Is Humanity Ready for First Contact?

[Kernel Sohcahtoa]

The greater number of civilizations you imagine existing in the galaxy, the greater the odds of one or more of them being VERY Darwinian and very gung ho on the idea they are the fittest and they want to survive by filling all the niches in the galaxy.

That's how lifeforms usually work.  Aggressors  win the petri dish, peacniks get eaten.

And at a certain level of technology, the galaxy itself starts to look like a petri dish . . .

That seems rather unfortunate.  I wonder if this behavior is what ultimately keeps us in the petri dish, rather than growing beyond it (whatever that might be)?

[vorlon13]

We are just a speck in the petri dish.

We don't know if we are alone in it yet.

[vorlon13]

As for colonizing other galaxies, well . . .


let's get this one wrapped up first.

[Thumpalumpacus]

The greater number of civilizations you imagine existing in the galaxy, the greater the odds of one or more of them being VERY Darwinian and very gung ho on the idea they are the fittest and they want to survive by filling all the niches in the galaxy.

That's how lifeforms usually work.  Aggressors  win the petri dish, peacniks get eaten.

And at a certain level of technology, the galaxy itself starts to look like a petri dish . . .

That seems rather unfortunate.  I wonder if this behavior is what ultimately keeps us in the petri dish, rather than growing beyond it (whatever that might be)?

As much as I hate the phrase, it is what it is.

There's no way of telling what an alien civilization might hold as values. Even in the context of species, we humans still look through our own two eyes. Through that filter, natural selection seems regnant, and our place at "the top of the heap" seems natural.

But who knows?

[Kernel Sohcahtoa]

As for colonizing other galaxies, well . . .


let's get this one wrapped up first.

Please forgive me if I'm being dense (I can be slow, so I apologize), but are you saying (metaphorically at least) that the other galaxies, or even reality itself, ultimately belong to a petri dish? Can we ultimately escape the dish or is dish reality like a never-ending set of Russian dolls?

In relation to the op, I'm pondering these questions, because, IMO, first contact between a non-dish life-form and dish life-forms could be a pretty interesting and perhaps unfathomable encounter.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I can't answer for Vorlon, but myself, I doubt we humans will ever come to a point here we say, "That's that! Time for a beer."

The Universe seems an awful lot like a Mandelbrot set, to me. Russia dolls, as you put it. The finer we see in detail, the more unknown details seem to crop up, molecule to atom to proton/electron/neutron to fermion and bosons. The grander we see in scope, the wider the vista seems too -- we started by observing planets and bright stars, but as we added technology to our observational capacity, we discovered a galaxy -- our own -- then other galaxies, then galactic clusters, then the Great Wall.

Paraphrasing Paul Williams from his book Das Energi, "We are as large to the smallest thing we can detect as we are small to the largest thing we can detect. We sit in the middle of our own perceptions."

The Universe, this universe, appears to be fractal.

No doubt Alex K will show up and start pulling my short hairs, my Teutonic brotha always catches me out.

[Anomalocaris]

In my opinion any technological civilization much more advanced than ours would certainly have carried out extensive genetic and cybernetic modifications to its individuals to allow something like a borg like thought and data interchange, as well as to tailor or enhance health and other desirable attributes.  Such life would be much more complex than the pure biological organisms from which they were made.

They would therefore be a higher life form.

I suspect very advanced civilizations would consist of just a few super individuals, each consisting of a vast interconnected network semi-biological amd cybernetic nodes.  Each biological nodes might be a highly edited and modified versions of an individual from the original biological species that gave rise to this advanced civilization.  These now form something similar to cells in the super organism.

Gotta ask...why would you thnk that?  Nothing you've just described is actually -beyond- vanilla biological systems.  There's no need or reason to engineer yourself as such, in and of itself....and ofc you could simply, biologically, be as such.

How do we apply the "higher" title?  Just sounds different, but not as much as some think...to me.

it's not clear to me what the limit of "biological" system is. But it seems to me electronic systems can surpass it by orders of magnitude in both complexity and speed of execution. So the merging of electronic and biological system would count as an increase in sophistication unattainable through conventional, as in classically biological as oppose to technological or cybernetic, evolution in much the same way that prokaryotic cells could not attain the sophistication of eukaryotic cells, and thus eukaryotic cells represent a distinct increase in sophistication over prokaryotic cells.

[I_am_not_mafia]

Unlike Warp Drive, mélange, Alderson Drive, hyperspace, and a slew of other fictional technologies, nuclear impulse technology is real and can do the job.

The first civilization in the Milky Way galaxy with the technology (that includes us) with the will to use it (does not include us), can colonize the entire galaxy in some millions of years.  A far shorter period of time than the galaxy has existed.

Even we would have the will to use that technology if all life on Earth was about to be wiped out by a meteorite.

But you don't just need nuclear power, you need some way to create a ship that can protect yourself from cosmic radiation and sustain life. Maybe you could hollow out an asteroid, but what about when all your lightbulbs blow? How do you build new ones? So you'd also have to build in manufacturing capacity which means mining resources from space rocks. Technically feasible even in the 60's, after all, we do it on Earth, but significantly harder in a small enclosed space in the vacuum of space. This would use up even more energy than propelling the ship through space.

[I_am_not_mafia]

it's not clear to me what the limit of "biological" system is.  But it seems to me electronic systems can surpass it by orders of magnitude in both complexity and speed of execution.

Speed of execution yes, but not in connectivity. Electronic systems are orders of magnitude behind biological machines in that regard.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Niven and Pournelle's Footfall tells about an alien race that was just a few decades, if that, ahead of us when they arrive here. The ethical crisis regarding colonizing a world that already has a sentient species is told from the aliens' viewpoint.