Stephen Hawkings & AliensFollow

Of course. It also occurred to me (since I watched the show), that for every planet with a biosphere capable of supporting intelligent life, maybe one in a billion will. So, that's a whole lot of planets with all the same potential resources for an advanced alien race to exploit without having to deal with folks like us. You'd had to go well out of your way to deliberately seek out a planet with the needed resources that also had an intelligent tool-using species on it.

Hence, why it was such a silly assumption. If they come here, it's because we're here, not because we happen to be inhabiting a planet who's resources they want to exploit. Doubly so given the proposed method of getting here Hawking's proposed on the show.

That sounds like an amazingly large assumption to me. The programme took it as read, did it?

I mean, we're postulating FTL capable civilisations here. The unihabited ones could already be colonised, thus supporting intelligent life even if they did not give rise to it, even if giving rise to intelligent life is so rare. The main assumption, though, is that human-level intelligent species wipe themselves out fairly quickly (on a cosmic scale) as, given the massive advantage human level or greater intelligence is, few other things could do the job, especially if we're assuming FTL drives are possible and aliens might discover them (this level of tech would allow them to easily avoid extinction at t hands of cosmic hazards like asteroids).

Edited, Apr 28th 2010 9:58pm by Kavekk

Yeah

Here's where things get interesting. Any sufficiently technically advanced race might be just as advanced, socially speaking, and it is entirely possible that such an advanced race might adopt something akin to - yep, you guessed it - the prime directive. The prime directive dictates that there can be no interference with the internal development of pre-warpFTL civilizations. It's a bit silly, yeah, but then, not so much. If we're going to speculate in one direction, why is it any more harmful to speculate in the other?

Edited, Apr 28th 2010 6:01pm by BrownDuck

This is will probably be the only time I ever type the following words: I agree with gbaji.

You know, I'm now making a habit of of checking every user who has made this joke for duplication, because I hear it so often it has to have been said twice by the same person once.

Also, you're off the hook... for now.

It might be a better idea to counter things I have said rather than things I have not said, although I do admit it'd be pretty cool if I happen to finally say that thing and then you're all "Gotcha!"

I never said they had zero interest in interacting with us. I said they have zero interest in interacting with use in any sort of relevant time frame. "if they had any intentions of interacting with us they would have done so one million years ago or aren't planning on doing anything for another million years." Whether this is because we haven't met some weird alien prime directive condition or because the space Republicans are running a million year long filibuster stopping laws to allow contact with other species doesn't matter. The point is that the period of time that is relevant to us is small and the period of time the event could occur is enormous.

I covered this with my redundantly redundant final sentence. The proposed method for FTL was that after the space nomads finished collecting all the usable resources in a star system, they would construct a Dyson sphere (as originally designed, not as commonly portrayed in sci-fi), collect energy from the star itself, and use that massive energy source to open up a wormhole to the next star system to repeat the process.

If we assume they don't jump blindly into other star systems, this method somewhat requires that they send probes for great distances around them in space to find a suitable next system to scavenge for resources. Hence, they would not "bump" into us accidentally and proximity may not be a very significant factor. Depending on how long it would take for them to collect a major portion of the resources of an entire star system (potentially centuries), and assuming that their wormhole/jump method allows them a reasonable choice of potential systems to go to (10s of light years at least), the odds of there being no other system with suitable resources for them except ours seems incredibly unlikely.



A possibility I included. I said that if they choose to come here, it would almost certainly be because we are here, not because we happen to be sitting on some resources they want. So yeah. If they come here for us, they came here for us...




This is identical to your first point. If you'd watched the show you'd have seen that Hawking's proposed scenario made absolutely no sense. There would be no reason for such a species to choose to come to our system. Assuming it is just about physical resources and ignoring any ethical considerations at all, it would make more sense to pick an uninhabited star system. The proposed method of travel does not allow for us just happening to be along a path they're traveling, and there's no way our presence could make their operations more efficient, so why go here?



Oh. I can come up with lots of reasons why an advanced alien species might come to visit us, either for beneficial or harmful ends. But the one that Hawking was talking about isn't one of them. It was just jarring to me because there are so many more rational explanations for why this might happen that his just seemed to have been incredibly poorly thought out.

Edited, Apr 28th 2010 5:37pm by gbaji

I initially read this without the comma, and it was far more amusing.

Funny thing is that I started re-reading the Ringworld Novels recently as well. Good stuff!

Even in the unlikely event that alien life does come to out planet I quote War of the worlds

There are some who claim that aliens have been watching us, perhaps for signs of our own progress towards FTL and atomics. Which would explain why many sightings and encounters have happened at or near military installations - they're concerned about our development of nuclear weapons.

How does that explain cattle mutilations & **** probes way, way off the military bases?