What possible resource does Earth or human civilization possess that ETs advanced enough to pose an interstellar threat would be interested in?
We might be tasty.
Not me. All gristle and bone. I taste like your used glorkin.
In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
#62I think the fears of some ET empire with Darth Vader (or similar) at the head is very misplaced. Just think of the economics... "let's go exploit that world 10 LY away from us that we don't fully understand and which will still takes us an insane amount of time to enslave and milk resources from!" What a scalable strategy given the size of space... one might even say it's astronomically large! The resource consumptio…
You can't know or understand possible ET motivations or capabilities. Humans routinely drive other species on Earth to extinction, our own cousins. We also damage our own planet's environment. It may be logical for an ET to just destroy us the way you might destroy a harmful bacteria, which might otherwise spread unpredictably. It wouldn't be about wanting slaves or raw resources (although as someone said, Earth itse…
"You can't know or understand possible ET motivations or capabilities."
True, but my argument is that their intentions fundamentally don't matter. The real costs of acting on ill-intentions through interstellar space would probably give any real life Klingons or Romulans pause.
Meanwhile we fly, sometimes even into space, drive, walk outside, stay inside, eat/drink things that we shouldn't (but enjoy), and a thousand other risks which are substantially more real on an everyday basis... and many of those risks also come with rewards that can make life much more full and rich.
I think making contact with aliens would most likely just 1) confirm we weren't alone or 2) might actually be of benefit as we exchange knowledge and ideas, and/or 3) tell us that evolution tends to creates fearful, xenophobic entities where it also develops intelligence... in that order and with no further consequence than the knowledge.
Re: In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the wrong way to look at it. You're not thirsty for resources. You're protective of them. Imagine if you were aware of giant, angry Americans who were flying to Japan to steal all of your coke and convert all your land and resources into coke manufacturing plants. Do you let the plane in? Do you stop it from traveling at all? Do you glass the surface of America with nuclear weapons? How do you know they won't…
But that makes no sense. You're spending resources protecting against a scenario that is effectively impossible. The term for that is paranoia. Plus, it doesn't even make sense to try to "protect" yourself because their first move if they even thought like this would be to nuke everything flat with no warning. There's no defense against it. You can't hide either, the signals are already out there, they know where you…
> But that makes no sense. You're spending resources protecting against a scenario that is effectively impossible. The term for that is paranoia.
It makes no sense to insist that aliens would think as you think they should. That doesn't even make sense for humans in most cases.
> You can't hide either, the signals are already out there, they know where you are.
That's arguably not true.
Re: In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that makes no sense. You're spending resources protecting against a scenario that is effectively impossible. The term for that is paranoia. Plus, it doesn't even make sense to try to "protect" yourself because their first move if they even thought like this would be to nuke everything flat with no warning. There's no defense against it. You can't hide either, the signals are already out there, they know where you…
> But that makes no sense. You're spending resources protecting against a scenario that is effectively impossible. The term for that is paranoia. It makes no sense to insist that aliens would think as you think they should. That doesn't even make sense for humans in most cases. > You can't hide either, the signals are already out there, they know where you are. That's arguably not true.
Even if they don't think the same way we do they are (probably) bound by the same laws of physics. Obviously this argument doesn't work if they have developed warp drives or infinite energy sources and reactionless engines, but if they're bound by the rocket equation as we are then there are truths that can't be avoided.
We are on the cusp of being able to detect the biological markers of life on distant worlds by spectroscopy. An alien civilization that can traverse the enormous gulf between solar systems can very easily build widely spaced telescopes that can monitor all nearby solar systems for changes to atmospheric composition. Anybody who is paranoid enough to need to kill any life around them would obviously build such an array. There is no hiding from them, the technology is much too simple compared to what you need to travel between solar systems.
Re: In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But that makes no sense. You're spending resources protecting against a scenario that is effectively impossible. The term for that is paranoia. It makes no sense to insist that aliens would think as you think they should. That doesn't even make sense for humans in most cases. > You can't hide either, the signals are already out there, they know where you are. That's arguably not true.
Even if they don't think the same way we do they are (probably) bound by the same laws of physics. Obviously this argument doesn't work if they have developed warp drives or infinite energy sources and reactionless engines, but if they're bound by the rocket equation as we are then there are truths that can't be avoided. We are on the cusp of being able to detect the biological markers of life on distant worlds by sp…
> An alien civilization that can traverse the enormous gulf between solar systems can very easily build widely spaced telescopes that can monitor all nearby solar systems for changes to atmospheric composition.
Maybe they can't themselves, but don't like the idea that someone else eventually may be able to.
I think you're overconfident of the safety of actively advertising our presence to the universe because you're making a lot of assumptions and only considering a small number of possibilities. The problem is that there are so many unknowns and so many shades between different possibilities that no one can really be confident about anything, except that the risk could be anywhere between zero and the maximum.
Re: In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The motivation isn't exploiting Earth resources, but killing us before we can kill them. Most humans don't believe non-human species have any right to life, so why would sapient aliens believe humans have any right to life? Humans have a non-zero probability of growing powerful enough to be an existential threat to the aliens, so the safest option is to preemptively eliminate them. And even if the aliens are convince…
"so why would sapient aliens believe humans have any right to life?" I'm suggesting that it doesn't matter and that there are other, more significant factors that render this concern moot. "Humans have a non-zero probability of growing powerful enough to be an existential threat to the aliens, so the safest option is to preemptively eliminate them." Non-zero, but near zero. The same sorts of constraints on resource c…
"Any aliens advanced enough to hear our signals and have the realistic ability to contemplate a move against us can probably do the math: the likely threat of any alien civilization is from a practical perspective, zero, to them or us. The costs are too high, the barriers are too high, the risks are too remote, the rewards are too low."
This argument reminds me of economic theories that assume all humans are so-called "rational actors".
Even humans, which are in most ways like us and who we have some hope of understanding, do all sorts of things which most of use would consider "irrational", insane, self-destructive, and otherwise incomprehensible.
What justification could there be for assuming alien intelligences think in terms of costs, risks, or rewards? Or that they are in any way "practical" from some human's point of view?
Your argument also ignores the possibility that they have technologies or capabilities that might seem impossible (or even unimaginable) to humans of today (or perhaps of any time). Something that seems undoable to us, like FTL travel, might be possible or even easy for them. We don't know what we don't know.
Re: In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was that what the parent comment said?!? I thought it was something about not understanding fear of the unknown. And then like I thought, hey is there a metaphor that might show how sometimes that it would be wise to have some little bit of wariness about the unknown at least? And then I said ah hah, there is and I wrote it down. I'm pretty sure it went something like that.
You can be cautious around something without being afraid of it.
sure - and people might play semantic games about what words really mean but at some point these concepts blend into each other.
hence https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/caution
Another word for caution noun
Careful forethought to avoid harm or risk:
calculation, care, carefulness, chariness, gingerliness, precaution, wariness. See fear
And I mean the perfect lack of knowledge is impossible, yes if I definitely did not know anything about something I would not be afraid of possible problems with that thing - how could I?
But we always know a bit even about the 'unknown' even if the thing we know is that there might be something in that unknown thing that would be dangerous to life, as many things in the Universe are like extreme heat, cold, releases of kinetic energy, too much water, or the presence of elements of one sort or another in more abundance than is healthy for us, or life that is similar to life on this planet since much of life on this planet is focused on killing other life on this planet for various reasons. I'm walking in an unknown environment on this planet I might still be afraid because I don't know what large carnivores it has, but I do know it might have large carnivores.
Re: In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can be cautious around something without being afraid of it.
sure - and people might play semantic games about what words really mean but at some point these concepts blend into each other. hence https://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/caution Another word for caution noun Careful forethought to avoid harm or risk: calculation, care, carefulness, chariness, gingerliness, precaution, wariness. See fear I guess most people would admit a relation between the concepts, caution seems…
I see where you're coming from. I maintain that caution and fear are different, even if they're related.
My original post was probably too broad to be useful. This topic requires nuance that I didn't express.
Re: In search of ET: Fear of what’s out there causes split among space scientists
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The atmosphere point is even more compelling. Earth has been broadcasting with quite non-trivial power "I HAVE LIFE" for about two and a half billion years. Most of the "hostile alien" hypothesis work out to the hostile aliens needing to exterminate all life, not just life that already seems to be intelligent, because you don't know how fast something might become intelligent when you're not looking, so if Earth was…
"The atmosphere point is even more compelling. Earth has been broadcasting with quite non-trivial power "I HAVE LIFE" for about two and a half billion years. Most of the "hostile alien" hypothesis work out to the hostile aliens needing to exterminate all life, not just life that already seems to be intelligent, because you don't know how fast something might become intelligent when you're not looking, so if Earth was…
Obviously known-intelligent life would be a priority, but if they can't get around to the lower priority stuff in 2.5 billion years, well, why should we take the Dark Forest argument any more seriously than any of the other civilizations we've cruised by in the past 2.5 billion years?
The amount of energy available to even a single solar system, let alone all the advanced galactic civilizations that are supposed to be out there, dwarfs what it would take to sterilize Earth. And don't think I'm underestimating that quantity; it's larger than any impact real Earth ever sustained, and it has sustained some doozies. But what's in even a small star, even in a small star's yearly output, is orders of magnitude larger. And this is with the relatively expensive brute force method too; if you're willing to roll the dice on the target not having intelligent life a few steps above where we are now, you could probably put together a gray-goo-esque replicator that would conclusively eliminate any civilizational threat from a given planet permanently, for the cost of delivering a few kilograms of payload to the target system, which is presumably trivial for our advanced civilizations.
As I said, I'm still pretty much on the "yeah, we're probably effectively alone" side, because when you really treat the "the universe is full of advanced intelligent life" idea seriously, you just don't get what we see in our sky. Not least of which is the wide variety of ways in which we simply shouldn't exist, because our ecosystem should have been wiped out one way or another, be it by raw destruction, or simply interaction with some other much more advanced ecosystem that simply steamrolled Earth's primitive life the same way we steamroll an ant hill, a billion years ago. Just about the only way to save the hypothesis is that we are the "Progenitors" and the universe is full of intelligent life if you look at a random place and time, it's just that the "full of intelligent life" hasn't happened yet. If the universe as a whole is full of intelligent life, there still has to be a first set of civilizations, and while every individual in those civilizations may rationally say "the odds of me being here when the universe is empty are as good as zero", there still have to be some "lottery winners".