h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

In an article today, Hawking suggests that we shouldn't try to contact aliens.

"He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

Far be it for me to contradict a genius, but he's wrong.

Why on Earth would aliens, even with a massive technological advantage, go to the bother of fighting us for resources? The likelihood is that everything the Earth has got is replicated on a million other planets that don't have intelligent life.

Has Hawking been on the waccy baccy?

Or is I wrong?

If a planet is similar to ours, it's likely to have intelligent life, unless it's very new.

There may be millions, but they're very far apart, and it takes a very long time to travel. When we do make contact with aliens, I do hope they're the kindly wise type, and not the current human type.

I think it's pretty safe to say that with the rarity of planets supporting our particular eco-system, if some aliens were on the harvest and came across ours, they'd be having them some of that.

Shouldn't we be more worried about diseases/bacteria/microbes etc than intelligent aliens? I've heard that huge numbers of indigenous people died from diseases brought by European colonisers to which they had had no exposure and therefore no immunity. Might it be the same with aliens?

Maybe they are looking for a product of intelligent life. They could harvest our amino acids to produce cold fusion hyperdrives (Can you tell I'm not a scientist? )

Or use our noses as aphrodisiacs.

I´m afraid Hawking is right. The idea of Little Green Man´s burden where they come and help rid us of disease and poverty before letting us join a galactic brotherhood sounds nice. I do however think there are obstacles that could create problems for advanced aliens, which could be solved by a general looting spree. If their population is expanding, which doesn´t seem unlikely, they would need some place to house all those "people". It may be that any planet suited to that, would already have developed life of it´s own. Let´s hope they can build some ringworlds instead. Or it might just be that they lack general resources.
You often hear talk about how any alien species advanced enough to travel the stars would need to be peaceful, or they would have wiped themselves out with internal warfare. I think that rather assumes warfare must mean you are some trigger happy species. Take for example the Japanese, they have been engaged in many wars, also as the agressor. Yet Japanese society itself is relatively peaceful, you don´t see lots of Japanese men loosing their temper and starting bar fights. War can be due to overt agressive impulses, but sometimes it´s merely, as Churchill said, a continuation of politics by other means.

They'll never take my bacon....

All this stuff seems to be based on some pretty big logic jumps... Sure we can see how life evolved on earth, and postulate on how it all began, but isn't it a bit of a leap of... I dunno faith or something, to then go from knowing the bits and pieces we do about life on this one plannet, that just happens to be 'Earth', and extrapulate from that all kinds of 'facts' about what life elsewhere would be...

I mean, the universe is like just so big, so massively big, you might think its a long way from your house across town to the all-night supermarket, but really that's nothing compaired to the size... of the universe... And, like, you might think Grandma Beevis is old, but she's not got a day on like the age of the universe... just so big and so old (the universe that is, not Granma Beevis).
Surely life elsewhere would be so utterly differnt to what we take 'life' to be we'd just as likely skip over it and not even notice it were there, something which I think vaguely my memory banks tell me we've done a couple of times within our own ecosphere here on Earth...
My money is still on the hyper-inteligent shade of the colour 1, a unique lifeform made from wavelengths and particle osculations existing only in a temporal state within any one universe at any given time, which performs multiple quantum tangents throughout several universes at the same timein order to perfunctually perform its replication events, and so can only be observed or measured by the interaction of massive particles within the hyperspace boundry between tea-time and pub closing, and which has a strange but predictible affect apon the inner-most nucleai of the six heaviest particles as they exist in their alternative forms within clouds of quasi existent quantum dark matter in the order of 50% semi-decayed...

Seems to me that the only danger of extra terrestrials coming here is that they may not be able to get back home unless we lend them the taxi fare..

It also takes enormous resources to get anywhere in this universe however super intelligent you are.That alone is going to put paid to any sort of intergalactic war/invasion plan because you could get all the way across from another star system only to find that where you've arrived doesn't have enough of whatever resources you require to even make it worth your way to beat up the local populace let alone to get back home..

Just think if Columbus had arrived on a lousy resource poor shore after months at sea to find no food,water and no wood..

Otto:

>>
Shouldn't we be more worried about diseases/bacteria/microbes etc than intelligent aliens? I've heard that huge numbers of indigenous people died from diseases brought by European colonisers to which they had had no exposure and therefore no immunity. Might it be the same with aliens?


Not so sure of that. Alien diseases would have co-evolved with their hosts. They would be adapted towards infecting the alien species.

Have you read Jared Diamond's 'Guns Germs and Steel'? (you should. highly recommended by many a hootoo researcher). He points out that, on the whole, diseases don't migrate between species. However, Europeans spent many, many generations living amongst their livestock and hence eventually caught variants of the same diseases. They also developed immunity to those diseases. The New World inhabitants had never met those diseases and had no immunity. *Furthermore*, they hadn't domesticated animals to quite the same extent so there were no epidemics passed the other way.

It's now thought that a thriving civilisation in the Mississippi valley, equivalent in complexity to the Aztec or Inca, was wiped out by the arrival spread of chickenpox from Mexico northwards, some sixty years in advance of the arrival of Europeans in North America.

Whatever...when the Prawns get back to Jo'burg, there's going to be *hell* to pay!

The more photos we see from Hubble the more I am reminded of photos taken
through microscopes. Macrocosm=microcosm.

Our entire solar sytem is but a cell in some bit of food, a galaxy sized bit
of old beef which is being digested by the greater beast of the cosmos.

We can even see the metabolic process as matter converts to energy in the suns.
And in the decomposition of asteroids and the accumulation of stellar dust we see
the growth and decay of the beasts bodily parts.

We are but a digestive enzyme in the belly of the beast.


~jwf~

Isn't it true that some of the strongest radio waves sent into space are from when the Nazi's where in power?* So if the aliens do turn up and go lets have a look at them they'll pick that up and possibly reconsider visiting / have their view of us radically changed.

*Credit goes to Ictoan for that, if I remembered it correctly that is

No, you´re thinking of the signal from the Berlin Olympics in the 1930s. One of the first things broadcast with enough power to be recieved in space, as mentioned in Contact. However another event was actually before, I think a coronation.

So the aliens will ask to be taken to Jesse Owens?

I'm still not letting the aliens anywhere near my bacon... Nor the Nazis for that matter... or Jesse Owens for that matter

Xan

If any alien species has the sophistication and the technology to fold space (thinking of reading the Dune trilogy - dare me?) they will have either established the moral rectitude to treat their journey as a mission on a par with the early European presence in the third world, or a fantastic opportunity to plunder and assimilate. Either way, we're screwed - because like the indigenous people of South America, we wouldn't have a clue what their good deeds were until our whole concept of right and wrong had been rewritten for us by agents of which we have no understanding.

Or - if they have the above sophistication, they would be like vague guidance on the ether to which they have evolved, beings of pure light, and come to us as angels to be misinterpreted for aeons. Christ I talk some shit when I'm drunk, on my birthday no less.

Let me drag some legitimacy from this post. If c is the maximum speed limit for this universe, whatever life forms visit us will have, at the bare minimum, 4.2 years to wait to get to us. But that presupposes that two stars closer to each other than any others will have sustained intelligent life. In a galaxy of over a hundred billion stars that would be like winning the lottery twice in a row. So we have to presume that the wait will be significantly longer than that. 40 years at a minimum, after a quick wiki on Extrasolar planets. *If* they can travel at the speed of light.

Humans can live up to 120+ years, tortoises a fair bit longer than that. A clam has been discovered which is estimated to be hundreds of years old. What is the lifespan of an intergalactic race? Have they the secret to eternal youth? Or do they, as we, invest so much of their success as beings into the successes of their progeny. It's reasonable to expect that a civilization capable of crossing the galaxy will be capable of perpetuating its existence so to do. But at what cost? Would you be the same person a hundred years of travel later that you were on take off? Would your children still be the devoted standard-bearers of your mission? Or would they be a generation of tired, resentful, dysfunctional people looking for somewhere to stop and stretch their legs.

I've run out of schtick. Let us now sing hymn number 42, "For those in peril on the sea".

You´re forgetting how time slows down when you move at high speeds.

But to slow it down by significant amounts, you'll need a *lot* of energy/matter.

I mentioned this recently on another thread...but I seem to recall reading recently that you'd need about a solar system's worth to make interstellar travel worthwhile. (But I still haven't remembered my source for this).