I was trying to not copy it too closely, but the bit about vibrating air is a little close, haha.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
    Yeah, but we have also mass-produced mold-removal stuff in supermarkets, hardware stores. And insectizides.
- wcarss 4y ago
  The argument would maybe be more readily taken if instead of mold, the GP had said "birds". We think birds are kinda neat, but most people hold a perspective with inbuilt human-exceptionalism, and birds are fundamentally not humans. Birds may communicate complex things to each other, they may construct homes, feel emotions, dream, and even do some things we can't, like fly -- but they don't have Shakespeare or the Primes so if it comes down to us or them, it's us. A lot of humans believe only humans possess "souls". To fully go into the argument: an alien species may well hold their own form of self-exceptionalism, and they'll have their own practices and history which we can't compete with. It is perfectly possible that there is nothing we could accomplish which would make us read as peers, as opposed to birds, gorillas, or... mold. (edit: I do think the "at best" above may be unreasonably gloomy -- at best in this outlook, aliens might regard us with compassionate curiosity, as some humans do toward the species we share the earth with. That would be pretty lucky, but not impossible!)
  - elevaet 4y ago
    If we found something chimp, bird, or even mold-like living on another planet, we would be utterly fascinated. I don't see why a "higher" life form would not.
    - mongol 4y ago
      Yes. And besides, it is not just us humans. There is incredibly diversity of life on this planet. If alien species have any curioisty at all they must be delighted.
      - jxy 4y ago
        Look at this planet, emitting some unusual EM wave, full of self replicating stuff mostly made of carbon and water!
        xp84 4y ago
        "And when you put the self-replicating entities in a strong acid bath, they produce the most peculiar shrieks while they dissolve! Ha ha ha ha! Zorblux, come here, you drop in a handful of them! Do you hear that?"
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  I don't like to be vivisected, anally probed, or something like that ;->
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    "After millions of sentient races and centuries of study, we've found most of them don't like the probing".
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      Most.
- asdff 4y ago
  Considering we are the only species on our planet that exhibits such curiosities, this seems pretty unlikely. Hopefully they don't just bat us around violently like my cat does with weaker species. That's my cat's definition of curiosity towards other life anyhow.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Thought and art are the true rare commodities in the universe.
- pleb_nz 4y ago
  I don't think they said the aliens wouldnt study mold. Just that we would be like mold to them. We do study mold, they might to.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
If we were an advanced alien civilization capable of interstellar travel, how would we look at a planet/species like 2023 Earth?
- teekert 4y ago
  Something like: hmm these guys went from horseback riding to cell phones, internet and a mars helicopter in the time we took to travel to their star. Perhaps we should keep an eye on them.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    It's that last thing that's most concerning: "hmm, these guys aren't going to be contained to their own rock for long"
    - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
      But space is beyond vast and there are no shortage of rocks out there. I don't think that's really a concern. Plot devices like aliens attacking Earth for her water really burns me up. The universe is brimming with water and materials. Why expend the effort to lift water out of a gravity well, when you can just gather it from comets and asteroids and not have pesky humans shooting at you?
      - unsupp0rted 4y ago
        It only takes a couple million years for humans to colonize the entire galaxy. As long as a species like humans is confined to their own rock, there's no threat of them doing much harm. Once they get to a second rock, there's a good chance they'll get to a 3rd, 4th and nth in another star system, within a couple decamillennia. It's exponential grown, limited only by the speed of light. They'll probably start building Dyson swarms too and taking over stars that way, which is a lot more annoying than them taking over planets. This is scary fast to observe if you're a long-lived species, or if you live around a gravity well and time dilation makes it seem like humans are buzzing along and taking over stuff at incredible speeds.
exitb 4y ago
Not necessarily a probe, maybe just a piece of cosmic junk? An equivalent of our rocket booster or a Tesla Roadster on its way to Mars.
narrator 4y ago
I've got a better theory. Interstellar civilizations have probably fought wars over habitable planets and in the aftermath of those wars they probably have set up some rules for a long time about what you're allowed to do on habitable planets in a galactic framework. In fact, the reason this planet is not strip-mined and every living thing on it dead thousands of years ago is they probably have some rights in there given to life that evolved on a planet. Besides, E.Ts can probably do ok in deep space or underground on lifeless planets if they can do interstellar travel.
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  i've got a better better theory! interstellar civilizations have never and will never exist.
  - NovaVeles 4y ago
    It is a reasonable conclusion. Resource limitations means civilizations, burn up too much of their energy/materials before they ever get truly space bound. They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the size of a fridge - is nearly zero. Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner. Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off. During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.
    - kelipso 4y ago
      All that probably but main thing is faster than light travel turns out to be actually impossible.
      - nerdix 4y ago
        So to go full circle on crazy theories: We're live in a simulation. The universe we see is just a facade because our host civilization doesn't have the compute to simulate an entire universe. The speed of light is an artificial limitation added to the simulation to maintain the facade (you can't go there because it doesn't exist..like a skybox in a video game that renders far off horizons which are unreachable). Because of this no life outside of the solar system exists.
morepork 4y ago
If we found mould on mars or anywhere without terrestrial origins it would be the subject on intense scientific curiosity
yyyk 4y ago
>But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up if scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an interstellar probe Just about every ancient tradition has some form of non-human intelligent beings who are not god(s). Polls suggests almost 50% of Americans believe in ghosts[0]. I don't see why any belief system would change too much given what people already believe. The only people who perhaps should worry are the aliens - surely a significant portion of humanity will find some way of blaming all our problems on them. [0] https://www.newsweek.com/more-45-percent-americans-believe-demons-ghosts-are-real-survey-1466743 https://www.newsweek.com/more-45-percent-americans-believe-d... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/style/do-you-believe-in-ghosts.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/style/do-you-believe-in-g...
janef0421 4y ago
If 'Oumuamua is a probe, it appears that it would be a fairly simple one. To a sufficiently advanced civilisation, it would probably be relatively low-cost. If an alien civilisation has a reasonable degree of curiosity, sending a cheap probe to examine another star system is likely worthwhile.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  I would imagine there's also a universal drive of life to try and spread. a probe that can parachute microbes to earthlike planets as it 'buzzes' them would seem worthwhile on its face to me. I rationalize it as a way to 'pay forward' the debt we owe for the current mass extinction, but on some level it's probably also an abstraction of my sex drive.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
This presupposes an advanced alien civilization only sends out probes to places they find interesting. I think it is just as plausible that an advanced civilization would just shoot out a billion probes at random to zoom through the universe collecting data.
- namrog84 4y ago
  To compound this. Its not unreasonable to think said probes could find appropriate asteroid belts with appropriate materials(e.g. metals) mine them and replicate more and send them out. Potential exponential growth of drones across the galaxies.
  - htrp 4y ago
    To compound this. Its not unreasonable to think that malfunctioning probes could consume entire solar systems to create more probes before eventually engulfing the galaxy. aka the VN Berserker hypothesis
trts 4y ago
Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, about 1/3rd of the age of the universe. If another technological civilization that is more advanced than us by even 1M years is watching earth, and suddenly this planet starts spitting up rockets, satellites, nuclear explosions etc., that seems pretty interesting. That's one species out of 2+ million on earth, which is one of trillions & trillions of dead planets, that manages to transcend the atmosphere. But to your point, I guess at the scale of even just the known universe it's hard to assert that anything is common or rare.
booleandilemma 4y ago
It depends on how rare life is in the universe. What if we're the first mold they've ever discovered? It would be a historic meeting for both civilizations.
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
The problem with that should be obvious. Mold does not detonate nuclear weapons, emitting gamma rays into deep space, nor does it have an RF noise bubble out to 50 light years. An optical survey of our atmosphere would demonstrate techno-signatures. Any observers in NEO would see city lights and pick up radio stations. Radar observation would reveal aircraft.
lanna 4y ago
> advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold Like a mycologist, you mean?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ryandvm 4y ago
> But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up I think such a revelation would have almost no impact. Let's be real, people that are all in on religion didn't get there using logic. Adding one more unanswered question isn't going to change anyone's mind.
throw__away7391 4y ago
Finding alien mold would be immensely exciting in my opinion.
HyperSane 4y ago
Intelligent life is rare enough that I think they would find us at least mildly interesting.
- stackbutterflow 4y ago
  Or maybe it's a huge party on the other side of the galaxy and we're not invited.
mFixman 4y ago
Maybe aliens are trying to contact us in a way they understand. SETI has been sending unconventional radio signals to random spots of the cosmos and waiting for a quick response. An extraterrestrial SETI might have launched ʻOumuamua a billion years ago hoping that it would be detected by alien life. I propose we find a cool Earth rock, launch it to the solar system Vega, and wait a couple billion years for an alien response.

xmonkee 4y ago

>but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold Why? An advanced civilization wouldn't have cultural curiosity? They wouldn't want to study us from all the different perspectives we study people and literature and philosophy and even biology and neurology etc etc?

simonh 4y ago
Bear in mind we study mould. It’s some people’s life’s work.
- Karawebnetwork 4y ago
  We even use slime mold on representations of maps to see if it would have done things the same way we do. For all we know, perhaps we are in a galactic petri dish and the entire point of our existence is to test out the growth of life for some great universal scientist! (tongue in cheek comment) https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-perfecting-traffic-networks.html https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-per...
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    It would be sort of funny. So we put some humans on this planet. Now, keep in mind, they don’t possess any group consciousness — they have some limited ability to communicate information by vibrating the air around them, but they don’t have anything like the globalmindnetwork that we experience. But look: over many generations they create these little pathways, to ship goods from population center to population center. It isn’t obvious how, somehow despite lacking any overall coordination, they manage to perform these complex emergent behaviors…
    - Karawebnetwork 4y ago
      Worst... "They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "Meat. They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat." https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        A classic. I was trying to not copy it too closely, but the bit about vibrating air is a little close, haha.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  Yeah, but we have also mass-produced mold-removal stuff in supermarkets, hardware stores. And insectizides.
wcarss 4y ago
The argument would maybe be more readily taken if instead of mold, the GP had said "birds". We think birds are kinda neat, but most people hold a perspective with inbuilt human-exceptionalism, and birds are fundamentally not humans. Birds may communicate complex things to each other, they may construct homes, feel emotions, dream, and even do some things we can't, like fly -- but they don't have Shakespeare or the Primes so if it comes down to us or them, it's us. A lot of humans believe only humans possess "souls". To fully go into the argument: an alien species may well hold their own form of self-exceptionalism, and they'll have their own practices and history which we can't compete with. It is perfectly possible that there is nothing we could accomplish which would make us read as peers, as opposed to birds, gorillas, or... mold. (edit: I do think the "at best" above may be unreasonably gloomy -- at best in this outlook, aliens might regard us with compassionate curiosity, as some humans do toward the species we share the earth with. That would be pretty lucky, but not impossible!)
- elevaet 4y ago
  If we found something chimp, bird, or even mold-like living on another planet, we would be utterly fascinated. I don't see why a "higher" life form would not.
  - mongol 4y ago
    Yes. And besides, it is not just us humans. There is incredibly diversity of life on this planet. If alien species have any curioisty at all they must be delighted.
    - jxy 4y ago
      Look at this planet, emitting some unusual EM wave, full of self replicating stuff mostly made of carbon and water!
      - xp84 4y ago
        "And when you put the self-replicating entities in a strong acid bath, they produce the most peculiar shrieks while they dissolve! Ha ha ha ha! Zorblux, come here, you drop in a handful of them! Do you hear that?"
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
I don't like to be vivisected, anally probed, or something like that ;->
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  "After millions of sentient races and centuries of study, we've found most of them don't like the probing".
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Most.
asdff 4y ago
Considering we are the only species on our planet that exhibits such curiosities, this seems pretty unlikely. Hopefully they don't just bat us around violently like my cat does with weaker species. That's my cat's definition of curiosity towards other life anyhow.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Thought and art are the true rare commodities in the universe.
pleb_nz 4y ago
I don't think they said the aliens wouldnt study mold. Just that we would be like mold to them. We do study mold, they might to.

unsupp0rted 4y ago

If we were an advanced alien civilization capable of interstellar travel, how would we look at a planet/species like 2023 Earth?

teekert 4y ago
Something like: hmm these guys went from horseback riding to cell phones, internet and a mars helicopter in the time we took to travel to their star. Perhaps we should keep an eye on them.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  It's that last thing that's most concerning: "hmm, these guys aren't going to be contained to their own rock for long"
  - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
    But space is beyond vast and there are no shortage of rocks out there. I don't think that's really a concern. Plot devices like aliens attacking Earth for her water really burns me up. The universe is brimming with water and materials. Why expend the effort to lift water out of a gravity well, when you can just gather it from comets and asteroids and not have pesky humans shooting at you?
    - unsupp0rted 4y ago
      It only takes a couple million years for humans to colonize the entire galaxy. As long as a species like humans is confined to their own rock, there's no threat of them doing much harm. Once they get to a second rock, there's a good chance they'll get to a 3rd, 4th and nth in another star system, within a couple decamillennia. It's exponential grown, limited only by the speed of light. They'll probably start building Dyson swarms too and taking over stars that way, which is a lot more annoying than them taking over planets. This is scary fast to observe if you're a long-lived species, or if you live around a gravity well and time dilation makes it seem like humans are buzzing along and taking over stuff at incredible speeds.

exitb 4y ago

Not necessarily a probe, maybe just a piece of cosmic junk? An equivalent of our rocket booster or a Tesla Roadster on its way to Mars.

narrator 4y ago

I've got a better theory. Interstellar civilizations have probably fought wars over habitable planets and in the aftermath of those wars they probably have set up some rules for a long time about what you're allowed to do on habitable planets in a galactic framework. In fact, the reason this planet is not strip-mined and every living thing on it dead thousands of years ago is they probably have some rights in there given to life that evolved on a planet. Besides, E.Ts can probably do ok in deep space or underground on lifeless planets if they can do interstellar travel.

pasquinelli 4y ago
i've got a better better theory! interstellar civilizations have never and will never exist.
- NovaVeles 4y ago
  It is a reasonable conclusion. Resource limitations means civilizations, burn up too much of their energy/materials before they ever get truly space bound. They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the size of a fridge - is nearly zero. Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner. Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off. During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.
  - kelipso 4y ago
    All that probably but main thing is faster than light travel turns out to be actually impossible.
    - nerdix 4y ago
      So to go full circle on crazy theories: We're live in a simulation. The universe we see is just a facade because our host civilization doesn't have the compute to simulate an entire universe. The speed of light is an artificial limitation added to the simulation to maintain the facade (you can't go there because it doesn't exist..like a skybox in a video game that renders far off horizons which are unreachable). Because of this no life outside of the solar system exists.

morepork 4y ago

If we found mould on mars or anywhere without terrestrial origins it would be the subject on intense scientific curiosity

yyyk 4y ago

>But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up if scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an interstellar probe Just about every ancient tradition has some form of non-human intelligent beings who are not god(s). Polls suggests almost 50% of Americans believe in ghosts[0]. I don't see why any belief system would change too much given what people already believe. The only people who perhaps should worry are the aliens - surely a significant portion of humanity will find some way of blaming all our problems on them. [0] https://www.newsweek.com/more-45-percent-americans-believe-demons-ghosts-are-real-survey-1466743 https://www.newsweek.com/more-45-percent-americans-believe-d... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/style/do-you-believe-in-ghosts.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/style/do-you-believe-in-g...

janef0421 4y ago

If 'Oumuamua is a probe, it appears that it would be a fairly simple one. To a sufficiently advanced civilisation, it would probably be relatively low-cost. If an alien civilisation has a reasonable degree of curiosity, sending a cheap probe to examine another star system is likely worthwhile.

SuoDuanDao 4y ago
I would imagine there's also a universal drive of life to try and spread. a probe that can parachute microbes to earthlike planets as it 'buzzes' them would seem worthwhile on its face to me. I rationalize it as a way to 'pay forward' the debt we owe for the current mass extinction, but on some level it's probably also an abstraction of my sex drive.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

This presupposes an advanced alien civilization only sends out probes to places they find interesting. I think it is just as plausible that an advanced civilization would just shoot out a billion probes at random to zoom through the universe collecting data.

namrog84 4y ago
To compound this. Its not unreasonable to think said probes could find appropriate asteroid belts with appropriate materials(e.g. metals) mine them and replicate more and send them out. Potential exponential growth of drones across the galaxies.
- htrp 4y ago
  To compound this. Its not unreasonable to think that malfunctioning probes could consume entire solar systems to create more probes before eventually engulfing the galaxy. aka the VN Berserker hypothesis

trts 4y ago

Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, about 1/3rd of the age of the universe. If another technological civilization that is more advanced than us by even 1M years is watching earth, and suddenly this planet starts spitting up rockets, satellites, nuclear explosions etc., that seems pretty interesting. That's one species out of 2+ million on earth, which is one of trillions & trillions of dead planets, that manages to transcend the atmosphere. But to your point, I guess at the scale of even just the known universe it's hard to assert that anything is common or rare.

booleandilemma 4y ago

It depends on how rare life is in the universe. What if we're the first mold they've ever discovered? It would be a historic meeting for both civilizations.

PM_me_your_math 4y ago

The problem with that should be obvious. Mold does not detonate nuclear weapons, emitting gamma rays into deep space, nor does it have an RF noise bubble out to 50 light years. An optical survey of our atmosphere would demonstrate techno-signatures. Any observers in NEO would see city lights and pick up radio stations. Radar observation would reveal aircraft.

lanna 4y ago

> advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold Like a mycologist, you mean?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ryandvm 4y ago

> But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up I think such a revelation would have almost no impact. Let's be real, people that are all in on religion didn't get there using logic. Adding one more unanswered question isn't going to change anyone's mind.

throw__away7391 4y ago

Finding alien mold would be immensely exciting in my opinion.

HyperSane 4y ago

Intelligent life is rare enough that I think they would find us at least mildly interesting.

stackbutterflow 4y ago
Or maybe it's a huge party on the other side of the galaxy and we're not invited.

mFixman 4y ago

Maybe aliens are trying to contact us in a way they understand. SETI has been sending unconventional radio signals to random spots of the cosmos and waiting for a quick response. An extraterrestrial SETI might have launched ʻOumuamua a billion years ago hoping that it would be detected by alien life. I propose we find a cool Earth rock, launch it to the solar system Vega, and wait a couple billion years for an alien response.