Would advanced alien tech surprise you?
- Thread starter Crewman47
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Since the concept itself is entirely made up by fiction writers there's no reason to assume anything of the kind WOULD exist. We don't know if Hobbits, Orcs or Leprechauns ever existed in pre-history either, but odds are good that they did not.
Science fiction made the term up, but there could be something like it out there, even if there isn't it would be a handy tool. If not then an entire fleet would have to leave to explore one area, which would be a waste and take alongggg time to explore our small part of the galaxy.
Just like there could be leprechauns, dragons, elves and hobbits.
But probably not.
Exactly.
In the real world, space exploration is mind-bogglingly expensive and time consuming, and it always will be. The fundamental questions of the endeavor is how much money are you willing to spend, and how soon do you want your results.
This is one of the resolutions to the Fermi Paradox, by the way: at the end of the day, the COST of interstellar exploration always vastly outweighs the benefits to such a degree that no extraterrestrial intelligence ever commits enough of its resources to that task to make an impact in the universe. To assume that they would--or even should--is something of a conceit among humans who assume that intelligence has certain universal traits, including curiosity and the desire to contact other civilizations, but there is no reason at all to assume that an alien race, no matter how highly developed, MUST harbor such a strong desire for contact that they would commit a large portion of their resources to such a program (our civilization sure as hell doesn't, and the idea that this will ever change has never been anything more than wishful thinking).
Boy, I am soo glad you have everything figured out and saved every sentient being in the universe the trouble. Talk about conceit.
Where precisely did he said any of that was fact?
Eh. He's got a point – due to the immense difficulty, it's not even a majority opinion amongst humanity that we should devote time and recourses to flying to the stars. There's no reason we should expect any hypothetical alien civilization to go to the trouble of spaceflight, either.
We're dooomed.
My sentiments exactly. Especially if our species never gets off this rock we call Earth.
Well, the Universe is going to expire eventually by heat death, Big Rip or whatever, so why bother doing anything?
There is a difference of time scale. If we remain on this rock, we will probably use up all its resources in a couple thousand years.
That's a far cry from the billions of years before heat death.
Yeah, it was rhetorical question really. I agree with you.
I think you have the question wrong. It should be "Why does he believe it is fact?". To which I can only reply: ask him. It's his statement that purports to know the motivations of alien races he hasn't encountered, all future technological development, and what will ultimately not be possible.
It once took an entire civilization to build something as large as the pyramids. How many buildings do you think have been built in just the last year that are larger? Who is to say that in the future new technologies might make interstellar flight reach an economical point where it won't take a majority opinion?
^I agree with the premise of avoiding ascribing human traits to hypothetical alien races but one thing that I think many physicists and TV-scientists are guilty of is automatically going to the opposite side of that coin and making sweeping generalizations that aliens will automatically be nothing like us (I know Newtype you were just talking about certain specific cognitive traits like curiosity, etc, but the point goes to any kind of comparison).
I think it's obvious we shouldn't assume aliens will resemble us, either physically, socially, cognitively, or psychologically but I do think the study of astrobiology should try to identify the environmental triggers that cued certain evolutionary paths in US so that we understand whether certain traits of ours are flukes or biologically selective advantages. I really don't mean to steer this conversation into one about evolution, but I do think that at the core of the question of "Who would aliens be?", is the question of whether there are any underlying principles that direct the development of an intellectual species; i.e., questions like "Are we intellectually curious because it has proven an evolutionarily advantageous trait for us to be curious?" Thus it might prove evolutionarily advantageous on another planet entirely.
That's actually a bad example because I'm pretty sure the pyramids are larger than any standing building, in terms of footprint and mass, not height. But I agree with your point... We perceive space travel as difficult, but it's only a 60 yr old technology, and socially we haven't put much into it. Look at the electronics industry and how fast it has matured, from the 60's until today, and that's because of the MONUMENTAL amount of money that's been put into it, from one end of the industry to the other, because of the incredible demand for it, and the diversity of its application. If you took the amount of money and manhours spent in the last 60 years on the development of microelectronics, and investigated how much further along in technology that same amount of utility would have progressed our space program, it would be counted in decades. Similarly, if you took the money and man hours spent on space exploration and asked yourself how far we would have gotten in the last 60 years had that been what we dedicated towards the development of electronics, we would still be in the 70's or the 80's.
I think it's obvious we shouldn't assume aliens will resemble us, either physically, socially, cognitively, or psychologically but I do think the study of astrobiology should try to identify the environmental triggers that cued certain evolutionary paths in US so that we understand whether certain traits of ours are flukes or biologically selective advantages. I really don't mean to steer this conversation into one about evolution, but I do think that at the core of the question of "Who would aliens be?", is the question of whether there are any underlying principles that direct the development of an intellectual species; i.e., questions like "Are we intellectually curious because it has proven an evolutionarily advantageous trait for us to be curious?" Thus it might prove evolutionarily advantageous on another planet entirely.
That's actually a bad example because I'm pretty sure the pyramids are larger than any standing building, in terms of footprint and mass, not height. But I agree with your point... We perceive space travel as difficult, but it's only a 60 yr old technology, and socially we haven't put much into it. Look at the electronics industry and how fast it has matured, from the 60's until today, and that's because of the MONUMENTAL amount of money that's been put into it, from one end of the industry to the other, because of the incredible demand for it, and the diversity of its application. If you took the amount of money and manhours spent in the last 60 years on the development of microelectronics, and investigated how much further along in technology that same amount of utility would have progressed our space program, it would be counted in decades. Similarly, if you took the money and man hours spent on space exploration and asked yourself how far we would have gotten in the last 60 years had that been what we dedicated towards the development of electronics, we would still be in the 70's or the 80's.
^ true. They could be peaceful lizard like people that breath Methane.
Life will not be anything like us, while some may be human like, might even have the same look as us, their make up will be far different.
Ex. Anciets on Stargate, looked like humans but were far different, only through genetic testing and mating with us did we get some of their DNA.
Life will not be anything like us, while some may be human like, might even have the same look as us, their make up will be far different.
Ex. Anciets on Stargate, looked like humans but were far different, only through genetic testing and mating with us did we get some of their DNA.
At which time, a whole lot of people are going to live very short, non-offspring producing lives, and the human population is going to drop substantially: humanity undergoes a period of downsizing.
Our species has only existed in its current form for about half a million years. We might soldier on for another half a million yet, but to expect our standard of living and technological achievements to endure that long is probably wishful thinking.
Actually it's my statement that we DON'T know the motivations of alien races we haven't encountered and therefore the Fermi Paradox proceeds from a false assumption. Why should we EXPECT alien races to seek contact and then imply a paradox in the fact that they have failed to do so? It's just as likely that a sufficiently advanced civilization would purposefully AVOID contact on the off chance that an alien presence might disrupt the balance of their (finally stabilized) civilization.
Or a million other things might be at play; they might have contacted us already and gone unrecognized, they might have contacted our ancestors and been forgotten about, they might have contacted past species on Earth that developed flash-in-the-pan intelligence and then stopped paying attention to Earth after those species went extinct (not believing that intelligence is likely to arise twice in the same spot). Point is, we have NO IDEA what an alien civilization will do when it reaches a certain point of technological development, and there is zero reason to think that seeking contact with other civilizations is one of them. Again, there's little indication that OUR civilization will ever get around to that, which makes applying those motives to an alien race that much more speculative.
Which is still speculation, and an assumption based on optimism and a fair amount of wishful thinking. Some day that might change, at least in the context of exploiting resources of our own solar system. But the act of exploring OTHER solar systems is an order of magnitude more difficult and more complicated, let alone searching those solar systems for intelligent life. There's no gaurantee that we'll ever get around to this, or even bother to try; so far, even the exploration of our own solar system has had a depressingly low priority for the past five decades.
And this is what we know about our OWN civilization, and we can only speculate about what we might do some time in the future. We might colonize all the planets and moons of our system, or we might continue to use manned space exploration as some kind of high-tech pork barrel program. Otherwise, the Fermi Paradox isn't that much of a paradox UNTIL we have seen ourselves reach out into the galaxy looking for other intelligent life and then wonder why nobody else is doing the same. Why expect other civilizations to accomplish what we haven't, can't, won't, and possibly never will?
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