The Poll of the Seven Planets

[Bamspeedy]

Hoping for more advanced in hopes they will teach us something is really taking a gamble.

Daleks: We are better... different than human beings.
Dalek: With static power, the Daleks will be twice as... useful.
Dalek: Why do human beings kill human beings?
Dalek 1: Exterminate all humans!
Dalek 2: Exterminate all humans!
Dalek 1: Exterminate, annihilate, DESTROY!!!
All Daleks: Daleks conquer and destroy!!! Daleks conquer and destroy!!! Daleks conquer and destroy!!! Daleks conquer and destroy!!!
Dalek: We are not ready yet, to teach these human beings the law of the Daleks!

 

[Glassfan]

Klingons eat live worms, inflict pain on each other for fun, and I'd rather listen to a herd of cats fighting than "Klingon opera."

Romulans have terrible fashion sense and no imagination when it comes to hairstyles.

Klingons are Brutal, but Romulans are devious. And OMG - I'm a SciFi Bigot!

 

[Gori the Grey]

If they were more advanced, wouldn't we have picked up on their own radio, etc. signals from forty years back?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

If they were more advanced, wouldn't we have picked up on their own radio, etc. signals from forty years back?

You're assuming they would use radio.

That's one of the problems of trying to contact other civilizations - we could be bombarded with messages right now, but we don't have the technology to even recognize their existence.

 

[Glassfan]

If they were more advanced, wouldn't we have picked up on their own radio, etc. signals from forty years back?

I've been assuming by "advanced", we mean thousands or millions of years advanced, not forty. So right, probably not radio.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

You're assuming they would use radio.

That's one of the problems of trying to contact other civilizations - we could be bombarded with messages right now, but we don't have the technology to even recognize their existence.

Truth

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I believe expansion in the Solar system will be done through automatic research, mining and power stations. At least in next several decades. It is already going on for about 50 years, by the way. Human exploration will be restricted to may be competition to reach Mars first, but other than that, progress in AI and robots technologies will make automatic exploration far more feasible. For human colonization, I think remote places on Earth are a good example. Some people work in Antarctica, but not too many of them want to colonize it, despite it would be much easier than Moon or Mars. In optimistic scenario we will have manned research station on the Moon in next 50 years or so.

This is a likely outcome and scenario.

And do what with it? There would have to be a lot of people all the way out there to make any kind of lucrative market for it. And how would it be disposed of, once people don't want it anymore - do we create planet-sized piles of plastic?

Hydrocarbons are the backbone of our society. You need them in one form or another for agriculture as raw input and for construction materials. Having them in such easily obtainable quantities would be a boon to the entire effort of solar system colonization.

Why? What life could there be on Mars? Microbes? Even insects? We pay no concern whatsoever to their lives here on earth. So what does the moral question stem from? The unique gene code? Well, unique gene codes are cool and I see the sense in bio-diversity. But bio-diversity is important because we live in this biosphere and need it.
We are not going to compete with Mars sperm over a place in their biosphere. We would have to create our own. So, if colonization destroyed some of that - it probably would not matter.

A lot of people would have very strong moral concerns about destroying native Martian life. I side with you in that I give priority to Earth life and think it needs to spread through terraforming. But I do not outright ignore the moral implications of taking such a course of action and I personally have not been able to construct a moral framework that fully justifies it. I don't think people ever will, it's going to be a grey area until it's a settled matter - which will take centuries or millenia to play out.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I've been assuming by "advanced", we mean thousands or millions of years advanced, not forty. So right, probably not radio.

Radio is actually not a bad way to communicate to as many nearby systems as possible. It gets through most of the gas and debris of the galaxy fairly well and would also be easily detectable by any civilization that had the capacity to even ask if life was out there. It's only the blink of the cosmic eye that came between humans realizing they were on a single planet of many to the invention of radio, after all.

It's also relatively omni-directional and doesn't require highly focused detection systems to pick up. But all of this only applies if alien civilizations want to be discovered and are actively pinging the universe for fellow travelers. If an advanced society wants to keep its mouth shut, we wouldn't find it until our detection devices advance to a higher sensitivity level and are employed on a much greater scale than they currently are. Right now the search essentially relies on blind luck and in a galaxy with billions of stars and planets (many of which are blocked by other stars and objects and can never be observed) we would have to be astronomically lucky to find anyone.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Hydrocarbons are the backbone of our society. You need them in one form or another for agriculture as raw input and for construction materials. Having them in such easily obtainable quantities would be a boon to the entire effort of solar system colonization.

What do we do with the piles of space-plastic we don't need anymore?

I feel guilty every time I throw a plastic bottle cap away, but there are no plastic recycling facilities where I live. Cardboard, yes... plastic, no.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

What do we do with the piles of space-plastic we don't need anymore?

I feel guilty every time I throw a plastic bottle cap away, but there are no plastic recycling facilities where I live. Cardboard, yes... plastic, no.

We'd recycle or discard it. The former is most likely as outer space colonization efforts will be as closed to a closed-loop as possible. That is to say they'd be in a position where the less energy intensive and destructive option would be to repurpose as many materials as they can. We're never going to have another place as forgiving as the Earth to dump our garbage.

You may also be hurting the environment by recycling paper and many plastic products, by the way. Cardboard and other paper products in the 1st world are often sourced from forests that are grown specifically for paper. They capture carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in a form that will take decades to recycle back into the air in normal circumstances. If we bury it in landfills, it could be millenial or milliions of years before that stuff comes back into the air.

By recycling it, we're putting more carbon back into the air to move it around and reprocess it into new paper. Burying it and growing more trees is a better ecological solution in many calculations.

Plastics have the same thing going for them, more or less depending on the specific type of plastic and how easily and efficiently it can be reprocessed. It is very bad to leave plastic out in the environment when discarding it but not so bad if it winds up in dedicated landfills. But for some plastics it makes sense to recycle them.

The calculus changes for very large facilities or extremely dense urban environments where the carbon hit to transport and recycle paper or plastic is very low due to density. But outside of those special circumstances (which don't apply in rural Canada) it makes more sense to landfill the waste. I am a huge proponent of environmentalism and recycling in general, if that means anything.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

We'd recycle or discard it. The former is most likely as outer space colonization efforts will be as closed to a closed-loop as possible. That is to say they'd be in a position where the less energy intensive and destructive option would be to repurpose as many materials as they can. We're never going to have another place as forgiving as the Earth to dump our garbage.

Unless we start dumping it on airless, waterless planets or sending it into the Sun.

You may also be hurting the environment by recycling paper and many plastic products, by the way. Cardboard and other paper products in the 1st world are often sourced from forests that are grown specifically for paper. They capture carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in a form that will take decades to recycle back into the air in normal circumstances. If we bury it in landfills, it could be millenial or milliions of years before that stuff comes back into the air.

By recycling it, we're putting more carbon back into the air to move it around and reprocess it into new paper. Burying it and growing more trees is a better ecological solution in many calculations.

Sorry, the local landfill doesn't allow people to bury their own garbage.

Plastics have the same thing going for them, more or less depending on the specific type of plastic and how easily and efficiently it can be reprocessed. It is very bad to leave plastic out in the environment when discarding it but not so bad if it winds up in dedicated landfills. But for some plastics it makes sense to recycle them.

Some apartment buildings have special bins for #2 plastics. Mine doesn't, so I really don't have any choice - it has to go into the garbage unless I can figure out a way to reuse it for something else. My glass, metal, and plastic bottles and jugs go to the depot and I get money for them (10 cents for containers up to 2 litres and 25 cents for containers 2 litres and larger). This applies to all milk, juice, pop, water, beer, and liquor containers (only the first 4 apply in my case, of course).

The calculus changes for very large facilities or extremely dense urban environments where the carbon hit to transport and recycle paper or plastic is very low due to density. But outside of those special circumstances (which don't apply in rural Canada) it makes more sense to landfill the waste. I am a huge proponent of environmentalism and recycling in general, if that means anything.

I don't live in rural Canada.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I'm talking about the landfills burying your garbage, not you doing it yourself. Everything in a proper landfill will end up buried eventually, even if it's only by other trash. The vast majority of stuff under the surface will cease decaying at an environmentally-hurtful rate whether or not it's rock, dirt or more trash on top of it.

I don't have a problem dumping garbage on empty rocks in space, so you're right, we do have better places to dump garbage than the Earth. I don't know why I even said otherwise.

Non single-source recycling is a pain to deal with. Sorry your city doesn't offer it.

 

[Zkribbler]

I voted "Other" and invoke the words of that great American philosopher Doris Day when she opined, "Que sera, sera."

 

[CavLancer]

Hoping for more advanced in hopes they will teach us something is really taking a gamble.

They might just teach us to be careful what we wish for. The chance that they would crush us like a bug makes the whole notion of more advanced too risky to contemplate. Sure, we might end up with a cure for cancer, but we might all just end up dead. the chance for the first isn't worth the possibility of the second. It would likely not be avoidable either way. No chance of sneaking up on the buggers to try to figure it out before we say hi.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

If they were more advanced, wouldn't we have picked up on their own radio, etc. signals from forty years back?

In addition to everthing everyone else said, we wouldn't detect it even if they were using radio. If they were broadcasting terrestrial signals that were powerful enough to be detected 40 light years away, that might be considered overkill and perhaps not all that energy efficient.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Oh, I thought I read somewhere that any planet within (2017-1881=) 136 light years of us could know that we were an intelligent species b/c our radio broadcasts just keep travelling in an ever-expanding sphere outward indefinitely (and meaningful communications are distinguishable from noise). You all are of course right that if they've long ago moved entirely on to some non electro-magnetic mode of telecommunication (Future Tech), then we wouldn't be picking that up. I guess there's no way of knowing how deep into the future we'll abandon radio for something better. (Though there was a thread here about a year ago about how no human tech has gone utterly obsolete). And, yes, there's no way of knowing what the attitudes of a different intelligent species would be (wanting to keep undiscovered, rather than reaching out to their interstellar neighbors).

 

[Sommerswerd]

Tough question. All outcomes are acceptable.

This:

Is acceptable???

Actually... don't answer that

 

[warpus]

I mean, that's only a model

 

[Sommerswerd]

I mean, that's only a model

WHAT?!? The historical documents?? Fake?!? BUT WHY??

 

[Farm Boy]

Good movie.