You’re the first to meet an intelligent alien species. What are you going to do? Here’s a brief, handy guide — I’ll just excerpt a few points.
I like this idea: there’s no way we’re going to war with them. Our technologies will not be comparable, and we have to note the obvious: they’d be the ones with interstellar space flight, not us. So, yes, it will be a case of nuclear weapons vs. sponges, and we’d better be careful.
But there is one important matter to consider about the comparison. If you found a sponge on a beach crowded with sponges, how much remorse would you feel if you took a sample? You don’t want to be the first contactee. Or the second. Or any of them. This is going to be a personally dangerous event. Your best bet is to run away rather than try to chat.
There are several more suggestions for how to communicate, and it ends with this example.
Now if we’ve gotten this far, we’re going to have to assume that the aliens do see us as something more than sponges. If we’re close to them technologically, then yes, it’s worth your while to show off your awareness of your place in the universe. If we’re not close, then face it — the aliens won’t care how much knowledge of our species’ history we have. They’re going to be sizing us up for edibility, or suitability for mindless labor, or whether we’d be useful scrubbing implements in the shower, none of which require any philosophical or scientific capabiity at all.
It’s an interesting thought exercise, but only if we meet an alien species that isn’t too far beyond us intellectually.
I would direct the Aliens to the Vatican, then the newage foundations on the west coast, then to the Immans in Saudi Arabia and they would become so befuddled, we could kick their asses and take their shit, and use it for wind power.
I’d have to say my first reaction would be extreme caution. In situations where I’m uncertain of my surroundings and the people in them, I tend to stay quiet, listen and watch. That would be even more important in the case of aliens.
I always think of extraterrestrials as immense jellyfish-like beings, a la Cosmos.
If the ultimate test is whether we have figured out evolution and don’t believe in a creator who made the universe especially for us anymore, we really wouldn’t want them to land in the USA…
Rorschach:
No we wouldn’t. However, there aren’t many places they could land and not encounter a theist of some sort who would blurt out the inevitable goddidit.
That should be wouldn’t.
Fermi said it all : even if superintelligent ET’s do exist in the vast void, is there any reason to believe even they could overcome the problems of distance and time on the astronomical scale?
Yeah, that occurred to me when I was writing my comment…:-)
In that case we better hope that the Fermi paradox works in our favor !
I’d wager they have landed and tested us in the past and are possibly still doing it. They have probably been using the standard alien method of testing a species’ intellect by asking, “How did life begin on your planet?” Until they reach a higher percentage of people who give an answer remotely close to “slowly over millions of years”, they will not make public contact.
I could have watched too many movies.
I stick by my original suggestion that we give them Saudi Arabia, then maybe Burma, and finally cede Oklahoma, perhaps Minnesota if they persist.
Lets face it, if they came all the way out to this back water galaxy rim rock, they obviously stole a spaceship and crashed, nobody with any technology would bother with this backwater anthill unless they were running from the Federation.
Well, there was the Covenant…
The problem with relativity, as far as we know, is that once you launch your ship into near lightspeed, you cut yourself off from your seed planet, which negates all of our dreams of sharing civilizations.
The ship contains a period of speciation that no longer exists, so it’s just a freakshow on the improbable wheels of implausible physics and even more unlikely politics.
We definitely need better Physics, even the string guys can’t give us Kirk and Spock.
and Kirk and Spock are
like
snif sniff
Adam and Eve
There’s still an assumption there that we’re the pinnacle of evolution. We don’t even have the biggest genome! Sure, we’re pretty successful, and since these aliens will inevitably be technological, they’re likely to be interested in the planet’s ultimate (so far) tool users. But they still might say “call that humility, humans? Why don’t you show more respect to the ants?”
This is why the aliens haven’t contacted us yet.
I would think that it’s quite unlikely we will ever encounter intelligent alien life. Not because it’s unlikely to exist, but because, as I understand it, faster-than-light space travel is in fact absolutely impossible,* so there is an absolute limit on how fast it would ever be possible to travel interstellar distances. And however technologically advanced, and aggressive and/or curious, a civilisation was, it seems doubtful to me that their best and brightest would want to spend thousands of years trapped in a metal box, travelling across vast expanses of space, just to see what was on the other side.
Indeed, I suspect that if we did encounter alien life, they’d be convicts or outcasts of some kind who had been exiled from their society and condemned to drift through space, like British convicts being transported to Australia. And, as the British convicts did to the existing population of Australia, they’d probably massacre anyone they encountered. So it doesn’t look too hopeful
*I’m not a physicist, and know nothing non-fictional about the topic other than what I read on Wikipedia, so take this with a pinch of salt. :-)
@scooterKPFT
Well, we have some theoretical constructs already that revolve around exotic manipulations of local spacetime geometry around a ship. While objects can’t move WRT a coordinate system in spacetime faster than c, the coordinate system itself (eg, spacetime; c2dt2=c2-(dx2 + dy2 + dz2) [d being sloppy notation for delta, not a literal differential], for all valid, positive values of t) is free to “move” or “stretch” at any rate. This is how galaxies at high redshift can appear to be receeding at a velocity greater than c.
So, the idea is, plunk yourself down in a region of smooth spacetime, and strongly warp the spacetime immediately around you and “ride” that spacetime distortion in a bubble of static spacetime. Your effective velocity (eg, to an observer equidistant from and at rest WRT your beginning and destination points) could be arbitrarily faster than light travelling adjacent to your bubble (within your bubble, standard physics applies).
The catch is you need matter with negative energy densities (though dark energy possibly qualifies), and lots of it. And loads of energy too. I think it’s currently at something like Jupiter-in-100%-mc2-reaction energy. And inside the bubble you can’t interact with it, so you need infrastructure to create the bubble around you and to disable the bubble around you. But yeah. It’s not *quite* impossible. Just maybe impossible. (See “Alcubierre Drive” or “Alcubierre metric”).
ObRef: We’re made out of meat!
I think my last post dropped a bit much by way of physics jargon ~_~.
TL;DR: *waves hands* Go obscure General Relativity edge case that may not be realizable, even if mathematically ok!
You may be. I’m built like a toothpick.
Mmmh. Maybe that’s not a good thing after all.
It’s ok, folks, they just want To Serve Man!
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?”
On greeting aliens: I think I might open with the Vulcan salute. “Peace and long life” is at least polite, and I think I’d be very unlikely to come up with anything clever on the spot. Besides, it’s a good way to find out if they
– speak English
– have been monitoring our broadcast media
– have something recognizable as a sense of humor
We’re an absurd species, and they might as well know that right up front.
Walton, if “aliens” come to Earth, they’re likely to be machines or avatars.
(cf. “Router”, from Accelerando (available free online) for a plausible¹ method of interstellar travel.)
—
¹ It’s SF, but AFAIK it doesn’t violate known physics.
PZ is assuming that theyll have the same traits we do.
id cross my fingers and hope that they have transcended animalistic impulses and have become an altruistic species.
but judging by humanity’s track record, not likely.
ironic, isnt it, that we have to hope that we meet an alien species that is nothing like us…
Yeah, what tigerhawk…etc said.
Given that most of the universe is made of stuff we don’t know diddley about, i.e. dark matter, dark energy, if there are interstellar travelers about, they certainly aren’t using any techniques that we understand.
So why would you want to give them such a crappy impression of our species by referring them to religious whackos? [Sorry for the redundancy]. That sounds like a perfect strategy to get us all labeled as “expendable”, or “consumable”.
So if any of y’all are taken away, and can get back, do us all a favor and see if you can borrow one of their physics books or discs or whatever, OK? Promise them you’ll bring it right back.
And while you’re at it see if you can get one of their books on paleontology too. That would be so cool.
It’s also possible that they might send some ecologists over to study us, and that they would watch is as we live, and not try to interfere in any way. Or, maybe, they’d set up cruises, and their tourists would come over to look at us, kind of like a safari. They don’t have to consider us worthless scum just because they are more technologically advanced.
I would always be very hesitant to call anything impossible.
Let’s hope the’re so advanced to be Atheists and Humanist and know how to treat us with consideration.
I’m not sure Pythagoras’ theorem is the best place to start. Planar geometry is built on an abstraction that humans make about the world; the universe doesn’t have any real Euclidean-ness in it. If, for whatever reason, modeling their planet’s surface as flat had never been a beneficial trick for their survival, planar geometry might not be recognisable at all.
Also, there’s a chance that they will know what the right-triangle diagram represents and think it shows we think the earth is flat.
Forget about it. What is the chance that any two origins of life end up with the exact same set of amino acids?
If you’re industrialized enough, you don’t need manual labor.
“Industrialized”?
We’re talking about interstellar travel here…
Or indeed “Warp Drive”.
Googleaccountperson @27: It would be pretty weird if they were Humanists (they only just met us and, well, WE’RE MADE OF MEAT!!1). “Sentience has intrinsic worth even if not backed up by our levels of intelligence”-ists would be good.
Also loving the assumption that the reader can’t speak more than one language well. Only in Anglophonia!
In reverence to the Big Dumb Chimp, which one tastes more like bacon?
Walton,
I think you’re being a little unfair to my ancestors – at least the British and the (probable but undocumented) Tasmanian ones. But you didn’t say anything about the Irish convicts… Maybe you’re trying to forget massacres (etc.) closer to home, because that’s the way the Brits have conducted (and eventually lost) their conquests all along.
A convict on the run has been known (in Tasmania) to use his fellow escapee, or an indigenous person, for meat when hungry. But if we’re talking ‘massacres’ (rather than ‘living off the land’ or ‘snacking’), I’d be far more worried about the military police carrying out punitive raids on the native population for suspicion of harbouring a fugitive.
Interesting, funny.
But I don’t think we need to be worried about being eaten by ET. As David mentioned, we would likely be indigestible. Moreover, they would do better and finding other, more sustainable, ways to make food than to wander the galaxy looking for collection of organic things. Unless, of course, they were a giant jellyfish/squid creatures that went from star system to star system looking for complex organics to consume. That would be cool. They could form a ring around the planet at a geostationary orbit and descend tendrils of carbon nanotubes down to the planet surface…
Anyhow, we look at 1000 years to get somewhere as a long time because we only live a fraction of that time. To a creature or system that lived a 100,000 years, a 1000 year trip becomes more like a trip across the Atlantic in a wooden sailboat. Such creatures/systems (system because there is no reason to assume that they would be living creatures, they could just as well be artificial) would have likely come across other lifeforms before us so if you are standing in their presence, they are likely quite prepared to communicate with you. Well… either you or your iPhone, all depending on their criteria.
Actually, unless they are using something like Douglas Adam’s Improbability Drive, they would have had a fair bit of time to observe our planet and listen into our broadcasts while on approach so I wouldn’t be surprised if could communicate in a language that you would likely understand.
Of course, if they come here not by design but by desperation or accident, such as an Ark of fleeing survivors from their Cylon overlords, they may, after a 1000 years of wandering the galactic desert, view our little blue ball as something of their personal promise land. :)
mattheath @ 30. I’m wondering how we define sentience, can anybody offer a cut-off point?
These questions are why District 9 failed as a movie for me.
There was a wonderful sci-fi short story in which a group of humans were being held in an alien zoo & were attempting everything imaginable to get across to their captors that they were intelligent–Pythagorean theorem diagrams, etc. They were released from their confinement when they trapped a small rodent-like critter which was infesting their cage & made a pet out of it. The zoo-keeper aliens considered a sentient species to be one which keeps other beings in cages.
Alex @ 23,
Aside from the fact that the definition of alien is something completely unfamiliar and unlike us…
What if they were self aware but so alien that they didn’t even recognize our own self awareness as being relevant to their reality?
I regard the fact that they aren’t ALREADY here as strong evidence that practical FTL drives across the distances between technological civilizations ISN’T possible. There may well be communication technologies that we haven’t discovered, but actual travel seems unlikely.
First – we don’t know enough to say what will or will not be possible after another 1000 or 10000 years of scientific and technological advance. We’ve only really been at that for about 200-300 years.
Second – (as others have said) we most likely will not taste good to anyone not from earth. Galactic panspermia? Unlikely.
Third – We Humans – at least the majority of us – are still semi literate barbarians. If we don’t settle down and get along we’ll blow ourselves up fairly soon. Seems like this would be a universal self regulating mechanism to make sure that violent species don’t expand throughout the cosmos.
@33, john scanlon wtote:
Welcome to the relativism that is Science Blogs.
Does anyone know/suspect who made this?
SON of a… only then do I notice the big fat copyright notice that my eyes somehow couldn’t see because it was in an orthogonal dimennsionnnn. Carry on.
I say we should trick them into thinking we’re two species – one who knows evolution happens and one which is a pack of creobots.
The aliens would probably kick the crap out of the latter.
If captured by aliens, I’m resorting to learned behavior: If caged, throw poop.
Can aliens be HUMANist?
Why not look aliens in the sensory organs and tell them that the universe was created for us? I’m sure after who knows how long in space they could use a laugh (or whatever they do when vastly amused).
Also remember if the aliens are paying attention and/or interested, they already know quite a lot about us. Mostly from television. Ok, they know a lot about our fantasies anyway. Reality…may surprise them.
Its a fun thing to think about but, the concept that aliens would be ‘more’ intelligent than us just strikes me as bad science. Time itself is no proper evolutionary engine for an increase in mental capacity, so why, exactly would they be capable of greater intelligence, as opposed to simply possessed of greater knowledge? One must also consider that, just as their evolution within a different environment would likely lead to a different form, so too would it likely lead to a different sort of intellect emergent from a different sort of brain. While I’m sure that a simple look at our cities and tools would convince any alien life that we possess intelligence, I’m neither sure that they would be qualitatively “better” than us, or necessarily interested in (or capable of) communicating.
Surely all they’ll do is come and take all our pigs away, thus guaranteeing them a supply of tasty bacon…
Don’t think they’ll be particularly bothered about us once they find out about bacon – unless they need some tips on rearing, slicing and grilling pigs.
We may not be edible for them, actually. Though they will likely be carbon-based, their amino acids may be of the opposite chirality. They might not be able to make use of our protein.
Doesn’t mean they can’t turn us into slaves, though.
More seriously, we should also be able to explain to them our genetic code, the four fundamental forces, and logic, both philosophical and mathematical, including circuits. In addition, we should exhibit a willingness to learn and a willingness to teach them what they do not know.
Franklin Percival @35: We wouldn’t need a cut-off point to have a definition; we don’t have a cut-off point for “tall” but we can define height perfectly well. A definition is still probably tricky though.
It would be just our luck if alien visitors were a breakaway, persecuted religious minority from their home planet, and felt the need, nay, the DUTY to come here and proselytize and convert anyone they could, and then slaughter and/or confine the unconverted populations to concentration camps or reservations. Sound familiar? Ironically, they are capable and all too happy to pilot the ships that were built by actual scientists and engineers, though they descry the actual technology behind the ships as being “just some theories”.
What are the aliens looking for in our butts?
With all the non-consensual anal probing going on there the aliens would think they were home.
That was horrible. I’m sorry… but not sorry enough to keep from posting this.
I’m trying to remember the title or author of a short story I once read. The main premise was that space travel was trivial but that humanity had somehow missed it. Thus while alien cultures tended to discover interplanetary travel at an iron-age level we went ahead and developed technology to do what everyone else in the universe did by raiding other planets (get more stuff).
So one day a spaceship appears on the Mall in DC… and a phalanx of aliens (literally, spears and shields) marches out to meet tanks with laser-guided munitions. As the last alien dies it wonders what they have released upon the universe.
Probably our heads, if they’ve actually been monitoring our electromagnetic transmissions.
This seems apropos: http://abstrusegoose.com/122
Or maybe they just want to use us for our entertainment value.
Come on, PZ, you’re ruining my vision of a future with intellectual but docile Vulcans, naked Betazoid weddings, and nubile Orion dancing girls!
Katharine, #50:
We stopped using slaves once we had developed the steam engine. What use is someone with an engine capable of spanning interstellar distances going to have for slaves?
It’s more likely that anything we could teach them, they forgot on purpose.
Or maybe….the pope IS an alien!
What if they’re only here harvesting human horn?
Somebody’s got to clean those engines. Or maybe humans make good fuel (there are a couple ways to parse that and I meant both of them). Besides, humans may actually be cheaper labor than robots, depending on which resources are more readily available to our imminent overlords. At least for a while.
Maybe they’ve reached a point in evolution where the manufacture of cheap clothes using the equivalent of slave labor from their own species has become distasteful and want to outsource the work to Earth.
It is also possible their credit card companies are looking to outsource customer services jobs.
You guys are so self-centered. Do you realize how many people intergalactic anal-probing employs?
In case of alien attack, The Firesign Theatre has prepared this Government Training Film. Warning: your brain may no longer be the boss.
whew..had to read that twice.
thats a definite possibility.
then id say were screwed.
While the post is funny it is not an accurate way to manage aliens. Didn’t anyone see the documentary District 9?
As long as you are able to accelerate continuously at a decent rate it is possible to cover amazingly large distances in a surprisingly short amount of subjective time. IIRC maintaining a 1G acceleration halfway to Barnard’s star (40LY away) and then 1G deceleration the rest of the way gets the astronauts there in 5 years their time, 100 ears or so our time.
Interstellar travel is only a problem if you want to go back again, but if you just want to go, not that impossible (or even unreasonable).
I think that the reason we haven’t encountered any travellers is not so much the distances involved, but the number of places to go to is so huge that the probability of picking our sun is extremely low.
re 62:
Or like the Dr.Who miniseries Children of Earth, maybe we are their heroin.
I’m still waiting for the Vulcans to show up.
The first aliens we meet will be real estate agents.
With an eviction notice.
They’ll have already bought up all the credit default swaps, underwater mortgages, and politicians.
Don’t worry. I hear Venus is nice this time of year, and they’re dropping us all off there soon.
Please leave the keys to everything in the locks, and put the cats and dogs in the freezer for the new owners.
The fact that you people automatically assume you haven’t already been contacted by an alien intelligence is not going to look good in the report I’m writing for the Hive Council. However, I’m pretty sure the samples of poutine and Mexi-fries I’ve been beaming back will score mega points in your favour.
The universe is absolutely thick with FTL-capable species, but humans are the only ones we’ve so far encountered who’ve mastered the esoteric technology called deep frying.
Actually, just one. Don’t worry, even Thlorpe’s family thinks he’s an odd duck.
Iono. It’s not really much of a surprise.
I don’t tend to open the door when Jehova’s Witnesses or charity collectors ring the bell. I assume aliens have the same good sense.
TWood | April 14, 2010 9:45 AM:
zoonotic* diseases, obviously.
*Rather, xenonotic diseases.
And why assume it would be their “best and brightest”, being sent out to “explore”?
You seem to think alien ethics are far behind alien technology. If they’re sufficiently advanced to travel lightyears through space couldn’t they also be sufficiently advanced to have peacefully resolved conflicts on their homeworld and pursue a path of universal peace?
As has been mentioned, it is actually possible, within human lifespans, to travel to other star systems. Relativity is a bitch, though. =)
Carl Sagan had an episode of Cosmos where he demonstrated quite nicely that if we could develop a ship capable of ~.9c, we could literally tour most of the known universe, not just the galaxy, in 40 or subjective years. The bitch is the amount of time that would have passed back on earth whilst one was doing the traipsing…
Cheers,
Wylann (formerly FastLane)
Look at them in what optical sensors they use, tell them the universe is made for Us, and then demand $50 each. You’re no worse off, and you could get fifty bucks per alien.
And since the Evil, Alien Esquimaux have *already* come down from space to devour us (see Hayden Howard, “The Eskimo Invasion”), the meat thing seems to work for them. After all— the Evil Esquimaux did eat the Beothuk.
It’s not a matter of how long we’ve been at it; the question is, how long has the galaxy been churning out civilizations? It only would have taken one with the longevity, inclination to explore, and technical capabilities to acheive interstellar travel to colonize or at least thoroughly explore the galaxy in a time frame on the order of hundreds of thousands of years. Hence Fermi’s famous “Where is everybody?”
I suspect that the key factor in the Drake Equation is L, the length of time a “communicating civilization,” in SETI terms, lasts. What we’re experiencing now, nearing the carrying capacity, flirting with catastrophic climate change and general environmental/agricultural collapse could be the end of our run as galactic contenders. That puts L on the order of hundreds of years (and that’s being generous!) if we are typical. So imagine the galaxy as a vast dark space and each technological civilization as a flame that winks on briefly and then gutters out. Over the past several billion years it’s been a regular light show, but nobody’s had the time to conquer the distances involved. Anyway, to my mind, that’s the most plausible answer to Fermi’s paradox.
Harry Tuttle@55
That was a short story in Analog at least 20 years ago. The aliens came in wooden ships with cutlasses and muskets, and we quickly kicked their very surprised butts.
If you are really interested, let me know. Otherwise, its not worth the effort of paging through a couple of hundred back issues.
A few notes:
First… the likely developmental asymmetry between us and the hypothetical aliens would be reversed if we found them.
Next… even the most far-out guesses about potential aliens are probably too anthropormorphic. This is not unreasonable: The only things we can imagine are things we can imagine, and they are inevitably influenced, if not bounded, by our own experience. In actuality, aliens would almost certainly be (to borrow a phrase) “not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
But… OTOH, maybe not: Presuming natural law is truly universal, and given that we so far know of life arising only on one planet with very specific conditions, what if life can only exist within a fairly narrow range of conditions? And what if within those conditions, evolution tends to converge on similar ranges of outcomes? Perhaps the real surprise will be that alien life turns out to be far less “queer” than we suppose.
Further… as tigerhawk and others have alluded to, there’s always the possibility that Breakthrough Physics™ will render FTL travel possible. I don’t doubt the reliability of modern physics, but it would be hubris to imagine that we’ve decoded the universe in any final and comprehensive way. What might another 100 or 1000 or 10,000 years of theory and research teach us that will make quantum mechanics look positively Aristotelian?
And… even without breakthroughs in physics, relativity may bar (you should pardon the expression) intercourse between interstellar populations, but it does not prevent the spread of life throughout the universe. Even at speeds considerably less than ~0.9c, there are any number of scenarios by which intelligent life could spread throughout whole galaxies. They wouldn’t be able to go home, of course, but so what? More to the immediate point of our ability to survive a First Visitation, they wouldn’t be able to phone home for reinforcements. No matter how hugely advanced the technology, if they haven’t come in vast numbers it might be that the absence of reinforcements and resupply might dictate conciliation rather than conquest. Think about it: Could you really have conquered the entire medieval Earth with a single B-52?
To the physicists here: what are your thoughts on Michio Kaku’s ‘Physics of the Impossible’? Given the subject matter I think it might be fairly relevant (granted, coming from somebody who has very limited knowledge of physics).
What might another 100 or 1000 or 10,000 years of theory and research teach us that will make quantum mechanics look positively Aristotelian?
The galaxy has had billions of years. No evidence that any civilization in all that time has utilized such technics and plenty of anecdotal reasons to suppose that technological advancement coupled to a biosphere is a self-limiting dead-end.
It’s like time travel to the past. It seems to me there are three options: it’s not possible, it’s never been done, or the state of the universe as we find it is a product of its application.
To the people waiting for the Vulcans: I’m waiting for the Vogons. And their lovely poetry. And truncheons for all!
Regarding anthropomorphic aliens
That’s something I’ve thought about a bit. While bipedalism has a very low rate of occurrence here and we still don’t know what selective pressures led to that, other things that would make an alien seem familiar to us are much more common. Specifically, bilateral symmetry and cephalization. Both offer advantages that would be useful in many habitats, so it seems fair to guess that it would be common on other worlds as well. So if we do meet aliens some day, they may at least have a face. They may have 6 eyes and 10 legs, though. Actually, if I remember my biology class, some scientists figure that the extraterrestrial life would have a better chance of resembling arthropods than primates (or reptilians), due to the huge success arthropods have had here.
Alex @ 66,
Perhaps, but they might just be completely unaware of us and leave us alone.
Or like the Dr.Who miniseries Children of Earth, maybe we are their heroin.
though a spin off of Doctor Who, TorchWood is a separate series.
(http://www.bbcamerica.com/content/262/about-torchwood.jsp)
The miniseries was one of the most disturbing I have ever seen personally and I recommend it.
As to the question of ET and what they are likely to be like I think it might depend to some degree on how many “inhabitable earth like planets” there are.
Even if they have developed a benign peaceful planet wide culture unless aggression has been bred out of the species. What is to stop some individual or group of individuals from deciding that they want to have there own “Empire” and make a colonial one by conquest. See the history of South Africa and mister Rhodes or any variation on our own colonial past, where the indigenous population was at best just an inconvenience to be discarded or exploited as was seen fit.
uncle frogy
…the huge success arthropods have had here.
Which is nothing like the “success” that primates have had, such as it is, which has largely consisted of skulking around in the trees and hiding in the dark, in relatively small numbers. Yet that’s the lineage that gave rise to a technological civilization here.
I agree that any alien biosphere is highly likely to support large numbers (both taxons and individuals) of arthropod-analogues –too many relatively inexpensive good tricks there for evolution not to exploit– but I totally disagree that a technology-using species is likely to arise from such a lineage. Just contrast the typical arthropod survival strategy (fast, cheap, and out of control) with that of the typical primate (long-lived, not fecund, heavy parental investment in gestation and offspring).
I would imagine that this will depend on exactly why it is that life on earth ended up with the set of amino acids we did. Was it just a random historical accident, or was there something inherent about those amino acids that made them more likely to be chosen – ie were they somehow more stable, or more abundant, or more readily formed in abiotic conditions.
My suspicion is that there is probably going to be a subset of “most probable” amino acids (on the assumption that peptides and proteins possess sufficient advantages as catalysts that life will very commonly end up using them, rather some other polymer entirely), the individual probabilities from each one varying relative to each other depending on the fine details of the initial abiotic situation of each independent abiogenesis event. This “most probable” subset will likely bigger than the 20 that earth life uses.
But it would reasonable to expect some overlap. The aliens might well be able to eat us and use those amino acids that we share with them, while just excreting the rest.
A bigger barrier might be the specific concentrations of essential trace elements and heavy metals that the aliens’ biology evolved to tolerate and take advantage of, since their biology will likely be optimized to those concentrations and their tolerance for even slight deviations might be limited.
If they use arsenic instead of phosphate as the high energy binding group for their cellular energetic mechanisms, or even if they use phosphate but at a substantially lower ambient concentration, we would be deadly poison to them.
Note that in the movie Avatar, the atmosphere of Pandora is very similar to earth, about 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen, except that CO2 is a few percentage points higher. And that is enough to render it lethal to humans. Aliens would encounter the same challenge with every single biologically relevant trace gas and trace element in the earth’s biosphere.
Bill Dauphin, OM @ 81,
I think this gentleman might perhaps diagree…
http://fora.tv/2008/09/25/Frank_Wilczek_The_LHC_and_Unified_Field_Theory#fullprogram
To be fair, I don’t think my biology TA was talking about “intelligent” life. Just that in general, multicellular extraterrestrial life may have a better chance of being an arthropod-analogue (good word choice). As far as technology-using intelligent life goes, it would have to be some form for which intelligence offered an advantage that is not outweighed by the cost of brain development – something that has not occurred in terrestrial arthropod lines. They’ve certainly managed to achieve large numbers and a lot of diversity without the need for intelligence.
On the other hand, if you were the first ever pioneer discoverer of a beach full of blue ringed octopus, and decided to take a sample, depending on how careless you are, you might not make it back to report your discovery!
So it isn’t actually totally inconceivable that a war with visiting aliens might not turn out ok for the home side. The aliens are going to be far from home, resupply and reinforcements are going to be challenging. Their power and fuel are going to be limited. Even if they can recharge from local resources such as solar power, the rate of recharge is going to be limited. Their state of preparedness and their foreknowledge of us and our capabilities is going to vary depending on any number of unforeseeable variables. Assuming no FTL, their technology, advanced as it is, will be obsolescent by their own standards and may, thanks to the rigors of the journey, be in varying stages of disrepair. They will also be heavily outnumbered.
And there must be limits put on their technology by the laws of physics and chemistry themselves. In other words there is a ceiling to the maximum degree of superiority they can possibly have. For example if we manage to pop a nuke on them, is it really reasonable to think that no matter how advanced their materials technology is, there is any material allowable by the laws of nature that will allow them to take the blast without suffering damage? (Thwarting our ability to target them successfully is probably a more likely realm of superiority).
Of course if it should happen, we’d better hope that the emissary we manage to luckily take out wasn’t too influential or popular back home. . . .
>>>>>>>>>>
No matter how hugely advanced the technology, if they haven’t come in vast numbers it might be that the absence of reinforcements and resupply might dictate conciliation rather than conquest. Think about it: Could you really have conquered the entire medieval Earth with a single B-52?
>>>>>>>>>
may not but with a small Carrier Battle group
it be easy. holding would be another thing
think Iraq. People are pretty hard to control for any long.
I guess you don’t have to worry about anal probing.
Yes of course, it was Torchwood, not Dr. Who. I hang my head in shame.
I should try proof reading once in a while
that was >>>>>>>
People are pretty hard to control for “any length of time”
Of course not; you’d need the whole band, Ricky Wilson included.
That would entirely depend on how much fuel and munitions you bring with you, and how readily you could get more. Would you even be able to traverse the necessary distances to even visit all the rest of the world without refuelling tankers?
When you run out, well I suppose if your carrier was nuclear powered it would keep going, but your planes would be grounded, and eventually you’ll run out of missiles and bullets and shells for your ship guns. You’d probably be able to establish your own floating fiefdom, and no one would be able to attack you, but conquer the rest of the entirety of the world?
(Some clever diplomacy and bluffing and pretending to be god-like powerful might help too. Your medieval foes need not know that you’ve run out of fuel, after all.)
Perhaps if you knew what you were doing, you could try taking over some part of the middle east first (or other oil rich area) and try to refine your own fuel? You’d have to plan ahead and bring the necessary expertise and equipment with you for that.
conelrad @ #37 – and any others who are interested…
That SF story about humans held in an alien zoo was The Cage by Bertram Chandler, from F&SF, June 1957, and also anthologized by Groff Conklin in 12 Great Classics of Science Fiction, 1963.
Harry Tuttle @ 55
The story you mention is The Road Not Taken by (odd coincidence) Harry Turtledove. It’s been anthologized several times. A race with FTL spaceships and antigravity armed with black-powder muskets and cannon, attacking an Earth (well, the USA) armed with machine guns, jet aircraft, heat-seeking missiles. The invaders were… surprised. And of course when the dust settled, humanity had an FTL drive and antigravity to study.
Mike in Ontario @ #52
For a tight little story on proselytizing aliens, try Alice Sheldon’s Help!. It’s in her anthology Ten Thousand Lightyears From Home, when she was writing as James Tiptree, Jr. The prequel to that story, Mama Come Home is also pretty good. In fact almost all her stories are pretty good, even, perhaps especially, the bleak, cold, despairing ones.
hankroberts @ 71
Alice Sheldon (again writing as James Tiptree, Jr.) had two different (and chilling) takes on this: The Screwfly Solution and Angel Fix, both in her anthology Out of the Everywhere.
A primitive weapon can still be deadly. “Sticks and stones may break my bones” is not merely a schoolyard chant.
Brownian, @97, wins teh intertooobz!
amphiox #98
And how many of your personnel would not succumb to disease … temptation
And this seems apposite
sinfest aliens
fuel and weapons, supplies aside shock and awe might win the first battles and even destabilize the governments and cause them to fall rather quickly but as we have learned in our own history holding the ground is the hard part people are a stubborn quarrelsome bunch on a good day. If ET comes with earth style colonialism / empire in mind his only option will “species cleansing” eventually.
Given the vast distances and time involved wouldn’t it likely be practical to do it in a ship or ships large enough that they would be virtually self sufficient being able to fabricate what ever they needed and providing food water medical needs from what they find. There are sources of hydrogen, metals, silicon and most minerals in many places. Shit happens and they would need to be able to survive if not thrive.
If they are sent without any ability to survive without support then they will be expecting some or will be in no mood to accept no from who ever they meet.
things to think about when we venture out because I doubt any one will be coming here.
uncle frogy
The things we could teach them (or, possibly, sell to them) are likely going to be things like our art and music and philosophy and details of our biology, which, irrespective of our relative levels of technology, may to some extent be unique to us and our particular way of thinking.
This is assuming that the aliens are even interested in such things.
And yes, even our religions count. (Who knows, maybe the aliens get kicks out of tragicomic fiction.)
The thing about that scenario is that there really is nothing that says a civilization that rises and falls in that manner cannot recover again in couple of centuries or millennia. While certainly crashes all the way to extinction are possible, civilization is much more fragile than the species itself, and it is far more likely for a civilization to crash to below a communicable technological level, but to have survivors. And the survivors will have an opportunity to rediscover, and eventually even surpass, the achievements of their ancestors.
So the pattern one might see is that of blinking candles. Technological civilizations rising and falling in sequence, again and again, over time.
Overall pretty good.
One thing I noticed immediately: the little math demo in the middle is missing a designation for Zero.
We tend to forget that Zero is a concept that makes a lot of other math possible. It’s almost certainly something that would help demonstrate intelligence to a more advanced civilization. Plus, the number “10” doesn’t work as well to convey “base 10” without making them understand our notation for Zero.
That was such a hoot! It made me recall PZ’s review of Avatar and how the appearance of aliens in science fiction is very humanoid-centric. It has been noted (especially by Carl Sagan in The Cosmic Connection – I have quite a library) that while dolphins may be as intelligent as human beings, they are at a disadvantage in the arena of developing a technological civilization. This is due to that, as dolphins, and excepting what they might evolve into in the future, they are unlikely to discover fire, and they lack limbs that would enable them to excel at manipulating objects in their current environment.
Applying the above criteria to intelligent life that did not evolve on this planet, I suspect that the discovery of fire (and I know of no other analogues than the rapid oxidation of stuff) would be a pivotal moment in the intellectual/technological development of any species, anywhere (cue Also sprach Zarathustra from 2001: A Space Odyssey). I would not be surprised if alien mythologies, if any, and which I would presume they have outgrown long before we have ours, did not include a Prometheus-type character.
For the above reasons, I think a case can be made (and I am more than willing to be wrong and learn something thereby), that any extraterrestrial, technological, space-faring species, would have many, if not all, of the following characteristics…
At least two eyes (stereoscopic vision is quite useful and “surround-sound” vision would be even better)…that see in roughly the same range of the EM spectrum that we do, for if they are to discover fire, there would have to be significant amounts of free oxygen in the air, and thus some similarities to the atmosphere of earth. Also, given an atmosphere roughly similar to ours, with similar “windows” for certain EM wavelengths, it might be difficult, but by no means impossible, to develop a science akin to astronomy if the hypothetical species in question were blind to many of the frequencies that we terrestrial life forms can see. High-energy radiation (x and gamma rays) will be just as destructive of complex chemical bonds here on earth as they are anywhere else in the universe.
I would also be moderately surprised if an alien (though not necessarily intelligent) life forms lacked some kind of symmetry in its anatomy. Bi-fold (like us), three-fold, or whatever, I would be surprised if it did not. Also, some kind of appendage capable of manipulating the objects in their environment would be useful in developing the technology that would be used in bringing us to their eventual notice as well (a cephalopod-type critter that lived on dry land would be cool…and okay, I’m pandering to our host).
I have never committed these speculations to print (or photons) before and welcome comments if there are any major holes in my reasoning.
On the other hand, think about what Jackie Chan could do with a sponge.
#100
“Our superior intellect is no match for their puny weapons!”
re: 107, with regards to fire:
Since fire is just a basic oxidation reaction, it is rather inconceivable that any species could advance as far as interstellar space travel and NOT discover fire!
But as to fire being something of “mythical” importance, I’m not so sure. The way I see it, there are two possible trajectories of development involving fire:
A. Fire is discovered early (just like we did here on earth), perhaps even prior to truly full sentience (probable for our own ancestors). It is a major enabling technology for further advancement. It allows easy access to stuff like metallurgy and becomes the fundamental basis for all early energy production, until it is replaced by truly advanced methods like fusion and the like (note that our own civilization is still fire-based).
B. Fire is discovered late. In this scenario, the intelligent aliens manage to advance technologically without access to fire. They might get access to metallurgy by stumbling on some other way to generate very high temperatures, or they don’t get metallurgy and all their early development utilizes naturally occurring materials (helpful if they arise in a particularly rich and diverse biosphere). They get to an arbitrary level of advancement, develop chemistry, and THEN discover fire. How important fire will be to their future development will depend on precisely what level they are at when they achieve fire, and whether or not they had managed to find alternative methods of generating large amounts of energy.
(A) seems the more likely one – it seems to be an easier pathway.
But I’m really skeptical of arguments that say that (B) is somehow impossible. It might be rarer/harder/longer, but it seems imminently feasible to me. It might be the trajectory that an aquatic intelligent species might follow. Their early history involves them colonizing their world’s oceans without the help fire. There follows a phase in which they explore the “new frontier” of the land. At some point, once they get themselves onto land and into the air, they discover fire. But they would already have a thriving complex technological society in place long before fire.
If i meet aliens, i would start making pictographical figures like this.
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Can anybody guess, what I’m trying to do? I know it’s easy but just for fun. And would that be useful?
The thing about that scenario is that there really is nothing that says a civilization that rises and falls in that manner cannot recover again in couple of centuries or millennia.
Our industrial civilization has been built based on the existence of a vast amount of easily obtained hydrocarbons. We are running against the limits of availability there, and we may not be able to wean ourselves off our dependence on them.
Any successor civilizations here on Earth won’t be able to use said hydrocarbons (not for another few million years at least). Which means they’ll be stuck pretty much in the eighteenth century.
Re Mark’s suggestions on fire-using aliens, one more thing:
If a clade to which the alien belongs is characterised by an external covering of flammable material with a very large surface area, the fire-using lineage will have evolved to reduce this flammability.
Whether fire-use or reduced flammability (i.e. reduced body hair) came first in our lineage is unknown, but there may have been some very nasty incidents of natural selection when apes first played with fire.
#111, I see mostly prime number of X’s (49 is not prime), so I’m not sure what you’re getting at. You’re also missing a couple of quantities (5 and 11).
After reading too much Charles Stross, I now believe if aliens come here, they will be AIs/uploaded consciousnesses created long ago by whatever race used to exist, and when they arrive they won’t care that we are here, they will just start off the nanobot colony to stripmine all material on earth into its components – including us – to rebuild the solar system into whatever configuration they need.
We might have a few years warning since they might start with the oort / kuiper / asteroid belt to build up raw material.
So yeah, I hope they don’t come here ;)
Your last statement makes no sense. I can’t seriously think that a race that advanced would have any need for us whatsoever.
If they wanted our meat, it’d probably be easier just to grow it in vats.
If they wanted labor, they can build robots.
I understand this whole thing about comparing us to ants, but, seriously, no matter how advanced they are they can tell we’re intelligent, otherwise they’re complete idiots.
So what you’re saying is, they probably won’t be following the prime directive? Bunch o’ savages the lot of them. ;)
We have arrived on Earth. The planet is overrun with a species called humans. They have fouled their own environment through ignorance, greed, and plain stupidity. Even though they realize this, they have done nothing about it – some positively deny it for political reasons secretly harboring the belief that a never-seen deity would not, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, let anything bad happen – and continue to consume and destroy the planet that supports them and which they cannot leave. They breed like bacteria, largely because of something written in a book millennia ago by a moron, and have no respect for other life forms. Request permission to eradicate.