As food?
As slaves?
As children?
As bacteria?
As threatening?
As insignificant?
An alien.
shareWe regard ourselves as being an advanced species, and by Earth standards we are. We've got instant communication via the Internet, easily available computers that can do all sorts of wondrous things, a health care system that can respond to something like COVID quickly, et cetera. We've even sent people to the Moon. When the hell have dolphins ever done anything like that?!
But the truth is that we're still semi-conscious beings who can only act rationally with an effort of will. And our technology, impressive as it is to us, would be insignificant to a species able to travel interstellar distances.
I'd guess they'd regard us in about the same way we regard Neanderthals. They'd think of us as a little more advanced but not much different than other brute animals. "These humans might amount to something, someday, maybe in a hundred thousand years." They might study us, eat us, enslave us, make pets of us, et cetera, But they'd have little interest in conversing with us or reasoning with us, except in the way we've taught some gorillas sign language -- as research. And although there might be a fringe element among them proclaiming that humans have rights too, i.e., their version of PETA, in general that idea would strike them as absurd, just as we would consider it absurd to grant chimpanzees the rights to vote, to enter into contracts, to serve on juries, et cetera.
But you’re basing your assumptions by human standards.
share> But you’re basing your assumptions by human standards.
Sure, but those are the only standards I have. And I was certainly using human analogies to state my ideas, since I'm writing to other humans. Seems like a good idea, but I could be wrong.
We can conceive of ways to travel interstellar distances, but none seem to be achievable. Sure, the Enterprise can have its warp drive, as long as you don't mind that it takes ten times the total energy in the universe to power the thing. Now, I suppose someone in the 22nd century might make The Great Discovery to make such a thing possible. Who knows? But I suspect it's going to take a lot longer than that, if it ever happens. It's not just the science but the engineering.
Here's something to toss into the mix. About 3000 years ago, humanity went through a profound change in mentation. If you could step through a time machine back 2000 years and have a gab with some guy, you'd find his beliefs quaint and even barbaric, but you'd have no reason to doubt his fundamental soundness of mind. Go back 4000 years and you'd think the guy you were talking to was nuts. He literally heard things that weren't there, frequently, and sometimes saw things that weren't there. Puts a new light on Biblical stories like the burning bush, doesn't it?
That change isn't yet complete, and there's no reason to think it's a final step. A species advanced enough to overcome interstellar distances might have gone through *several* more such changes. If so, it's not just that they'd know a hell of a lot more than us. Their way of thinking would be incomprehensible to us, and all of our culture and intellectual achievement might be no more impressive to them than bees communicating by dancing is to we humans.
I can't even make a guess how far down the scale they'd put us. Like we see Neanderthals? Maybe not far enough. Maybe like mice -- things to be kept as pets, used in lab experiments, eradicated as vermin, or ignored.
Yes, this was more towards what I was striving at. I believe that any intelligence that was able to travel such vast distances would be so far advanced that we might not even register in their perception. We’d be no more than microbes.
shareMaybe but let's be honest, what's keeping us from traveling farther is mostly out lack of the will to do so. Our push beyond the earth has been very underfunded and handled poorly. If we had the motivation or the will to get off this rock I think we could go a very far way in just a couple of generations. We won't be crazy intelligent, we'll just have applied our collective labors in a different direction.
We (as in the US/NASA) went from the first manned missions to the most distant point in space that a human has even gone to and come back in roughly 8 years. If that trend would have continued we'd have a colonized Mars today without any doubt and probably manned missions to Jupiter and Saturn on a regular basis.
I don't agree. We have been so fragile in our outer space travels, we have to be so closely girded just to make a simple movement, I don't think the Universe is all that welcoming right now. Nor if we had worked harder at it back then. YMMV
share> If we had the motivation or the will to get off this rock I think we could go a very far way in just a couple of generations. [...] We (as in the US/NASA) went from the first manned missions to the most distant point in space that a human has even gone to and come back in roughly 8 years.
But what's the motivation now? Project Apollo wasn't about exploration or science. It was a Cold War effort against the USSR. The science and exploration got a free ride. I think the Moon landings happened for four reasons:
1) The Cold War, which made it necessary that we out-achieve the USSR;
2) The hot war in Vietnam, which turbocharged the economy and made it financially possible;
3) The Moon's distance from the Earth -- close enough to be possible, far away enough to be audacious; and,
4) JFK's death, which gave Gemini and Apollo a sort of political armor -- fulfilling the wishes of a fallen martyr, etc. There was a fair amount of opposition to NASA's endeavors -- "we've got problems on Earth we could spend this money on, and astronauts are getting killed, all over a silly geopolitical pissing contest?"
NASA's talking about sending people to Mars, but I'm skeptical it will happen. There's no comparable situation to the 1960s to drive the effort. And although I remember Apollo and would be glued to my TV if people went to Mars, I'd vote against the idea. If science is the claimed justification for doing it, we can do a lot more with unmanned missions far more cheaply.
Some of it is going to be a serious drop in the price of space exploration. We're already seriously starting to gear up for another trip back to the moon. China becoming much move active in space in the past couple of decades is starting to set things up for another space race.
Aside from that we also have more commercial interest and private funding than what we did during the first dozen years of manned space exploration. This will continue to grow as the technology matures. Off-Earth mining has some serious potential. Mars would be more of a pure science venture at first but may find itself firmly at the center of the mining economy and potentially space tourism.
"If we had the motivation".
Perhaps it will happen once we finally use up all the resources that we have here.
Yes and no,
We are a commodity to be traded, just like any other animal
They would take us as they have done for thousands of years as a retarded type pet for their enjoyment and their enjoyment only
But its not like it would be some major focus of the civilization, just like how there is cattle brokers that make up one of the million jobs a human can have
Any other ET from this planets perspective that is on a positive polarity wouldn't interfere as it fucks with free will and natural evolution of a species
Yeah spot on
and the ego of humans blinds them of this fact
I think it would depend on why they decided to come here. Is it for scientific observation? Then we might be seen as animals and we might be a vacation spot. Earth safaris.
If they want our planet as a home for them, they zap us, or they might use us as slaves to build their new civilization and then zap us.
The possibilities are vast.
They have been coming here for thousands of years
The human ego blinds the bulk of society of this fact, because it would require people to admit they are powerless and have no real agency
That's why there is 10,000+ stories of people seeing UFO's and aliens with videos and its just dismissed as they are either crazy or making it up to get attention
Because it would wreak their reality and require some introspection, and their bubble would be burst so to speak.
So the ego protects them, hence why its dismissed, in context of all human recorded history going back thousands of years, speaks of alien intervention
So tens of thousands of people look up to the sky and see "something" but no tangible proof but it's the billions who've done the same who've seen nothing who are delusional? Ok then.
share> I think it would depend on why they decided to come here.
That's always been the point that makes it difficult for me to believe stories of alien encounters. Even if it's possible for the aliens to come here, why would they want to?
There are two scenarios I can see. Let's say that they had the ability to do interstellar travel but had only developed that ability recently. It would still be difficult and expensive for them. So, to do research? No. That makes as much sense as if I, in Kentucky, were to reason, "I've heard about the weird plant that grows in Arctic Alaska, I'm going to *walk* there and have a look at it."
The only possible justification I can imagine for such a trip under those circumstances would be if it was a matter of survival for them. Something like "our planet is dying, here's one that's similar enough to ours that we can use it." In which case we'd be dead meat.
The other possibility is if they've not only developed interstellar travel, but have progressed beyond that to the point where such travel is affordable enough for their society that it can be used for things other than vital interests. Not all interstellar travel is equal, though -- it must be far less difficult to travel to a close star than all the way across the galaxy. If we do spot aliens, I suppose we should hope they're little green scientists from Alpha Centauri or Sirius.
We could be a 'Space God's' discarded toy.
We might be a snack that takes hundreds of millions of years to ripen.
I still think that we wouldn't even register with them - we wouldn't be able to comprehend them any more than an amoeba can comprehend us.
shareAs objects.
For all we know, space travel leads to a degeneration of all cognitive functions. If their autopilot manages to land the vessel, we can be happy if they know the result of 1+1.
If there are aliens we don't know what they would look like or their intentions with us. If they're the size of a golf ball then we're ok. But if they're as tall as us and mean. Well, were dead.
shareBut you're judging them by our standards. What if they were godlike?
shareA godlike golfball can still zap us to dust just as easy a godlike Titan.
Earth Vs. The Godlike Golfballs - coming soon to a theatre near you.
Plot Summary - A highly advanced race of small, golf balls imbued with godlike powers are traveling on an interstellar journey through space when they pass close by Earth. They are about to move on, when they pick up the broadcast of The Masters tournament which happens to be going on at the time. Seeing the abuse being heaped upon their Earthly cousins, the godlike golf balls zap humanity out of existence, and the planet is ruled thenceforth by newly-freed bedimpled spheres.