(September 25, 2016 at 10:05 pm)Kernel Sohcahtoa Wrote: Suppose there is a broader community of sentient life-forms who are remarkably advanced (socially and technologically). Do you think they would be interested in learning about humanity? If you were in their shoes, then what would be your criteria for making first contact? What are your observations of humanity and does humanity meet your criteria? From your perspective, is humanity ready for first contact?
We are still so very early in the potential full paths of scientific progress. We are only 400 years removed from theory of gravity, there are likely billions of years yet to go in the possible progress of science.
As a result we are still almost totally ignorant of majority of the possible manifestations of just those laws of nature we know of. Consequently observing other life on earth still constitute almost the only way we can know anything about them. Hence our curiosity to get into their presence and interact with them.
However, diverse and complex as life on a planet might be, the degree of diversity and complexity is not infinite. It seems reasonable to me that sometime in the not too distant future in our scientific progress, say within the next 1000 years or 10000 years, our mastery of the physical laws and ability to deduce how they can manifest themselves would have progressed so far that from a fairly distant observation, it would be possible to analyze and deduce almost the entire complexity of a planet's biosphere to an very high degree, far higher than we can to hands on with our own biosphere now.
When this happens, curiosity no longer need direct interaction to be satisfied.
This I think explains the Fermi paradox much better than there being no other intelligent lifeforms.
