(November 26, 2008 at 11:37 am)Daystar Wrote:(November 26, 2008 at 5:20 am)Kyuuketsuki Wrote:(November 24, 2008 at 12:45 pm)Daystar Wrote: It is interesting that life on other planets is always perceived as being superior to our own. They are always far more advanced than we are.
Firstly, that isn't true ... "Stargate" (film & and two spin-off TV series) springs to mind where the "aliens" are most definitely not always perceived as advanced (more often rather primitive) and series such as "Star Trek", "Firefly", "Babylon 5", "Doctor Who" and so on will contain stories featuring more primitive races. Secondly, when you're talking about films (for instance) where aliens visit Earth yes, they are usually superior but that makes some sense because such scenarios tend to be set in the [then] present day against aliens who have come from a supposedly far flung world and as such they almost certainly must have technology greater than ours as we have only go unmanned satellites to anything other than the moon.
You are talking about science fiction though. Being a great fan of Frank Herbert's Dune I would agree with you there, but the general public tends to speculate for the most part that alien life is far more advanced than we are. It is almost a utopian reflection.
Let's see ... first you claim alien life is always seen to be superior so I offer two arguments for that, you dismiss one based on it being science fiction (and I agree it was but you did not specify that in the point you made) and you appear to dismiss the other for some vague reason that the public *tends* to speculate ...
Firstly, disregarding science fiction (which sets us in the real world of today), I would say that it is still true that any alien race must necessarily have come across a minimum if 4 light years of space (something beyond our current capability) and so almost certainly WOULD be more advanced than we are and secondly, the general public? As far as I can tell the vast majority of people simply don't even think about such things, certainly not in non-SF terms.
I have to say that your answer disappointed me a little and leads me to suspect that you won't concede even the most reasonable point whether it is about religion or not.
Kyu
