(August 19, 2014 at 10:15 am)Rhythm Wrote: There's really no reason to assume that aliens would have "philosophy" of any kind, nor that they would be technologically advanced. Not even if they showed up here. We're imagining a very specific sort of alien when we imagine a machine builder and a thinker. It's a very "human" sort of alien. That's a great mirror for considering aspects of ourselves - but it may also explain why we so often imagine that sort of alien not to "come in peace", why we imagine human misery and impotence would follow it's arrival. After all, that's what happens when human beings show up with "better boats" in our history.
I assumed those aliens of interest to this discussion would be aliens that were technological, or at least bordering on the technological, so as to present the dilemma of another peer tenant in the same universe that manifestly fall outside of any conceivable scope of genesis, aliens that can't be written off as animals, but clearly equal or superior to us in all aspects that makes us think we are superior to animals.
A machine builder is a reasonable assumption, since given the plausible spectrum of technological capabilities and our very primitive position on it, it seems very much more likely for them to initiate contact than it is for us, with our currently poor technological powers, to do so, and that requires on their part not only machines, but vastly superior machines than ours.
