Space brains resign over efforts to attract ET attention A pair of noted space thinkers have resigned from an international body in protest at plans to send out powerful radio signals to alien civilisations. The two men feel that the risks of contact with extraterrestrials - who would need to be much more technologically advanced than humanity in order to visit us - have not been …
Jesse, I was trying to show that "human behaviour" is a VERY limited set of modes of thought even here on earth. The variety of modes of thought in the universe would be much more than that.
Ants don't go out their way to kill others. Neither do spiders, snakes or some apes. Heck, it is thought Neanderthals didn't fight to get new land when they migrated.
So the distance we are from someone is all the protection we need and all we can use. It isn't going to be worth the trouble invading an earth-like planet with humans on when there are hundreds of earth-like planets much closer with nobody on them. If the aliens are more advanced than us, they will (barring self extinction) remain more advanced than us, so if they are far enough ahead NOW to travel here in a fraction of their lifetime, we're no threat and will remain no threat (unless another race gives us a big leg-up, rather like the US paying the Taliban to fight Russia, maybe). We will never forseeably be a threat to them.
What we may be is slightly more advanced and this spurs them on to try harder to overtake, but they'd have to hope there is FTL travel too.
Having read these comments I notice one thing.
The thought behind our future space travel is often that of colonisation, Mars for instance.
Yet many posters consider alien visitations as just that - a visit, sightseeing, saying hi.
Any very advanced civilisation will be far more conscious of the limited life of their star, and if they have the same drive to survive that we have, they will eventually wish to establish colonies outside their solar system to ensure the survival of their species.
With the expense involved, this is the reason for interstellar travel that makes most sense. therefore, we can imagine that the most likely motives of any species that notices us will be colonisation - likely including replacement of our own species.
Now this does not make me call for a halt to active SETI just yet. The distances involved are so huge that there probably isn't a problem for a million years or so ( the idea of 1000 years is a bit short, the likelihood for the nearest space fairing civilisation would be much, much further than 1000 LY).
Active SETI is most likely to attract a phonecall or two, not visitors (conquering or otherwise), and that would be rather cool, even if hostile in nature, it would still cause a re-adjustment for us that could help us evolve out of the primitive religious tendencies we currently possess in abundance and stand more chance of destroying us than anything else.
As for us and our space travel, we have perhaps a half billion years before we all have to move to Mars (and work out how to shield ourselves from the sun's UV), and then another half billion before Titan looks like home, so there is no great hurry.
FTL travel and other Star Trek fictions remain for the moment just that - fiction. Unfortunately physics doesn't allow it and having a belief that we are just not advanced enough to achieve it yet doesn't change physics. Apart from wormholes (extremely doubtful in practise) there is no way to achieve FTL travel.
With the 'window' argument mentioned far above, I agree that we may find evidence for aliens only as archaeologists on some distant planet in some distant moment in the future, and also that that is how we will be discovered by aliens.
"With the expense involved, this is the reason for interstellar travel that makes most sense. therefore, we can imagine that the most likely motives of any species that notices us will be colonisation - likely including replacement of our own species."
But that would suppose our earth is particularly suited and the only suited planet within 1000 light years.
How likely is that? There are dozens of candidate earths within 100 ly, 1000 ly is a sphere of 1,000 x the volume. Must be more than one earth in that!
Are you really sure about that? We may have discovered many planets recently but none are known to be earth-like and are many of the ones found really that close?
There has been lots of conjecture about aliens thinking the earth is poisonous, and it may be - oxygen for instance. But I think liquid water is a good reason to think it's not.
Anyway, there may be lots of niches we can't envisage yet, we keep finding life in really hostile places here, but we find the vast majority of life dependent on water.
Someone once said that probably the most convincing argument that intelligent life exists on other planets is that none of it has contacted us yet.....
If you want an IT angle on this, what's being suggested by the anti-active-seti lobby is nothing more or less than SECURITY BY OBSCURITY!
Of course, it's just possible that this form of security is the only sort we actually have - which is a most frightening concept.
Based on the responses in the thread here, I think "galactic insane asylum" is quite apropos of the situation. Wow.
I mean, radio waves don't travel through space??? How do you think we're getting those pictures and data from the Mars rovers? Or the two Voyager spacecraft, rapidly approaching the edge of the solar system? Or the many manned missions to the Moon? *shakes head sadly*
Screeching about whether or not there are aliens out there is a fantastic waste of time. As someone pointed out, not only are the distances prohibitive, the time scale makes things improbable as well. Still, I think there is Life out there - somewhere. *If* they exist in our timeframe, and *if* they are capable of visiting us, I highly doubt they're going to be aggressive. The level of cooperation needed (as has already been pointed out here) is going to sublimate aggressive tendencies simply because they're counter-productive. Do you really think (using a Star Trek reference myself) that the Klingons could advance far enough to get off-planet, let alone develop a star/warp/FTL drive? I cast serious doubt and aspersions in that direction.
C'mon, people. Use your heads for something besides a hat-rack.
If there is one extrasolar civilization in our galaxy there are probably hundreds of them, if not thousands. With almost all of them having rapidly evolved to a non-biological state. Given the number of stars and the number of galaxies visible from here at least one new sentient machine civilization is emerging (as a "singularity") in some stellar system somewhere in the universe every single second. How can anyone assume that "any alien civilization which has the vast intellectual resources required to come looking for us, will have long outgrown war and conflict, and will therefore be coming in peace"? This may be true of some, or even most, but of all?
Peter Hook
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