Well, someone has to get to be the "Old Ones". Right, let's get started putting the fear of Cthulhu into the younger races. Now where did I put my octopus mask?
If We're Not Alone, We Should Fear the Aliens
- Thread starter ThankQ
- Start date
That's some reasonable speculation, but remember that a star "generation" spans [sagan]billions[/sagan] of years. Even if intelligent and technological life wouldn't have had the resources available to them in a 1st or 2nd generation star system, and, assuming - perhaps wrongly - similar technological progression, any civilization that had a million or even a thousand years on us would be so advanced that they might as well be Gods. If they didn't want us to know they were around, we wouldn't.
We search for radio waves, but maybe the average intelligent species only uses it for a few centuries before going completely narrow band and through hard lines for communications, effectively cutting off their radio "bleeding". In many ways we're doing that ourselves. Maybe they find some other way to communicate that we don't have the physics to understand yet. "Subspace", quantum entanglement. Hell, maybe they're telepathic. Searching for interstellar mega-structures is another good idea, to be sure, but the sky is so vast we'd have to stumble upon one by accident. There could be a number of them on the other side of the galaxy but we'd never be able to detect them.
In short, aliens are alien, and ascribing motives to why or why not they are here or out there is rather pointless until we have concrete evidence. We've never encountered an alien society, or alien ethics, or an alien religion. I do tend to agree, however, the plain old natural resources are in abundance out there, that's not much of an incentive to come down into our particular gravity well. Heck, they could farm the rest of our system if they wanted to and not really bother us in the slightest, if they had a reason to want something particular. Unless it's people that are the resource, either in body or for labour.
But...but... maybe they want to seek out new worlds and new civilizations?
^ or they could see us a a global wildlife documenty:
- The Humans of Earth -
"and here we are in one of their largest habitats, notice how the male wins favor of the female by presenting her with gifts of precious metals."
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNOAJvtWqYA[/yt]
Wonderful!
One alternative conclusion, of course, might be that while the Universe contains many many worlds harboring intelligence the optimism of science fiction enthusiasts about the technological practicality of travel or even communication across vast interstellar distances is completely unfounded in fact. There may be a billion civilizations not one of which will ever directly observe an artifact of any other.
The idea that because biological evolution works along certain principles that the rise of technological civilization on a living world is inevitable is itself nonsense. Civilization has existed for an eyeblink here on Earth - out of billions of years of evolving life - and could as easily have been wiped out or frustrated in its development by the natural processes of this planet or cosmological flukes.
IOW, if you can read this thank a killer asteroid.
I also don't think there are an infinite number of ways life can evolve. I actually don't think there are that many. We are hampered by only understanding (partially) how one kind of life evolved but even so, it seems such a specific sequence of events that, given there can't be that many Goldilocks planets out there, there might not be that many combinations.
How about the warlords of Krikkit. Their planet was surrounded by a thick black dust cloud that obscured their view of the rest of the universe. When they ventured beyond their solar system they were able to see the rest of the universe for the first time; it frightened them so much that they decided to destroy it so that the cosmos would be as black and empty as the sky looked from their world.
In Star Control-II they had these really annoying space probes sent by some aliens on a gas giant somewhere. The probes would always begin by seeking peaceful contact, then turn around and attack for no particular reason (a programming error, it turns out; honest mistake).
A dizzying number of combinations exist right here on Earth, and we are only the MOST intelligent species, far from the ONLY intelligent species.
And in the scheme of things, HUMAN intelligence is just a flash in the pan; we spent nine hundred thousand years wandering the globe as hairless apes before something snapped and we suddenly discovered clothes, fire and flint tools. If we hadn't, some other species might have made similar developments sooner or later (or COULD have before we did; you never know).
Or it might never have happened.
I wasn't talking about species but the origins of life (RNA and DNA) itself.
