"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life.
It's just been too intelligent to come here."
/Arthur C. Clarke /
israel sadovnik wrote:
"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life.
It's just been too intelligent to come here."
/Arthur C. Clarke /
Apparently he was a great SciFi writer... not much of a
comedian but a great writer.
People are too well trained. They've watched too much
Star Trek, believe that it's reasonable to expect to cross
light years in seconds and that time compression is no
longer a thing...
But what else can stop aliens?
#1. Disease
When westerners started colonizing Africa they
encountered tropical diseases and were dropping like
flies. And that was moving from one part of the planet
to another.
Tonic Water, quinine was invented just for this reason.
NOTE: In discussions on human evolution, it has been
speculated that things like the Bantu Expansion, which
only happened like 3k years ago, had to wait until some
immunity to sub Saharan diseases were acquired.
Probably malaria being a biggie.
NOTE II: When Europeans arrived in the Americas,
they touched off devastating plagues. In fact, when
the so called Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower they
stumbled across one or more abandoned villages,
because disease had already ravaged the population.
The Spanish had long been to the south, the French
had fishing/whaling bases in Canada and even the
odd English ship was there exploiting the insanely
rich fishing off the New England coast. So the
massive die-off had already begun.
Smallpox was devastating, yes, but some have
claimed that Chickenpox was a more likely culprit.
The natives has zero exposure to it, zero immunity
and as harmless as it is to our children, it's much
more serious in adulthood amongst Europeans.
Imagine how much worse it was for natives here!
Any aliens that arrived here, if there biology was
anywhere close to similar to our own, would be
fodder. There's viruses, there's bacterial infections
and there's even molds/fungus. Without immunity,
they would be rotting corpses.
#2. Food
What do aliens eat?
This is a common issue where people just assume
that Star Trek is a documentary and aliens can just
use their Replicators to magic food into existence.
Water is a particular problem. It can't be compressed.
So 100 cubic feet of water takes up 100 cubic feet,
and there's no getting around it.
Getting food & water from here is a problem, because
of the risk of contamination. Also, because they're
ingesting it, they have to worry about more than the
biological threats, such as viruses, but chemical
contamination. Every planet cooks up minerals a
little different. There's already been several unique
compounds discovered on the moon. So it's likely
that there are many compounds in nature, or from
our pollution, that would be poison to them.
#3. Violence
A Chimpanzee can rip your face off, quite literally.
It has happened.
They have been known to kill, dismember and eat
other animals, and even each other, with their bare
hands.
Or what about this:
"Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!"
Yeah, *Tons* of dangerous animals...
The British lost an entire army to a bunch of Zulus
with spears!
I don't care how powerful they are, if there's like
five aliens touching down here, and there's maybe
seven or eight BILLION of us, their odds aren't too
good.
And if they killed a million humans or 10 million
or whatever, to show us how powerful they are,
that might just convince the other 7 billion that it
would be a really good idea to kill them.
Related:
#4. Mountain out of a Mole Hill
So the aliens come here, we gleam some technology
from them and the next thing they know we're facing
off with them in their own home system.
Japan opened up in 1853. Just 80 years later and they
were a world power, rampaging through Asia and the
Pacific, defeating the European militaries. Aliens would
probably not want to repeat the same mistake with us.
#5. Economics
The cost would be obscene, all the more so when you
consider than nobody on their planet could live to see
any return on the investment.
Without pretending that Star Trek is a documentary,
there would be no reason to believe that there ever
could be a return on the investment. So much time
would go by, before any return data, what whole
civilizations could crumble. There might not be any
memory of the mission what so ever, no knowledge
as to where or how to retrieve data...
Human ethnicities, cultures, languages have all
come and gone in less time than a return trip would
take at light speed, for more than 99% of the galaxy.
Effectively, there's never an economic return.
#6. Is there even science?
Aliens come here but, what do they bring back home
with them?
How much room is on their ship? How much storage?
Are we talking a Noah's Ark where they want examples
of our life form? Do they want samples of all our
minerals? What about our technology? Our building
materials?
What?
The most obvious work around is to say "Data," then
it's just bits on a thumb drive, right? Problem there is
that if you're just collecting data, then any data you
don't collect, for whatever reason, is effectively gone.
But if you have a sample, you can keep going back,
collecting more & more data...
#7. Exposure
The absolute best way to protect what you've got is
to keep anyone from knowing that you have it.
Right?
If someone doesn't know that you've got the Hope
Diamond under your pillow, they're not going to
break into your home and murder you in order to
steal it. Well, coming here risks exposing their
existence.
It's telling us that they exist.
Can you think of anything else that would stop
aliens from coming here?
For me he was more like actual visionary than SciFi author.
For example he started to push the idea of geostationary
communication satellites about dozen years before Sputnik 1
was launched.
This should have been titled "a few entirely surmountable challenges
aliens would face coming here", as every item fits that description with
one exception
why are
we assuming only five aliens would make the trip? In a sub-light-speed
world where, as the article points out, centuries or millennia would
pass on the home planet (if not the ship itself) during the trip,
whyever would you send only FIVE individuals?
I think it's interesting how a lot of these lists blithely mention
things "that would stop aliens" and illustrate this point with examples
of humans being barely slowed down by that issue.
interesting how so many seem to focus on arguments of prudence -
diseases would suck, the economic returns would be bad, no rational
being would do such a crazy thing as spacefaring given those objective drawbacks. And they gloss over the fact that humans are exactly that
crazy by (I suppose) assuming that we're weird like that and we can't
assume aliens would have our same thirst for knowledge, passion for
discovery or tendency to just get obsessed over bizarre stuff.
Humans got there by exapting traits that evolved for different reasons,
and those traits include curiosity, a drive to discover and a propensity
to get passionate about random things.
That's why I think the cost issue is a bigger one than the returns issue
by the way - the fact you can't get any money from a trip to Proxima
Centauri won't stop us doing it.
We haven't gotten any money from going
to the Moon either yet look at us
What
*could* stop us is if the sheer cost or impracticality of going to
Proxima Centauri makes it prohibitive to do for the pure sake of it.
Anyway, I don't see how you get any kind of spacefaring alien from carbon-based life on an Earthlike planet without them evolving those
traits too.
Arkalen wrote:
This should have been titled "a few entirely surmountable challenges
aliens would face coming here", as every item fits that description with
one exception
Whoa, kitten. Little the shorts!
The Americas were utterly devastated by diseases brought over by
Europeans. Half or more of Europe was wiped out by the plague. Some historians claim that 50% of ancient Rome likely died every year, and
not from old age.
And yet we all live on the same planet, with the exact
same shared origins, with millions of years of evolutionary adaptation
to these diseases and their forbearers.
Aliens would have absolutely zero resistance.
why are
we assuming only five aliens would make the trip? In a sub-light-speed
world where, as the article points out, centuries or millennia would
pass on the home planet (if not the ship itself) during the trip,
whyever would you send only FIVE individuals?
Any assumption is still just an assumption. The same question can be
asked regardless of number.
I think it's interesting how a lot of these lists blithely mention
things "that would stop aliens" and illustrate this point with examples
of humans being barely slowed down by that issue.
The population of the earth, the various regions, has been completely transformed several times over.
I also find it
interesting how so many seem to focus on arguments of prudence -
diseases would suck, the economic returns would be bad, no rational
being would do such a crazy thing as spacefaring given those objective
drawbacks. And they gloss over the fact that humans are exactly that
crazy by (I suppose) assuming that we're weird like that and we can't
assume aliens would have our same thirst for knowledge, passion for
discovery or tendency to just get obsessed over bizarre stuff.
Space has been a ridiculously low priority. Biden has spent more on
the Ukraine than all the missions that NASA has in the works,
combined. We can't and won't send our best technology to investigate
the moon, Mars and other bodies because that would tell China and
Russia exactly what we are capable of.
We have 11 aircraft carriers, with four more under construction. The
Voyager craft were sent out in the 1970s.
It is claimed, with estimated development time, we had fully funded
the nuclear drive famously spoken about by Carl Sagan, we'd already
have a craft on the verge of arriving at proxima centauri.
The human race has gone practically nowhere. Space has not been a
priority at all.
Precious little science without a direct military or economic benefit
gets prioritized. At this unfortunate stage, here on the clown world,
most of it is politicized.
Humans got there by exapting traits that evolved for different reasons,
and those traits include curiosity, a drive to discover and a propensity
to get passionate about random things.
We are generations behind our potential. Our priorities suck.
That's why I think the cost issue is a bigger one than the returns issue
by the way - the fact you can't get any money from a trip to Proxima
Centauri won't stop us doing it.
Like I said, it is claimed that we could already be there, or very close to arriving, if we had made it a priority. We did not.
We haven't gotten any money from going
to the Moon either yet look at us
The claim is that for every dollar spent on the moon program, $7
were returned to the economy. This was due to the advances, the
innovations.
Without the space program there'd be no GPS, satellite communications
and research. There'd be no nuclear-tipped ICBMs either.
What
*could* stop us is if the sheer cost or impracticality of going to
Proxima Centauri makes it prohibitive to do for the pure sake of it.
Proxima Centuari is next door. They would be coming from much
further away.
Anyway, I don't see how you get any kind of spacefaring alien from
carbon-based life on an Earthlike planet without them evolving those
traits too.
We're not spacefaring. Space is an insignificant priority. There is a
known potential for life on Venus and Mars as well as a number of
moons within our solar system, and they are not a priority.
Life on other worlds is the single greatest discovery we could ever
make, even microbes. And it's simply not a priority.
The Americas were utterly devastated by diseases brought over by
Europeans. Half or more of Europe was wiped out by the plague. Some historians claim that 50% of ancient Rome likely died every year, and
not from old age.
And here we stand, barely slowed down.
Aliens would have absolutely zero resistance.
Aliens would especially have zero transmissibility.
Earth bacteria,
fungi, viruses etc would have zero resistance to alien immune systems.
Another point is that assuming a relationship between population size
and disease/disease resistance, any spacefaring aliens capable of coming
to Earth would be coming from a much larger population than we are.
In
fact odds are they'd be coming from a much larger population *that has encountered alien life before*, unlike us.
More to the point, I'm assuming those spacefaring,
Earth-visiting-capable aliens have invented the spacesuit. Just keep
them on, done.
why are
we assuming only five aliens would make the trip? In a sub-light-speed
world where, as the article points out, centuries or millennia would
pass on the home planet (if not the ship itself) during the trip,
whyever would you send only FIVE individuals?
Any assumption is still just an assumption. The same question can beI'm not sure what question you're referring to. The "five aliens" were mentioned in the context of violence and the prospect of the number of
asked regardless of number.
aliens touching down holding off against eight billions of us.
More to the point that's another example of something that barely slows humans down. The colonization and exploration of the 15th to 20th
centuries showed plenty of examples of explorers 1) actually forging
positive relationships with the new peoples they met (however that ended
up like on the long term) and 2) dying horrible deaths that nevertheless failed to discourage later explorers. If anything the dangers of
exploration got romanticized.
The population of the earth, the various regions, has been completely transformed several times over.
Yet we still keep doing the things that transform it.
Okay, so what you are saying is that 1) actually there is economic
benefit to exploring space
Any aliens who *did* become
spacefaring to the point of being able to come to Earth would be even
*more* passionate about discovery for its own sake than we are.
On 22/07/2023 03:58, JTEM is my hero wrote:
People are too well trained. They've watched too much
Star Trek, believe that it's reasonable to expect to cross
light years in seconds and that time compression is no
longer a thing...
But what else can stop aliens?
#1. Disease
When westerners started colonizing Africa they
encountered tropical diseases and were dropping like
flies. And that was moving from one part of the planet
to another.
Tonic Water, quinine was invented just for this reason.
NOTE: In discussions on human evolution, it has been
speculated that things like the Bantu Expansion, which
only happened like 3k years ago, had to wait until some
immunity to sub Saharan diseases were acquired.
Probably malaria being a biggie.
NOTE II: When Europeans arrived in the Americas,
they touched off devastating plagues. In fact, when
the so called Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower they
stumbled across one or more abandoned villages,
because disease had already ravaged the population.
The Spanish had long been to the south, the French
had fishing/whaling bases in Canada and even the
odd English ship was there exploiting the insanely
rich fishing off the New England coast. So the
massive die-off had already begun.
Smallpox was devastating, yes, but some have
claimed that Chickenpox was a more likely culprit.
The natives has zero exposure to it, zero immunity
and as harmless as it is to our children, it's much
more serious in adulthood amongst Europeans.
Imagine how much worse it was for natives here!
Any aliens that arrived here, if there biology was
anywhere close to similar to our own, would be
fodder. There's viruses, there's bacterial infections
and there's even molds/fungus. Without immunity,
they would be rotting corpses.
#2. Food
What do aliens eat?
This is a common issue where people just assume
that Star Trek is a documentary and aliens can just
use their Replicators to magic food into existence.
Water is a particular problem. It can't be compressed.
So 100 cubic feet of water takes up 100 cubic feet,
and there's no getting around it.
Getting food & water from here is a problem, because
of the risk of contamination. Also, because they're
ingesting it, they have to worry about more than the
biological threats, such as viruses, but chemical
contamination. Every planet cooks up minerals a
little different. There's already been several unique
compounds discovered on the moon. So it's likely
that there are many compounds in nature, or from
our pollution, that would be poison to them.
#3. Violence
A Chimpanzee can rip your face off, quite literally.
It has happened.
They have been known to kill, dismember and eat
other animals, and even each other, with their bare
hands.
Or what about this:
"Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!"
Yeah, *Tons* of dangerous animals...
The British lost an entire army to a bunch of Zulus
with spears!
I don't care how powerful they are, if there's like
five aliens touching down here, and there's maybe
seven or eight BILLION of us, their odds aren't too
good.
And if they killed a million humans or 10 million
or whatever, to show us how powerful they are,
that might just convince the other 7 billion that it
would be a really good idea to kill them.
Related:
#4. Mountain out of a Mole Hill
So the aliens come here, we gleam some technology
from them and the next thing they know we're facing
off with them in their own home system.
Japan opened up in 1853. Just 80 years later and they
were a world power, rampaging through Asia and the
Pacific, defeating the European militaries. Aliens would
probably not want to repeat the same mistake with us.
#5. Economics
The cost would be obscene, all the more so when you
consider than nobody on their planet could live to see
any return on the investment.
Without pretending that Star Trek is a documentary,
there would be no reason to believe that there ever
could be a return on the investment. So much time
would go by, before any return data, what whole
civilizations could crumble. There might not be any
memory of the mission what so ever, no knowledge
as to where or how to retrieve data...
Human ethnicities, cultures, languages have all
come and gone in less time than a return trip would
take at light speed, for more than 99% of the galaxy.
Effectively, there's never an economic return.
#6. Is there even science?
Aliens come here but, what do they bring back home
with them?
How much room is on their ship? How much storage?
Are we talking a Noah's Ark where they want examples
of our life form? Do they want samples of all our
minerals? What about our technology? Our building
materials?
What?
The most obvious work around is to say "Data," then
it's just bits on a thumb drive, right? Problem there is
that if you're just collecting data, then any data you
don't collect, for whatever reason, is effectively gone.
But if you have a sample, you can keep going back,
collecting more & more data...
#7. Exposure
The absolute best way to protect what you've got is
to keep anyone from knowing that you have it.
Right?
If someone doesn't know that you've got the Hope
Diamond under your pillow, they're not going to
break into your home and murder you in order to
steal it. Well, coming here risks exposing their
existence.
It's telling us that they exist.
Can you think of anything else that would stop
aliens from coming here?
This should have been titled "a few entirely surmountable challenges
aliens would face coming here", as every item fits that description with
one exception, and even that only alludes to the actual issue. The "Economics" reason frames things in terms of economic *return* but the
issue is less that the returns would be lower than the costs of such a
trip, but that the cost of the trip is astronomical and incredibly impractical to begin with because of the limitations of the speed of
light. That also makes a lot of the other reasons a bit moot - why are
we assuming only five aliens would make the trip? In a sub-light-speed
world where, as the article points out, centuries or millennia would
pass on the home planet (if not the ship itself) during the trip,
whyever would you send only FIVE individuals?
I think it's interesting how a lot of these lists blithely mention
things "that would stop aliens" and illustrate this point with examples
of humans being barely slowed down by that issue. I also find it
interesting how so many seem to focus on arguments of prudence -
diseases would suck, the economic returns would be bad, no rational
being would do such a crazy thing as spacefaring given those objective drawbacks. And they gloss over the fact that humans are exactly that
crazy by (I suppose) assuming that we're weird like that and we can't
assume aliens would have our same thirst for knowledge, passion for discovery or tendency to just get obsessed over bizarre stuff.
But that's wrong. For exactly the same reasons of prudence and
cost-benefit that these lists rely on, there will never be a selective pressure for carbon-based life on an Earthlike planet to be spacefaring. Humans got there by exapting traits that evolved for different reasons,
and those traits include curiosity, a drive to discover and a propensity
to get passionate about random things. There are absolutely good evolutionary reasons to evolve such traits - in a way they're an
extension of play, which all the most intelligent animals do. It's a behavior that consists of doing semi-random things not for the obvious survival- or reproduction-related purposes but for their own sake. This behavior has clear relationships with learning ability and behavioral flexibility, and it makes sense because a certain amount of random
search is critical for finding novel solutions to problems. Humans take these traits up to eleven, and clearly we've also taken "finding novel solutions to problems" up to eleven compared to other Earth life forms.
And those abilities to seek knowledge for its own sake, to be interested
in things beyond pure survival and reproduction, to invest in a variety
of random things, were obviously a vital part of getting us to invent spaceflight, and will be a major reason we actually fly to other worlds
if we ever do.
That's why I think the cost issue is a bigger one than the returns issue
by the way - the fact you can't get any money from a trip to Proxima Centauri won't stop us doing it. We haven't gotten any money from going
to the Moon either yet look at us, still obsessed with the idea. What *could* stop us is if the sheer cost or impracticality of going to
Proxima Centauri makes it prohibitive to do for the pure sake of it.
Returns matter at the margin where it's too prohibitive to do it for the glory but not so impossible that it wouldn't be worth doing for the
returns, but that "at the margin" means it deserves a footnote in the paragraph describing the issue, not the title role IMO.
Anyway, I don't see how you get any kind of spacefaring alien from carbon-based life on an Earthlike planet without them evolving those
traits too.
israel sadovnik wrote:
"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life.
It's just been too intelligent to come here."
/Arthur C. Clarke /
Apparently he was a great SciFi writer... not much of a
comedian but a great writer.
With degrees in
Pro Plyd wrote:
With degrees in
Nobody tell it that "degrees in math and physics" don't map to
skills as a comedian.
You and Elaine are
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