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Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

scientificamerican.com

261–270 of 299 posts

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#261
post #2

>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…

But what percentage of ants find themselves the subject of human curiosity? We look at a few ants, but not most of them. Maybe it's the same with aliens. We're just another mound of monkeys; nothing they haven't seen before.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#262
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ants are interesting because of the complex behavioral systems emerging from their comparatively simple biological systems, reminiscent of the game of life. Seeing the insane complexity of the human condition (look at the amount of scientific disciplines we come up with) and thinking "nay, this won't be interesting to a higher mind" feels awfully dismissive. sure, depending on the leap of sophistication we may appear…

I seriously doubt the human condition seems complex to a species that went through this stage a billion years ago. Or even a million years ago. If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals. So the horizon of interest where an encounter w…

> There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals.

Generally speaking, about once a year, archeologists find something that completely challenges their theories on human evolution.

https://www.livescience.com/biggest-archaeology-discoveries-...

Just the amount of engineering the Egyptians did is enough to warrant our continued fascination with their culture, some 5,000 years later.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#263
post #2

>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…

Do you think the ants notice it much?

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt the human condition seems complex to a species that went through this stage a billion years ago. Or even a million years ago. If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals. So the horizon of interest where an encounter w…

"If we ever invent a time machine I doubt we'd learn much from humans of 10,000 years ago. There would be some surprises for historians and archaeologists, but we certainly wouldn't treat them as cultural or technological equals." That's only your opinion, and it's most probably wrong. These guys were capable of feats you can only dream of. And you could be very surprised at their level of sophistication, which might…

Quite. It’s an insult to our ancestors to dismiss their ability to use their technology.

The ruins we find around the world from previous civilisations tell us they were very smart.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have devoted large amounts of time and resources to studying the differences between seemingly similar ant colonies, and we have lived alongside ants for our entire existence as a species. Imagine now that we had never seen an ant, had a totally different biological origin to the ants, and had no idea why they did what they do because we had no cultural conception of them as an entity. We’d only be more interested…

This is missing the point. We might be interested in ants, but the ants would not be interested in us, because ants cannot understand us. We can prod and research ant hills all we want. But all ants will ever see are some unexpected occurrences - maybe a very unusual scent which they can't place, or some food which wasn't there earlier, or an unexpected plague of ant death - which they will forget almost instantly. I…

I don't know about that - we don't have any real scale equivalence in actual life forms so I'll use celestial objects as an example. The movement of other planets has almost no impact on our daily lives - the moon may impact the tides and the sun leads to our day night cycle but we can't effectively impact that and so, for the average person, life goes on without more than a momentary thought given to how things are going on up there. Though, we are all vaguely aware that we could suddenly and arbitrarily be killed by an asteroid impact (much like a colony being arbitrarily chosen to become some kid's ant-farm - or being run over by a truck) it isn't in the front of our minds because we need to get back to filling out that TPS report.

Still, as a society, we have a number of dedicated individuals that do study celestial movements and would try and prevent a sudden asteroid impact, and we all do remain vaguely aware of what's going on up there. So I'm not certain how much I agree with the fact that ants cannot understand us. Sure we can't sit down and have tea with an ant and talk about the weather, but if the moon was a gigantic dragon that just moved really slowly in a mostly predictable manner then how we interact with it might not be particularly distinguishable from how we interact with it when it's just a chunk of rock.

A good parallel to think of here is probably Discworld, I might suggest reading The Light Fantastic if you never had to get a bit of a sense of how we might interact with celestially sized lifeforms and just how one-sided that relationship could potentially be.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#266
post #233

I disagree with the author's statement that the Fermi paradox is "pretentious" because it assumes we have cosmic significance. I think a better word for that is "presumptuous", but pedantry aside, I don't believe the Fermi paradox ever says anything about what aliens think of humans. It asks why there isn't more evidence of aliens anywhere we've ever looked, not about why aliens haven't come to ask us for our wisdom…

> It's not asking why they haven't contacted us, it's asking why we can't see them Space is vast. The strength of communication signals drops off quickly with distance. All life is subject to the laws of thermodynamics. The Fermi paradox was proposed in 1950 during a time of rapid growth and empire. At that time, radio communications were powerful, and it seemed like they would only get more powerful as our civilizat…

Upvoted for a thoughtful response, but I want to be clear that I'm not saying the Fermi paradox is valid or even useful. What I'm saying is that the author of the original article argued that the paradox assumes humans are fascinating to other species, when it makes no such assumption. There may be many reasons to dismiss the Fermi paraxox, but the one he leans on the most heavily is a non sequitor.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#267
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is that while ants are indeed interesting to us as a subject, not every single anthill gets our attention. There are probably lots of anytime anthills in out of the way places that have never had human interaction.

Maybe not humans, but they probably do get visits from other insects and animals.

an interesting point which begs the question of what is a threshold of intelligence required to lose interest in a species. and if intelligence isn't the only parameter, what are the others? predation is an obvious one, curiosity comes with a form of intelligence, what else is there?

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#268
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't quite follow how the "early bloomers" theory would imply either of those two conclusions. What I meant is the concept that our galaxy is young and the conditions just became right for ingelligent life to form, and here we are.

I've never heard of any theories that earth like conditions are new or unique, in fact half of all stars like ours are over 9 billion years old. And the universe has almost stopped making new stars. If you believe it takes, on average 9 billion years X 100 billion star systems to create 1 civilization, then you believe in some kind of 'filter' that stops life almost completely. A filter that we have passed to be the…

There is indeed as far as I know some evidence that we are early bloomers https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2015/news-2015... Half of the stars might be 9 billion years old, but for heavy emelents fo form, you need already certain conditions like neutron star mergers need to have occured. Our galaxy might be just old enough for that.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#269
post #48

What bothers me quite a bit, both in more-or-less scientific conversations and in Science Fiction, is that we virtually always assume a human-like psychology for aliens, and we judge what they may want or not based on our thinking. Even when we think about potentially highly advanced aliens, we still assume they'll have a psychology similar to ours, and they'll just be more advanced technologically (ie. the aliens an…

I agree with you, but I think it's worth remembering/noting that this happens mostly because it's very difficult if not impossible to imagine what a sentient being with a psychology entirely unlike our own would be like. I think that most people (who think about such things) realize that extraterrestrials, if they exist, may well be more alien than we can even imagine. But it's fun to imagine things, so we try anyway…

For instance, try to imagine a new emotion that is not a composite of the emotions you have.

We know animals have emotions, and they mostly map to our emotions. With less related animals likely having less related emotions to ours (like the emotions of a tuna fish compared to a chimpanzee).

Now, try to map the emotions of life-form that from a completely different tree of life from ours. Their version of emotions may not even be mappable to anything like we can ever experience or imagine.

Emotions are pretty core to our understanding of the universe and ET may have emotions so radically different to ours that their view of the universe is not understandable to us.

Re: Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe aliens will be interested in Earth for Astrogastronomy.

Sorry, no - only the consumption of cultivated humans is allowed.

How would you know that you are being cultivated?
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