111–120 of 299 posts
So if you want to find aliens, look during a solar eclipse. It's a rare phenomenon and if there are alien tourists, they'll want to see it.
>We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as ants are to us; after all, when we’re walking down the sidewalk we rarely if ever examine every ant along our path. Not really the most convincing argument. There are professions that study ants. And I'm sure I'm not the only person on this forum that has a casual interest in observing ants. Pretty sure aliens would still be interested in us even if we were as primi…
I've always loved the thing about solar eclipses and auroras: in order to see an aurora during an eclipse, the moon has to be the exact same size as the sun (when viewed from the planet). Earth has this (for a while at least - the moon is slowly moving away from us), and it makes us special. So if you want to find aliens, look during a solar eclipse. It's a rare phenomenon and if there are alien tourists, they'll wan…
For as far as we know, they've observed us, and have long moved on, finding us entirely uninteresting, which seems to be the one explanation we love to overlook, but given we are humans with big egos, love to make ourselves out to be more important than we actually are.
> When weighing the risks involved in interactions with less-developed cultures such as ours, these advanced civilizations may choose to refrain from contact. I think establishing communication with a more advanced civilization would be deeply disrupting to our culture. We would ascribe their cultural practices to their advancement, and get a bunch of people doing "alien cargo culting". Imagine they were strict veget…
I've always loved the thing about solar eclipses and auroras: in order to see an aurora during an eclipse, the moon has to be the exact same size as the sun (when viewed from the planet). Earth has this (for a while at least - the moon is slowly moving away from us), and it makes us special. So if you want to find aliens, look during a solar eclipse. It's a rare phenomenon and if there are alien tourists, they'll wan…
> When weighing the risks involved in interactions with less-developed cultures such as ours, these advanced civilizations may choose to refrain from contact. I think establishing communication with a more advanced civilization would be deeply disrupting to our culture. We would ascribe their cultural practices to their advancement, and get a bunch of people doing "alien cargo culting". Imagine they were strict veget…
Or imagine they were psychopathic sadists, like the Affront in that Ian Banks novel.
I've always loved the thing about solar eclipses and auroras: in order to see an aurora during an eclipse, the moon has to be the exact same size as the sun (when viewed from the planet). Earth has this (for a while at least - the moon is slowly moving away from us), and it makes us special. So if you want to find aliens, look during a solar eclipse. It's a rare phenomenon and if there are alien tourists, they'll wan…
What makes you think it is a rare phenomenon to them, or that they have the same conceptualizations of "needs and wants" as we do? What if they view these events the same way we view watching paint dry or grass grow? Just as we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize animals and other species, we must also not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing alien species until there's an actual encounter and we get to 'k…
More of the same old anthropomorphizing I guess.
> When weighing the risks involved in interactions with less-developed cultures such as ours, these advanced civilizations may choose to refrain from contact. I think establishing communication with a more advanced civilization would be deeply disrupting to our culture. We would ascribe their cultural practices to their advancement, and get a bunch of people doing "alien cargo culting". Imagine they were strict veget…
As it is right now we're doing human cargo culting, most of which is indoctrinating people into believing things that are not true - sooo YMMV?
I'd presume an advanced culture that can traverse the galaxy has many resources. Like humanity, I'd assume that with abundance, entertainment would be prioritized.
We might be nothing more than a new source of fashion and novelty to them! They may like Rock & Roll, our food, our clothing, or even pogs.
We might even be boring to them for the moment, but they're hoping for a future payoff.
Or they could just look at us as a future source of diversity in their society. The different methods of creating sentient beings might be of great importance to a post-biological society (maybe there's charm in our resource inefficiency).
Determining the motivations of a post-singularity society is a difficult task. It's fun because it forces you to think beyond your current means. But I wouldn't consider it a productive endeavor.