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I'm interested as to why you'd assert that so confidently. Is it perhaps the more comfortable of the two possibilities?
by mark_integerdsv 14y ago
I'm interested as to why you'd assert that so confidently.
Is it perhaps the more comfortable of the two possibilities?
- cgag 14y agoI can't imagine there's anyone on this forum who doesn't want it to be alien technology.
- pekk 14y agoI don't want it to be alien technology if it isn't.
- rsheridan6 14y agoI don't. If aliens exist and are able to travel to our vicinity, we're probably screwed as a species.
- gbog 14y agoWhat is nice with alien is that we really don't know. So the sentence above tells much more about your pessimism than about aliens.
- mark_integerdsv 14y agoI tend toward a similar pessimism. Hawking has said that we need only look at the history of inter-species relationships on our planet (let alone race relationships) to get a hint of what exopolitics might look like. He goes on to mention that in terms of the search for alien life, we'd do best to keep our heads low.
- Wintamute 14y agoIt's too late for keeping our heads low. There's a sphere of EM radiation travelling at 3x10^8 m/s that started expanding out from Earth about the time that we turned on the first radio set. It announces our presence to anything capable listening.
- superrad 14y agoAfter a few light years non focused radio/tv transmissions will drop off into background noise. Active SETI is what's needed to send a signal to other planets
- vacri 14y agoHistory up until... when? The last 60 years has seen considerable advances in inter-race politics, and it's improving all the time. Why wouldn't exopolitics be an advanced form of this?
- chii 14y agoexcept of course, when the "advanced" species wants something that the "lower" species has. What if liquid water is a rarity, and the earth happens to have a lot of it?
- rsheridan6 14y agoSixty years is not a long time, and there's no reason to believe that this trend will continue forever.
- vacri 14y agoThere's also no reason to believe it won't, unless you're aiming for bias in the analysis.
- rsheridan6 14y agoI would not deny the possible that, for reasons I don't understand, any species advanced enough to be capable of interstellar travel behaves like a cross between Bono and Peter Singer. But I would not stake the survival of my species on it. And there is a reason to believe that they probably won't be - they will be the product of Darwinian evolution, just like us, which is really not a very nice thing.
- vacri 14y agoI completely agree on not staking the survival of the species on it, I just think that it's an overly cynical view. Same as I think most people are good people, but I still lock my car because a very few of them are thieves.
- gbog 14y agoThe strong assumption here is that the is no divide between intelligent and non intelligent life forms. I don't think it is the only view. I'd rather compare alien encounter with something like Marco Polo going to China: he didn't wish to kill them all, was impressed by some achievement and inventions but was also disgusted by the Chinese diet. Came back and wrote a book, and it was so foreign most readers didn't believe him.
- rsheridan6 14y agoAny alien lifeform that can reproduce would be subject to Darwinian natural selection. It would tend to grow exponentially, if the resources were available, and if you do the math, the universe ain't big enough for more than one exponentially reproducing species.
- gbog 14y agoYou don't know. Alien could be of a different scale, ant or mountain sized, and then most likely wouldn't even notice or mind our presence.
- rsheridan6 14y agoIf aliens decided to use our resources, they would probably do something like build a Dyson Sphere around the sun, which would mean there would be nothing left for us. It wouldn't matter how big they were, because they would use the resources we need. Look at it this way - we don't notice or mind the presence of insects or flowers, but that doesn't help them when we pave or plow their habitats. A lot of wild things escape us because we aren't that good at harvesting every possible resource, so there's a lot left over, but presumably aliens would be more efficient. Because of the properties of exponential growth, there would be nothing left over for us. If two organisms double their numbers 250 times, their numbers would roughly equal the number of atoms in the observable universe, which means there would be none left for anyone else. The only hope would be that they either don't reproduce, which seems unlikely since they would be the survivors of a process of Darwinian evolution just like any other critter, or that they're Space Vegans with a moral code against exterminating other species. We really don't know how they would think.
- gbog 14y agoyou seem to take exponential growth from granted, I'm not sure why. this seem to be the exception, not the rule.
- crusso 14y agowe really don't know I think that's the point. When you don't know anything about the motivations of an alien race that can easily wipe out our species, why would you take any chances? Pretend for a moment that I have a Button. The owner of that Button can push it and eliminate every person on the planet besides the people that owner didn't want to kill (friends, family, city, state, country, whatever) Would you be an advocate of giving that Button to any random person on Earth? Any race of aliens capable of interstellar travel probably has that Button. So while (I assume) that you wouldn't be okay with giving that Button to any person on Earth -- you'd be okay with having an alien race that we don't understand even a little bit in possession of such a thing.
- akiselev 14y agoOh yeah it's a totally safe assumption that if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and made it all the way to Mars that they won't find us... you know... one planet over, with a century of RF radiating away from our home. Unless of course you believe they're hiding inside Europa...
- crusso 14y agoWhich message are you even responding to? Maybe you should read the thread in order to understand what was being discussed. It had nothing to do with your response.
- gbog 14y agoWell I don't think I said I'd purposefully give such a killer switch to an alien race, I just said we don't know. We are all aware of the reasons to be pessimist, because of all the books and movies, but there are reasons to be optimist too: advanced technology may come with advanced ethics, for instance.
- crusso 14y agoThis isn't about "giving" the button to an alien race. You criticized the original poster's sense of pessimism for holding the only parsimonious, evidence-based and logical position on the subject. Have whatever fanciful opinion you want to on the subject, but pretending it's based in anything but wishful thinking is naive.
- Cthulhu_ 14y agoI love (sarcasm) how a supposedly technologically superior and enlightened species of non-earth intelligent beings would only be out to destroy or punish us, according to science fiction and a lot of people.
- kzrdude 14y agoDo you remember what happened when the europeans travelled around the world? 90% of populations died from new illnesses. They basically saw nothing ill in settling and displacing the remaining population.
- Fargren 14y agoWell, alien illness probably won't kill us. Without a common ancestry, it's highly unlikely that anything that uses an alien as a host can live in our bodies.
- crusso 14y agoWe don't know that. There are plenty of examples on Earth of cross-species infections. No telling how microbial/fungal agents could directly attack or indirectly impact the delicate balance here on Earth. Further, any microbe hitching a ride aboard an alien may well find Earth's general environment to be easy to thrive in. Think Kudzu, but at the microbial level. Eventually, the alien microbe and/or the natural Earth microbes will mutate in order to out-survive the other.
- nnq 14y agoYou assume that all life would be carbon based. And even assuming a "super fit" carbon-base alien microbe, the worst you could get would be some kind of eco-disaster that will end up being controlled anyway - like some sort of alien-algae overpopulating our oceans doing some eco-havoc. Even that would involve a kind of "super-fitness" created by an accelerated evolution running for much longer than here on Earth, as this microbe will have to compete with many others that are much more adapted to our environment. Anything really dangerous, like something that can infect multiple species, would have to be "engineered". "Mother nature" (aka evolution) doesn't engineer bio-weapons made to take over alien ecosystems - you would need huge time spans plus ubiquitous means of interstellar transportation for natural selection to favor such features (think "star gates" but zillions of them with tons of creatures and cargo running through them for at least tens of millions of years). So I'd take contact with a "non-engineered super infection" like you describe as a sign that someone has been operating a huge network of interstellar transportation systems for quite some time, as this would provide the only "peacefull" evolutionary history (again, excluding civilizations expert in bio-war things...) for such thing to evolve, so it would be quite a good omen for hopes "intergalactic fraternity" :)
- waskosky 14y agoIf the evidence becomes associated with conspiracy theory though, many people prefer to shy away because of the commonly held feelings about "those people." For example the recent claims of ET corpses being genetically studied, mysteriously absent from headlines it seems: http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1109-disclosure-nearly-identical-et-corpses-found-in-russia-and-south-america http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1109-disclosu...
- edmccard 14y agoNo, it's just the more reasonable. Most likely it's not any kind of artifact, but we have a lot more evidence for the existence of man-made spacecraft than we do for alien spacecraft, and Mars is a lot closer to Earth than it is to anywhere aliens might come from.
- mark_integerdsv 14y agoHmmm... I'm not sure we have reasonable evidence either way on this thing. At face value it is a seemingly artificial object where (reasonably) such a thing should not be, and (reasonably) you cannot honestly claim to know where in the universe aliens might come from.
- argonaut 14y agoPlease stop butchering Occam's Razor.
- znowi 14y ago> Is it perhaps the more comfortable of the two possibilities? The more plausible of the two (Occam's razor). Even though it's highly unlikely to stumble on a spacecraft wreckage on Mars. It is even more unlikely for this to be an alien tech. Though, I do admit, I want it to be :)
- jcfrei 14y agoI think Occams razor would dictate that it is just a weird looking piece of metal formed in the early days of mars, when there was more volcanic activity.
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- akiselev 14y agoRegardless of your interpretation of Drake's equation, we have no evidence for life existing anywhere else but on Earth. We never sent Curiosity to look for intelligent life, we sent her to look for evidence of past life or life buried in the rock. To assume that one of the first shiny object we see could even remotely indicate alien life is laughable. Discovery of alien would be nothing but revolutionary for the human race but don't let scifi and fantasy get in the way of reality. A rock formation like this is not unheard of just because you've never heard about it.