Musings on The Orion Plan (spoilers ahead)

[SolarpunkFan]

I've recently finished The Orion Plan by Mark Alpert.

The synopsis is as follows:

Scientists thought that Earth was safe from invasion. The distance between stars is so great that it seemed impossible for even the most advanced civilizations to send a large spaceship from one star system to another.

But now an alien species―from a planet hundreds of light-years from Earth―has found a way.

A small spherical probe lands in an empty corner of New York City. It soon drills into the ground underneath, drawing electricity from the power lines to jump-start its automated expansion and prepare for alien colonization.

When the government proves slow to react, NASA scientist Dr. Sarah Pooley realizes she must lead the effort to stop the probe before it becomes too powerful. Meanwhile, the first people who encounter the alien device are discovering just how insidious this interstellar intruder can be.

In The Orion Plan, Mark Alpert presents a fascinating story of first contact with an alien intelligence far beyond what we can imagine.

It sounds good, but the book felt rather mediocre to me. But that's not the biggest thing that struck me as a problem.

The alien itself is described as an entirely mutually symbiotic biosphere on a planet with plentiful resources. Good so far, until the alien's actions on Earth come into play. It causes a large amount of destruction, death and suffering with the ultimate goal being Spoiler

the complete annihilation of all native Earth life and the replacement of our biosphere with its arsenic based one

.

My beef with this is this: why would the described being evolve such ruthlessness or even intelligence for that matter. I'll quote the book Blindisght to show what I'm getting at:

Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials — but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.

It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an on going succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.

To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?

It makes sense to me. Intelligence is hugely resource intensive and hardly necessary on a well-stocked planet with absolutely zero predation whatsoever.

This book ultimately feels like a massive critical research failure on evolutionary biology.

If anyone wants to chime in on further thoughts or refutations to my argument, I'm all ears.

[Simon_Jester]

My beef with this is this: why would the described being evolve such ruthlessness or even intelligence for that matter. I'll quote the book Blindisght to show what I'm getting at...

It makes sense to me. Intelligence is hugely resource intensive and hardly necessary on a well-stocked planet with absolutely zero predation whatsoever.

This book ultimately feels like a massive critical research failure on evolutionary biology.

If anyone wants to chime in on further thoughts or refutations to my argument, I'm all ears.

It depends on what the intelligence in question is like.

A bunch of individual alien beings who evolved in such an environment, IF they evolved intelligence at all, would evolve it to compete with each other more than to survive the environment. The most intelligent nonhuman animals are NOT necessarily the ones with the greatest need to dodge predators. For that purpose, evolving a high reproductive rate and a fast set of legs seems to be more useful.

Instead, intelligent animals tend to be social animals, because to be a social animal you have to be able to react specifically to situations and on some level understand them. Reflexes won't do the job by themselves; they'll protect you from a striking snake or a thunderstorm, but instinctive reaction isn't enough to protect you from a challenge for dominance of the pack if you can't cope with figuring out who your supporters and enemies are. Conversely, being a successful member of a social species requires knowing how to align yourself with the dominant member of the group and form a pecking order... which requires some level of (animal-level) intelligence. Lizards wouldn't be able to do that.

So it's hard to predict how they'd behave. They'd be competing among themselves for status and not so much for survival- but being a winner in status competitions has a lot to do with whether you get to have offspring.

Then you have to ask, how would they treat an alien planet? This has more to do with culture than with evolutionary biology, and how one is affected by the other is an open question. It sounds like the alien 'terraforming' probe was sent at a long distance by an alien culture that may have little or no awareness of us, based on your summary. They may not even have known Earth had intelligent life when they launched. They might not view us as intelligent life if we lack some key feature their culture deems critically important. Or they may have some notion of "manifest destiny" that makes it justified for their species to destroy incompatible biospheres regardless of what occupies them, even if they would never commit genocide among their own species.

[SolarpunkFan]

Thank you. I had a feeling I overlooked a few things and you summed them up nicely.

I especially agree with the hard to predict part. After all, we currently only have a sample size of one as far as planetary biospheres go.