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Don't Talk To Aliens, Warns Stephen Hawking
Megaport writes "Promoting his new series on the Discovery channel, Stephen Hawking has given an interview to the Times in which 'he has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all that it can to avoid any contact.' He says, 'I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. ... If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.' Personally, I've always thought that the indigenous people of the world really had no chance to avoid contact here on such a small planet, but is hiding under our collective bed an option for humanity in the wider galaxy?"
Hiding will never work :)
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Interesting that I should wake up to find this article when I finished reading Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice last night before going to bed. It's one of the earliest books I've read that deals seriously with communications from space. I won't get into the details fo the book but instead pose equally speculative assumptions about advanced life that contradict Hawking (a man much respected in my eyes).
As humans have "advanced" over the past two thousand years, it is apparent that killing each other is simply not productive. Well, this is apparent to me anyway. And I would argue that although the numbers have probably gone up for homicide on a world wide scale, there is far less nationalistic or religious conflict on the Earth today and the percentages of death related to that have dropped drastically since World War II. Were it not for this movement towards sanity and science, a lot of our technological advances would have been inhibited by 1) the effort it takes to exterminate your neighbor and 2) being killed by your neighbor. While military research brings advancements in other fields, the primary goal is stopping the enemy. Had scientists that invented napalm at Dow Chemical been given the same amount of resources to invent more efficient fuels and engines, I've no doubt they could have.
Simply put: why is it that we assume an "advanced" civilization means that it is militarily advanced and not ethically advanced? Those two categories are not mutually exclusive and I would argue that any alien race not ethically advanced before becoming militarily advanced will simply continue to focus on killing each other. I will also posit that intergalactic travel is near impossible without the ability to understand anthropology. Using this logic, I would wager that the nomadic roving death squads are no more likely than the aliens in Asimov's Childhood's End that show up and help us technologically as well as ethically (we've still got quite a ways to go in some areas more than others).
It's hard to agree with Hawking's assumption of aliens as it's more apparent they would simply die out from lack of resources before ever finding their first victims. I suppose all I have to offer is science fiction references since that's all that's being discussed here.
My work here is dung.
It sounds like this physicist thinks the film Independence Day may come true. What could we possibly have in our young solar system that would make it worth the bother for a nomadic civilization of harvesting aliens to visit?
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
We've got Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith. We'll be fine.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
I think he's saying this to generate debate and thought about aliens. It's too late to hide. The radio waves are already on their way. But if he's saying this on a TV show he's trying to generate buzz for it and get people thinking about it. It also leads to the conclusion we need to build SDF-1, thereby getting humans into space.
Hawking isn't called a genius for no reason. There is another subtle arguement there that we need to get of this planet to start looking for those resources too.
Etc etc.
That would make a really good science fiction movie....oh, wait.
What is the probability of aliens conquering Earth? What is the probability of an all-out nuclear war, an incurable virus getting loose from some lab or other similar niceties happening? Why should then anyone in their right mind actually be concerned about the former?
The enormity of the effort they would have to mount given the physics of space travel would be rather significant, and at great cost to themselves. The time it would take would depend on how close to the speed of light they can reach. And the physics of THAT means they would have to have the technology to convert matter into energy somehow. Or, it would take them many thousands of years to get here. Either way, it's NOT going to be a friendly housecall, no matter how you shake it.
The public has in its collective imagination all these SF stories that assumes some way has been found to avert the realities of the physics that we now understand. But I am not confident at all that a way can be found to make interstellar space travel "cheap and affordable", per se. Wormholes, if they even exist, require energies way beyond our imagination, way beyond any civilization would be able to harness, energies at galactic scales or worse, and even at that there is no clear understanding if they would actually be useful for travel.
We indeed understand a lot today about physics and cosmology, and nothing I've seen to this time would even hint at the merest possibility of anything that could possibly make interstellar travel "cheap and affordable" my mere civilizations throughout the cosmos
So, I deem it extremely unlikely that Humanity's fantasies about space travel will ever likely be true.
And thus, on that basis, I would firmly agree with Hawking.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
We needed this advice back when we started high power radio transmissions... we've got plenty of advertising of our presence out there now.
I think we vastly overestimate how important we are.
An alien race isn't going to travel light-years to have a cup of tea any more than we would travel to a remote corner of the earth to make peace with the native bacteria.
"I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet." Sounds like Stephen has seen Wall-E too many times. Does he have a five-year-old? Anyway, I doubt we'll be conquered by a race of vacuous, immobile, milkshake-slurping space balloons who aren't interested in anything past their viewscreens.
I, for one, welcome our new aliens-in-massive-ships overlord.
The way things are going, in a few more centuries either we'll have wiped ourselves out, or Earth will be a massive polluted desert...
"I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach"
Are you sure they were talking to Stephen Hawking and not Roland Emmerich? Because I swear this is the plot of Independence Day...
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
i understand his arguement, but i would think it would come down to logistics.
they would have to use up all the resources not only on their home world, but their stellar system as well.
even then, they would be more likely to use an uninhabited planet like mars than have to deal with rogue aborigines(us)
Forrest Gump was flying Apollo 13 ...
are a million to one he said
... [/obligatory response]
Hmmmm .... Sounds like someone is making wild, baseless assumptions, and projecting humankind's shortcomings onto a hypothetical extraterrestrial species ...
Trust me, if we see aliens on Earth, it'll be representatives of our former race who represent those that WEREN'T stranded on this hunk of rock called Earth... And if they kill us, it'll be a mercy killing after seeing how far we'd fallen from our once great status as gaurdians of peace and brotherhood throughout the galaxy.
See? I can make baseless claims too.
Humans, the other red meat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Dk9z6Ul4X4
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
"Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror." --Ming the Merciless
Judging aliens by our standards and in the context of our experiences may be the gravest error. Since we are talking scifi, let us mention Ender's Game, where the 'bad' aliens thought humans were of no consequence because of their racial context. To coin a phrase, "Welcome, but check your weapons at the door, please".
If I were an alien out looking for resources, I would imagine that Earth is far too primitive to have an industrial base that could help at all. Not only that, but the aliens would probably only be able to muster a handful of ships with a population numbering in the millions at the most, while Earth has billions of natives. The natives also have about 10,000 nuclear weapons, and though they may not pose a lethal threat, could knock out the alien ships with one or two lucky hits, which would inflict unrecoverable losses on the aliens, as they would necessarily lack the industrial base to make more anytime soon, being light years away from the nearest anchorage. Add all this together, and if I were an alien, I'd figure Earth was more trouble than it's worth to take over, and pick some other uninhabited planet with abundant natural resources to take over instead.
There are pleanty of other resources out there, why come all they way here to get them?
It would be like filling your car full of fuel, driving to the airport (past several orchards, forests, landfills, and supermarkets), filling up a 767, flying to Tahiti in it, then raiding a village for its produce.
It just wouldn't be worth it. Not saying they wouldn't be interested, just that the expense and effort to take our stuff would not even be close to break even.
The only reason I could see for them to actually come here are for biologicals. Perhaps petroleum which is also biological actually. Basically us, the plants, all of the bugs, the germs. And that is only useful to them if the biomass is is similar and compatible to theirs.
Quite frankly they could probably produce their own Earth sized biomass with less energy than it would take for them to to transport such infrastructure here.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Given the vastness of the universe it's hard to believe that earth holds some resource that can't be found anywhere else - plus the size of the earth in relative galactic terms probably wouldn't make much of a beep on the alien overload's metal detector. And, if aliens do make it here, it's a good bet that we're too dumb and fragile to be used as their slaves. My bet is that all us humans will simply be shipped off to alien zoos across the universe as curiosities and exotic pets. Those left behind will be part of a larger indigenous exhibit for our touring overlords.
I've got my towel.
I would think that they would have to leave due to something like the end of life of their sun, not the depletion of limited resources. It seems to me that an advanced civilization would have understood the concept of sustainability...
...if they bring healthcare reform with them...
Now I'm picturing any extraterrestrial species as grumpy as everyone on Battlestar Galactica was if their trip had listed a few thousand years more.
And I'm thinking Hawking has a good point.
The aliens' response: "Shut the fuck up, you flid!"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Some of you will recall that on July 8, 1947, witnesses claim that an unidentified flying object (UFO) with five aliens aboard crashed onto a sheep and mule ranch just outside Roswell , New Mexico .
This is a well known incident that many say has long been covered up by the U.S. Air Force and other federal agencies and organizations.
However, what you may NOT know is that in the month of April 1948, nine months after that historic day, the following people were born:
See what happens when aliens breed with sheep and jackasses?
via Tom McMahon's blog
We are of peace. Always!
The radio waves are already on their way.
Although we have sent radio transmissions into space, don't they peter out before they get too far away? Maybe it's not too late to stop Hawking's interstellar resource-hunters from finding us.
Why did he start talking now? What does he know that we do not? He surely was aware of that possibility for years. Have They, for a moment, lost control over him? Or could he wrestle his mind from Their control long enough to warn us? These are the signs, my friends - the final days are ahead! Stock up on ammo, food and fuel, in case you have been so negligent to not have done so already. The hills, head for the hills!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Mostly harmless.
Jeez, come on the technology for defeating them came out in 1997! Didn't any of you see Independence Day? We already know from this fine documentary that all we need is a Wall Street G3 and we can easily penetrate their puny firewalls. Sure they have intergalactic travel capabilities, and ships that can hover over entire cities (without char-broiling them with hover-exhaust, mind you...) but WE have 14.4 modems, Mac OS and the Fresh Prince of BelAir.
What's to worry about?
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Ummm.. if they have intergalactic travel capability, they would be able to get any resource they needed from a much nearer source. After all, every resource we use here on earth is available in vastly larger quantities elsewhere in the Universe than on our tiny little rock. Every resource here came from somewhere else, remember?
The argument that they would come here looking for resources is simply asinine.
If they used up all the resources from their home planet, how could they build their massive ships?
Sounds a bit like the Migrant Fleet from the Mass Effect universe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Races_in_Mass_Effect#Quarians).
Hawking's creepy robot voice freaks *me* out, and I'm not even from another planet!
just reverse polarity and the radio transmissions will be sucked back to their source.
rewriting history since 2109
So far, resources here on Earth have been practically unlimited for us humans, such as living space, food, and energy sources.
Ehm... yeah, sure. The fact that wars have been fought (and are being fought) over each of those items you mention, says otherwise. Let's face it: we're all on a big spaceship here (Earth). It's big and can take a lot of abuse, but in terms of resources, it's like a closed shell - hardly 'unlimited'. And there are lots of us - more every day.
The aliens are addicted to videogames, remember?
then it is because we probably deserved it considering the way we humans treat each other...
or someday when the human race consumes the resources of earth if we build interstellar space craft we are forced to become the enemies of some other planet much like Hawkings is waring us about = we become the monsters from outer space to some other poor schmucks on some other rock orbiting some other star
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Our species, up to and including our most advanced thinkers*, is too wedded to unexamined assumptions and too fond of creating self-referential aphorisms and/or ironic maxims to realistically model first contact with non-human species.
*-apparently.
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
Any aliens with FTL are going to be advanced enough to cobble up anything they want or need using some local star's energy, metals from asteroids and hydrocarbons from the nearest Jupiter-like planet (assuming they're organic like us). They'll also have advanced computing and simulation so I think neither tourism nor entertainment will hold much attraction to them.
Their adolescents *might* send down the occasional silvery, large-eyed avatar in a ship to interact/goof with us for research, or fun with anal probes, or something, but that's probably as far as it would go. They won't *need* us.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Hawking is saying that ANY aliens who can travel between stars and AT reasonable
speed will HAVE to destroy planets and stars for the fuel of their conveyances.
The energy needs are simply too great at our level of understanding. The would
need huge amounts of energy to even approach the speed of light, let alone exceed
it.
Did we all forget our basic physics and are relying on as yet fictional literary
devices to save our asses? Sheesh.
..."To Serve Man" is a cookbook!!!
Embrace our new Alien Overlords.
I've come to believe that form is function and for there to exist other intelligent life in the universe there has to be another Earth, with the exact same environment, and the intelligent species would have to have had the exact same events-path through its history. Not likely. No intelligent dinosaurs, or frogs, or fish, or lizards or whatever naive people like Hawkings are thinking. I don't believe the existence of other intelligent life in the universe depends much on an awe for the numbers. Primitive life is probably widespread however. And THAT is the true problem. It is the bacteria that we have to be afraid of arriving here and using our resources, not intelligent life in large space ships. Or perhaps some interplanetary kudzu arriving or being brought back by us to spread over the world. But even bacteria probably need a somewhat Earth-like path. Extremophiles, in my humble opinion, probably evolved in better circumstances and adapted to the extreme environments rather than evolving in the extreme environments. We ARE alone. The rest is science fiction.
Sqreater
E Proelio Veritas.
Would either side, alien and human alike, even recognize the other as 'intelligent', or for that matter, as beings/entities at all?
That was the conclusion of a Playboy interview concerning aliens years ago (I don't remember who they were interviewing). The analogy was, if I remember correctly, to the Piraha people of South America, who did just that to the Spanish invaders. As a consequence the Piraha were left alone for another hundred years, while all other triebes who allowed the Spanish in were devastated.
Any civilization that has the resources to build massive ships and navigate them between the stars doesn't need to conquer earth; they have so much excess energy that they can turn whatever lifeless rock they want into whatever biosphere they desire.
But it's doubtful that they would even bother keeping their original ape-like forms. Cyborgs and uploading are not all that far out technologically, and they are the most reasonable choice for space travel. But once you do that, there's no reason to conquer biospheres anymore.
This is a statement about the probability of hostile and resource hungry alien life visiting us, it hinges on a lot of unknowns and miniscule probabilities. The conditions are:
* Intelligent alien life exists near us in time and space
* They perform interstellar spacefaring for migratory reasons
* They survived resource depletion of their entire home system
* Earth is in one of the nearest systems they choose for strip mining next
* Earth is more interesting in our solar system then the gas planets, the kuiper belt, the moon, mercury, venus, the sun and the asteroid belt.
* Their technology which enabled them to cross interstellar distances hasn't produced independence of extensive resources as a by product
* They are hostile and their inbred aggression somehow didn't result in them going extinct long before they reach other solar systems
* Their inbred aggression also hasn't led them to be fighting some war with somebody as capable as them
* They've not had any contact with any civilization they haven't quite wiped out, which would've produced another war as a by product, which they'd also survived.
There are quite a few unknowns in it, but looking at all the conditions that must be unequivocally *true*, it's quite unlikely we'll ever see that kind of alien around our neighborhood (or at least before we've managed to wipe ourselves out)
Experiments and other stuff
At our state of knowledge, the chance that we should expect biological life like humans running through the galaxy at speeds below the speed of light is not very high. I myself also believe it will be mostly our machines that do space exploration, not we ourselves.
Ergo, why should we be worried about earth in particular, a planet whose only really defining feature (as far as we know) is that it supports a myriad of biological life forms (at least a lot as compared to whatever glimpse we got of the rocks in our solar system). Why not worry more about, say, the sun or Jupiter.
Either has a nice amount of mass and energy as compared to earth. What sort of space civilization wants a rock thinly covered with the most common atoms in the universe, anyhow? I bet if we encountered alien civilizations, they'd only be after us for their curiosity about life forms, if they cared at all. I don't think we'd have ANYTHING to offer to them in terms of any industrial relevance.
Who do you think is more skilled at the art of deception?
Us or them?
Everyone knows how it really ends.
I come to the same conclusion as Hawking - that we should try to be a quiet civilization - but not for the same reasons.
The fact that we haven't detected advanced life in all of our SETI searching, and the fact that our solar system has not been visited by an alien probe (see Fermi Paradox) is some evidence that our galaxy has a "sterilizer civilization" - which is a pretty straightforward concept.
If two civilizations begin interstellar colonization in our galaxy, their spheres of expansion are bound to intersect in the future. As they will largely be competing for the same resources (sources of energy differential), some sort of conflict is inevitable. But a conflict at this scale would be so horrible that any reasonable civilization would want to avoid it at all costs. This reasoning makes me think that any suitably advanced, reasonable civilization will be a sterilizer civilization: For the moral purpose of preventing great suffering, they will sterilize any technological civilization before they begin their interstellar colonization. Being rational, they will do this in the most efficient way possible: They will send a robotic probe which will duplicate itself in our solar system, and this autonomous army will wipe out all technological life and monitor our system to make sure that none re-emerges. Since sending even a small payload at great interstellar distances requires great energy, the rational sterilizer civilization will choose a speed for the probe that will bring it to its target safely before their interstellar colonization phase begins, but not much earlier. It is quite possible that such a probe is on its way to us right now, but won't arrive for another thousand years.
On the very unlikely scenario that we are somehow the first technological civilization in our galaxy, I think that we have an ethical obligation to become a sterilizer civilization ourselves. Everyone now wishes that somebody killed Hitler when he was a baby. It would have prevented great suffering. Like Hawking, I think it's inevitable that if contact is allowed to occur between two colonizing civilizations, the result will be catastrophic on a scale that will make the casualty count of a nuclear war seem like a rounding error. So of course there are ethical downsides of sterilizing a budding, intelligent civilization, just like there are downsides to killing the still-innocent baby Hitler. But I think the refusal to do this would be far more monstrous. The costs could be mitigated by meticulously recording all information about the culture and biology of the extinguished life, or perhaps even saving some specimens who will be safely contained in some sort of a galactic zoo.
So how should we react if there is a sterilizing probe on its way to get us? We have to begin our interstellar colonization before the probe gets here. I don't think it makes much sense to try to raise up a defense, because we can't even guess at the mechanism of such a probe. One thing it might do is to create a tiny black hole and drop it into the sun. (Or perhaps the probe just is a small black hole set to collide with the sun in a thousand years or so.) At this point, we are still a very vulnerable civilization, and will remain so until we have covered a substantial part of the galaxy. Also, we should be working hard on the technology for an effective sterilizer probe, just in case SETI does eventually reveal an alien civilization. I know it's "no fun" to kill aliens before we ever meet them, but I think the ethical costs of not doing so are unacceptable.
I wonder if a person in Physics is the right specialty to infer the actions of species. Bioinformatics, AI, neuroscience, nanotech, etc would be some skills that might help to project the possibilities. All of the above, and more is my guess.
We need a psycho-historian and a foundation to start from.
Regardless of the type of creature, virtually all of nature is about exploitation. Everything feeds off everything else. Humans sit atop the food chain on Earth because they are the ultimate exploiters. We harness everything for our use. Plants, animals and the very planet itself bears our mark. The reason we haven't yet moved on to Mars is that we haven't found a need to exploit it yet....but we're looking. Given what I see here I doubt that the Universe differs all that much. Nature's rule is that the strong survive.
from the Imperial Galactic Government, and we're here to help.
HAHAHAHA!
No seriously, we're here to demolish your planet to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.
Have you ever considered that we are the most advanced species in the universe? scary no? maybe there is lots of alien life everywhere, but all forms are pre-Yuri Gagarin so-to-speak.
I don't think Hawking is suggesting we hide under the bed, I just think he's saying we should stop jumping up and down and shouting "HERE WE ARE!".
Here's a thought:
What if the level of complexity and resources required in order to become a space-faring society are such that any civilization that is able to achieve this must first be able to overcome their own self-destructive tendencies? In other words, on the tech-advancement tree, world-peace is a prerequisite for space travel. Any civilization that obtained space-travel technology that still has self-destructive tendencies may just end up destroying themselves with it. This is somewhat similar to Carl Sagan's Cosmos chapter where he discusses how a civilization must overcome their moral/technological adolescence in order to break through a certain scientific/technological glass ceiling and become a part of a larger galactic society.
Discuss...
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Can we hide at all? Aren't we ourselves, with our primitive technology, already able to detect the reflected light of planets orbiting relatively (at the moment) distant stars, and analyze this light to identify molecules that are markers for the presence of life?
So, the composition of an atmosphere already allows to look for the presence of life, and its relative composition might even perhaps allow to identify the presence of intelligent, or not so intelligent, life.
He wants his story back.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
We've still got Jeff Goldblum, after all.
I am more or less in the Darwin camp.
Any civilization we meet are likely to be expansionists.
Non expanding cultures goes extinct sooner or later.
But since earth haven't been colonized yet lends some credit to the thought that we are alone.
Or that life is an extraordinary rare occurence.
If this wasn't the case there should be massive civilizations all over the place because they might have had an head start of a couple of billion years.
Stephen Hawking's assumption is that we should be thinking carefully about advertising our presence in the universe because any Alien visitors might be like Columbus discovering the America's in 1492. I think he most certainly has a point, but what about another viewpoint, where Aliens take a look at us and what we have done in our history of contact with new civilisations, realise what the implications for them would be if we were to meet them, and decide that a pre-emptive attack to exterminate all of humanity is probably their safest course of action?
There is a particularly depressing science fiction book called The Killing Star, which describes exactly such a premise. The story is depressing because only a tiny group of people actually survive the devastation to flee in utter silence from the solar system. The method used to exterminate humanity is absurdly simple. No huge ray-guns, no huge bombs, or poison or any such thing, just objects accelerated to 99% the speed of light, so-called relativistic kill-vehicles. Almost impossible to stop because even if you do detect them coming, they're so close behind their own light signal that there wouldn't be much time to do anything about it.
This is the assumption that would worry me the most, I think. any alien civilisation intelligent enough to understand what we are would be intelligent enough to understand how dangerous we could be to them.
Beam Battlefield Earth into space 24/7. That will work better than extract of coyote urine on deer.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I believe an advanced alien race capable of harnessing the enormous amounts of energy required for space travel already has the capability of transforming widely available matter into energy, and terraforming dead planets, thus have no real need of our planet.
The worst can happen is they make Earth into some kind of zoo, complete with a big cage.
Everyone now wishes that somebody killed Hitler when he was a baby.
No, they really don't. The common question which you've heard, "if you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?" is meant to generate ethical debate, and the answer is not meant to be obvious. In fact, with the same fervor that you would use in answering "yes" to that question, I would answer "no." Killing someone for crimes they have not yet committed is simply unacceptable in my world view, and life itself isn't as important to me as holding to such moral guidelines.
In other words, I'd more than willing to accept the extinction of the human race over condoning the brutal "sterilization" of other sentient species. A species such as the one you describe isn't worth protecting.
What makes us so superior that we can make genocidal decisions for others in the distance future? Maybe, just maybe, they have to make their own decisions and suffer their own consequences. They might even like each other.
Sqreater
E Proelio Veritas.
Just as 'you must be a Nazi' is over-used, the tired mantra of blaming the Americans for the world's ills is getting very old. We need a new 'Godwin's Rule' to say the argument is over when people start jumping on this bandwagon.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
As long as we can't go out and discover alien races ourselves, our best chances are hiding. When we have the ability to go out and discover alien races ourselves, we're closer to equal footing with aliens who might find us, so hiding is less necessary.
That sounds like a great way to get "sterilized" yourself by:
a) your own probes turned against you by the civilizations that you intended to "sterilize" OR by a computer glitch,
b) by a civilization or civilizations that you have not yet met but who have already heard about your reputation,
c) by a civilization that is way more developed than yours - as nobody likes living next door to a psycho,
d) getting your civilization torn from inside by your own people or their psychoses due to the fact that not everyone is a heartless bastard willing to condone to a xenocide or two or dozen.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I don't agree with Hawking here at all.
Considering that space travel takes so long there is a balance between food and fuel. Less fuel equals less speed equals more food. More food requires more fuel because of weight. More speed requires more fuel but more fuel requires more fuel because of weight. A ship can really only be so big before diminishing returns sets in.
Making the assumption that our scientists are wrong about faster than light travel (that is, in regular space you cant go faster than light and effectively you cant even go that fast and opening a worm whole would take more energy than our solar system contains) then aliens would have to have:
enough resources to scout planets. a radio wave doesnt really identify if the planet has enough resources to support their civilization.
enough foresight to start scouting and to build the colony ship(s) before their resources are gone
technology to help them survive for a thousand years in space.
seriously, we have be looking for aliens with seti since 1993. Any civilization that develops radio technology which would certainly be required for developing space flight would have to be farther than 17 light years away or we likely would have detected some signal. at a fraction the speed of light (maybe 1/10) its 170+ years in a colony ship.
As far as the aliens being robots, well, life seems to prefer to evolve biologically and I doubt that robots or computers would or even could ever evolve sans organic live. Electronic life, again, unlikely to evolve on its own. Could an organic life form screw up at create Cylons? sure. would they need our resources? probably not, they could mine asteroids and synth chemicals themselves. probably would want to come after us unless they percieved a threat -OR- they were idiotically programmed to kill intelegent life.
real alien voice broadcast in 1977
We are doomed, and all because someone didn't listen to their mommy about not talking to strangers.
... they wouldn't notice us
Ceci n'est pas une
I seen a lecture where Stephen Hawking told everyone not to worry about falling to black holes because you will come out the other side. Nice guy and all, but I am not so sure about how sound his advice is on certain things.
Living in Chile
New species discovered on planet in hitherto insignificant Sol system!
Zarglwellian explorers discovered a species of egotistical bipeds with limited intelligence on a planet orbiting the Sol star yesterday morning. First contact was made in the Earth town of Lamesa, Texas, where intrepid Apheliousian space explorer Taivarg Artxe beamed down to the surface of the planet to be met by a collection of adorable beings armed with what appeared to be unsophisticated projectile weapons.
After initial greetings were exchanged, Taivarg explained to the bipeds using universal heiroglyphics that he was on an interstellar quest to find new and exciting crusine to offer to customers of his francise of fast food resturants. He announced to the collected bipeds that he had intended to eat them, and if they were sufficiently tasty, round up and cull his species before sending their remains to resturants around the universe, but he instead thinks that there's more profit marketing the human species as novelty pets for the children of Aphelion, and they should be thankful that their species will be used to bring happiness to billions of Aphelion's children instead of used for food.
So children, look out for new bipedal hooman pets, coming soon to a pet shop near you!
Any civilization that is sufficiently advanced to travel between two stars (as an entire civilization), and does so, will implicitly be able to use energy from the star very efficiently (think of a Dyson sphere). If you have a ship large enough to keep all your people, with a stable ecosystem that can get you from one star to another, what the hell do you need a planet for?! And if you can use the star directly, how hard is it to find a star that doesn't have any inhabited planets? Furthermore, what would be the problem with leaving the teeny Earth in orbit while you use the rest of the energy emitted by the Sun? Earth can barely cast a shadow on the Moon, and the Moon is close, and in the orbital plane. Why would you even think of using the orbital plane, which is full of asteroids and stuff? (I would go between Mercury and Venus, with an orbit perpendicular to the orbital plane)
The second case is the case of a civilization that sends out colonies. The same arguments as before apply. These colonists would have a ship that carried them for a long time between stars. They can obviously eat very little, or sleep for long times, so they would have no reasonable motive for staying and killing humans, when they can easily set off for another star. It's pretty obvious to me they wouldn't really need a terraformed planet.
It's true that I don't see the need for world peace before sending explorers to other stars. What I see is that most likely the societies that get tired of war will get off their planet, and go to the satelites of a nearby gas giant to live in peace. From there, they can silently grow enough to start visiting other stars, while the idiots back home are busy choosing between Muhammed and Christ.
I sincerely don't see a reason for us to fear aliens. Intelligent machines would be dangerous, in the sense that they could reasonably argue that their energy requirements are less than ours, and it wouldn't make sense to give resources to the race that is less efficient. But they would have no reason to let us live in constant numbers (what, isn't it enough to have two kids per family?), or even grow a little as they grow, because if we do create intelligent machines, they will most likely have moral values that are close to ours (otherwise we pull the plug before linking them to a robot body. It's called survival, and any animal life would do it).
new sig
All of this peace and harmony has been slowing down our technological progress.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
all the life in civilization has to be as greedy, arrogant, reckless as us, and should have used their resources wastefully, waging war on each other, developing philosophies that would justify that kind of abuse like we do, and, SOMEHOW, despite all this destructive behavior, they should be able to escape any kind of planetary disaster these could induce, and rise into the stars to be able to conduct effective interstellar travel.
what an arrogant and earth centric view of existence.
hawking is a great man indeed, but his vision is narrow in this regard, because he apparently assumes any intelligent life in universe has to follow the same path for social evolution. in reality, any average history hobbyist with some research under his/her belt would be able to say that, even our civilization's advancement has been tied to our declining levels of agression throughout history, especially in the last 200 years. it is very low chance that, an aggressive, oppressive society would be able to easily elevate to effective interstellar travel level, since aggressiveness in ANY form causes much resource and time to be lost due to the waste belligerent activity creates.
sorry hawking, but you lost me on this one.
Read radical news here
It's time to build Gundam
it's a cookbook!!!!!!!! it's a cookbooooooookkkkkkkkkk!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(lame ass filter)
I would guess that a civilization sufficiently advanced to both master interstellar travel, AND do it in such a way as to be any threat to our world, would be quite able to find us - or at least find our very hospitable planet - without our help. It's not like we could hide if we wanted to. How could we, exactly? We have many decades' worth of radio signals emitted already, and we're sending more all the time. Are we going to suddenly stop the use of radio? Build a giant Faraday cage around the planet, and paint it to look like an inhospitable, dead planet? Of course that might attract MORE attention from a race who could send out an automated planet-munching mining machine. It's tough to make bets when you don't even know who or what you're betting on, if anything.
Here's my suggestion. Live your life. Don't worry about things over which you have absolutely no control whatsoever, and never will have. If we discover or are discovered by off-planet life forms, we'll just have to see how that works out - we may be more advanced, less advanced or, God help us all, about the same. The chances of any of it happening in our lifetimes, or in the next few thousand years, is probably pretty slim anyway. On a galactic scale, our presence on this planet has been just the blink of an eye - the odds are in our favor. If someone does find us all we can hope for is that they're a lot smarter than we are, and a lot nicer.
You gotta kill baby Himmler too.
And baby Hydrich and that baby responsible for the grat depression, that little fucker! Oh and that french baby from worldwar I
The idea that a such a civilization exists is ridiculous. A civilization that has the technology for interstellar travel of that sort of scale would have no need to look for tiny little planets like Earth for our puny resources. They would find many orders of magnitude more resources in their own back yard.
With overwhelming probability, any planet that evolved life would exist in a solar system not unlike ours. I'm not sure that a singleton planet is even possible. So, they would find enough hydrogen in a single gas giant to power themselves for eternity. Enough minerals in other rocky planets, moons, Kuiper-belt objects, and asteroids to build anything they could ever want. Do you know just how much iron is in our core? And if they do progress to become a civilization so vast, so immense as to actually use up all of that, they certainly wouldn't need to come hunting for the relatively slim pickings on our planet. They could simply go to whatever solar system is closest and get stuff from there. No Independence Day-like scenarios required. No civilization is going to scrape the tiny fraction of minerals that exist on the surface of their world, and then exhausting that just leave to go hunting for more resources on another habitable planet.
You have been rated +5 interesting...
I don't know about that, but you are certainly not insightful.
Your babble is the usual stuff of boring Sci-Fi that was mass produced in the 60-80s. However, to read it as a serious comment, even in the context of the speculative discussion that we are having, is something else entirely.
I submit for your consideration: Al Gore, Steve Jobs, and Glenn Beck. It should be obvious to even the casual observer that none of these three is remotely human.
Al Gore brought us the internet, while Steve Jobs is the purveyor of "locked down shiny". The internet resulted in massive amounts of free pron, distracting millions of geeks from attempting actual reproduction. Similarly, locked down shiny stuff distracts the remainder of the geeks either directly or by endless arguments about its coolness vs its locked down nature - either way, the distraction again results in self-elimination from the gene pool. Finally, Glenn Beck promotes a level of populist anti-intellectualism that will lead to a pogrom eliminating anybody with an IQ greater than 60, thereby mopping up any remnants left behind by the Gore/Jobs strategy. By the time the mother ships arrive, all that will be left will be the drooling remnants of a once great civilization.
Do the real numbers. Look at the fact we have largely exhausted many resources in less than 200 years. Even base materials like copper are getting hard to find and value is going up. Add in we have barely reached the Moon and are centuries from space mining and resources become a limiting factor. I think it's safe to say Earth is fairly average for a life sustaining planet. We may have more or less water than average but most other things required for technology are going to be similar. Say there's a 300 year window for space travel. Odds are there are few if any in our Galaxy other than ourselves. Even if you expand the window to a 1,000 years there may only be a couple. 10,000 years would mean there would likely be a few but that would require them to be space mining so they'd need greater vision than we have, we aren't seriously even considering it yet. It's not even unlikely that there may be a million years between advanced civilizations. A burst of technology followed by long dry spells. The odds of life? Nearly a 100%. Odds of an advanced civilization that is trying actively to contact us? Near zero. That said I'm a massive fan of SETI but what most laymen fail to realize when they say SETI hasn't found a signal is that from 10 light years using the equipment they are using Earth would appear lifeless. We haven't broadcast a signal that we ourselves could receive. The assumption is that an alien would be using a massive array to look for intelligent life. Something we ourselves have yet to do. Until we launch a major program looking for weak signals then SETI hasn't in fact failed they just lack the resources. The point is in truth would a space bearing race waste such resources as it would take to contact us? Given the desperate need for efficiency that is the true paradox of intelligent civilizations. Since they couldn't likely reach us with existing resources why would they bother since two way communications would take hundreds of years?
To everyone suggesting aliens may have high moral standards:
We don't know how their society works at all.
And the only society we know, ours, doesn't hold higher moral standards for less than a decade, and even these are not held onto firmly.
Imagine that we eventually had built a generation-type-spaceship to escape our eventually doomed planet Earth, and we finally arrived at star system with a planet harbouring intelligent life.
Would we turn back? No we wouldn't even if we had the resources to. At the very least we would encroach on the domain of the aliens by settling somewhere in their system.
So this is why we wouldn't want to announce the existance of a habitable planet by broadcasting.
Other species might take this even more serious, and would have policies in place that forbid even accidental broadcasts. And maybe not because of xenophobia, but because they KNOW there are hostile species out there.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
I've been monitoring my Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic iPad application, bought from the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation and it hasn't indicated the presence of any spacecraft in Earth orbit for some weeks now. And if and when it does, I won't panic. I'll switch to the Guide app, with its large friendly letters and it will tell me everything that I need to do.
Well who should I (or we) talk to? God? He doesn't exist!
Why does noone ever consider that we might be the 1st intelligent life in the Universe - not the only life - the 1st intelligent life. We could be the Ancient Ones ourselves.
Any civilization that would seriously consider Sarah Palin for political office deserves to have it's resources plundered.
Do planets stagnate? Same thoughts reverberating? Maybe some pool their replicator rations and take a trip. Record everything ala googleMaps++, come home you sell the reality show version, the art, etc.
On the way home with objective in hand, mention in passing: "You should check out x, y, and z. Stop by and download our culture any time, and we hope to be back to yours in 100 years. Have a nice day!"
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
is irrelevant. Resistance is futile.
everyone that a group of Marxist Revolutionaries equipped with only AK47, black pyjamas a coolie hat, the occasional bicycle and dried rat for lunch (according to Martin Sheene in Apocalypse Now) managed to defeat the might of an invading alien army equipped with unimaginable resources, superior weapons and the ability to spend 168 billion US Dollars with a projected end cost of 900 billion US Dollars.
Then there were the Somalis. They just had Technicals and 9 year old boys equipped with RPG launchers...
So all members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Earth, SG1, the Resistance and any other exciting names you can think up, get your spray cans ready and let's begin with the first letter we will need.
V.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Broadcast very loudly that we are here and very technological.
Aliens that need to find new plannets will avoid us because
1) They believe our bluff that we are very advanced and can protect us.
2) Realized that we are not so advanced but that we probably have destroy or planet through pollution and/or wars. And if it not yet done, it would be by the time they arrive.
So they will go to the next star that do not broadcast their position and have planets.
We know which stars have planets so that's not the difficult part.
We already knows hundredth of planets and by 2020 (release of the GAIA catalog) we will knows thousands more.
http://gaia.esa.int/
The theory of panspermia is where microbes transmit life to habitable bodies in space in for form or comet's and asteroids. If a planet such as earth were to be impacted by something large, fragments would be launched in to space, these would immediately freeze and preserve microbes almost indefinitely. A few cubic meters of frozen sea water from earth would contain a soup of trillions of single celled microbes and be in a perfect delivery system to survive reentry on another planet. Given the large numbers of fragments ejected in to space from such an impact and the small number of microbes needed to populate a planet, there is a good chance that our DNA has evolved across the whole of our galaxy.
So If you believe that which I think is far easier to believe then faster then light travel. The idea of a Christopher Columbus scenario doesn't make sense. Any intelligent aliens arriving by craft would have a few problems. There 10's of thousands of years from home. The idea of having then arrive with an Attack fleet is just impractical given the times and distances involved, and the resources just for a small group to make such a journey. The one group that does arrive would be more like Robinson Crusoe trapped on an island with no technology other then what they can scavenge off there ship. Advanced technology would be impossible to replicate. Imagine trying to make a semiconductor fab with a small group stranded on an island, it's not happening. They also probably wouldn't be well adapted for our environment. The temperature, mixture of gasses etc. I think there first order would be like the Avatar movie scenario. To evolve hybrid creatures that can think like them and know their culture but be bio-compatible with earth. They would have to do this by mixing there DNA with earth creature DNA, which probably would work because of microbial panspermia. Mostly likely they would want there hybrids to fit in and rise to power based on there technological advantage and then leverage the local population to do there work for them.
Also if it happened with once race of aliens then it's probably happened with several each one landing and hybridizing local populations.
The other alternative is they have become a machine race, with there whole beings becoming entirely data. At which point our planet would be little more then a curiosity.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
If we ever actually met aliens, we would have a huge (possibly deadly) allergic to their alien protein/DNA/whatever they have. Also, viruses bacteria and diseases they bring with them would wreak havoc for us (as well as for our ecosystem as a whole)
Think chickenpox infected blankets X several thousand orders of magnitude.
That doesn't make him omniscient nor immune to logic. It is entirely too late for the human race to hide. It's not our radio emissions that will give us away to advanced aliens but the natural radiation the Earth is currently reflecting into space. With our current technology we've found (and confirmed) 452 exoplanets and managed to image several. A new generation of planet hunting telescopes is beginning to come online (they're largely funding limited and not technologically limited) and they'll find and image even more exoplanets. It won't be too long before we're able to detect and get spectra from terrestrial planets around stars.
Any species with the means and desire to fly around the galaxy is going to do a survey of exoplanets before they leave home. If they're out there they've seen us already. They know what the Earth's atmosphere is like, they have a good idea of what its made of, and they know something lives here. They may not know specifically that humans live here and are armed to the teeth but they know something lives here. Damn near every inch of the Earth is covered in living organisms, the chlorophyll in spectra will make that abundantly clear. Check out NASA's Earth Observatory page. We can gather that sort of data with dedicated instruments in orbit but it's all being broadcast to the rest of the galaxy. A sufficiently advanced and large enough interferometry telescope would be able to gather the same data about the Earth from the aliens' home system.
Hiding from advanced alien species that want to pay us a visit is impossible. Radio emissions won't make any difference at all. If anything radio emissions would likely be a deterrent for a resource gathering alien species. Why bother coming here and fighting us for our resources when they can head over to the uninhabited system next door and take what the want without a fight? Even if our radio emissions aren't a deterrent they're hyper advanced aliens that can travel interstellar distances. They know the Earth is here and if they want it there's not a lot we can do besides becoming hyper advanced ourselves providing our current technology wouldn't be adequate for our defense.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Anyone who is trying to even remotely project human rationalization (universe is too big.. radioactive slag is useless.. earth is too infant to be a neighborhood threat..) really needs to stop thinking like a human [and read more sci fi!].
Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth narrative is fiction, but who's to say it really isn't? MLM's only goal was living.
'hawking is a great man indeed, but his vision is narrow in this regard, because he apparently assumes any intelligent life in universe has to follow the same path for social evolution.'
Not at all.. what he's saying is to not make any assumptions whatsoever. He's illustrating his point by giving examples completely outside the bounds of how we would operate or expect others to.
Alien life does exist and it's most likely not human :)
Why do we assume that the dangerous aliens developed the tech?
What if instead the galaxy is full of intelligent species and an advanced ethical species spread its technology to less ethical intelligent species without consideration of what would be done with that tech? What if that less ethical or more primitive species simply stole the tech?
Think of our own history where advanced European tech such as guns was rapidly absorbed by hunter-gatherer tribes. They couldn't make them but they could use them.
Imagine what we might do if tomorrow we obtained a fleet of FTL ships. Would we act ethically or go hunting for other planets to colonise? With certainty some of us would go marauding.
Has Hawkings been dipping into the Sliders reruns a little too heavily?
He's basically telling us to watch out for the Kromaggs .
the galaxy is full of natural resources. if you have mastered inter-stellar travel you can get to all of them ... mining asteroids or non-habitable planets is not a problem. same with energy. aliens don't need planet-based fossil fuels. they have nuclear fission of course and can mine the raw materials for that from gas giants which are again plentiful.
further, if they have figured how to live for tens or hundreds of years, the time required to cross inter-stellar distances, in space habitats, they aren't interested in our "habitable" planet. earth is most likely toxic by their standards.
so, there's not a practical reason for them to subjugate us. that leaves the possibility that they are just violent for the sake of violence. that's extremely unlikely though, as they managed as a species to survive together long enough on their planet to develop space travel.
that all being said, there's still a small chance that whatever aliens find us would for some reason do us harm. there is also of course a good chance they would do us *good*. a species that possess the technology for inter-stellar travel could gift us even their simplest technologies and can get humanity over this bump in the road we are facing now. for example, nuclear fission reactors would give the world clean, plentiful energy.
considering how humanity is going and it's chances of survival, alien contact would be an incredible bit of luck for us now.
As logn as we have some ZPMs then wwe should be ok
goonfleet.
Who wishes they could time travel to kill babies? Certainly not "everybody". The people I run with would want to try to change Hitler before he became a monster. Maybe even get him into art school...etc etc
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
it is apparent that killing each other is simply not productive. Well, this is apparent to me anyway.
The inventors of the following all thought their inventions would end war:
Smokeless gun powder
Airplane
Atomic Bomb
But those are *military* weapons..of course they won't end war...consider also:
The Television
It makes the list. If we could only learn about other cultures, we wouldn't want to go to war. Mankind seems to have a penchant for turning every invention into a way to wage more efficient war. What if someone invented a cheap way to feed everybody? Well, congratulations, you've also invented a cheap way to feed armies. They can now fight war better.
Perhaps the alien will be like us, in this way.
Technology and philosophy seem to have a less than perfect track record for enlightening us...
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
if you say the first race has the "ethical obligation" to sterilize the second race, then you shouldn't say " We have to begin our interstellar colonization before the probe gets here", you should say "We have the ethical responsibility to graciously be the loozers and lie down and let doom hit us", because anything else is "unacceptable"
If aliens developed to an advanced enough level, they will have created intelligent machines and probably lost control of them. The aliens roaming the galaxy are probably highly evolved cybernetic organisms with no use for us. But we will probably take a shot at them and trigger a swarming response which kills us all.
"Is hiding under our collective bed an option for humanity in the wider galaxy?"
Considering that, recent human history, Hitler proved to be as good about Jews, as Europeans were about all indigenous colonial people, as Pol Pot was about Cambodians. As V-POTUS George Wild Bush, Emperor Crazy Napoleon, and Mad Joe Stalin were about wasting the best Russian, French, and US Warriors in murderous personal interest ventures.
Public spectacles entertainment of Gladiator games, at least the participants are now much better paid, and far more survive their "Sport" career into early retirement with a few having regular comfortable income until death.
Considering human history..., If we ain't ready to compete in protecting our planet from ourselves by colonizing other uninhabited home-system planets, limiting population growth (by other than war) ...? Well beating back a resources consuming, global ravaging hoard of alien locus (Movie Independence Day, the enemy is very human) is very unlikely.
We will be the lambs (like US-NAP) for the slaughter, or at best an exploitable slave (like Jews) resource for politicians and C*Os trying to barter for more time to survive, all because we were to stupid to hide from the colonist looking for riches, land, and resources to plunder.
!HAVEFUN!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
If they need resources, they don't need to talk to us. They can be out there stealing our asteroids without our bothering them until we're out there also. A single asteroid has more metals than we can mine here. Actually, they'd probably find the metals under our crust to be useful. So they should put some asteroids together and start chipping (splashing) pieces off the planets until they've broken them back down into separate rocks. The thin film over the surface of our planet won't be any bother, really.
You should try talking to trees as an exercise. They are a pretty alien life form IMHO.
When they're here, but don't want to be detected cause they know we'll use nukes that will destroy the resources they want?
Not all of them are aliens, some of them are our friends.
This mofo been watching too much V.
Listening to Hawking speaking as if this has never happened before, I am now 120% sure it already has happened in the past.
All the above /. discussion concerns the reasons why they left.
The REAL question is whether and how precisely they intervened in our evolution. Unfortunately a physicist cannot answer that.
The point being that any interstellar capable civilization can easily destroy planets. MAD may not be an adequate deterrent when you are talking about the death of your home planet and possibly your entire species. The viewpoint of the Killing Star aliens is that any such risk is too great, and must be eliminated preemptively.
I think the oneil, dyson stuff misses the point of Hawking remarks. He is saying lets all be scared, and the real reason for being scared is that these guys would not be properly worshipable of their gaia equivalent. Personally, I think earth will always have sort of a collectability value for us and so end up in a museum. or maybe a theme park.
it seems he is rather tech imagination limited, which also may be what he pushes. It sort of looks like generation ship tech, Pooh, with a decent economic structure, we could be seriously working on that sort of stuff right now. So, it is a bit too big a step this century to be set as a public goal and so on. it would not be the correct response to the spirit of the times. But if we pay attention to business, i expect it will be on the agenda next century. and do you really feel comfortable about predicting tech details a century out if you are not intending to suppress fundamental science development?
I thought Stephen Hawking was supposed to be smart?
The only vaguely plausible reason for invasion is something like the Predator films; for sport. If you can cross interstellar distances, synthesising food is not going to be a problem, and you'll need a sufficiently high level of technology that slaves are not competitive with robots (or specifically engineered biotech organisms). Metals are fairly scarce in the universe, but the concentration on the Earth is pretty much irrelevant.
There are other reasons. They could launch pre-emptive warfare to neutralize a potential future threat / competitor. The gathering of abundant, planet-side, organic resources could be far cheaper than synthesis, or planets could be seen as better real-estate than spacecraft for a variety of rational and irrational reasons. A "socially advanced" civilization could take upon itself the mission of "civilizing" natives or to eradicate a morally/ethically abhorrent species as viewed through their eyes.
Of all of those reasons, I find the first most compelling. There might be plenty of "living room" in space, but while resources are plentiful, they aren't unlimited. Another species might simply want us out of the way or consider us a potential risk for attacking them for the same kinds of reasons. If a species evolved through many of the same pressures we did, then they should have many of the same motivations for xenophobia, competitiveness, desire to acquire more and more resources, etc. War and conquest is likely to be part of the genetic heritage of any creature that came to exist through natural selection.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. Why haven't aliens already come here to obtain our resources
if they have had the ability to see our reasources for billions of years. I doubt a civiliation millions
of years more advanced than ours would have anything to gain by enslaviing man. I am sure they could build
robots that are much more productive than us.
Sounds like Mr Hawking just read some of Alastair Reynolds' work.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to cross interstellar space would have little need for any resources a biosphere at the bottom of a gravity well might offer. It wouldn't be worth the energy expenditure compared to asteroids and moons.
.. fast.
However if they did they would start with Kupier and Oort objects, moving along to mine something like Europa or Titan first which are rich in water and likely organic compounds. So we should watch titan, if we find it loosing mass to a cloud of UFOs we should start researching antimatter weapons
This is all moot of course, surviving in space practically requires a almost zero-wastage self contained habitats that need little more than an energy source. We should really be looking for dyson spheres not flying saucers.
Scratch that, knowing what we know about the potential coming singularity, maybe they've just uploaded? Why do we assume we'll be meeting little green men?
I really can only imagine a very few plausible scenarios where we'd be contacted... or invaded. We'd still be a scienfitic curiousity most likely, in which case we'd likely be thoroughly observed and studied without being aware. It'd be a necessity that we'd not be interfered with. Don't Panic.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Right, hiding didn't work for the Native Americans. Columbus came anyways. The best we can do is prepare for the unknown.
I agree with this premise.
After all, it is inline with the natural world, or history.
Any new lands invaders explore brings disease, conquest and eventual destruction of a cultures technology and civilization.
I would like to think an exception exists where we could point to and say, look, everyone just got a long.
But that is not the case.
So if we truly believe that natural laws work the same everywhere in the universe, then we can assume life works the same as well including for the fauna.
Which bring us to an almost stunning result: The reason why there is nobody here, is because this rule is in fact very very real.
That means:
1) Civilizations that do try to communicate are snuffed out rather quickly by their neighbors.
2) Since these civilizations do not survive, they can't come here.
Two very logical conclusions I would like to point out that naturally explains why we have not been visited and why things seem to be very very quiet.
and finally I come to number 3.
3) Civilizations that DO survive either make contact when they are technologically advanced enough to flee to other worlds, or the invader bites off too much they can chew and are conquered themselves.
Right now humanity would be a cinch to kill off and then, you have a nice planet all to yourself. We can't go anywhere and our technology is very primitive. Perhaps Stephen is just being prudent. We should wait till we are technologically advanced enough to travel to distant worlds easily so we would not be in danger of being killed off.
Something to think about and I do not see anything unscientific about 1-3. Seems logical and backed by our own historical fact.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
For every planet with intelligent life, there are many other planets that have not been depleted of the resources, and are much more easily colonized. Furthermore, any civilization that is capable of interstellar travel must also be capable of advanced Artificial Intelligence. Any civilization that is capable of advanced AI is probably peaceful or it, most likely, would have destroyed itself long before it was capable of interstellar travel. Splogic dictates that any civilization capable of interstellar space travel will be peaceful.
The ability of humans to pathologically reject what they don't want to know is simply amazing. In the 1950's the UFOs did everything but drop turds on the White House Lawn. The ability of some people to dismiss what they don't want to know with nonsensical references to ball lightning or swamp gas is beyond belief if you have not seen it happen.
Major world governments, do not have that option. Sometime in th 50's or before the UFOs did contact them. Ever since the major governments' policy has been to make humanity look more like redwoods and less like med-fly!
Does anyone really think that space aliens are smart enough to make ships capable of interstellar travel and yet not be able to do simple Malthusian arithmetic? If humanity had the power to escape the prison of the solar system, how long would it be before humans infested everywhere? An eyeblink by the standards of galactic history. It is the policy of the major earth governments to:
See how much is explained by this theory:
I do think that it follows from my logic that if there is a comparable or greater power than us in the galaxy, the moral thing for us to do is to destroy ourselves before we can start colonizing interstellar space.
Right... My post makes "silly assumptions".
So... according to that logic every intelligent species will eventually fit your criteria for self-immolation. BRILLIANT!
Not only did you solve the Fermi paradox, you have also cracked the purpose of life. Its purpose being to end.
Who's your logic mentor? Agent Smith?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Just go way back and kill baby Cain. That should fix EVERYTHING!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
A civilization so advanced will probably be able to transmute energy to matter and visa versa, meaning that our all so precious resources on earth would be nothing but worthless to them.
So Stephen Hawking thinks that this would be an OCP for the human race? That would depend on whether we met the Culture or some other grouping.
Humans have learnt to fight quite well, and we aren't likely to let some random alien species win. It might take some time to win though.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
...in the early years of the 21st century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a queeglumph with a high-definition trinary kinotentacle receiver might scrutinise the contestants and actors on 'Galactic Idol', 'Project Launchpad', 'Temporarily Mislocated' or 'Battlestar Dimensiona'.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with half-amused eyes, and slowly and surely teleported a bowl of popzapf, their remote controls and a refreshing Glurtlefloop (tm) from the stasis chamber...
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Seriouly, the Terrans and Protoss are just as ruthless when it comes to resource exploitation. Has the StarCraft Universe experienced peak mineral yet?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Right, because if we found a fascinating uncontacted alien civilisation, our first reflex would be to kill them all, bomb their artifacts beyond recognition and just strip mine their planet for precious minerals, right? Right?!? More like we would study the shit out of them without trying to contaminate them.
No, forget it. Christopher Columbus went with destruction, and we all know that intelligent beings from more advanced civilisations would do the same dumb things as people 5 centuries ago.
Which is funny, we like to project onto those eventual aliens our projected technological advances of centuries in the future, but at the same time we want to project onto them the behaviour, moral retardation, ruthlessness, disinterest and folly of centuries ago. No cookie for you Stephen Hawking, you may be good at astrophysics but that didn't prevent you from falling in the old trap of projecting the familiar onto the utterly unknown.
You just got troll'd!
they double-decimate you and repeat until proper annihilation has been achieved.
Just move our entire civilization underground like the Reptilians did, provided we don't start any underground wars with them we can fool the other invaders from the stars that we died in some atomic war.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I see that you've also played UFO: AI (and maybe X-COM UFO as well...)
If aliens exist and have the ability to travel a hundred light years to get to us (and to have found us no less) -- and they would probably have been around for a million more years than we, as our technological era is rather new -- then if their intention were bad, we'd have 0.00% chance of a) knowing they were coming, b) evading them, or c) defeating them. So there's no point in raising fear about something we can't even avoid. I know his moral is that we shouldn't be seeking them out or doing things that might draw attention to us, but I think that threat is rather minor.
The kind of fear of aliens he's proffering is a mere extension of our fear of our own mutual aggression because of our being primitive enough to have such a concept called "war," and the fact that we're not even smart enough to live in harmony with and hence sustainably in our own environment, and we didn't need to hear it from Stephen Hawking for those particular two synapses to fire. His ideas aren't new or fresh; we just have a tendency of treating them as something profound because they happen to come from Stephen Hawking. Think Independency Day, War of the Worlds, Aliens, Predator, Earth: Final Conflict, Stargate SG-1, etc. etc. going back decades. Just because he's good at math and cosmological speculation (*speculation*, no less -- he's not an oracle) doesn't mean that he has any special insight on this topic. He's just having fun with his authoritative status..
If they have bad intentions we won't be able to stop them. If they have good intentions and let us know it and we don't believe them, running away won't be an option (unless they leave voluntarily just because of the distrustful atmosphere). In fact if they have good intentions and they're smart (which they would be), such a fear of them would probably delay any ambition of theirs to publicly contact us. The ideas he's spreading are merely the planetary-level analogue to xenophobia or agoraphobia, or as the OP said, "hiding under our collective bed" with respect to the greater universe -- as if we're not a worried and anxious enough species already.
On the topic of the aliens themselves, though.. considering how new our technological development is, and how long species tend to last, and the mere hypothetical fact of their being able to reach vast distances to get to us, we're perfectly willing to admit that they may be millions of years "older" than we, technologically speaking. But we don't seem to fathom that being around for millions of years would likely mean growing in all imaginable dimensions, not just technological -- spiritual, emotional, psychological, cultural, universal understanding/awareness, etc. Even here on Earth some humans are vastly more advanced than others (think Gandhi, Sai Baba, the Dalai Lama, and so on), and they don't even have the advantage of a sane culture or a million years of cultural evolution. Just imagine how graceful the aliens must be -- in fact that's probably the *only* reason they haven't made a public announcement of their presence: they're probably well aware of us and smart enough to either a) follow something loosely like the "Prime Directive" (I say "loosely" because they wouldn't be dense enough to treat it as an absolute even at the expense of common sense or compassion), and/or b) they don't want to cause the mass panic or even just general anxiety that would result from such an exposure, or if nothing else to impose themselves where they might not feel particularly invited by the collective mentality. My belief is that, though there are always exceptions, in general the other species in the universe are at best like "big brothers" (not Orwellian), and at worse something like an average neighbor -- not particularly malicious, and likely willing to lend a helping hand if they happen to come across such a necessity.
After all, if the aliens come closer to us than 40 light years, they would probably pick up these and these images and they will be scared away...
Humanity has it all wrong with all this New World Order, economy, healthcare, and infighting bullshit. We need to focus on getting to Mars and uncovering a Prothean artifact, leading to our discovery mass effect technology so we can stop the Reaper threat!
There is probably one reason that aliens will not come to Earth as a raiding party/sterilizer group.
Digital uplift of consciousness with fantasy porn. Civilizations will become self absorbed and indulgent in cyberspace.
Then the real trolling beings. People say no aliens will come and say hi. I say for precisely that reason they will come. The only aliens who will come out of the virtual fuck fantasy are the ones craving real experiences with real consequences. They may even download themselves back into real bodies for added risk. And then they will troll the locals for the Lulz.
Fuck the Prime Directive. I obey the Lulz Directive.
(The thought of the GNAA as the last remaining spacefarers is both disturbing and amusing)
Now, think a million years ahead. Different suns. Different instantiation of life. Different rates of development.
The point is that the increase in technology is a product of the in-ability of the biological systems to keep up. Its not -artificial- if its destined to happen by virtue of the weakness of biological systems. Its sort of evolutionary. If the same pattern of emerges on other worlds and is given enough time, I think that all intelligent systems will migrate towards faster-better-smarter-stronger: Machines. And they will probably have less than zero use for any of us; they will be beyond advanced by the time they get here.
Take my word for it, they are already here in the form of megalomaniac corporations to mine our resources.
Holy shit someone is coming to get me...
came to mind when reading this.
Oh, like you didn't see this coming, like you didn't think someone wouldn't do this kind of thing.....
I for one welcome our new colonising, enslaving overlords!
Normally, I'm a big fan of very brilliant people... but then I didn't think it was possible to jump the shark in a motorized wheelchair. Seriously, what would any civilization want from a messed up, polluted tiny little planet like Earth? Any resource we have, except our own stupidity, is more abundant elsewhere.
-- Straights are for fast cars, corners are for fast drivers.
This is just moronic. Why would such an advanced speicies bother to visit earth in order to harvest nor colonize such a small planet. Given that they can move that far in three dimensions or even travel in four, that would just make us a less likely candidate for anything other than scientific research.
That might however also be a bad thing for the human race, but surely we have other more likely things to worry about in the perspective of doomsday theories/prophecies. /slashdot@jonasrosenqvist.se
If they're looking for resources, they could do a lot better than trying to take over Earth. Humans have depletion quite in hand, thankyouverymuch.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
It's easy to know why an intelligent creature might come here in search of other intelligent life, in fact we know exactly why they would do it because it is the very same reason that we go out looking for intelligent life: curiosity. There don't need to be "resources" involved, or really any motive at all other than trying to understand our universe, how we got here, what is going to happen to us, and what other creatures share our fate.
I have said this for years! Imagine you've been on a very long cross-country drive. You come across a small town. What are your priorities? Get gas, Get food, go to the bathroom and dump your trash. A basic pit stop.
Well this is exactly the case with interstellar travel. It isn't easy! You're limited by the speed of light. To get from one system to the next takes a long time. And when they get here they're gonna do the same thing... To get "gas" they're gonna drain of the sun of all its hydrogen. Food... Us. All of it. All the plants, all the animals all the humans... It's a very, very long trip to the next system; gonna need more than a snack to tie them over. The only thing they're gonna leave behind is their trash.
We do not want to meet an alien race because all it is going to mean to them is a pit stop.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Hawking should stick to math and leave the philosophy to the more scientific among us. People have a disturbing tendency to revere the ideas of celebrities, no matter how closed-minded they might be. And if you're going to point out the similarities between cosmology and philosophy, I would only counter that he has a most unscientific attitude toward the latter.
Look at it from a galactic scale and you will note that we are not anywhere near the action when it comes to the resources this galaxy has to offer. If you are an advanced intelligence capable of interstellar travel and you need more resources then you are going to head for the closest stars and from those you would choose the one that put you on an optimal path toward the most dense parts of the galaxy. So what about Sol, where is our sun, off on the edge of the galaxy on an arm and near the edge of the arm so even if the consumptive nomads started their journey further out along this arm that we are on they would be travelling along the arms core, not near us. So how many likely system are so close to us that this logic does not matter, bugger all and then our signal may actually give the others a hint that they should choose the nearest other star to plunder as it is a lower risk proposition. In other words even if the "other" is a huge big heartless star eating robot the chances of it existing are slim and the chances of it finding it logical to come our way are even slimmer. Do the math, we are galactic hill billies and need not fear the traffic on the main roads.
He's just fscking with us ;) Probably some reporter asked yet another dumb question like "If you grow your hair long does it make you high?"
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
This is one of those arguments that's a bit silly. I'm actually surprised that Mr. Hawking posited something so ludicrous.
Folks, we are never going to leave our solar system and zip around the universe in spaceships. There will never be a Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, Star Wars, Solaris, Dune, Battlestar Galactica, Pandorum, or, sadly, Firefly.
We will have reached the singularity, the point in which machines are more intelligent than us, the point beyond which, to survive, we will join our intelligences with those of the machines. At some point the AIs and captured intelligences, able to function as a single, multi-part, inhuman mind, will depose us as the lead species of Earth.
It's my honest belief that the technology to breach one's home stellar system and the technology to achieve the singularity must necessarily be reached at roughly the same time, and the outcome would nearly always be the same. Once the machines are smarter than the species that created them and once they attain the desire to survive, the parent species is subsumed.
Why would a species of the mind, unbound by the physical limitations of biology, find us interesting enough to communicate with? Now that we have technology, our time will be cosmologically short, and the end may be brutal, but the result will be like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Another species of the mind. It will be our descendants, the machine minds, that aliens, also machine minds, will be interested in communicating with.
I have a suspicion that alien intelligences are aware of us and simply watching, waiting for the emergence and dominance of our descendant machine minds. Until then, they lose nothing by waiting. In fact, I would think they might jeopardize our transformation by communicating with us, by revealing the course our intelligence will take. How might mankind react if they weren't ignorant to the eventualities?
Mr. Hawking either lacks imagination or is pretending that man's time upon the stage is eternal. I'm a bit disappointed in him either way.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
A civilization which has achieved such a degree of scientific knowledge, such as interstellar travel, is most likely to be an enlightened one. Humans always have a nasty tendency to project their own shortcomings. The arrival of such a civilization would in fact mean that all official instances would lose power and meaning, that we would have to reconsider our own knowledge and view on science. Humans could perhaps evolve pas their futile differences and live as one peaceful race. The technological advancement would end poverty and dependency once and for all and people could be really free and perhaps see other worlds.
This is exactly what those in control do NOT want.
The technological singularity could give us the means to fight any unwanted alien invasion. At least machines carrying our legacy could spread throughout the galaxy, colonizing alien planets and being the earthlings. Humans are the first and last naturally evolving species to develop technologically capable intelligence in our planet. Machines will replace us as the dominant life form on this world, since we can make them much more advanced than ourselves. They don't have organic needs, so they will easily wander through space and spread. We're pretty much stuck on this rock, and we're the cusp of organic evolution on this planet, whatever comes next will be engineered by us, eventually becoming our replacement. I don't think humans will disappear or become slaves of the machines.
At first machines will be our servants, they will always defend us from external threats, but eventually they'll become advanced enough to develop their own agendas, that will hopefully not include destruction of our species. We shall have two groups: super advanced machines that will do as they please, and not-so-advanced machines along with humans doing whatever else. Usually not very many conflicts for resources shall arise, since the intelligent machines should be able to extract resources from places humans and their less advanced machines can't.
We evolved from primates, but we normally don't live in the same habitats as them, they're out in the forests and we're here in the cities. We have some resource conflicts with them, but they'll end up surviving OK. The relationship shall be very similar between super machines and humans.
Given the past history of contacts between "more" and "less" advanced peoples it is ridiculously optimistic to believe that they will be nicer than us.
We, for example, are inconceivably more complicated and "advanced" than ants but we still step on them.
This is all just my personal opinion.
I have a question and an answer.
The question is - why would a respectable brain like Hawking’s miss-lead us on the supplies issue? Is his wanting to afraid us? Does he want us (people of Earth) to be scared of aliens? Because it is unquestionably better to know your (potential) enemy than to play the ostrich.
Meanwhile, sooner or later the need will come for us to encounter another intelligent species. Just to show us that is possible. This will have the same effect on Earth's population as Jesus’s philosophy did, showing the way, showing the other way. And if we will be at a critical point where an extremely important decision should be made about our future, they're better show up: dropping by, just to say hi!
Today, for some people (like what, 2? maybe 10%?) of Earth knowing for sure, having a proof of alien existence will be a boost, an incredible one. But for a large majority it will be a nightmardesque awakening from different beliefs. And you can't just destroy a philosophical system, a human's beliefs without driving him crazy. That is brainwash. So for now, no, it's not the moment just yet.
The answer I found is that the only useful thing to us from a more technologically advanced alien race is one of their history books. This book should contain information only up to 50 years more than our actual technological level. Initially I thought 100, but even 10 are huge. The most interesting part, tough, will not be the technical advancement history, but the real history, the conflicts, how did they solved them, their beliefs (religions), their philosophical system, their way of life. Now that will be awesome!
...from orbit. It's the only way to be sure that the advanced aliens won't eat us!
.. then they may come here to wipe us out purely as revenge for sending them Family Guy.
Why earthlings are exploring moon, mars and other planets?
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
He says, 'I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. ...
If they have the resources to build those ships, then they probably don't need us... perhaps they need some material resources, but they can obtain that from quite a lot of planets, not necessarily earth-like, nor necessarily inhabited. Anyway, if they don't rush up, there will be no much resources here also.
"Stephen Hawking rents 'Avatar', Panic Ensues"
As long as a society needs institutions like police, they are not ready for outer space.
Mr. Hawking also obviously moves within the same mindset.
From a security/military point of view, the key is what they are capable of. Intentions are hard to determine, and can change. Capabilities may be hard to determine, but overestimated capabilities leaves you still safe.
However, the ability to travel in large groups between stars implies a level of energy control that is daunting. Any efforts to resist need to be based on making it just too much work.
If the aliens can use a blasted planet, then we're hooped. However if they want to have some form of 'economic' dealings with us, there is some space to work. (We have economic dealings with cows: We exchange steady food, disease prevention, good water for steak.)
The first level short of blasting could involve taking out most of the world's electronics with EMP pulses. At one point I read an estimate that a 100 MT bomb exploded 120 miles over Nebraska would take out most of the electronics in North America. This would essentially stop our economy, probably without killing more than 5% of the population directly.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1626766&cid=31942386
Maybe I'm a genius.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
...unless we actually went out of our way to bother them.
Hypothesis:
The universe is roughly 15 billion years old.
As I understand it, our solar system is approximately 5 billion years old, and was generated from a molecular cloud that would itself have been created by a previous star exploding, which would have had a lifespan (to be nova-likely) of something under 1 billion years. So VERY roughly speaking, our entire existence cycle is roughly 6 billion years or so.
Even granting that the universe didn't really settle into its current state for the first 5 billion years, that would give the first civilizations - if there are any, and to me it's likely - as much as a 5 billion year head-start on us.
So extant civilizations in the universe would be anywhere from 0 (just reached sentience) to 5 billion years old. Given that on such a scale, we're just on the verge of reaching starflight ourselves, we don't really have to worry about encountering any races YOUNGER than us...they won't be starfaring.
Which means that anyone we meet is going to be anywhere from 0 to 5 BILLION years more advanced.
Look at Earth, and ask yourself what chance a civilization would have against a group only 1000 years more advanced. And then consider the increasing PACE of development - the next 1000 years' tech will be a MUCH greater step than, for example 0 AD to 1000 AD, or 1000 AD-2000 AD.
And then figure out how 'troubling' we'd be to someone 100,000, a million, or a billion years more advanced?
By their scale, really, we'd be insects (minus perhaps the ability to actually annoy). If they want something we have, they'd just take it and probably not even notice our objections.
So no, I'd like to HOPE that they are also ethically advanced, but I wouldn't stake humanity on it. I'd much prefer that they didn't even know we were here (aside from the chance of accidental obliteration due to construction of a hyperspace bypass...), and that we have absolutely nothing they want.
Further, my thought experiment would also suggest that yes, if they DID care to observe us out of some curiosity, we'd have absolutely no clue, even if they were right here. A billion years more advanced? Do ants notice you watching them? I doubt it. Hell, events that we take to be logically-explainable processes like volcanoes could just be the equivalent of the finger of a bored supersentient adolescent.
-Styopa
No, forget it. Christopher Columbus went with destruction, and we all know that intelligent beings from more advanced civilisations would do the same dumb things as people 5 centuries ago.
Five centuries or five years, human behavior has only changed shape to suit the available technologies and accommodate much larger population bases. Other than that, everything is the same, or perhaps even worse since psychopaths have multiplied in the capitalist environment.
Slavery, which was one of the top destructive forces in Columbus' day, remains alive and well today, the difference being that we keep our slaves in factories in other nations rather than on plantations in our backyards.
Whereas resource rape is relatively new; there was no strip mining in Columbus' day, but if they could have they would have, no doubt.
The way we treat the cattle and various livestock industries should offer an indication as to how we might find ourselves treated by an alien presence. Life eats life and we are not the top of the food chain, but human egotism is such that we think aliens would want to parlay with us rather than just treat us like a resource.
Aliens have been here since the dawn of history and simply remain hidden because they exist in a higher energetic state. We are trees to their people, and with our vastly limited perceptive abilities as compared to theirs, we are nothing more than a crop awaiting harvest.
Why do you think we built all those hundreds of empty concentration camps. . ?
-FL
I thought Niven was way better before he started writing with Pournelle, but what do I know?
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
john may lives!
Well, those are all the bad scenarios. Personally I'd be happier to think that ET would land in secret, and start slowly training, teaching, or converting select groups of humans. Heck, if you look at so called "aliens abductions" as them taking select humans to try and adapt them to the ways of the universe, learn from us, and have us learn from them (no anal probes thanks), then perhaps such things are so unlikely after all.
"I would not be surprised if a fry cook invents warp drive."
Do they call them fry cooks in Montana?
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Seems unlikely that advanced aliens would need to resort to military conquest when economic conquest would be cheaper and more efficient. They could probably trade some of their minor technology, like nuclear fussion, light-weight alloys, or computers on the open market here and buy anything they needed from us. Instead of having to bomb us into oblivian and then do all the work of shifting through the debry, they could sell us a small nuclear fussion plant that could power a city, recieve in exchange enough materials to make a hundred more, trade a few of those for more material, and so on. The items they give us would cost them no more than the materials they would consume conquering us (bombs, etc.), and we would deliver whatever they want from us to their door instead having to dig through a radioactive rubble.
Eric S. Nylund explored it in the 90's in his awesome sci-fi novel Signal to Noise.
In a nutshell, humanity makes contact with an alien race that are like a galactic version of capitalist exploiters -- they just want to discover other less-evolved societies (and the location of their planets) so they can consume them for resources. The races that survive are the ones that successfully conceal themselves and keep anyone from finding out where they are hidden.
Its a very entertaining book, with an awesome and hilarious ending which I won't spoil for you here.
Anyone remember the good ole days. Three part equations, observation, experiments hypotheses you know, this sort of stuff as opposed to this sort of stuff
-
Many have called Stephen Hawkins a genius and whilst I don't doubt he's a very clever guy (indeed smarter than I), I'm not sure what observable proof of his science we've had to date? On this latest offering/musings on ET - I'm interested in how this thread seems to mostly reflect the view of staying quiet and even mentions (godwin alert) killing hitler as a baby and wiping out other civilisations as an act of compassion as all life is likely to compete itself to death.
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Maybe look at this for some hope in human evolution and violence whilst the evidence presented isn't perfect, it is at least an attempt at evidence not just a single mind kind of making stuff up...
The good news: there's no particular reason for alien species to invade the earth for "resources", because realistically, all rocky planets are more or less the same. Big balls of silicate minerals, lots of iron, nickel, aluminum, smaller quantities of other stuff. You don't have to come to earth to get this stuff, you can get it quite literally anywhere. Or if you need volatiles, there are plenty of comets waiting to be picked up.
The bad news: that pretty much means that there's essentially no chance of kicking off a space-based economy - since there's nothing particularly unique to be "mined" in space, and getting stuff from up there is ludicrously expensive, we'll probably just save our money and keep using the stuff down here at the bottom of the gravity well.
What do we have that aliens, capable of traveling between stars, would want.
Gold --NO(more common in space, asteroids etc.)
Platinum --NO(more common in space, asteroids etc.)
Hydrogen/water --NO(more common in space comets etc.)
Tritium etc. --NO(more common in space, solar wind etc.)
A place to live. --NO(Earth has nasty creepy crawlies and aliens have ammonia for blood etc.; They might be robots -- Earth has nasty corrosive atmosphere, and electrolytes every where. Mercury might be better. )
Our culture/knowledge. --NO(Earth has boring ignorant creatures with limited life span that only have pain and suffering to offer.)
We just aren't that special or attractive to advanced civilizations.
They just don't care.
The chance of anyone even being able to pick the broadcast out of background noise seems exceedingly small. The chance of turning that analog signal back into a moving picture seems even smaller. And even given all that, what on earth would an alien civilization make of it? A funny-looking biped waving it's forelimbs and making screechy noises, in front of a big crowd of other roaring bipeds. With literally no context at all, it would be the video equivalent of Linear B.
Sure, gravity gets it all together for you. But then you have to lift it up out of the gravity well and ship it all the way back to where your home civilization can use it. Why bother, when you can get the same thing anywhere?
Radiation hormesis. Disclaimer: while this is not a generally accepted theory, it's not complete kooky-town, either. This is one of those cases in which reasonable people can disagree about whether it's true. Personally, I don't know enough to form an opinion.
... the chances of there being anything like drugs appearing on some other planet is approximately nil. The fact is that there just isn't anything on these planets that would be worth the expense of recovering it. Your story makes for good SF, but it doesn't match up with reality very well.
There's nothing particularly special about earth - it's made up of all the same stuff as the rest of the chunks of rock out there. Why would aliens even bother to show up?
To be so rapacious as to need this many resources, your hypothetical society would have to be growing exponentially in numbers. And if it was growing exponentially in numbers, it would fill up the entire galaxy in a matter of a few thousand years. Given that the galaxy is [voice="sagan"] billions and billions [/voice] of years old... it's highly, highly probable that this would have already happened, and absolutely tremendously unlikely that it's just getting started now(ish). So the fact that we haven't already been pillaged is pretty good prima facie evidence that this kind of thing is not going on.
The costs of even going to some extrasolar planet (not to mention sending an invasion/economic exploitation force) would be so huge that there would effectively never be any return on the investment, so we dont' really have to worry about being invaded for economic reasons after all. An Orion Project style mission to Alpha Centauri was once estimated to cost a tenth of the entire US GDP - or a trillion and a half dollars in today's figures. That just gets a spaceship there. To actually invade some planet, well, you'd have to send a few scouting missions first, to know what you were getting into. Then you'd have to build and send your invasion force. Since even optimistic estimates for getting two Alpha Centauri (in the Orion-type ship) were 40+ years, this project would take hundreds of years and cost uncounted trillions of dollars. And then how do you actually monetize what you'd get? Who would get the money?
Stephen Hawking is a smart guy, but he needs to think this one through. This is not even a remotely realistic threat.
I never bought the aliens invading us for resources idea, it would be like discovering there are cavemen living on a asteroid in the asteroid belt so we launch an attack to steal their fire. In the original TV series V, they wanted to steal our water, the universe is full of water, if you have access to the amounts of energy to launch an attack on another planet, you certainly have the energy to purify water from asteroids, you could even just make water from hydrogen and oxygen or even make the oxygen atoms themselves. What could the earth possible have that the presence of life would be a sign of. If we look at our own history here on earth, the australian or american natives for example, people did not come to australia and america because they new there were people there, the people just got in the way. It would seem to me we are better of letting alien civilizations know of our existence, so they may take us into consideration where planning their hyperspatial express route, not that they necessarily will, but we are better of giving them the option.
Sorry Stephen, I think that's about as likely as them coming to steal our women. Have you been watching Independence Day, which was wrong from beginning to end? Any aliens with the technology to travel the stars have no need of going to the bother of invading a populated planet for resources. As has become perfectly clear in recent years, our galaxy, indeed our local solar system, teems with materials that are unclaimed and free to exploit. Much easier to target uninhabited planets or indeed asteroids. The old idea of aliens stealing our water is a classic of the genre, but pretty dumb when you consider how much free water is out there. Don't get me wrong, the idea of alien invasion is a fun one and I've even written a book relevant to the subject, (Waging the War of the Worlds - http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/ but we've got very little to worry about on this score, with one exception. If the aliens are anything like us, there might be purely xenophobic reasons for them to attack!
Maybe they don't like future competition so they kill all intelligent civilizations in their infancy? Someone already had the idea and wrote a nice book on it:
>>>
The killing star
Authors Charles R. Pellegrino, George Zebrowski
<<<
Good read, although the Buddha, Jesus sections are very weak.
Well, the earth has had plentiful resources for at _least_ the last 10,000 years ;) and we haven't been invaded yet. At our current rate of technological development, we will most likely be able to 'hold our own' within the next 1,000 years, so I wouldn't worry too much about it... Unless of course, they are waiting on the far side of Mars at this very moment just waiting for the right time to attack!
Anyway, we've already shit on our resources, so if they did attack now, thet'd be too late!
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
Hawking's example of American Natives doing poorly as the result of European visitation DOES NOT CORRELATE !
American Natives suffered because Europeans brought new diseases that Europeans were resistant to. Soo this is the question that must always be revisited, are we the most primitive, is our planet dirtier then others, will our diseases always be worse, trump alien diseases.
I think the odds are pretty good that from a practical standpoint, that is for the purposes of war, our diseases are the worst, thus we are protected from contact and invasion, for the time being.
It is often said that if they were soo powerful and aggressive we would have been invaded already, perhaps NOT, are our diseases protecting us from invasion and are the huge distances to travel to get here withholding their most powerful forces ???
Will they eventually get here with the BIG GUNS and are their biobots breading alien human hybrids so that they can live amongst us without being killed by our diseases so that they then may invade, control, and dominate successfully.
And this talk of consuming the resources of a planet to exhaustion and then moving on, it is hard to believe that an advanced culture would need soo many resources, their expenditure of energy from our point of view should be PERFECTLY EFFICIENT.
I think it is MUCH more likely that they would invade to dominate and control, to STOP us and their criminals from spreading our diseases to other planets.
They will come and kill us for our ART! ...
They will steal our statues! Our paintings! Our music, our sitcoms (they might download them from the internet, but according to *IAA thats stealing anyway)!
They will steal the Eiffel Tower, Mount Rushmore and the Pyramids and Stonehege. Although the last two were borrowed from them, so perhaps that's not stealing
I say, reopen the base on Cheyenne Mountain, put SG-1 team back again!!!!
We need to defend ourselves against the Goaud, replicators, wraiths and Orais!!!
Hell I refuse to go live underground in Sion!!!!
Contact the Asgards and Tokras!!! they may be able to prepare us to defend our planet!!!!!!!!!
There was one horror story about one cryonics company that had equipment failure and their tanks warmed up, as in HOT! The contents were obviously lost, and I think there was a resultant lawsuit or two.
I also don't think you'll be the same person if they were to bring you "back" -- you'd be an identical copy that is fully convinced you're the original. But you won't be. You see, I have this theory of consciousness that it requires a continual activation to keep the true "you" you. And that link is broken if you die. Indeed, even if you were brought back from sudden hypothermia as sometimes happens when individuals fall into very frigid waters, I don't think you're the same if your brain went flat-line.
Of course, this raises all kinds of notions with regards to consciousness and humans, which is totally out of line for this topic.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Let's take a look at nuclear physics/energy. If you look back ~100 years, the idea of matter and energy being interchangeable was only theoretical. If you go back ~150 years, you would probably be laughed at if you claimed that it would be possible to power an entire city with enough electricity to blot mask the stars with light, using only a piece of metal.
You are assuming that the progress of knowledge is linear; that what we know now vs. what we'll know 100 years from now is the equivalent of what we knew then, 100 years ago, to what we know now.
You couldn't be more wrong.
Knowledge is highly nonlinear. It interacts with itself, and it has wide-ranging synergistic effects. But the flipside of that is that once you hit a critical level of understanding, you quickly exhaust what you don't know that will also have huge impact on you as a civilization.
The progress of knowledge is more like the sigmoid curve than a straight line. The 20th Century represents the sharp rise in that sigmoid, and we are approaching the asymptote now.
This is more the case with (large scale) physics than it is with anything else. We're at different points of that sigmoid in other fields.
I wish I were wrong on this, and I've been trying to convince myself that I am over the years. But I don't think so.
Be grateful that we've lived at a unique time in history and have been able to witness and experience the sharp rise of that sigmoid. I think we've got more rise to see, but we're closer to that asymptote that we'd like to believe, I'm afraid.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
My point is that although we've achieved a lot, the nature of the questions we're able to ask today demonstrate that we still don't really understand huge areas of how our universe is constructed and the physics that support it.
If we try to see a way today to make interstellar space travel cheap and affordable in the context of the limitations we know of (as you are doing) then we can only assume that it's impossible. But the whole of history has demonstrated that as advanced as technology and knowledge is at any fixed point in time, hundreds and thousands of years later what is known and achievable is vastly different. Off the scale even. And so it will be for our successors, many generations from now.
See my post somewhere else on this thread about the sigmoid nature of our understanding of the Universe.
Just because there are gaps in our understanding does not mean that our basic understanding of GR and QM are so far off that we can't draw some cautious conclusions about what is possible, what will be expensive, and what we shouldn't even bother with.
We may still do Interstellar Travel. I have some ideas of my own on how to make it "cheap and affordable", but nothing to do with circumventing the realities of Relativity and the limitation of the speed of light.
Basically, an idea I've been playing around with -- self-replicating robots that I've dubbed "Replicons". These Replicons would go out to the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter, etc. to to use the raw materials present to not only build more of themselves, but to also build anything we want -- including interstellar space ships of any size we want. The Orion idea could be utilized for propulsion. A trip to Alpha Centauri would take 40 years or so, so it would be a generational journey. And I know MANY would want to sign up for such a journey.
The costs here would be mainly one of time, plus the enormous initial investment to engineering and deploying the first of the Replicons to get things going.
But at least the Replicons would provide a significant ROI for its investors -- all kinds of rare earths can be had; all kinds of goods could be manufactured by these beasties. Can you imagine doing an order for a nice sleek car and having it parachuted from orbit to your front door in a few days?
The engineering challenge I see for Replicons will involve finding new ways to mine and refine -- ways that don't require a lot of water or petrochemicals. The understanding on how to do this may already be there, but just not practical to do on a world rich in water and petrochemicals. Still, it will require a lot of research and development, but I'm up for it if the funding can be had.
So, as you can see, I am not a complete killjoy on this matter. I was hoping to do something with the Repliconics idea, but I don't have the time nor the clout to pull it off right now. And due to all the misconceptions created by popular movies like "Terminator", it may prove to be a hard sell in any case.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies