GunDoctor wrote:SirNitram wrote:Wow, you're a retard. What, precisely, is going to be so valuable on a planet when we have asteroid belts to mine? Or is this too complex for your infantile worldview?
Wow, you're sooo convincing. If something is possible, an expansive tool using sapient will do it eventualy. You're right, there are tremendous resources is space, and they will be exploited. Is that any reason to let a perfectly good planet go to waste?
Yes. Planets tend to have things like violent weather, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and hostile/incompatible atmospheres/life-forms/native sapients/climates. They also can't dodge, so your enemies are liable to make a beeline for them, should they choose to attack you. Not to mention getting onto them requires expensive and heavy thermal shielding to enable a vessel to survive the heat of reentry, and enormous quantities of fuel to get back up into orbit. The only way exploiting a planet would be even remotely profitable is if you built a space elevator . . . an enormous, surprisingly fragile construct you're not about to trust around primitive alien sapients.
If there's profit to be had from making contact with those primitives, and there's really no way to know untill you do, someone's going to go for it.
Planets aren't profitable unless you're willing to make
massive infrastructure improvements, as stated above. And you're more likely to make those improvements to planets which aren't full of potentially resentful or overly religiously zealous natives who might get hold of some ancient 9/11 footage where flying machines brought down large towers and start wondering if the same can be done to your space elevator.
Not to mention that there's
absolutely nothing a primitive alien culture can offer to a culture capable of interstellar travel. Let's go down the list.
Medicine? Nope, different biochemistries. Even if we assume that all complex life will be DNA/RNA based (or a reasonably close analogue, which is a surprisingly good assumption to make,) they will likely use a different set of proteins and amino acids than you will.
Food? Nope. See above. Not to mention you could simply take samples of their plants/animals/reasonably similar analogues and clone them using your technology.
Science? Are you kidding? These are primitives stuck to their own planet. You think they're going to have anything worth knowing?
Technology? This would earn one of those sickeningly colorful "ROFLMAO..etc...etc...etc" in 18 point font that I've seen around here on occasion. The one-note civilization that is painfully primitive in all areas except one, where they've got AWESOME POWAH is something that exists only in bad TV sci-fi. What use would you have for an ox-drawn cart if you've got a John Deere tractor? What use would you have for an obsidian-spiked club and goofy animal-skin head-dress if you've got a Colt M1911A1 and a Kevlar vest? What use would you have for a Saturn V rocket if you've got the starship
Enterprise?
Land? Not even this. You're likely to not be able to throw a rock ten light-years in any direction without inadvertently wiping out at least one habitable planet. Habitable planets are the next best thing to free, and the vast majority of them will be inhabited by nothing more strenuous to overcome than single-celled cyanobacteria analogues (recall that, for the first 85% of Earth's history, the dominant life-form on Earth was
blue-green algae. Furthermore, sizeable land animals didn't make an appearance on Earth for the first
93% of the planet's history.) Planets with sapient natives will be easy to avoid.
And once there's trade, everthing else follows. Trade mission, embassy, embassy guards, etc.
This assumes that the primitives have something worth trading. This isn't going to be like the native Americans and the Spaniards. It's not even going to be the British Empire versus the Zulus, or even Transnational Logging and Paper Company versus Naked Primitives living in the Amazon. It's going to be more like a Suburban American Family versus an
Ant Colony.
It's not about what is neccesary, it's about what is profitable. It wasn't neccesary for Europe to colonise anywhere else, but they did. 'Course I can't convince you of that any more than you can convince me that any species that gets into space suddenly becomes hippy peace-niks singing kumbya and passing a joint.
The relative time and energy expended in getting to the Americas is nothing compared to the time and energy expenditure of getting to the Moon. You could do the former with leaky wooden boats powered by wind. You could send many tens or even a couple hundred people at a time to the Americas with such a primitive contraption. We needed an enormous rocket and a small army of technically competent people just to send
three people to the Moon, only two of which actually landed. And even then, they could only stay a few days. We're going to need enormous rockets, a large army of technically competent people, and an enormous capital investment just to build a little base on the Moon for a few astronauts to spend a few months in. We'll need an even larger rocket and an even larger army of highly technical people just to send a spacecraft to Mars for a year.
An interstellar civilization will need a positively gargantuan rocket powered by extremely expensive to produce antimatter with many meters of shielding, or lots of exotic physics wankery to send a crew, or even a small robotic probe, to another star system. The expense will be such that it can only be undertaken by a Type II civilization . . . and the only way you can get to being a Type II civilization is if you've become
very good at playing nicely with others. So good, in fact, that you're capable of building the up the enormous interplanetary infrastructure needed to build starships, without having to worry about some idiots with a handy asteroid smashing holes in it over some petty differences. Contrary to bad TV and movie sci-fi, a starship isn't going to be something that can be built by a crackpot and a small team of spunky protagonists living in the post-apocalypse Montana wilderness. And the more wankeriffic an interstellar civilization is, the more energy they'll require. A primitive planet will have
zero to offer an interstellar civilization.
What follows is an example:
Link
In the above link, a scheme is mentioned to send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri using a 10 million gigawatt laser shining on a 1,000 ton laser-sail space probe. Such a craft would be capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in ten years. You can easily compute how much energy will be expended in the effort. You ready for the result? Here it is:
3.1536E+24 Joules
The total power generating capacity of the entire planet Earth is only
2.275E+12 watts (Extrapolated from
here.) Some simple math reveals that you would need to dedicate the entire electrical output of the planet Earth for
43,956 years to get the 3.1536E+24 Joules needed to send even a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri in ten years.
<ADDENDUM:>
Edited because the huge number represents total energy expenditure, not power. Unless you applied all that energy in one second, in which case, watts would work.
-- Asuka
