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The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of i

by ebbv 14y ago

The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. And it's obvious that if we could travel around the galaxy and we detected life forms on another planet, we would obviously go visit them and check them out. The issue is that, for it to have any hope of ever visiting or communicating with us the intelligent life would have to be in our own galaxy. Which is a lot less likely (going down from billions of billions to just billions of stars.) Even then the task is far from trivial. But I think it's a certainty that if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us. Also based purely on what we know about life on earth intelligent life which is capable of developing technology is exceedingly rare when compared to life in general. It's not necessarily required that any planet which gives rise to life ever eventually develops intelligent life. If not for the extinction of the dinosaurs we'd never exist. So personally I tend to think it's most likely there are other planets with life in the Milky Way, but possibly none with intelligent life. And even less likely for it to be more advanced than us.

asdfadfs 14y ago
>>The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. << Look, there are many ponds of varying sizes, a couple of meters to hundreds of meters in diameter, in the woods near my home. Some of them most likely have life of some form. How interested are you in going there and study that life or even just check out what life there is? None? Right. That is the whole point of the article. You already know there is life there, it is not unique. Why bother? Your are making the exact mistake the author cautions against. We think we are important, most likely we are a dime a dozen in the vastness of the galaxy.
- ebbv 14y ago
  There are people who are interested in the contents of those ponds, and they already have been studied. The people who are curious about the ponds (planets) are the ones that would be put on the ship. Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so. Your argument is extremely, extremely weak. As I said, it's obvious, if aliens were cruising around the universe the whole purpose of it would be to find other intelligent life and inhabitable planets and interesting stuff. If we were doing it, that would obviously be our purpose, there's no reason to think that wouldn't be the purpose of any other intelligent life.
  - lmm 14y ago
    >Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so. No - the whole point of the article is that they're not. Sure, it's a tiny proportion of planets. But in an unimaginably vast universe, there have got to be billions of them - and while there would surely be aliens who study some other civilizations, once you've seen a few million human-level civilizations you've seen them all. Analogy: even though four-leaf clover are rare and interesting as clover go, still the vast majority of four-leaf clover in the world have never been examined by a human.
    - ebbv 14y ago
      But it doesn't matter that in the entire universe there are tons because anything outside of our galaxy might as well not exist when you're talking about communication / contact. So just focusing on the galaxy, even if life arises on every planet where it is capable, it's not going to be common. The planets with life on them will be few and far between. And as I said, based on our evidence, not even all (or any necessarily) of those will have intelligent life.
  - asdfadfs 14y ago
- adventured 14y ago
  Humans have spent a massive amount of time and effort studying other forms of life on this planet. As a species, we clearly have an intense interest in that, demonstrated in everything from what we look at on Reddit, to what books are purchased to what types of vacations people like to take, to gardening and cultivation, to the number of people that work in fields directly related to the environment or animals. Your premise is invalid.
  - asdfadfs 14y ago
    Right, and thanks to all that time studying it is very likely that whatever is in the pond is nothing new. Which is kind of the point of the article. Whatever is in the pond is most likely nothing we haven't seen before. Now, studying the depths of the Arctic is a different matter. Are you saying that we are so rare (just like Arctic species hundreds of meters below ice) that aliens will rush to study us? The whole point is that we are probably average, just like the life in the pond is probably average, which is the reason nobody will put us on their priority list.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- danielweber 14y ago
  If life is so common that alien civs just have their total pick of who to study, then we should see some evidence of all these neighbors. Remember, civilizations are composed of billions of beings. You only need one being to decide to come study this pond, or otherwise enforce a rule against anyone doing it.
aegiso 14y ago
> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Actually, as far as our interactions with other life forms go, we either ignore them (intestinal bacteria), keep them away (diseases), exterminate them (pests), or harvest and devour them (farming), or kill them for sport (hunting). The utterly insignificant fraction that become objects of our affection are those that are extremely close to us on the evolutionary scale. This wouldn't be the case with a civilization advanced enough to visit. Not even close. If someone somewhere discovered a new breed of cockroach, would you care?
- trafficlight 14y ago
  If it were a Mars cockroach, we would desperately care.
  - aegiso 14y ago
    Except it would be extremely unlikely for us to be the first new species such a space-faring civilization would be coming into contact with. At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach.
    - ebbv 14y ago
      > At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach. There's not much difference between one species and another here but we still study all of them in great detail. Don't mistake your lack of intellectual curiosity about a certain subject as being a trait shared by everyone else. I don't care about football but that doesn't mean nobody else does. Similarly, as I said already, if you're going to go cruising about the galaxy, you're going to put people on that ship who are interested in what they're going to find. Otherwise there's no point.
- ebbv 14y ago
  Oh come on. That analogy is so weak I can barely believe you're serious. See my response to the other guy who brought up a similar analogy.
roc 14y ago
Looking at the level of interest/affection we have for intelligent animals on our own planet isn't exactly reassuring. We know/strongly suspect dolphins/whales/etc are intelligent. But we don't care enough about what they might have to say to really try to communicate them. And we know gorillas are intelligent. We even know we can teach them to communicate on a simplistic level -- but we don't really do it. We just don't care to. Occasionally we take one from captivity, establish communication aaaand... leave it as a curiosity for some sub-set of under-funded researchers. No-one's going into the jungle to liaise with the gorilla tribes, help them through their troubles, educate them, present them with technology, medicine, etc. The best we've managed on either count, on a species-to-species level, is to start to try to raise their perceived value to a level greater than that of slight inconvenience. (To halt the wanton slaughter we were previously, casually and without much remorse, engaged in.) So would aliens ever come to Earth to stock up their zoo or fill out an encyclopedic survey of the galaxy and its life? On-Earth experience suggests that part is near-guaranteed if they ever swing by. Might they ever establish communication with a handful of such subjects, mostly to see if it could be done? Again on-Earth experience suggests that's also plausible-to-likely. But would they ever establish "contact" as our culture defines it? On-Earth experience makes that look less likely than their visiting in the first place. The only real hope we have for contact, is if the Aliens perceive themselves to be only marginally more advanced than ourselves [1]. But for that to be plausible starts to eat into the requirement/assumption that they be significantly more advanced than ourselves. [1] more along the lines of Spaniard/Native American interactions, than human/gorilla.
- ebbv 14y ago
  I wasn't arguing the aliens would treat us well. They very well might not. But they'd probably make some form of contact with us. That was my only point. I think it's guaranteed. Just think about if we got that technology. If suddenly magically a ship capable of zipping around the galaxy appeared in NASA's hands, other than disassembling it and trying to replicate it, what would we use it for? Looking for other life and inhabitable planets. No reason to think aliens wouldn't do the same. It's obvious, IMHO.
  - 14y ago
katbyte 14y ago
Not to mention they may have religious or cultural reasons to contact/convert/kill any other form of intelligent life.
- tylee78 14y ago
  indeed. again, looking at world affairs, that might be a greater motivational force than anything else.
pekk 14y ago
> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet Which is a human characteristic shared by hardly any (if any) other species on Earth. So why do you suppose that fundamentally different life will have that human characteristic? > if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us. More advanced than ourselves, presumably, in the mode of what it means for humans to be more advanced. And you are again presupposing that said beings have human-like interests and will be excited about sending us prime numbers on the radio. This isn't a 'certainty'. This is no better than an article of faith on your part.
akiselev 14y ago
The interest and affection we have for pets is a very different situation than that of an intergalactic civilization's view on intelligent life. If they respect other life, intelligent or not, in the galaxy, chances are they would be very unwilling to interfere. I'd be very excited to visit a planet with other life on it but I would give an extreme amount of thought about whether I wanted to risk introducing pathogens or exposing an intelligent civilization to knowledge and technology far beyond its time (the immediate philosophical and psychological impact of discovering that you are not alone in the universe cannot be predicted, especially with alien races). If, on the other hand, they didn't respect other life not as advanced as them, why would their actions be any different than that of humanity for thousands of years when dealing with less intelligent life forms?

by ebbv 14y ago

asdfadfs 14y ago

>>The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. << Look, there are many ponds of varying sizes, a couple of meters to hundreds of meters in diameter, in the woods near my home. Some of them most likely have life of some form. How interested are you in going there and study that life or even just check out what life there is? None? Right. That is the whole point of the article. You already know there is life there, it is not unique. Why bother? Your are making the exact mistake the author cautions against. We think we are important, most likely we are a dime a dozen in the vastness of the galaxy.

ebbv 14y ago
There are people who are interested in the contents of those ponds, and they already have been studied. The people who are curious about the ponds (planets) are the ones that would be put on the ship. Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so. Your argument is extremely, extremely weak. As I said, it's obvious, if aliens were cruising around the universe the whole purpose of it would be to find other intelligent life and inhabitable planets and interesting stuff. If we were doing it, that would obviously be our purpose, there's no reason to think that wouldn't be the purpose of any other intelligent life.
- lmm 14y ago
  >Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so. No - the whole point of the article is that they're not. Sure, it's a tiny proportion of planets. But in an unimaginably vast universe, there have got to be billions of them - and while there would surely be aliens who study some other civilizations, once you've seen a few million human-level civilizations you've seen them all. Analogy: even though four-leaf clover are rare and interesting as clover go, still the vast majority of four-leaf clover in the world have never been examined by a human.
  - ebbv 14y ago
    But it doesn't matter that in the entire universe there are tons because anything outside of our galaxy might as well not exist when you're talking about communication / contact. So just focusing on the galaxy, even if life arises on every planet where it is capable, it's not going to be common. The planets with life on them will be few and far between. And as I said, based on our evidence, not even all (or any necessarily) of those will have intelligent life.
- asdfadfs 14y ago
adventured 14y ago
Humans have spent a massive amount of time and effort studying other forms of life on this planet. As a species, we clearly have an intense interest in that, demonstrated in everything from what we look at on Reddit, to what books are purchased to what types of vacations people like to take, to gardening and cultivation, to the number of people that work in fields directly related to the environment or animals. Your premise is invalid.
- asdfadfs 14y ago
  Right, and thanks to all that time studying it is very likely that whatever is in the pond is nothing new. Which is kind of the point of the article. Whatever is in the pond is most likely nothing we haven't seen before. Now, studying the depths of the Arctic is a different matter. Are you saying that we are so rare (just like Arctic species hundreds of meters below ice) that aliens will rush to study us? The whole point is that we are probably average, just like the life in the pond is probably average, which is the reason nobody will put us on their priority list.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
danielweber 14y ago
If life is so common that alien civs just have their total pick of who to study, then we should see some evidence of all these neighbors. Remember, civilizations are composed of billions of beings. You only need one being to decide to come study this pond, or otherwise enforce a rule against anyone doing it.

aegiso 14y ago

> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Actually, as far as our interactions with other life forms go, we either ignore them (intestinal bacteria), keep them away (diseases), exterminate them (pests), or harvest and devour them (farming), or kill them for sport (hunting). The utterly insignificant fraction that become objects of our affection are those that are extremely close to us on the evolutionary scale. This wouldn't be the case with a civilization advanced enough to visit. Not even close. If someone somewhere discovered a new breed of cockroach, would you care?

trafficlight 14y ago
If it were a Mars cockroach, we would desperately care.
- aegiso 14y ago
  Except it would be extremely unlikely for us to be the first new species such a space-faring civilization would be coming into contact with. At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach.
  - ebbv 14y ago
    > At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach. There's not much difference between one species and another here but we still study all of them in great detail. Don't mistake your lack of intellectual curiosity about a certain subject as being a trait shared by everyone else. I don't care about football but that doesn't mean nobody else does. Similarly, as I said already, if you're going to go cruising about the galaxy, you're going to put people on that ship who are interested in what they're going to find. Otherwise there's no point.
ebbv 14y ago
Oh come on. That analogy is so weak I can barely believe you're serious. See my response to the other guy who brought up a similar analogy.

roc 14y ago

Looking at the level of interest/affection we have for intelligent animals on our own planet isn't exactly reassuring. We know/strongly suspect dolphins/whales/etc are intelligent. But we don't care enough about what they might have to say to really try to communicate them. And we know gorillas are intelligent. We even know we can teach them to communicate on a simplistic level -- but we don't really do it. We just don't care to. Occasionally we take one from captivity, establish communication aaaand... leave it as a curiosity for some sub-set of under-funded researchers. No-one's going into the jungle to liaise with the gorilla tribes, help them through their troubles, educate them, present them with technology, medicine, etc. The best we've managed on either count, on a species-to-species level, is to start to try to raise their perceived value to a level greater than that of slight inconvenience. (To halt the wanton slaughter we were previously, casually and without much remorse, engaged in.) So would aliens ever come to Earth to stock up their zoo or fill out an encyclopedic survey of the galaxy and its life? On-Earth experience suggests that part is near-guaranteed if they ever swing by. Might they ever establish communication with a handful of such subjects, mostly to see if it could be done? Again on-Earth experience suggests that's also plausible-to-likely. But would they ever establish "contact" as our culture defines it? On-Earth experience makes that look less likely than their visiting in the first place. The only real hope we have for contact, is if the Aliens perceive themselves to be only marginally more advanced than ourselves [1]. But for that to be plausible starts to eat into the requirement/assumption that they be significantly more advanced than ourselves. [1] more along the lines of Spaniard/Native American interactions, than human/gorilla.

ebbv 14y ago
I wasn't arguing the aliens would treat us well. They very well might not. But they'd probably make some form of contact with us. That was my only point. I think it's guaranteed. Just think about if we got that technology. If suddenly magically a ship capable of zipping around the galaxy appeared in NASA's hands, other than disassembling it and trying to replicate it, what would we use it for? Looking for other life and inhabitable planets. No reason to think aliens wouldn't do the same. It's obvious, IMHO.
- 14y ago

katbyte 14y ago

Not to mention they may have religious or cultural reasons to contact/convert/kill any other form of intelligent life.

tylee78 14y ago
indeed. again, looking at world affairs, that might be a greater motivational force than anything else.

pekk 14y ago

> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet Which is a human characteristic shared by hardly any (if any) other species on Earth. So why do you suppose that fundamentally different life will have that human characteristic? > if intelligent life does exist in our galaxy which is more advanced than ourselves, it will obviously try to contact us. More advanced than ourselves, presumably, in the mode of what it means for humans to be more advanced. And you are again presupposing that said beings have human-like interests and will be excited about sending us prime numbers on the radio. This isn't a 'certainty'. This is no better than an article of faith on your part.

akiselev 14y ago

The interest and affection we have for pets is a very different situation than that of an intergalactic civilization's view on intelligent life. If they respect other life, intelligent or not, in the galaxy, chances are they would be very unwilling to interfere. I'd be very excited to visit a planet with other life on it but I would give an extreme amount of thought about whether I wanted to risk introducing pathogens or exposing an intelligent civilization to knowledge and technology far beyond its time (the immediate philosophical and psychological impact of discovering that you are not alone in the universe cannot be predicted, especially with alien races). If, on the other hand, they didn't respect other life not as advanced as them, why would their actions be any different than that of humanity for thousands of years when dealing with less intelligent life forms?