Theories about aliens

[El_Machinae]

No, it's not. Just as you can generalize about life, we can make reasonable assumptions about intelligent life.

Sure. But I am going to say it again, you're anthropomorphising intent. We have two methods of predicting intelligent life's behaviour: the rules of economics, and an understanding of instinctive bias/cognitive failures around those. You're applying your own economic instincts to predict the behaviour of entire civilizations. Humans have gazillions of motivations, human organizations have billions of motivations, human meta-organizations have their own effective meta-motivations. They're all based on the laws of economics and modified by human instinct.

The "embedded energy" as you keep calling it is irrelevant. We are talking about civilizations that can produce energy outputs orders of magnitude greater than humanity. A little biomass will hardly be important to them, especially since this biomass is of the wrong kind.

No, it's not irrelevant. In order to produce power, either the fuel needs to be shipped (which has shipping costs) or the materials to harvest novel power needs to be shipped. An onsite source of fuel is easily going to change the costs of what materials are required to colonise.

And altering an atmosphere is going to be easier when you can spontaneously get some of the gases in the atmosphere to react! The cost of terraforming, despite the energy-wealth of the civilization, is going to be cheaper.

Communication delays, the need to maintain a chronological unity of the civilization, etc.

This could happen, but it certainly cannot be relied upon. We have dozens of historical examples of humans funding their own colonization of foreign areas with the intent of removing themselves from a previous civilization.

There is only half of the 'communication delay' from the perspective of the colonists, too. They will be receiving a constant stream of information from their host system, if they choose. They will not perceive a delay in their receipt of information (such is the very nature of time dilation). The only delay is if there is an attempt at communication (which doesn't need to occur, and again, is part of the time-value calculation which suffers instinctive bias).

Second, you imagine that violent expansion in a Universe that's more than big enough for billions of civilizations is the only way to spread life.

I certainly did not. A civilization needn't do only one thing at a time. Humanity is currently harvesting the rainforest for: fun, scientific knowledge, to gain access to minerals, and to clear land in order to cropland. Natives are being befriended by anthropologists and hippies and being persecuted by capitalists. We're currently mistreating sapient organisms for fun (seaworld), food (dolphin cove), and science (monkey experiments). We burn fossil fuels to raise cows in order to: get manual labor, feed ourselves, feed our pets, skewer bulls in front of an audience, and get bulls to chase tourists down a street. A variety of harmful actions for a variety of motivations.

We have nothing that would make it worthwhile.

I have mentioned two things. Remember, the initial cost of a colonization effort is similar regardless of the distance traveled. The only factor is time, which has economic value. We cannot predict the time value that the 'colonists' place on their travel time, and we cannot predict the time value that the 'host system' places on their initial outlay.

edit: a third factor is us. I've been assuming that the ET would know there's life on Earth (given that we've been spectroscopically broadcasting that for a couple billion years). Only a few thousand stars could know that there's intelligent life. Given that there's likely a technological ceiling due to physical laws, after that ceiling is reached all warlike capacity will be measured with 'resources under jurisdiction' which would be separated into individual stars; it would be a wealth question, not a technology question. At some point, a civilization is too expensive to dislodge, because their technological capacity is similar, but they're close to the star and so have the home advantage in the relative costs of bringing resources to bear on an intruder. We don't know how close humanity is to this ceiling of technological capacity. We might be only a few hundred years away. At that point, a time advantage is merely a resource advantage.

 

[warpus]

Because analogies using relations between humans who live on a very tiny speck of dust (in terms of the size of the Universe) are useful only to a limited extent.

Just as you can generalize about life, we can make reasonable assumptions about intelligent life.

So on one hand you make assumptions about life.. on the other you don't want to.

 

[Silurian]

So on one hand you make assumptions about life.. on the other you don't want to.

That seems balanced

 

[Berzerker]

Well, History is a very long process. If aliens visited planet earth something like 250 million years ago, we could never ever be able to prove it. Considering the universe was created something like 13 billion years ago... anything could have happened.

Maybe even life on earth is from alien origins... As far as I know, we've never been able to emulate the process leading to the synthesis of amino acid and DNA in earth conditions.

Panspermia is gaining ground, and I believe its very possible the proto-Earth collided with remnants from a nearby supernova loaded with the elements needed for life. Combined with Earth's water life was born... This raises interesting questions, astronomers accept the Earth's very violent past but what does that say about where the Earth formed? If it suffered a massive collision, where's the debris and where was the collision? How did the Earth form here with all this water when the early solar wind would have blown volatile gases outward beyond Mars? Thats where we find ice and water in abundance... and thats where we find debris.

So, can any astronomer types here explain how the Earth stayed in the same basic orbit after suffering a large collision? I'd expect such a collision to slow the Earth enough to "create" a new, closer orbit - and Genesis says, the Earth was in darkness and covered by water... And after creation? A spinning world in closer proximity to the Sun with plate tectonics forming the lands from beneath the waters and life appears.

 

[Berzerker]

I was just re-reading the Enuma Elish and saw an interesting name for "the creator"... Nibiru means "seizer of the midst". Now the Nazca Monkey shows the head of the monkey looking down between the 2 hands with 4 and 5 fingers and the Incan Genesis shows their creator - a celestial body following a large ellipse - separating 2 groups of celestial bodies of 4 and 5. Nibiru, seized the middle - the crossing place

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Well, History is a very long process. If aliens visited planet earth something like 250 million years ago, we could never ever be able to prove it. Considering the universe was created something like 13 billion years ago... anything could have happened.

Maybe even life on earth is from alien origins... As far as I know, we've never been able to emulate the process leading to the synthesis of amino acid and DNA in earth conditions.

There have been experiments to replicate the initial conditions that have managed to synthesize some large organic chemicals- the key is that random chance and high energy environments like volcanically-heated pools rich in nutrients can ultimately create rather complicated chemical compounds, which could, given enough time, ultimately lead to the creation of self-replicating chemicals, and ultimately life. Given that, at the time, there were no life forms to consume this rich biochemical soup, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that life could have arisen by this manner. Panspermia is another possibility, but ultimately it is so far in the past that it is effectively untestable with our present knowledge of the universe- and it presents the problem of explaining how the panspermic source of life arose.

 

[Cutlass]

Panspermia is gaining ground, and I believe its very possible the proto-Earth collided with remnants from a nearby supernova loaded with the elements needed for life. Combined with Earth's water life was born... This raises interesting questions, astronomers accept the Earth's very violent past but what does that say about where the Earth formed? If it suffered a massive collision, where's the debris and where was the collision? How did the Earth form here with all this water when the early solar wind would have blown volatile gases outward beyond Mars? Thats where we find ice and water in abundance... and thats where we find debris.

So, can any astronomer types here explain how the Earth stayed in the same basic orbit after suffering a large collision? I'd expect such a collision to slow the Earth enough to "create" a new, closer orbit - and Genesis says, the Earth was in darkness and covered by water... And after creation? A spinning world in closer proximity to the Sun with plate tectonics forming the lands from beneath the waters and life appears.

The Earth, after it formed, had one truly massive collision and vast numbers of smaller ones. The massive one was with another planet sized object, I'd have to look up how large it was thought to be, I don't recall, but the debris of that collision that was blasted out of the atmosphere became the moon.

I have a hard time believing any living cells survived that.

As for the forming of the Earth, that was mainly complete before the ignition of the Sun. A cloud of gas and dust coalesces and takes on an inward spiral. Most of the mass makes it to the center, where it will become the star. But other parts clump up to create the planets, and vacuum up all the dust in their orbits. This will include all the air and water as well as the rocks.

Once the star reaches the point of ignition, then after that the solar wind of the energy given off from the star will start to push all of the dust and gas out of the inner solar system. So we have clear skys not when the star first starts to burn, but some time after that.

The further accumulation of mass on the planets after the star is burning is pretty trivial to the overall mass of the planets. But there are billions of years of it. So it adds up to a bit.

In theory, with panspermia the biological material did not have to come from another planet size collision, but only had to be within an asteroid large enough to not burn up entirely when it hit the Earth.

As for the orbit, angles and mass matter for what the results would be. Earth has an elliptical orbit. Not a circle. And that could be an artifact of the collision that created the moon.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Technically, we've known since Kepler that every orbit is elliptical.

 

[Blue Emu]

Maybe even life on earth is from alien origins... As far as I know, we've never been able to emulate the process leading to the synthesis of amino acid and DNA in earth conditions.

Hardly that. The Miller-Urey experiment, conducted as long ago as 1952, used only water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen as reactants... all readily available in the early solar system... and it spontaneously produced more than 20 different amino acids, as well as a host of other important bio-chemicals.

Similar experiments conducted since then (eg: Oro, 1961) have produced a wide variety of other life chemicals, including adenine (one of the nucleo-bases from which DNA and RNA form).

The main reasons why you don't see it happening around you are:

1) Human attention-span is not measured in millions of years.

2) Life is already nearly everywhere. Any organic chemicals that spontaneously formed nowadays would immediately be eaten, by some microscopic living thing (eg: bacteria).

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Ah yes, that's the proper name of the experiment I mentioned earlier. Thanks Blue Emu!

 

[Winner]

No, it's not irrelevant. In order to produce power, either the fuel needs to be shipped (which has shipping costs) or the materials to harvest novel power needs to be shipped. An onsite source of fuel is easily going to change the costs of what materials are required to colonise.

It is irrelevant. For a civilization capable of travelling between the stars in a meaningful way, massive geoengineering projects, including stuff like huge Lagrange-point mirrors, solar shades, space elevators etc., will be trivial. The same applies to on-site fusion energy generation, asteroid/comet transfer, and so on and so forth.

The idea that an alien civilization would somehow be dependent on finding living planets for transformation and colonization is preposterous, because to the best of our knowledge, they are rare (we can be wrong about this, but so far this seems to be the case). It stands to reason that such a civilization would master the art of (terra)forming long before it actually came to direct contact with another biologically active and rich world, like Earth.

If the number of biologically inert worlds that are nearly there (meaning they have most of the conditions necessary for life present, but for one or two reason the life didn't develop/died out - e.g. Mars) is so much greater than the number of the fully-developed living planets, then learning to (terra)form these planets offers a much greater reward in the long term. It is therefore much more reasonable for any alien civilization to do this instead of searching the expanses of the universe for planets to wipe out.

Additionally, as I pointed out, actually getting rid fully of the old biosphere and supplanting it with your own is likely going to be more difficult than (terra)forming the "nearly there" candidate worlds.

And altering an atmosphere is going to be easier when you can spontaneously get some of the gases in the atmosphere to react! The cost of terraforming, despite the energy-wealth of the civilization, is going to be cheaper.

This is offset by the problems I mentioned. You don't want to adapt alien biospheres to your needs, that's always going to be sub-optimal to re-creating your own biosphere on a new planet.

I certainly did not. A civilization needn't do only one thing at a time. Humanity is currently harvesting the rainforest for: fun, scientific knowledge, to gain access to minerals, and to clear land in order to cropland. Natives are being befriended by anthropologists and hippies and being persecuted by capitalists. We're currently mistreating sapient organisms for fun (seaworld), food (dolphin cove), and science (monkey experiments). We burn fossil fuels to raise cows in order to: get manual labor, feed ourselves, feed our pets, skewer bulls in front of an audience, and get bulls to chase tourists down a street. A variety of harmful actions for a variety of motivations.

So, on one hand you're dismissing my argument because I am "anthropomorphising" the aliens, and then you write this, which in a way proves my initial point (as I explained it to warpus IIRC): people are afraid because they fear the aliens are going to treat us the same way we treat other humans, animals, and the environment.

Of course, none of these examples is transferable to the issue we're discussing. Of course the aliens might find it funny to just enslave us and tentacle-rape us to death. I just consider that very, very, very, very unlikely. As always, I count on the "interstellar travel bottleneck" to only let through civilizations that have moved past wanton brutality and self-destructive ways of treating the living environments.

And you're free to tell me this is completely preposterous, it would only be fair.

I have mentioned two things. Remember, the initial cost of a colonization effort is similar regardless of the distance traveled. The only factor is time, which has economic value. We cannot predict the time value that the 'colonists' place on their travel time, and we cannot predict the time value that the 'host system' places on their initial outlay.

So, on one hand distance (and hence travel time and comm delay) doesn't matter, but somehow the target planet transformation time does?

In any case, it's as I said - transforming a living planet may very likely be much harder than starting from scratch on a place like Mars, which you can shape and sculpt in whatever way you wish.

edit: a third factor is us. I've been assuming that the ET would know there's life on Earth (given that we've been spectroscopically broadcasting that for a couple billion years). Only a few thousand stars could know that there's intelligent life. Given that there's likely a technological ceiling due to physical laws, after that ceiling is reached all warlike capacity will be measured with 'resources under jurisdiction' which would be separated into individual stars; it would be a wealth question, not a technology question. At some point, a civilization is too expensive to dislodge, because their technological capacity is similar, but they're close to the star and so have the home advantage in the relative costs of bringing resources to bear on an intruder. We don't know how close humanity is to this ceiling of technological capacity. We might be only a few hundred years away. At that point, a time advantage is merely a resource advantage.

Now that's purely speculative. It also depends on whether some form of FTL travel is possible. If the answer is yes and we're still not hapless slaves of our alien overlords, then I think we can really stop worrying about this, because then one of the following would be true:

a) there is no other civilization currently expanding in our Galaxy
b) there are such civilizations, but for one reason on another they've left Earth and humanity alone

I tend to agree with a). Even without FTL, our Galaxy is actually very small. A civilization with a basic interstellar travel capability (let's say 0.1 c ships utilizing fusion as the main propulsion) could theoretically reach every corner of the Galaxy in just 1 million years. Which is nothing in terms of evolutionary time scales. Earth would have to have been colonized dozens or hundreds of times in its history, yet we've found no evidence of that.

So we're back to the Fermi paradox

(Personally, I find one of the proposed solutions - that Universe somehow kills any civilization that advances enough to start expanding - much more scary than the possibility of meeting another alien civilization. That would at least prove that we have the potential to reach the stars.)

So on one hand you make assumptions about life.. on the other you don't want to.

The key words there are reasonable and limited.

I could list reasons why comparing the history of, say, New World-Old World contact doesn't apply in space, but I consider them fairly obvious.

 

[El_Machinae]

A lot of your argument is based on 'terraforming instead of conquest/intervention'. I just don't know why. Yes, colonising dead planets will happen. I won't deny that.

I'll ask a simple question. Suppose *you* owned an interstellar-capable ship, capable of speeds such that time-dilation made travel time relatively inconsequential. Would you travel (on a one-way trip) to a 'far' living planet or a 'close' dead planet?

 

[azzaman333]

I don't believe anything that has no evidence to support it.

 

[Winner]

A lot of your argument is based on 'terraforming instead of conquest/intervention'. I just don't know why. Yes, colonising dead planets will happen. I won't deny that.

I'll ask a simple question. Suppose *you* owned an interstellar-capable ship, capable of speeds such that time-dilation made travel time relatively inconsequential. Would you travel (on a one-way trip) to a 'far' living planet or a 'close' dead planet?

Because we're talking about how such a civilization would spread and colonize the Universe. If that is the goal, then terraforming is the easiest and most effective way of doing it.

If *I* had such a ship and my goal was to create an interstellar colony, I'd find a good candidate for terraforming that is close enough to my home star system (because I don't want to end up 10,000 years removed from my parent civilization), gather what I need, move there, transform the planet, and enjoy the fruits of that.

If my goal was to explore, then sure, I'd travel to planets that likely harbour life. What I wouldn't do is arrive to a place, wipe out its native inhabitants, nuke the planet to high heaven, and colonize it with my home planets flora and fauna so that my species can prosper.

 

[warpus]

It stands to reason that such a civilization would master the art of (terra)forming long before it actually came to direct contact with another biologically active and rich world, like Earth.

I don't think you can just assume that..

 

[Winner]

I don't think you can just assume that..

Why not? Unless they're extraordinarily lucky to have two "Earth-like" planets in their home solar system, they'll be in the same situation we are. Biologically inert planets suitable for (terra)forming are probably much more common that actual biologically active planets, so the chances are they'll end up with one or two (or more) in their home solar system.

Somehow, I can't picture a species that for some reason refuses to colonize its own solar system and waits centuries to be ready to start sending interstellar expeditions.

 

[warpus]

Why not? Unless they're extraordinarily lucky to have two "Earth-like" planets in their home solar system, they'll be in the same situation we are. Biologically inert planets suitable for (terra)forming are probably much more common that actual biologically active planets, so the chances are they'll end up with one or two (or more) in their home solar system.

Somehow, I can't picture a species that for some reason refuses to colonize its own solar system and waits centuries to be ready to start sending interstellar expeditions.

Why not? Because you can't assume anything about an alien species that we haven't even encountered. You can't assume anything that specific about their technological or sociological advancement.

 

[Kyriakos]

Maybe they will be from a dying star, and spent the last 1000 years precisely trying to develop the tech for a safe interstellar travel in which they mean not just to colonize, but take over the living planet to re-base themselves on it.

However i agree with Warpus that we are always anthropomorphing the supposed aliens. For all we know they might be something entirely different from us, in ways in which we cannot even conceive.

 

[Winner]

Why not? Because you can't assume anything about an alien species that we haven't even encountered. You can't assume anything that specific about their technological or sociological advancement.

In this case I very much can. In space travel, you can hardly "skip" the solar system colonization phase and move directly to interstellar phase. That would be tantamount to Columbus saying "screw India, I am gonna go to the Moon. I have no idea how, but I have a lot of time to figure that out..."

So, if the alien civilization progresses in the sane and natural way, they'll end up colonising their home system sooner than they get to actually attempting interstellar spaceflight. It stands to reason that some form of (terra)forming will be part of this first phase. The lessons learned will then make it easier to transform other planets in other solar systems. Hence, there is little reason to believe that an alien civilization would be desperate to grab any "garden world" it runs into. Why, when there is plenty of other unclaimed planets that can be tailor-made to suit their specific needs?

 

[Winner]

However i agree with Warpus that we are always anthropomorphing the supposed aliens. For all we know they might be something entirely different from us, in ways in which we cannot even conceive.

They most likely are.

As I said many times before on this forum, the chance we'll ever run into a civilization that's roughly on the same footing as us in terms of technological progress is very, very low. Either we'll run into a "civilization" in the stone age period of its development (which on earth lasted roughly 200,000 years, or over 2 million if you count the human predecessors of Homo sapiens), or we are found by a civilization that's millions of years older than us. Therefore most likely so advanced that we'd find it incomprehensible, or God-like, for all intents and purposes.