I don't know that alien invaders are always representations of western colonial powers. There's an element of yellow peril to many representations.
Sorry - true, I think the whole sense of "what it is like to meet us" still applies. A lot - especially of the more classic SF - is Europeans, but the reality is that is just "humans" - as we present ourselves on this planet.
There's no reason to suppose that any advanced civilisations out there in the great cosmos would be malevolent. They would be hard pushed to be as awful as our species has proved to be! But the late Professor Stephen Hawking said that should we encounter aliens, we would be right to be sorely afraid of them.
They would obviously have a technology far in advance of ours in order to reach us. Perhaps far higher intelligence. Even if they weren't malevolent they might see us in the way humans would if colonising an island inhabited by sheep. We would be ripe for exploitation. I tend to agree with Professor Brian Cox, that advanced civilisations are rare, but with over 3 trillion galaxies known, it's unlikely they don't exist somewhere.
I tend to agree with Professor Brian Cox, that advanced civilisations are rare, but with over 3 trillion galaxies known, it's unlikely they don't exist somewhere.
I think that, at present, this is unquantifiable. We have a sample size of one, and hence no basis upon which to estimate probabilities.
Any extraterrestrial race that has the technology to reach us is by that token able to avoid civilizational collapse via nuclear war, climate change, etc - something it's not clear humans are able to do. Therefore any expansionist aliens are almost certainly more disposed to cooperation than we are.
Any extraterrestrial race that has the technology to reach us is by that token able to avoid civilizational collapse via nuclear war, climate change, etc - something it's not clear humans are able to do. Therefore any expansionist aliens are almost certainly more disposed to cooperation than we are.
So then, we can assume that since the European imperialists had the technology to reach places that hadn't attained similar levels of technology, that therefore European societies were always more co-operative than the people they came into contact with?
I tend to agree with Professor Brian Cox, that advanced civilisations are rare, but with over 3 trillion galaxies known, it's unlikely they don't exist somewhere.
I think that, at present, this is unquantifiable. We have a sample size of one, and hence no basis upon which to estimate probabilities.
Agree. A probability is what you get when you divide total "successes" by the number of trials. We have no idea what either of those numbers is. We'd be hard pressed to even agree on what the denominator should be. All planets? All planets in the "zone" of what is considered possible to enable the creation (metaphorically speaking) of life? Do we know there can't be a gaseous form of life on, say, Saturn?
Do we have a good enough grasp on the number of exoplanets to guess what either of those numbers could be if multiplied across all the star systems of the universe? You could say the denominator is vast, and I could give you that. But still we only know of one planet to put in the numerator.
Any extraterrestrial race that has the technology to reach us is by that token able to avoid civilizational collapse via nuclear war, climate change, etc - something it's not clear humans are able to do. Therefore any expansionist aliens are almost certainly more disposed to cooperation than we are.
So then, we can assume that since the European imperialists had the technology to reach places that hadn't attained similar levels of technology, that therefore European societies were always more co-operative than the people they came into contact with?
No, because the situations are not analogous in that way.
Any extraterrestrial race that has the technology to reach us is by that token able to avoid civilizational collapse via nuclear war, climate change, etc - something it's not clear humans are able to do. Therefore any expansionist aliens are almost certainly more disposed to cooperation than we are.
So then, we can assume that since the European imperialists had the technology to reach places that hadn't attained similar levels of technology, that therefore European societies were always more co-operative than the people they came into contact with?
No, because the situations are not analogous in that way.
It is interesting that you all assume that when (and if) we meet aliens, it will because they visit us, not vice versa.
It’s because we’re well aware that we aren’t anywhere near the level of technology that would allow us to go to them. I mean, now that we’ve more or less ruled out this solar system as a place to find other intelligent life.
It is interesting that you all assume that when (and if) we meet aliens, it will because they visit us, not vice versa.
Well, for the foreseeable future, we are so far from being able to travel to a possibly habitable planet, the only chances of meeting aliens is if they come to us.
Ray Bradbury wrote a lotta short stories where earthlings travel to other planets, especially Mars, and encounter extraterrestrial life(*). I suspect he would not have written those stories if probes had already sent back evidence of how barren the surfaces of those places were.
(*) And there was no consistency between the Mars stories about what kind of life humans encounter on Mars, which made reading The Martian Chronicles rather confusing for me as a kid, since I was expecting it to be like a novel.
Any extraterrestrial race that has the technology to reach us is by that token able to avoid civilizational collapse via nuclear war, climate change, etc - something it's not clear humans are able to do. Therefore any expansionist aliens are almost certainly more disposed to cooperation than we are.
So then, we can assume that since the European imperialists had the technology to reach places that hadn't attained similar levels of technology, that therefore European societies were always more co-operative than the people they came into contact with?
No, because the situations are not analogous in that way.
Where does the analogy break down?
European imperial powers didn't have technologies capable of wiping out the entire species if mishandled. The challenge since c1960 has been that if humanity fucks up it could wipe itself out almost accidentally. If a civilisation can survive having that technology for an extended period it's presumably no more aggressive/irresponsible than humanity, given we've come within a whisker of species-destroying nuclear winter at times, and may yet wipe cripple ourselves with climate change.
Where this hypothesis wobbles is the assumption that interstellar travel must necessarily be something requiring super-high technology, rather than simply involving science we've not figured out yet but is relatively easy to build. It could be that interstellar travel is easier than nuclear fission if you have the requisite knowledge, and there's no reason to believe that scientific progression must happen in a linear fashion across different disciplines.
Any extraterrestrial race that has the technology to reach us is by that token able to avoid civilizational collapse via nuclear war, climate change, etc - something it's not clear humans are able to do. Therefore any expansionist aliens are almost certainly more disposed to cooperation than we are.
So then, we can assume that since the European imperialists had the technology to reach places that hadn't attained similar levels of technology, that therefore European societies were always more co-operative than the people they came into contact with?
No, because the situations are not analogous in that way.
Where does the analogy break down?
European imperial powers didn't have technologies capable of wiping out the entire species if mishandled. The challenge since c1960 has been that if humanity fucks up it could wipe itself out almost accidentally. If a civilisation can survive having that technology for an extended period it's presumably no more aggressive/irresponsible than humanity, given we've come within a whisker of species-destroying nuclear winter at times, and may yet wipe cripple ourselves with climate change.
I could think of quite-plausible scenarios where an alien civilization develops nuke-equivalent weapons, maintains them without incident for decades or even centuries, but does not also develop a universal sense of co-operation such that would preclude them mistreating the inhabitants of other planets.
For example, on some goldilocks planet in another solar system, one technologically advanced tribe invents nukes or equivalent, uses them to subjugate and enslave the other tribes on the planet(thus lessening the threat of apocalyptic warfare), and then uses their advanced space-travel technology to find other planets on which to do the same.
Here is C S Lewis on space imperialism, in "Religion and Rocketry". I particularly like the last line.
I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if ever we meet rational creatures which are not human. Against them we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonized pity, and burning shame.
Of course after the first debauch of exploitation we shall make some belated attempt to do better. We shall perhaps send missionaries. But can even missionaries be trusted? "Gun and gospel" have been horribly combined in the past. The missionary's holy desire to save souls has not always been kept quite distinct from the arrogant desire, the busybody's itch, to (as he calls it) "civilize" the (as he calls them) "natives." Would all our missionaries recognize an unfallen race if they met it? Could they? Would they continue to press upon creatures that did not need to be saved that plan of Salvation which God has appointed for Man? Would they denounce as sins mere differences of behaviour which the spiritual and biological history of these strange creatures fully justified and which God Himself had blessed? Would they try to teach those from whom they had better learn? I do not know. What I do know is that here and now, as our only possible practical preparation for such a meeting, you and I should resolve to stand firm against all exploitation and all theological imperialism. It will not be fun. We shall be called traitors to our own species. We shall be hated of almost all men; even of some religious men. And we must not give back one single inch. We shall probably fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side. Our loyalty is due not to our species but to God. Those who are, or can become, His sons, are our real brothers even if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological, kinship that counts.
But let us thank God that we are still very far from travel to other worlds.
I am always struck by the argument in The Three Body Problem - the later books (sorry if you have not read them - very good, and very chilling). It is the Dark Forest theory - that any advanced society would hide itself, realising that it is too dangerous to broadcast ones presence.
I know this is not a scientifically argued answer, but it has, I think, value for consideration.
The argument isn't that more technologically advanced societies are inherently more co-operative. (Although the idea that the less technologically advanced societies that Europeans invaded were inherently less inclined to domination and expansion is laughable. Human societies that we know of are pretty much of a muchness.)
The argument is that in order to get to space travel a society has as far as we can tell to develop technologies that are capable of destroying that society if the society isn't co-operative. It's not clear whether humans are co-operative enough to avoid destroying our society.
The technologies required for human societies to expand into the territory of less advanced societies were not capable of destroying those societies, at least not in the time frames involved. The reasons that the societies they invaded didn't have the same level of technology weren't that those societies had used the technology to destroy themselves.
Interesting! Though it presupposes a fallen universe, not just our planet.
But if we take that view, I'd also expect that at some earlier stage of their development they would have been detectable for the same reason we are--namely, not realizing that our activities make us visible to anybody who can detect various kinds of energy.
And since the energy from the earlier stages of any planet's development are still "out there" travelling away from their location in space, they would still be detectable--just by observers at at increasingly larger distances from their location. Who might decide to drop by and see if the signal-makers are still there.
I mentioned the Dark Forest earlier in this thread. Part of the hypothesis behind the Dark Forest Deterrent is that signals by themselves say "someone's out there" but have very little information on where they are coming from - a direction, but along any line there are countless star systems the signal could have originated from (even if we exclude signals from space ships travelling between stars). For anyone who hasn't read the books (highly recommended) you may wish to avoid the spoiler below
The Dark Forest Deterrent was the transmission of a signal that pinpoints a specific location (ie: contains reference to distances to distinct and identifiable star systems), with the hostile invaders knowing that if they continue their attack this would be used to pinpoint the location of their home world - even though in doing so it provides anyone who has the earlier transmissions between these worlds the data needed to pinpoint Earth and so is the ultimate in Mutually Assured Destruction.
I tried to read the first 3 body problem book but couldn't get my head around the science/technology. I watched the Netflix and found I really didn't like enough of the characters to stick with it. I'm not of a generation that finds games an interesting topic.
It's interesting how different people approach the same books. I wouldn't have expected a reaction against game given how small an element it is in the trilogy. Much of the science is highly speculative, it isn't really a "what could we do with a small incremental step in technology?" type of sci-fi, sophons and collapsing multi-dimensions and changing the speed of light are way beyond that. I can see how people might prefer their sci-fi to be more grounded in recognisable physics, I like that sort of fiction as well.
The biggest issue I have with the science in the books (I didn't even know there was a Netflix version, much less know how it compares to the books) is
how the Trisolaran planet exists at all. The Trisolarans recognise that staying on their home world would doom them as it will eventually be torn apart by the Trisolar suns. But, the same forces that would tear the planet apart would have also prevented it from forming in the first place.
But, back to the thread. The Dark Forest scenario is an interesting concept to address the "why haven't we heard from them?" question. It's different from the answers "because they're not there"/"civilisation is so rare that our nearest neighbour civilisation is so distant we'll never hear from them" or some form of "Prime Directive" which means they're deliberately avoiding contaminating our culture by visiting. It's a scenario that doesn't even require all other civilisations to be hostile, simply enough of them that wisdom means everyone keeps quiet.
The argument isn't that more technologically advanced societies are inherently more co-operative. (Although the idea that the less technologically advanced societies that Europeans invaded were inherently less inclined to domination and expansion is laughable. Human societies that we know of are pretty much of a muchness.)
The argument is that in order to get to space travel a society has as far as we can tell to develop technologies that are capable of destroying that society if the society isn't co-operative. It's not clear whether humans are co-operative enough to avoid destroying our society.
Yes, I know. And in my reply to @Alan Cresswell , I outlined my reasons for thinking that it would be quite possible for a non-co-operative society to maintain nuclear-type weapons without incident, thus allowing itself to remain functional long enough to engage in interstellar imperialism. (And I can think of other scenarios besides the one I proposed.)
I also suspect Creswell is correct that the development of space travel wouldn't necessarily correlate with the development of nukes, though admittedly that requires a bit of alt-historical speculation. On the one planet we know of, nukes were quickly followed by space travel.
The silliness of the alien-invasion stories starts with the notion that aliens would want t a planet noticeably different from their own. This mostly started with "War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells, and we know more now than was known then about Mars. Martians would not want to invade Earth because of the massive differences in gravity, air pressure and temperature. (Actually, some of this was known back in the day.) It is as absurd for Mars to invade Earth as for Earth to invade Jupiter.
What about aliens from other worlds? We have at least some observations about thousands of extrasolar planets. None of them is likely to sustain human beings who travel there, and for reciprocal reasons, none is likely to harbor intelligent life that will want to invade us.
The silliness of the alien-invasion stories starts with the notion that aliens would want t a planet noticeably different from their own. This mostly started with "War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells, and we know more now than was known then about Mars. Martians would not want to invade Earth because of the massive differences in gravity, air pressure and temperature. (Actually, some of this was known back in the day.) It is as absurd for Mars to invade Earth as for Earth to invade Jupiter.
I think this might assume that the aliens would be invading Earth in the hope of finding comfortable place to set up colonies. But if it's more just about raw extraction of resources, they might not care that much about how habitable it is for the general population. They might even have ways of mining ore, siphoning water, sucking out the brains of homo sapiens for use in AI programming etc, by remote-control technology.
To reverse this...
Let's suppose that a space probe sends back photos from the surface of Mercury's scorching surface, and they reveal the planet is home to water-breathing dragons with the power to create ice with their exhalations. I think there would be, at the very least, a faction of interested and influential parties on Earth arguing in favour of exploring the possibility of making some sorta contact, benevolent or otherwise, with the creatures.
In middle school, we read a novel called The Gnomids, by the appropriately named WCH Chalk, one of those young people's novels that were clearly written for classroom purposes of classroom reading, and thus giving off the overall radiancy of a textbook(*).
The book was published in 1967, and involved numerous creatures emerging from the earth's interior and trying to adjust to life on the surface. I can't recall if anyone explained to us at the time that it was a metaphor for postwar immigration issues in the UK, but that was clearly what was going on.
(*) The British really seem to go in for this sorta thing. The moralizing US books seemed more like they had originally been marketed for enjoyment-reading. We did read one American school-reader novel, but it was about a murderer on the loose and didn't seem to be commenting on the larger society.
Quite possibly. I'm just saying that I don't think the inhabitability of a planet, in and of itself, would be an a priori reason to assume aliens would avoid trying to acquire it.
@Alan Cresswell apologies - I had probably read your Dark Forest comment but forgotten it had already been raised here. I kept being reminded of it as the conversation continued.
According to wikipedia, the word "expansionist" refers primarily to "states obtaining greater territory through military empire-building or colonialism".
And my understanding is that the word "society" refers to a group of human beings that co-operate with each other, even if a moderate amount of competition is permitted between individuals in that society. I'm not convinced that this translates to societies when they come into contact with each other - more the converse: that societies compete first, and only try cooperation if competition doesn't reach a resolution. It doesn't seem appropriate to think of humanity as a whole as being a society.
Over the course of human history, many human societies (and entire civilisations) have been wiped out with the use of human-made technology, through coming into contact with other societies and/or internal conflicts.
I can't see a compelling reason why spacefaring aliens would be likely to adopt a significantly more co-operative attitude towards other societies (compared to human beings), unless evolution turns out to be less competitive elsewhere in the universe.
It seems to me that the most likely alien visitor we might have would be an alien astronaut who would be delighted to set foot on another planet. Far from being angry and hostile, he might be curious and joyous.
I strongly suspect that it is simply impossible to traverse the large distances required in interstellar travel within any feasible timeframe or energy budget. I think any contact with others out there (and there might be many) would be via radio signals or similar, not physical visitation.
This reminds me of a scene in a short story (title and author long since forgotten) where aliens pick up Earth transmissions and send their own transmission of an audience in an auditorium, looking at a blank screen - in other words, "Send us more stuff to look at."
It's a scenario that doesn't even require all other civilisations to be hostile, simply enough of them that wisdom means everyone keeps quiet.
Or alternatively the existential consequences of one of them proving to be hostile is sufficiently great that it becomes best to treat all other civilisations as hostile.
I strongly suspect that it is simply impossible to traverse the large distances required in interstellar travel within any feasible timeframe or energy budget. I think any contact with others out there (and there might be many) would be via radio signals or similar, not physical visitation.
I often reflect on the sheer inefficincy of transporting and sustaining one's biology across vast distances and time.
I imagine that an advanced civilization would project or transport its individual consciousnesses via something like a holographic or biomechanical version of itself, and operate it remotely like an FPV drone or VR headset from the comfort of its own living room.
It seems to me that the most likely alien visitor we might have would be an alien astronaut who would be delighted to set foot on another planet. Far from being angry and hostile, he might be curious and joyous.
I think it's possible to be both a) delighted to set foot in a new place, and b) not particularly benign in one's intentions toward the inhabitants. Columbus and his men were probably pretty thrilled to be in the "New World", for example.
Here is C S Lewis on space imperialism, in "Religion and Rocketry". I particularly like the last line.
I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if ever we meet rational creatures which are not human. Against them we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonized pity, and burning shame.
Of course after the first debauch of exploitation we shall make some belated attempt to do better. We shall perhaps send missionaries. But can even missionaries be trusted? "Gun and gospel" have been horribly combined in the past. The missionary's holy desire to save souls has not always been kept quite distinct from the arrogant desire, the busybody's itch, to (as he calls it) "civilize" the (as he calls them) "natives." Would all our missionaries recognize an unfallen race if they met it? Could they? Would they continue to press upon creatures that did not need to be saved that plan of Salvation which God has appointed for Man? Would they denounce as sins mere differences of behaviour which the spiritual and biological history of these strange creatures fully justified and which God Himself had blessed? Would they try to teach those from whom they had better learn? I do not know. What I do know is that here and now, as our only possible practical preparation for such a meeting, you and I should resolve to stand firm against all exploitation and all theological imperialism. It will not be fun. We shall be called traitors to our own species. We shall be hated of almost all men; even of some religious men. And we must not give back one single inch. We shall probably fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side. Our loyalty is due not to our species but to God. Those who are, or can become, His sons, are our real brothers even if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological, kinship that counts.
But let us thank God that we are still very far from travel to other worlds.
This reminds me of a scene in a short story (title and author long since forgotten) where aliens pick up Earth transmissions and send their own transmission of an audience in an auditorium, looking at a blank screen - in other words, "Send us more stuff to look at."
I’m surprised CS Lewis’s planetary trilogy hasn’t yet come up in this discussion (unless I skimmed past too quickly). “Out of the Silent Planet” is a deliberate response to the account of a hostile alien invasion in “War of the Worlds”, which he refers to, with delightful and diverse Martians living in harmony until evil colonists from Earth attempt, and fail, to conquer it. (Similar theme to Ursula le Guin “The word for world is forest” or even Aldous Huxley “Island”.)
The premise in CSL’s trilogy is that God created the universe but Earth came under the partial influence of the devil and is therefore less harmonious than the other planets. He may have borrowed the theory from Milton, but I haven’t looked at Milton recently enough to know.
I remember the (was it three or four?) 'Quatermas' stories all had evil aliens try to do things to us humans. And in a nasty underhand way too! Scary stuff back in the 1950s.
I’m surprised CS Lewis’s planetary trilogy hasn’t yet come up in this discussion (unless I skimmed past too quickly). “Out of the Silent Planet” is a deliberate response to the account of a hostile alien invasion in “War of the Worlds”, which he refers to, with delightful and diverse Martians living in harmony until evil colonists from Earth attempt, and fail, to conquer it. (Similar theme to Ursula le Guin “The word for world is forest” or even Aldous Huxley “Island”.)
The premise in CSL’s trilogy is that God created the universe but Earth came under the partial influence of the devil and is therefore less harmonious than the other planets. He may have borrowed the theory from Milton, but I haven’t looked at Milton recently enough to know.
Comments
Sorry - true, I think the whole sense of "what it is like to meet us" still applies. A lot - especially of the more classic SF - is Europeans, but the reality is that is just "humans" - as we present ourselves on this planet.
They would obviously have a technology far in advance of ours in order to reach us. Perhaps far higher intelligence. Even if they weren't malevolent they might see us in the way humans would if colonising an island inhabited by sheep. We would be ripe for exploitation. I tend to agree with Professor Brian Cox, that advanced civilisations are rare, but with over 3 trillion galaxies known, it's unlikely they don't exist somewhere.
I think that, at present, this is unquantifiable. We have a sample size of one, and hence no basis upon which to estimate probabilities.
So then, we can assume that since the European imperialists had the technology to reach places that hadn't attained similar levels of technology, that therefore European societies were always more co-operative than the people they came into contact with?
Agree. A probability is what you get when you divide total "successes" by the number of trials. We have no idea what either of those numbers is. We'd be hard pressed to even agree on what the denominator should be. All planets? All planets in the "zone" of what is considered possible to enable the creation (metaphorically speaking) of life? Do we know there can't be a gaseous form of life on, say, Saturn?
Do we have a good enough grasp on the number of exoplanets to guess what either of those numbers could be if multiplied across all the star systems of the universe? You could say the denominator is vast, and I could give you that. But still we only know of one planet to put in the numerator.
Where does the analogy break down?
It’s because we’re well aware that we aren’t anywhere near the level of technology that would allow us to go to them. I mean, now that we’ve more or less ruled out this solar system as a place to find other intelligent life.
Well, for the foreseeable future, we are so far from being able to travel to a possibly habitable planet, the only chances of meeting aliens is if they come to us.
Ray Bradbury wrote a lotta short stories where earthlings travel to other planets, especially Mars, and encounter extraterrestrial life(*). I suspect he would not have written those stories if probes had already sent back evidence of how barren the surfaces of those places were.
(*) And there was no consistency between the Mars stories about what kind of life humans encounter on Mars, which made reading The Martian Chronicles rather confusing for me as a kid, since I was expecting it to be like a novel.
European imperial powers didn't have technologies capable of wiping out the entire species if mishandled. The challenge since c1960 has been that if humanity fucks up it could wipe itself out almost accidentally. If a civilisation can survive having that technology for an extended period it's presumably no more aggressive/irresponsible than humanity, given we've come within a whisker of species-destroying nuclear winter at times, and may yet wipe cripple ourselves with climate change.
Where this hypothesis wobbles is the assumption that interstellar travel must necessarily be something requiring super-high technology, rather than simply involving science we've not figured out yet but is relatively easy to build. It could be that interstellar travel is easier than nuclear fission if you have the requisite knowledge, and there's no reason to believe that scientific progression must happen in a linear fashion across different disciplines.
I could think of quite-plausible scenarios where an alien civilization develops nuke-equivalent weapons, maintains them without incident for decades or even centuries, but does not also develop a universal sense of co-operation such that would preclude them mistreating the inhabitants of other planets.
For example, on some goldilocks planet in another solar system, one technologically advanced tribe invents nukes or equivalent, uses them to subjugate and enslave the other tribes on the planet(thus lessening the threat of apocalyptic warfare), and then uses their advanced space-travel technology to find other planets on which to do the same.
Aliens due to arrive tomorrow.
They are going to take good looking older people
Excuse me,
I have to get busy packing.
Hmmm ... Who remembers Heaven's Gate'?
Here is C S Lewis on space imperialism, in "Religion and Rocketry". I particularly like the last line.
I know this is not a scientifically argued answer, but it has, I think, value for consideration.
The argument is that in order to get to space travel a society has as far as we can tell to develop technologies that are capable of destroying that society if the society isn't co-operative. It's not clear whether humans are co-operative enough to avoid destroying our society.
The technologies required for human societies to expand into the territory of less advanced societies were not capable of destroying those societies, at least not in the time frames involved. The reasons that the societies they invaded didn't have the same level of technology weren't that those societies had used the technology to destroy themselves.
But if we take that view, I'd also expect that at some earlier stage of their development they would have been detectable for the same reason we are--namely, not realizing that our activities make us visible to anybody who can detect various kinds of energy.
And since the energy from the earlier stages of any planet's development are still "out there" travelling away from their location in space, they would still be detectable--just by observers at at increasingly larger distances from their location. Who might decide to drop by and see if the signal-makers are still there.
The biggest issue I have with the science in the books (I didn't even know there was a Netflix version, much less know how it compares to the books) is
But, back to the thread. The Dark Forest scenario is an interesting concept to address the "why haven't we heard from them?" question. It's different from the answers "because they're not there"/"civilisation is so rare that our nearest neighbour civilisation is so distant we'll never hear from them" or some form of "Prime Directive" which means they're deliberately avoiding contaminating our culture by visiting. It's a scenario that doesn't even require all other civilisations to be hostile, simply enough of them that wisdom means everyone keeps quiet.
Yes, I know. And in my reply to @Alan Cresswell , I outlined my reasons for thinking that it would be quite possible for a non-co-operative society to maintain nuclear-type weapons without incident, thus allowing itself to remain functional long enough to engage in interstellar imperialism. (And I can think of other scenarios besides the one I proposed.)
I also suspect Creswell is correct that the development of space travel wouldn't necessarily correlate with the development of nukes, though admittedly that requires a bit of alt-historical speculation. On the one planet we know of, nukes were quickly followed by space travel.
What about aliens from other worlds? We have at least some observations about thousands of extrasolar planets. None of them is likely to sustain human beings who travel there, and for reciprocal reasons, none is likely to harbor intelligent life that will want to invade us.
I think this might assume that the aliens would be invading Earth in the hope of finding comfortable place to set up colonies. But if it's more just about raw extraction of resources, they might not care that much about how habitable it is for the general population. They might even have ways of mining ore, siphoning water, sucking out the brains of homo sapiens for use in AI programming etc, by remote-control technology.
To reverse this...
Let's suppose that a space probe sends back photos from the surface of Mercury's scorching surface, and they reveal the planet is home to water-breathing dragons with the power to create ice with their exhalations. I think there would be, at the very least, a faction of interested and influential parties on Earth arguing in favour of exploring the possibility of making some sorta contact, benevolent or otherwise, with the creatures.
In middle school, we read a novel called The Gnomids, by the appropriately named WCH Chalk, one of those young people's novels that were clearly written for classroom purposes of classroom reading, and thus giving off the overall radiancy of a textbook(*).
The book was published in 1967, and involved numerous creatures emerging from the earth's interior and trying to adjust to life on the surface. I can't recall if anyone explained to us at the time that it was a metaphor for postwar immigration issues in the UK, but that was clearly what was going on.
(*) The British really seem to go in for this sorta thing. The moralizing US books seemed more like they had originally been marketed for enjoyment-reading. We did read one American school-reader novel, but it was about a murderer on the loose and didn't seem to be commenting on the larger society.
Quite possibly. I'm just saying that I don't think the inhabitability of a planet, in and of itself, would be an a priori reason to assume aliens would avoid trying to acquire it.
And my understanding is that the word "society" refers to a group of human beings that co-operate with each other, even if a moderate amount of competition is permitted between individuals in that society. I'm not convinced that this translates to societies when they come into contact with each other - more the converse: that societies compete first, and only try cooperation if competition doesn't reach a resolution. It doesn't seem appropriate to think of humanity as a whole as being a society.
Over the course of human history, many human societies (and entire civilisations) have been wiped out with the use of human-made technology, through coming into contact with other societies and/or internal conflicts.
I can't see a compelling reason why spacefaring aliens would be likely to adopt a significantly more co-operative attitude towards other societies (compared to human beings), unless evolution turns out to be less competitive elsewhere in the universe.
Or alternatively the existential consequences of one of them proving to be hostile is sufficiently great that it becomes best to treat all other civilisations as hostile.
I often reflect on the sheer inefficincy of transporting and sustaining one's biology across vast distances and time.
I imagine that an advanced civilization would project or transport its individual consciousnesses via something like a holographic or biomechanical version of itself, and operate it remotely like an FPV drone or VR headset from the comfort of its own living room.
AFF
On a long enough timeline maybe species are willing to engineer their offspring to live in significantly different environments to themselves.
I think it's possible to be both a) delighted to set foot in a new place, and b) not particularly benign in one's intentions toward the inhabitants. Columbus and his men were probably pretty thrilled to be in the "New World", for example.
Amen!
Galaxy Quest too!
The premise in CSL’s trilogy is that God created the universe but Earth came under the partial influence of the devil and is therefore less harmonious than the other planets. He may have borrowed the theory from Milton, but I haven’t looked at Milton recently enough to know.
And an awesome trilogy it is! ❤️❤️❤️