Life usually makes me feel silly for using the term `never`. As a rule, I don't.
Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
21–30 of 122 posts
Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
#22The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. And it's obvious that if we could travel around the galaxy and we detected life forms on another planet, we would obviously go visit them and check them out. The…
> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Actually, as far as our interactions with other life forms go, we either ignore them (intestinal bacteria), keep them away (diseases), exterminate them (pests), or harvest and devour them (farming), or kill them for sport (hunting). The utterly insignificant fraction that become objects of our a…
Oh come on. That analogy is so weak I can barely believe you're serious.
See my response to the other guy who brought up a similar analogy.
Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
#23My theory is that once a life form gets advanced enough, their brains start penetrating a hidden dimension that we know nothing about. This dimension is so much richer than "our universe", that they never come back to this one.
It may have started to happen to us already -- I'm sure there are a few people here who have gotten lost in the World of Warcraft dimension for a time.
Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Look, there are many ponds of varying sizes, a couple of meters to hundreds of meters in diameter, in the woods near my home. Some of them most likely have life…
Humans have spent a massive amount of time and effort studying other forms of life on this planet. As a species, we clearly have an intense interest in that, demonstrated in everything from what we look at on Reddit, to what books are purchased to what types of vacations people like to take, to gardening and cultivation, to the number of people that work in fields directly related to the environment or animals. Your…
Right, and thanks to all that time studying it is very likely that whatever is in the pond is nothing new. Which is kind of the point of the article. Whatever is in the pond is most likely nothing we haven't seen before. Now, studying the depths of the Arctic is a different matter. Are you saying that we are so rare (just like Arctic species hundreds of meters below ice) that aliens will rush to study us?
The whole point is that we are probably average, just like the life in the pond is probably average, which is the reason nobody will put us on their priority list.
Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Actually, as far as our interactions with other life forms go, we either ignore them (intestinal bacteria), keep them away (diseases), exterminate them (pests), or harvest and devour them (farming), or kill them for sport (hunting). The utterly insignificant fraction that become objects of our a…
If it were a Mars cockroach, we would desperately care.
Except it would be extremely unlikely for us to be the first new species such a space-faring civilization would be coming into contact with.
At galactic scale, there's not much difference between a Mars cockroach and a regular cockroach.
Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Look, there are many ponds of varying sizes, a couple of meters to hundreds of meters in diameter, in the woods near my home. Some of them most likely have life…
There are people who are interested in the contents of those ponds, and they already have been studied. The people who are curious about the ponds (planets) are the ones that would be put on the ship. Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the…
>Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the galaxy, planets with life on it are special. And intelligent life even more so.
No - the whole point of the article is that they're not. Sure, it's a tiny proportion of planets. But in an unimaginably vast universe, there have got to be billions of them - and while there would surely be aliens who study some other civilizations, once you've seen a few million human-level civilizations you've seen them all. Analogy: even though four-leaf clover are rare and interesting as clover go, still the vast majority of four-leaf clover in the world have never been examined by a human.
Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
#27> The bottom line is that if an alien race is capable of getting here, all the other technology they've requisitely developed in the meantime would make the trip unnecessary at best - and more than likely, simply meaningless. This argument is structurally similar to the argument that God exists because God is perfect, and a necessary attribute of perfection is existence. It begs the question. Personally I think the r…
"This argument is structurally similar to the argument that God exists because God is perfect, and a necessary attribute of perfection is existence. It begs the question."
No it doesn't. The hypothetical alien race remains hypothetical throughout the argument. Not so with the Ontological Proof.
Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
#28The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. And it's obvious that if we could travel around the galaxy and we detected life forms on another planet, we would obviously go visit them and check them out. The…
> We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Actually, as far as our interactions with other life forms go, we either ignore them (intestinal bacteria), keep them away (diseases), exterminate them (pests), or harvest and devour them (farming), or kill them for sport (hunting). The utterly insignificant fraction that become objects of our a…
I wouldn't, but I can assure you there are lots of scientists on this planet who would care.
Your examples involve creatures that we already know about and have interacted with and "integrated" into our lives (one way or another).
But I suppose the counter-example is "it depends who finds us" -- if it's an intergalactic scientific exploration team of aliens, they'll probably be as nice as can be. If it's an intergalactic mining company, maybe not so much.
The equivalent here would be the contrast between a scientific expedition to explore new species in the Amazon Rainforest (i.e. people who would be benign and take an interest in new species) vs. a bulldozing crew out to find more land in those same rainforests ("Oh look, a bird. Ok boys chop down that tree").
Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
#29He's not addressing the idea of von neumann probes. Just a species or self-replicating probe that spreads out in all directions using all resources.
Another option is an alien race seeing us as a potential competitor for resources after millions of years more development and wanting to stop us now.
Re: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>The idea that advanced aliens wouldn't bother talking to us / visiting us if they could because we're too primitive is obviously wrong. We still have tons of interest and even affection for animals on our own planet who are far less advanced than ourselves. Look, there are many ponds of varying sizes, a couple of meters to hundreds of meters in diameter, in the woods near my home. Some of them most likely have life…
There are people who are interested in the contents of those ponds, and they already have been studied. The people who are curious about the ponds (planets) are the ones that would be put on the ship. Not to mention your analogy is terrible. Those ponds aren't interesting to me because they are nothing special. They don't contain anything that we aren't constantly surrounded with everywhere. On the other hand in the…
>>There are people who are interested in the contents of those ponds, and they already have been studied.
But has every single pond been studied no matter its size. Do people rush to study a new discovered pond 5 meters in diameter? Is it that novel that people will rush to it? No, because there are millions of ponds just like it. That is who we are, a little pond maybe 1 meter in diameter (probably should call it a puddle), nothing extraordinary about it. There are a millions of other 1 meter ponds/puddles around the world, why would our pond/puddle be singled out? What is so special about our tiny pond/puddle? That is the point of the article. You are not thinking big enough.