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Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
#41
RE: Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
I do, sure. I even see them building structures, etc, and I relate to that. Doesn't stop me from annihilating them - but if I tooled in my microscope and found a tiny microbial bicycle...yeah, I'd give them a little more thought (before annihilating them). I think the relationship of ourselves to bacteria doesn't really address what we're talking about. We'd both (in the case of another tech species, however advanced) be tinkerers, the builders of things. Hopefully said tinkerers aren't as aggressive as myself or yourself.

How would you feel about bacteria that built a handaxe?
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#42
RE: Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
My reaction? I'm going to try my best to not look tasty.
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#43
RE: Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
The thing is these being are I hope intelligent. They should have gotten past a lot of flaws (or not even have them) as we do. I think one issues with humanity is the fact we have not met something smarter than us yet. So our frame of reference is rather off. Neil DeGrasse Tyson makes an interesting metaphor with the comparison between humans and chimps.
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#44
RE: Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
(August 19, 2014 at 4:52 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: My reaction? I'm going to try my best to not look tasty.

Probably not that difficult. Big Grin

Oh shit, he's the Poleeeze!Confusedhock:
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#45
RE: Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
I think there may be a possibility that developing technology is an evolutionary loser. That every creature that develops civilization eventually depletes the resources of their planet and dies out. That ours may be a tragic comedy that's played out thousands of times and that's why we get no contact from extra terrestrials. We just have too much hubris about our technology to realize it.
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#46
RE: Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
(August 21, 2014 at 12:48 am)CapnAwesome Wrote: I think there may be a possibility that developing technology is an evolutionary loser. That every creature that develops civilization eventually depletes the resources of their planet and dies out. That ours may be a tragic comedy that's played out thousands of times and that's why we get no contact from extra terrestrials. We just have too much hubris about our technology to realize it.


Every life sustaining planet will eventually completely loses the ability to sustain life. Without technology there is no escaping from the planet or retarding the inevitable day of total life support collapse. Therefore no technology is a 100% certain bet for extinction on the cosmological time scale.

For any complex life we can seriously imagine, technology offers the only path available to prolonging a planet's habitability, and to escape the planet when it eventually becomes uninhabitable.

Technology may enable life to destroy itself before nature would otherwise do it in. But without technology nature will absolutely certainly do all life in. Technology offers the only slim possibility that there is to beat nature.
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#47
RE: Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
Agree with the logic but I don't believe we have ever hopped before.
I think it is what it is.

If we ever manage to hop, it'll be the first time.
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#48
RE: Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
(August 19, 2014 at 3:57 pm)Rhythm Wrote: I do, sure. I even see them building structures, etc, and I relate to that. Doesn't stop me from annihilating them - but if I tooled in my microscope and found a tiny microbial bicycle...yeah, I'd give them a little more thought (before annihilating them). I think the relationship of ourselves to bacteria doesn't really address what we're talking about. We'd both (in the case of another tech species, however advanced) be tinkerers, the builders of things. Hopefully said tinkerers aren't as aggressive as myself or yourself.

How would you feel about bacteria that built a handaxe?


I think you feel this way because on the scale of biological development, we are still so very close, maybe 1 million years, to the most primitive technology possible, the hand axe, that we naturally feel kinship to a handaxe maker. The bond is further strengthened because we are still compelled to use tools little different from hand axe from time to time. To us the first tool maker, the possessor of the first technology, may not be wholly human, but was already mostly human, and tool making distinguishes us, humans, from them, animals. Some minor exceptions aside. We sit on the tip of one small branch of a big evolutionary tree, and it just so happens all the tool makers share our branch.

Now imagine a creature that is at the end of an evolutionary tree that has passed 3 billion years beyond the first hand axe. It seems very likely that in those three billion years, the clan of tool makers have not only advanced greatly beyond our wildest imagination in tool use and would have no use whatsoever for a hand axes, but also speciated many, many times in the course of 3 billion years. A technological species 3 billion years more advanced then we would likely not sit on a lone branch of tool makers in a tree of non tool makers. Instead, after 3 billion years it would likely represent but the highest branch on a entire evolutionary tree of mostly different tool makers. Most may have gone extinct in the 3 billion years, but 3 billion years would allow the most advanced tool maker to the morphologically and behaviorally, to say nothing of technologically, so vastly different from other tool makers that have come and went in the 3 billion years, as different as we and bacteria, that it seems hard to imagine they would still identify mere primitive tool making as an significant mark of kinship.

(August 21, 2014 at 1:33 am)ignoramus Wrote: Agree with the logic but I don't believe we have ever hopped before.
I think it is what it is.

If we ever manage to hop, it'll be the first time.

We have not hopped before. But I find it astronomically unlikely that no one has hopped before.

The following fact further increase the odds, beyond a simple naive numbers extrapolation, that someone has hopped before is:

The planets in the universe, the ones on which life would have had the longest time in which to evolve technology, mostly likely formed in environments where stars are far more closely bunched together, in globular clusters, and in the central bulges of baby galaxies, than around the sun. From these planets interstellar hop would have been easier, and less time consuming, than it would be for us.

So those life that had the longest to perfect the technology for space travel are also likely to have evolved on worlds where nearby stars are closer and interstellar travel therefore easier.
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#49
RE: Reaction to extra-terrestial life.
That is an interesting hypothesis, with that said I wonder why we have no heard much from the interstellar community. Which I am sure has something to do with using the wrong communication medium. I wonder why this curiosity has not driven humanity to seek out said life. Sadly as Arthur C Clark stated about advanced technology, ..."Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So we might not know they could be watching or even have already visited us.

I believe in the grand scheme of things, Humanity would be a perfect educational planet to study. I imagine with the new stance on the Drake equation, not many advanced civilizations survive our stage of development. So it might be a wonderful observational experiment to see how a fledgling civilization evolves.

Another question too, if we found ancient alien artifacts on planets/moons with in our solar system would we cover that up? I feel there is a vested interest either to prevent chaos or maintain the status quo exists with in our current paradigm.
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