If We're Not Alone, We Should Fear the Aliens

[ThankQ]

When considering the prospect of alien life, humankind should prepare for the worst, according to a new study: Either we're alone, or any aliens out there are acquisitive and resource-hungry, just like us.

These two unpalatable options are pretty much the only possibilities, according to the new study. That's because evolution is predictable, and alien biospheres should thus produce intelligent creatures much like us, with technological prowess and an ever-increasing need for resources.

skipping...

We're likely alone in the universe, he writes. The cosmos is almost inconceivably vast, likely harboring at least 100 billion galaxies. And our solar system is relatively young compared to the rest of the universe — 4.6 billion years versus 13.7 billion years.

So there should have been plenty of time and opportunity for many alien civilizations to get a sizable evolutionary head start. The fact that E.T. seemingly hasn't contacted us is a strong indication that he's just not out there, according to Conway Morris.

The huge distances that would likely separate potential alien civilizations don't present an insuperable barrier to contact, Conway Morris said. "At least so far as this galaxy is concerned, a distance of circa 100,000 light years doesn't seem insurmountable, given a relatively slow diffusion rate and a geometrical rate of establishment of colonies," he said.

Anyway, go read the whole article.

That' 100,000 light years thing is interesting. If you had 2 billion years to slowly expand, getting 100,000 light years wouldn't be that big a deal. You'd only need to get one light year out every 20,000 years. And that's assuming you were on one edge of the galaxy and you wanted to get to another.

Now... getting from the Pinwheel Galaxy to here, that would take a bit more doing. But why would anyone leave their galaxy to go to another one, unless they had some really kickass FTL?

I have about 20 points/agruments to make w/the article, but I don't want to use up everyone's thunder.

It's a good read, and an opinion I've heard before but brushed off without too much consideration. Maybe I should rethink that.


ETA: Yeah! Go read! Link? huh? Oh...

http://www.livescience.com/space/aliens-earth-danger-fear-110110.html

 

[Shatnertage]

I can see where he's coming from, but...

If the aliens have mastered interstellar travel, shouldn't they already have a pretty good grip on managing their resources already? If they can travel dozens of light years and make the return trip already, do they really need our minerals?

Or will they come To Serve Man?

 

[ThankQ]

^Exactly. And why, a la Independence Day, would they need to strip OUR planet? No matter what you think, I'm sure we can all agree there are far more uninhabited worlds than inhabited. If you need gold or iron, why on earth come to Earth? I'd go to Mercury if I were them. Jupiter has a hell of a lot more useful gases than we have.

If you have figured out how to harness vacuum energy or some other massive source like that, what would you need with what we got?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

It's not worth the expense of travelling to another star system if you can exploit the energy and resources that are available in your own. If you can use computer technology to simulate any environment that you might encounter, why bother risking conflict and sabotaging your posterity by going anywhere? Even if your star becomes a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole, you can download yourselves into a new form that can extract useful energy from it for billions of years.

In any case, I don't agree that Darwinian evolution rules completely -- I suspect beings of sentient races evolve in a self-imposed Lamarckian manner once they have mastered the science of Genetics. They can become anything that they choose to be as a species, and most likely everything that they can imagine.

 

[bryce]

I can see where he's coming from, but...

If the aliens have mastered interstellar travel, shouldn't they already have a pretty good grip on managing their resources already? If they can travel dozens of light years and make the return trip already, do they really need our minerals?
[SNIP]

Yeah, most alien invasion stories (books, movies, etc) where the aliens need out land/resources/water/air/etc suffer from that major plot hole. (Niven's "Footfall" actually has a clever justification for why the aliens need our planet even though the have interstellar travel...)

But maybe they are berserkers, or have religious reasons, or have reasons that are beyond our comprehension - reasons that are...alien?

 

[Robert D. Robot]

[clip].....But maybe they are berserkers, or have religious reasons, or have reasons that are beyond our comprehension - reasons that are...alien?

"reasons that are.... alien?" That is a really interesting thought, bryce. In nature, some of us sometimes find the need to describe certain behaviors of other animals as "bad", when they are simply (and dispassionately) following their instincts to survive. The idea of an alien species invading Earth for a reason that is far afield from eating us, or taking the planet's resources, or to clear the way for a hyperspace bypass is an intriguing concept.

 

[-Brett-]

The article seems to make the assumption that aliens, if they exist, are capable of overcoming hurdles that are, for the foreseeable future at least, insurmountable to us. That might be true, but I don't think there's any basis to conclude that it is.

I don't think there's any reason to expect that sapient aliens would survive long enough, or have the impetus to leave their home star system until we've done so ourselves.

 

[sojourner]

There are more things in the universe than you can imagine, nevermind understand.

 

[RoJoHen]

^Exactly. And why, a la Independence Day, would they need to strip OUR planet? No matter what you think, I'm sure we can all agree there are far more uninhabited worlds than inhabited. If you need gold or iron, why on earth come to Earth? I'd go to Mercury if I were them. Jupiter has a hell of a lot more useful gases than we have.

If you have figured out how to harness vacuum energy or some other massive source like that, what would you need with what we got?

Maybe their ships run on HUMANS!

 

[Shatnertage]

The thing is, we've got absolutely no data to work from on this, so really anyone can say whatever they want and be equally "right." It's impossible to falsify until aliens actually do show up...or don't. Right?

 

[ngc7293]

Every time something like this comes out on the internet or TV or the radio I have to laugh. They say with all the billions of galaxies and billions of stars, why haven't we been contacted? I say, why should they want to? We humans who have sent Voyager space craft beyond the solar system are intent on contact, but that doesn't mean the universe is full of human psychology.

With things like the 'goldylocks zone' and what ever hit our planet that let mammals evolve to dominate. Not all planets are going to be in the right place or going to evolve the same. People are not going to thing the same so you are not going to get a universe of people thinking the same things we do.

 

[scotpens]

. . . The idea of an alien species invading Earth for a reason that is far afield from eating us, or taking the planet's resources, or to clear the way for a hyperspace bypass is an intriguing concept.

Maybe they want to blow up the Earth because it obstructs their view of Venus.

 

[MetalPants]

Perhaps we are just in some sort of nature preserve, with the occasional alien scientist getting permission to come, collect a sample, and probe our backside.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

Perhaps we are just in some sort of nature preserve, with the occasional alien scientist getting permission to come, collect a sample, and probe our backside.

I can accept this idea, funnily enough. Perhaps we have been discovered among conditions that are unfortunately incompatible with the physiology of the aliens - in that Earth may be too hot, too cold, too toxic, too dangerous, or not as resource-rich as expected - and they're just watching us with curious and scientific fascination, in much the same way as David Attenborough watches the animal kingdom?

(OK, now I've got the image of an alien David Attenborough and an alien BBC NHU crew whizzing around the planet and filming a documentary... )

And if Earth's natural conditions are incompatible with natural alien life, and if the advanced alien civilisation has, in addition to interstellar travel, mastered the art of compassion and empathy, perhaps we'll be protected and preserved by the aliens instead of being invaded, exploited and exterminated.

Failing that, the whole hyperspace bypass thing will probably happen instead. Where's Swampy when we need him?

 

[Deckerd]

Even if you accept that there is some society that can traverse our galaxy, saying that it's only 100,000 light years across is only a fraction of the story. Even if they visited a planet ever year for 100,000 years they would only have scratched the surface of the huge content of the Milky Way, unless by some contrivance their numbers exploded as they spread out instead of becoming more dilute.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Even if you accept that there is some society that can traverse our galaxy, saying that it's only 100,000 light years across is only a fraction of the story. Even if they visited a planet ever year for 100,000 years they would only have scratched the surface of the huge content of the Milky Way, unless by some contrivance their numbers exploded as they spread out instead of becoming more dilute.

Von Neumann probes -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft

 

[Bill Morris]

Maybe aliens have been monitoring Earth TV from orbit, recording Star Trek and ignoring the rest, and sending it home by subspace data stream as popular entertainment back on some planet orbiting 40 Eridani A, with the thought of perhaps making first contact a few decades from now.

 

[Zulu Romeo]

Maybe aliens have been monitoring Earth TV from orbit, recording Star Trek and ignoring the rest, and sending it home by subspace data stream as popular entertainment back on some planet orbiting 40 Eridani A, with the thought of perhaps making first contact a few decades from now.

Let's start preparing contingency measures for invasion before they get to "These Are The Voyages..."

 

[STR]

I don't think there's any reason to expect that sapient aliens would survive long enough, or have the impetus to leave their home star system until we've done so ourselves.

I read a recent article that stated that due to the material needs of our technology, which might only appear in sufficient quantity after 3 generations of supernova and reconstitution into stars, that Humans may be one of the first 100 civilizations in the observable universe to invent means of interstellar communication (in the form of radio).

This is also something that is never really explored properly in SciFi, though the Prime Directive touches on the core issues of this idea. What if there are lots of planets with life, even intelligent life, but when time comes it turns out EARTH is actually the only starfaring race in the galaxy and among the oldest in the universe?

 

[Deckerd]

I think 'the universe' is stretching it a bit, but in this galaxy I would say it's as valid as any other speculation.