RE: When do you think we will have extraterrestrials visit us? visit us
June 8, 2012 at 5:42 pm
(This post was last modified: June 8, 2012 at 5:44 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(June 8, 2012 at 5:33 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:(June 8, 2012 at 5:13 pm)Chuck Wrote: I am not projecting the opposit. I am trying not to project at all. I am trying to start from a clean slate.
The person I was responding to claimed that aliens that were 1% smarter than us would not care more for us than we care about Ebola. My statement concluded with 'I don't think it's so easy to predict alien attitudes.' I think you may have mistaken my position.
(June 8, 2012 at 5:13 pm)Chuck Wrote: I don't. We really have no idea what evidence we should expect from a sophant 5 million years, or 5 billion years, more advanced than we are. For all we know we could have been providing amusment like crickets in a box all along.
The aliens you propose would be indistinguishable from gods and all of the problems that apply to gods apply to them. I have only the one sophont species to judge by, but I think it's highly likely that a species with the technology and will to expand beyond their star system will exploit and transform everything in their way. If they valued non-intererence and invisibility, they could have stayed home.
The species I propose is fundamentally different from typical notion god because it is not omniscient and omnipotent, and is not a priori assumed to be anthropamorphic in the sense of possessing behavioral traits that blatant projections of what humans acquired through our own unique behavioral evolutionary path.
As to a species recognizably changing everything it touches on its way I suppose that is not necessarily true either. A species' notion of what is worth exploiting also changes dramatically as it evolves technologically and biologically, and as its demographic and economic conditions evolve. This is why the caves in which cromagnon man painted their cave art hasn't been paved over thousands of years ago for reuse. It seems just as plausible that a species would expand only so far before its notion of what is worth exploiting changes so much and beyond that point, it would leave little sign of that we would recognize as esxploitation.
