Stephen Hawking is Afraid of Aliens.

[adam_grif]

If it's large enough, then yes it will. You're still presuming that this species is merely about a thousand years ahead of us, when it's just as likely to be millions or tens of millions.

There is unlikely to be much/any tech difference between a civilization "a few hundred" and "a few billion" years ahead of us, technologically.

Again, he may well be trivial to his civilization, like Pizarro was to the Spanish, but nevertheless exceptionally dangerous against us.

This is probably the biggest risk I see. I saw it brought up on Atomic Rockets a while back that the individual citizens of advanced civilizations may possess more power than nation states do today in terms of firepower. The analogy was that a middle aged peasant could never hope to possess something as deadly as a rifle or a barrel of gasoline. If private citizens of alien cultures are allowed to own interstellar spacecraft, there's no real guarantee that one or more of them aren't going to be "rogue".

If we're dealing with far-out tranhumanist types, or uploaded minds living on slow spaceships, then there isn't any real way to predict how those kinds of minds are going to behave. Computers as powerful as physics will allow, advanced AI, autonomous, self-replicating factories and so on. One post singularity starship reaching Sol means it's game over should they be hostile, unless it's critically damaged or something.

So basically, libertarian aliens = we're doomed

[Shroom Man 777]

The engine thrust of an alien interstellar automobile will be more than enough to cause a devastating effect on the surface of the Earth. What if a single alien individual wanted to settle down on Earth, but decided to get rid of the annoying humans first?

[Stofsk]

If it's large enough, then yes it will. You're still presuming that this species is merely about a thousand years ahead of us, when it's just as likely to be millions or tens of millions.

There is unlikely to be much/any tech difference between a civilization "a few hundred" and "a few billion" years ahead of us, technologically.

What?

[Serafina]

If it's large enough, then yes it will. You're still presuming that this species is merely about a thousand years ahead of us, when it's just as likely to be millions or tens of millions.

There is unlikely to be much/any tech difference between a civilization "a few hundred" and "a few billion" years ahead of us, technologically.

What?

He propably means that science will hit rock bottom in a couple of hundred years - that there is a limit which can not be surpassed no matter how old a species is.

That is of course possible, but that's simply something we can not know.
Either way, any species that can reach us and wants to killfuck earth can easily do so and we can't co anything against it.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Obviously, this entire conversation is grossly speculative; still, if we're going to extrapolate from the one sentient, potentially space-faring species we know about, the most likely conclusion we reach is that:

Any sufficiently advanced, space-faring civilization must:

A) Consistently apply something analagous to the scientific method
B) Have a profound understanding of mathematics, physics, and computing
C) Have an incredibly large industrial base and power source

The argument for hostile alien-invaders is predicated mostly on the observation that human beings, in the past, have been cruel, exploitative, and genocidal. However, comparing your average European conquerers to some hypothetical civilization which exhibits A, B, and C is not a very useful comparison. Rather, an overall analysis of human social development has revealed that our moral sensibilities have grown more egalitarian as our technological capabilities have increased, despite our frequent and ongoing lapses into exploitative barbarism. The moral outlook of your average 21st century Westerner is vastly more egalitarian than your average 19th century Westerner, even taking into account the rampant tribalism, racism and homophobia that still exists today.

The only real reason to assume that an incoming interstellar species would be hostile is because the difference between us and them is probably an order of magnitude greater than the difference between us and, say, Homo erectus. Or possibly Pan troglodytes. We simply may not register as being something to care about. Especially since it's no certain thing that we'll manage to keep things together long enough to become an interplanetary species, let alone an interstellar one (some would argue that this particular species has come about as far as it can and will go back to banging rocks together when our own excesses come back to bite us in the ass, but that's another story.)

While it's certainly not a given that social progress must necessarily parallel technological progress, it's easy to see how the two naturally go hand in hand.

They have to, for a species to become interplanetary. Even moreso if they become interstellar. Look at us. Our technological progress has far outstripped our social progress and our awareness of the consequences of our technological progress. We'll have barely managed a Mars landing or two by 2050 (barring some PO-induced global economic catastrophe that kills the space program for another century, at least.) We won't be properly interplanetary for another century at least. Assuming we don't kill ourselves first.

But a hypothetical civilization capable of interstellar travel would most likely be (at least) thousands of years older than human civilization, and would therefore be likely to have almost completely embraced rationalism. In fact, it could be easily argued that any species which ultimately fails to embrace rationalism is unlikely to survive long enough to become a civilization capable of interstellar travel.

In light of all this, hostile alien invaders are incredibly unlikely. If interstellar space-travel is economically feasible at all, it's likely that any species which survives long enough to achieve such a capability would be highly rational and egalitarian, rather than brutal and superstitious.

A rational species is just as dangerous to us as an irrational one. Just talking to us would be enough to generate profound political unrest. On one hand, it would shatter the fragile belief systems of a large fraction of the world's leaders. On the other hand, it may spur massive increases in spending in an attempt to "catch up with the Joneses." If that spending was as short-sighted as human spending tends to be . . . it may only hasten our plunge down the Olduvai Gorge.

A rational species may also assign a lower utility to ensuring our survival than towards ensuring theirs. To them, we're cavemen. We're less than cavemen. We're chimpanzees. We have nothing to offer them, except some artistic curios. The probability of us achieving interstellar travel is extremely small. The probability of offing ourselves through self-induced climate change, gorging ourselves to death, or going out in a blaze of Shepaggedeon far exceed the odds that we'll amount to anything on the galactic scene.

Fortunately, a species that has seriously attained interstellar travel is just as likely to leave us alone and wait for us to burn ourselves out. Their interstellar civilization has been around for a minimum of several thousand years, and likely for an order of magnitude or two longer. We've barely had civilization capable of measurably improving the quality-of-life of the average human for perhaps two hundred years. Arguably for less than a hundred, when life expectancies really started going up. To put that into the perspective of an interstellar species: The former is less than the flight time for a single ship departing a Zeta Reticulian antimatter farm at Vega for Earth at 0.1c. The latter is about the flight time for that single ship departing from a Zeta Reticulian antimatter farm orbiting Sirius, at the same velocity.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

If it's large enough, then yes it will. You're still presuming that this species is merely about a thousand years ahead of us, when it's just as likely to be millions or tens of millions.

There is unlikely to be much/any tech difference between a civilization "a few hundred" and "a few billion" years ahead of us, technologically.

What?

There is a vast mountain of evidence (which is still growing, BTW,) that Einstein rules this universe. Not only does he rule the universe, he does so with an iron fist. And between him, and our other mainstream physicists; we have an essentially-complete grasp of the way the universe works. Certainly complete enough that we can computationally simulate it. The only things that seems to be left to do are filling in relatively small gaps in our knowledge and improving our theoretical models.

Some of our technology is already bumping up against constraints imposed by the laws of physics. And where we're not bumping up against the laws of physics; we can, at least, see where the bottom lies. We're already building features smaller than many atoms. We're exploiting quantum phenomena in everyday technology. We're on the cusp of duplicating nanomachinery through engineering that took evolution a few hundred million years to perfect. We can create antimatter (in vanishingly tiny quantities,) and will have the ability to make little artificial suns before the century is out. Assuming we survive the next couple of centuries, the only difference that will exist between us, and a civilization that's been around for a million years will be one of a few orders of magnitude worth of scale.

[Guardsman Bass]

Assuming we survive the next couple of centuries, the only difference that will exist between us, and a civilization that's been around for a million years will be one of a few orders of magnitude worth of scale.

A sufficiently big civilization with a lot of resources and time on its hands could try some of those "arbitrarily advanced civilization" experiments that encompassed wormholes and the like, assuming it's theoretically possible to make them (we'll need that Theory of Everything to be sure).

[Serafina]

While we seem pretty close to the "borders of physics" in some cases, other things still have enormous room for expansion, such as:
-Energy generation: Efficient fusion plants are close, but we will need a long time to get "maximum" effciency out of them.
-Space travel (etc.): We are nowhere near any limits. Sure, FTL might just be plain impossible - but we won't need FTL to utilize our solar system. Expansion by multiple orders of magnitude is possible here.
-Computation: There is still a lot of stuff that is possible but either not yet sufficiently researched (quantum computing, AI) or just not worth the effort yet (supra-cooled computers)
-Genetic engineering: Definately scientifically possible, but not sufficiently researched yet. Would allow greatly enhanced intelligence (and other features) and removal of many diseases.
-As a combination of both of the above, brain uploading

And there are still possibilities for much more exotic stuff where our current scientific knowledge can't say wether it's possible or not.

Either way, a civilsation with all of the above could crush us if they wanted to - just send a swarm of AI-controlled (or steered by very longliving/uploaded people) into our solar system (even if it takes a couple of millenia), construct many kinetic impactors and drop them.
Of course, that would carry no actual gain for them and would be utterly pointless.

[Bakustra]

If it's large enough, then yes it will. You're still presuming that this species is merely about a thousand years ahead of us, when it's just as likely to be millions or tens of millions.

There is unlikely to be much/any tech difference between a civilization "a few hundred" and "a few billion" years ahead of us, technologically.

Ahh, but I'm talking about scale of technology, which will change over millions of years, as the scale of the civilization grows.

Again, he may well be trivial to his civilization, like Pizarro was to the Spanish, but nevertheless exceptionally dangerous against us.

This is probably the biggest risk I see. I saw it brought up on Atomic Rockets a while back that the individual citizens of advanced civilizations may possess more power than nation states do today in terms of firepower. The analogy was that a middle aged peasant could never hope to possess something as deadly as a rifle or a barrel of gasoline. If private citizens of alien cultures are allowed to own interstellar spacecraft, there's no real guarantee that one or more of them aren't going to be "rogue".

If we're dealing with far-out tranhumanist types, or uploaded minds living on slow spaceships, then there isn't any real way to predict how those kinds of minds are going to behave. Computers as powerful as physics will allow, advanced AI, autonomous, self-replicating factories and so on. One post singularity starship reaching Sol means it's game over should they be hostile, unless it's critically damaged or something.

So basically, libertarian aliens = we're doomed

Even if they aren't hostile, imagine if they attempt to help and cause a massive economic crash by introducing too much technology at a time.

[Samuel]

If it's large enough, then yes it will. You're still presuming that this species is merely about a thousand years ahead of us, when it's just as likely to be millions or tens of millions.

I'm not aware of any substance that has a high heat capacity than the planet. Unless you make an extremely large ship, in which case you will be very careful with the laser, lest it burn away your sensors.

Or they're simply incompetent. We cannot assume that aliens would of necessity be hypercompetent in all their matters, and with the power available to them (note that I am restricting myself to civilizations that are between K-1 and K-2; if a K-3 civilization came knocking on our door, things would probably be even worse) the potential damage screwups can do is far, far greater.

If they were that incompetant, they wouldn't have gotten into space in the first place.

Even if they aren't hostile, imagine if they attempt to help and cause a massive economic crash by introducing too much technology at a time.

First Contract.

[Patrick Degan]

So your entire point was that no alien species would engage in interstellar travel unless it was an absolute necessity. In other words, interstellar travel would then be uneconomical. Well, I suppose that we can neither prove nor disprove this without any further experience. After all, there are potential assumptions that would allow economical space travel and there are others that would not. While you will no doubt claim that I have the burden of proof, we cannot assume either way without evidence. So you must demonstrate that it would be uneconomical, and I would have to demonstrate that it would be economical, but we cannot assume one or the other. You then decided to go for a strawman of the actual position, which is something that I will kindly lay out for you:

No, child, YOU must demonstrate that it would be economical. Kindly point this out for the class, please.

IF we attempt to actively make contact with alien species via deliberately sending significant radio signals (such as ones that vary in specific sequences not found in nature)
THEN they have a larger chance of discovering us
WHICH MAY lead to severe consequences for us
of which we can include things like, say, disastrous attempts by the aliens to uplift us culturally, or any of a variety of scenarios. Most importantly, we will most likely be totally at the mercy of the aliens. This presupposes that aliens hear and investigate. It does not presume malice aforethought on the part of the aliens, just that the consequences of interaction between civilizations of wildly different technological capabilities doesn't tend to turn out too well when it has happened before and that our experience with intelligent species indicates that we cannot assume that the aliens will necessarily behave perfectly rationally.

It also presupposes, does it not, that we even know where to signal in the first place, that anybody would hear it, and that the mentality of an alien species is analogous to our own. Nevermind the assumption that the aliens, whomever they might be wherever they might be, would be using the same sort of principles in their communication.

Yes, your belief that diminishing returns will hit at precisely the right technological developments to validate your arguments is both convenient and amusing.

I'm sorry, is that you pretending you've actually made a cogent point about anything?

No, it's me highlighting that you only make use of those technological conditions that support your own argument.

Then I presume you can demonstrate for us technological principles which allow anybody to circumvent the laws of relativity and inertia to support your argument.

Actually, it does refute your notion that any alien migratory group would simply decide, on a whim, to change course to check out what may or may not be "something" other than a blip or an anomaly, child. You also very conveniently ignore the difficulties in a course-change from a fixed orbital vector through the galaxy: if they burn up too much fuel effecting that course change, they won't have any left to decelerate again at the system they've decided to drop in on for a bit of sightseeing and they fly past, unable to stop. Anywhere.

Oh boy, here we go again with taking assumptions as fact. No doubt it is on me to prove that it is possible for a migratory civilization to maintain a fuel reserve (or solar and magnetic sails) for maneuvering in case of emergencies (like, say, a black dwarf or neutron star) or indeed that there might be such a thing as a migratory civilization after all, because in the tiny universe you store in your skull, there is only a narrow range of conditions possible for interstellar travel, conveniently the ones you are declaring as fact in this thread.

What a bullshit non-answer you give forth after declaring a number of your leaps-of-logic and assumptions as "fact". Very amusing indeed.

And if you don't want to be called "child", then stop acting like one.

And if you don't want to be called senile, then you better get that memory of yours working properly.

Sayeth the child who's throwing a temper-tantrum because his bullshit isn't taken seriously.

[Simon_Jester]

So their retarded and never have heard of the concept "clinical trial"?

Who knows? Maybe they are. Maybe their biology is so weird that they don't have the kind of complicated averse reactions to unexpected drugs that we do. Maybe their bio-engineers fuck up; that kind of thing happens to real civilizations that cannot be described as especially "retarded" in real life.

Why don't we just say they worship Cobra Commander? It is about as plausible.

Actually, I have to wonder why it is people think it plausible that aliens would even evolve supernatural concepts we would even recognize, let alone organized religion. It sounds like a strangely human conceit.

It is. But assuming that they would not have supernatural concepts (or organized religion) doesn't really improve matters. It's still quite likely that they will have some kind of philosophy, even if it's a purely secular one, and this philosophy might make them want to kill us. Or not, obviously.

For that matter, even aliens that have no concept of philosophy, culture, or religion at all might be a problem. Think about a swarm of von Neumann machines that are acting as the lead wave for a colonization project. If they weren't humanely programmed, they might well wipe us out (or just knock us back to the Stone Age) as part of their preplanned terraforming operations.

To us that makes no sense: "why would you kill aliens just because they're there?" To the von Neumann machine, the question itself makes no sense, because its idea of proper conduct is "this unit is a terraformer bot" or something.

No. But we might very well happen to encounter aliens while doing something else, and possibly wind up destroying them en passant. It is not difficult to imagine aliens who would do the same to us- simply because they do not particularly care about the atomic-powered apes of Sol III,

How? Unless they start messing with the orbits of planets or the like, there is no reason for them to interact with us at all. There is the rest of the solar system out there for raw materials.

Maybe they have an irrational nostalgia for open air cities, and send down a few million battle drones so they can build some. Maybe they think we're really really disgusting, and since they already control our high orbitals and already have the nukes on hand for asteroid propulsion, they might as well take us out the way I might step on a bug. I do not know.

I do not feel that it is wise or rational to assume that everything in the universe follows my own standards of behavior. Or to assume that someone will do only the things for which they have a logical reason obvious to me. I've seen people do things that make little or no sense to me given the options available to them, and sometimes suffered because of it.

Yes, IF. That's the key word. That is what I doubt-- that we, or any other species like us, would actually do it, if its even possible at all.

That raises a few questions though.

What if, by virtue of scientific principles we do not know today, interstellar travel turns out to be easier than we think? I'm not necessarily talking about FTL travel here, either, just some combination of tools that makes building a starship less than a worldshaking challenge. And before you jump on this, yes, I have a pretty clear idea of what the limits of physics we know are. But I don't think I can rule out the idea that "the end of physics" is farther away than we think, even if it's not immediately obvious at the moment where we'd go. No previous generation of physicists could have accurately predicted what breakthrough discoveries would look like more than fifty years or so ahead, either.

What if, by their nature, the aliens find the prospect of travelling between stars less onerous than we do? Maybe they have extremely long lives, or extremely low requirements for life support. Maybe they're a "race" of personality uploads that can sit around in cold storage during the cruise. Maybe they're a hard SF-style Type II civilization with their own Dyson sphere and have more resources than they know what to do with?

What if, by virtue of deep collective indoctrination into some idea we cannot imagine today, they really care about the existence of aliens (that is, us)? To the point where this is worth spending a worldshaking amount of resources over?

There are too many unknowns for me to be comfortable saying "well, interstellar travel is nigh impossible so the whole thing is a stupid waste of time and effort to worry about."

If you're dismissing the issue of "what if they're hostile" as an alien invasion fantasy, which by all appearances you are... "they are more likely to be altruistic" is not strong enough to support your position.

My point was never to dismiss it; I'm taking the skeptic position here. I doubt such a civilization could evolve or manage to avoid self destruction because the same kinds of behaviors that make them dangerous to us make them dangerous to themselves and each other, and I doubt that they could overcome the technical limitations or have sufficient motivation to do so either.

I am... unsure. I'd like to think that no species capable of that kind of omnicidal mania would be able to establish spaceflight, but I've been wrong about a lot of things I wished were true.

So I do think a bit of caution is called for.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Some of our technology is already bumping up against constraints imposed by the laws of physics. And where we're not bumping up against the laws of physics; we can, at least, see where the bottom lies. We're already building features smaller than many atoms. We're exploiting quantum phenomena in everyday technology. We're on the cusp of duplicating nanomachinery through engineering that took evolution a few hundred million years to perfect. We can create antimatter (in vanishingly tiny quantities,) and will have the ability to make little artificial suns before the century is out. Assuming we survive the next couple of centuries, the only difference that will exist between us, and a civilization that's been around for a million years will be one of a few orders of magnitude worth of scale.

An eight million tonne Orion using anti-matter initiated fusion devices with an uploaded computational intelligence crew so it can pull 400g's of continuous acceleration is still going to be able to stomp Earth's militaries like a bug if it feels like it.

[Bakustra]

So your entire point was that no alien species would engage in interstellar travel unless it was an absolute necessity. In other words, interstellar travel would then be uneconomical. Well, I suppose that we can neither prove nor disprove this without any further experience. After all, there are potential assumptions that would allow economical space travel and there are others that would not. While you will no doubt claim that I have the burden of proof, we cannot assume either way without evidence. So you must demonstrate that it would be uneconomical, and I would have to demonstrate that it would be economical, but we cannot assume one or the other. You then decided to go for a strawman of the actual position, which is something that I will kindly lay out for you:

No, child, YOU must demonstrate that it would be economical. Kindly point this out for the class, please.

What exactly is this proof that would satisfy you? We have too little information to really determine, for example, whether fusion can occur cheaply enough to allow us to produce high-acceleration torchships, or whether a Bussard ramscoop is practical (not likely, but still not resolved), or a number of other figures (such as how small we can make an ecosystem if we have a living crew, or the practicality of uploading if we go for an electronic crew). But this does not mean that it is automatically uneconomical, curiously enough. We can simply say "not enough information either way" and therefore, unless we are directly arguing about the practicality of interstellar travel, decide whether to incorporate it as practical or not in a particular thread. Of course, this is what the thread was initially predicated upon, but rather than argue about that, you decide that you would prefer to turn this into an extended debate on a ground too shaky to allow anybody to argue against your carefully-chosen position. Marvelous rhetorical skills, but unfortunately, feeble powers of discussion.

IF we attempt to actively make contact with alien species via deliberately sending significant radio signals (such as ones that vary in specific sequences not found in nature)
THEN they have a larger chance of discovering us
WHICH MAY lead to severe consequences for us
of which we can include things like, say, disastrous attempts by the aliens to uplift us culturally, or any of a variety of scenarios. Most importantly, we will most likely be totally at the mercy of the aliens. This presupposes that aliens hear and investigate. It does not presume malice aforethought on the part of the aliens, just that the consequences of interaction between civilizations of wildly different technological capabilities doesn't tend to turn out too well when it has happened before and that our experience with intelligent species indicates that we cannot assume that the aliens will necessarily behave perfectly rationally.

It also presupposes, does it not, that we even know where to signal in the first place, that anybody would hear it, and that the mentality of an alien species is analogous to our own. Nevermind the assumption that the aliens, whomever they might be wherever they might be, would be using the same sort of principles in their communication.

Marvelous! You do have a brain within that skull! Unfortunately, you then decide to immediately move to what I call the appeal to Cthulhu. You also decide to nitpick, rather than make actual points. Considering what you've been accusing me of, it seems as though you seek to single-handedly validate Freud's defense mechanisms. But you do make two points worth actually discussing.

Firstly, the idea that aliens might be totally different from the intelligent species we are familiar with is actually supportive of my argument. Expanding the potential mindsets results in the chances of aliens approximating our system of reason becoming far, far smaller, which in turns make them far more dangerous, because now we are far less able to predict their actions.

Invoking Cthulhu and his starspawn in this case neglects the central aspect of Lovecraft's stories about Cthulhu; the only thing humanity has in common with Cthulhu is the concept of hunger. As a result, Cthulhu will wipe out humanity if he should awaken, because he is incapable of noticing us as intelligent beings, or of caring if he did. Consider carefully the parallels to any "truly alien" species.

Your next point is merely worthless. If they somehow don't use the electromagnetic spectrum or have a concept of exponentials, logarithms, or numbers, then of course we cannot communicate with them. I do not see how they could develop space travel without them, but if they exist, then we cannot talk to them, but we would not want to, because they couldn't talk to us either.

No, it's me highlighting that you only make use of those technological conditions that support your own argument.

Then I presume you can demonstrate for us technological principles which allow anybody to circumvent the laws of relativity and inertia to support your argument.

Oh, you're an arrogant one, aren't you? There are principles that, while they violate your pathetic understanding of inertia and relativity, do not violate the actual principles. Now, if you wish to claim that they do, I have a request first: put up or shut up. Let's see your feeble, decaying mind run the numbers. While I cannot be so optimistic to assume that you will comply with either part of this request, I feel better having said it.

The possibility of a closed ecosystem on a level small enough to fit in a practical spaceship. The practice of carrying reserve fuel in case of emergency maneuvers while in interstellar space. The idea of uploading simulations of a brain onto a computer and cutting your necessary mass down by an immense factor, making your starship far lighter and requiring less fuel.

Oh boy, here we go again with taking assumptions as fact. No doubt it is on me to prove that it is possible for a migratory civilization to maintain a fuel reserve (or solar and magnetic sails) for maneuvering in case of emergencies (like, say, a black dwarf or neutron star) or indeed that there might be such a thing as a migratory civilization after all, because in the tiny universe you store in your skull, there is only a narrow range of conditions possible for interstellar travel, conveniently the ones you are declaring as fact in this thread.

What a bullshit non-answer you give forth after declaring a number of your leaps-of-logic and assumptions as "fact". Very amusing indeed.

Stop that. Stop that right now. You do not have carte blanche to project your faults onto me. Granted, you are small-minded enough to consider this a victory, but it's more pathetic than anything else.

And if you don't want to be called senile, then you better get that memory of yours working properly.

Sayeth the child who's throwing a temper-tantrum because his bullshit isn't taken seriously.

Temper tantrum? This is actually delight at being on a board where I can insult freely, and therefore do not have to suffer arrogant blowhards such as yourself.

[Bakustra]

If it's large enough, then yes it will. You're still presuming that this species is merely about a thousand years ahead of us, when it's just as likely to be millions or tens of millions.

I'm not aware of any substance that has a high heat capacity than the planet. Unless you make an extremely large ship, in which case you will be very careful with the laser, lest it burn away your sensors.

I was thinking in terms of a light-sail propeller, and having it release almost all its energy at once, as opposed to the longer duration you'd need for a sail.

Or they're simply incompetent. We cannot assume that aliens would of necessity be hypercompetent in all their matters, and with the power available to them (note that I am restricting myself to civilizations that are between K-1 and K-2; if a K-3 civilization came knocking on our door, things would probably be even worse) the potential damage screwups can do is far, far greater.

If they were that incompetant, they wouldn't have gotten into space in the first place.

They could have backslid, or be psychologically far riskier than humans (either through massive reproduction, short fertile periods, or both).

Even if they aren't hostile, imagine if they attempt to help and cause a massive economic crash by introducing too much technology at a time.

First Contract.

They came, from beyond the stars... to sell us the very finest in electronics.

[Samuel]

Who knows? Maybe they are. Maybe their biology is so weird that they don't have the kind of complicated averse reactions to unexpected drugs that we do. Maybe their bio-engineers fuck up; that kind of thing happens to real civilizations that cannot be described as especially "retarded" in real life.

Alien life with no poisons. I don't think you can get living things like that.

I was thinking in terms of a light-sail propeller, and having it release almost all its energy at once, as opposed to the longer duration you'd need for a sail.

If it can burn off a continent, it will do worse to a light sail which has to be thinner.

They came, from beyond the stars... to sell us the very finest in electronics.

Someone actually wrote a story called First Contract. I can't remember the writting style, but it involves aliens buying Jupiter for the equivalent of Encyclopedia Britannica and using its raw materials to crash the consumer goods market. Our heroes must than venture to the interstellar goods convention and sell plastic drink holders for the new bedrock of the Earth's economy. If they fail... well, then their "stall" is shut down. And the oxygen with it. Meanwhile the competition has planets with entire ecosystems genetically engineered to advertise for them. Fortunately the good guys prevail in the end and manage to get a large number of sales and a loan backed by the "we use tyrannids if you default" consortium.

Of course, something like that would require FTL, but it would be hilarious if we had aliens who thought being a salesman/trader was fun and so spent their lives scouring the galaxy for customers.

[Bakustra]

I was thinking in terms of a light-sail propeller, and having it release almost all its energy at once, as opposed to the longer duration you'd need for a sail.

If it can burn off a continent, it will do worse to a light sail which has to be thinner.

I was being somewhat figurative, but the key point is that it releases the energy over a far longer period (say, if it can output energy in the e26 range, then it outputs that over about a month rather than a second) when it acts as an engine.

They came, from beyond the stars... to sell us the very finest in electronics.

Someone actually wrote a story called First Contract. I can't remember the writting style, but it involves aliens buying Jupiter for the equivalent of Encyclopedia Britannica and using its raw materials to crash the consumer goods market. Our heroes must than venture to the interstellar goods convention and sell plastic drink holders for the new bedrock of the Earth's economy. If they fail... well, then their "stall" is shut down. And the oxygen with it. Meanwhile the competition has planets with entire ecosystems genetically engineered to advertise for them. Fortunately the good guys prevail in the end and manage to get a large number of sales and a loan backed by the "we use tyrannids if you default" consortium.

Of course, something like that would require FTL, but it would be hilarious if we had aliens who thought being a salesman/trader was fun and so spent their lives scouring the galaxy for customers.

I'll have to look for that one.

[Samuel]

Using google to find it has problems as it gets mixed up with contract law, but it is by Greg Costikyan. I liked it, but my taste is shit so try to find a library copy.

[adam_grif]

He propably means that science will hit rock bottom in a couple of hundred years - that there is a limit which can not be surpassed no matter how old a species is.

That is of course possible, but that's simply something we can not know.

My money is on it happening in less than 100, probably ~70 or ~80. This is assuming advances in AI, because as soon as we can start building super-intelligences, every technology we will ever discover will be discovered in a very short space of time. Sans this, it's "a few hundred" before we hit the ceiling put there by physics.

[Starglider]

My money is on it happening in less than 100, probably ~70 or ~80. This is assuming advances in AI, because as soon as we can start building super-intelligences, every technology we will ever discover will be discovered in a very short space of time. Sans this, it's "a few hundred" before we hit the ceiling put there by physics.

That is a correct, but incomplete description. Superintelligence alone probably isn't enough to confirm all of physics (and speculatively design all possible technology) from the experimental data we have. I wouldn't rule it out, but it's unlikely. More experiments are probably required. However, nanotechnology and large scale automated manufacturing are likely to make the construction of new experimental equipment, even on the CERN scale very fast. These technologies derive very quickly from superintelligence. It is possible that we'll need megascale experiments to finish the job, e.g. the LINAC stretched across the whole solar system seen in "Diaspora". This still isn't likely to take more than a few decades given von Neumann machines. There is a small but nonzero probability that we'd have to do stellar scale engineering for the necessary data (e.g. collide some neutron stars as part of an experiment), or that some elements of physical law are only solvable with extreme (e.g. Matrioshka brain) levels of computing power.

Regardless, removing quality from the equation (for interstellar wars) leaves quantity, and aggressive max-advanced species will be expanding their exploitable resource sphere at a rate close to c.

[eion]

Some of our technology is already bumping up against constraints imposed by the laws of physics. And where we're not bumping up against the laws of physics; we can, at least, see where the bottom lies. We're already building features smaller than many atoms. We're exploiting quantum phenomena in everyday technology. We're on the cusp of duplicating nanomachinery through engineering that took evolution a few hundred million years to perfect. We can create antimatter (in vanishingly tiny quantities,) and will have the ability to make little artificial suns before the century is out. Assuming we survive the next couple of centuries, the only difference that will exist between us, and a civilization that's been around for a million years will be one of a few orders of magnitude worth of scale.

Yeah, but that's kind of like saying that the people of the Late 18th Century were as technologically advanced as the people of today since they can both generate and store electricity. Scale is not just a distinction of capacity; it's a distinction of advancement. It's one thing to manufacture an atom of anti-matter, it's another thing to make enough of the stuff to power a photon rocket.

An order of magnitude is not something to be taken lightly. 3 orders of magnitude is the difference between 1 atom bomb and 1,000 atom bombs.

[Einzige]

Personally, I'd be more afraid of an alien psychology that was truly alien - while there must be similarities between ourselves and any hypothetical species advanced enough to take to the stars, I don't think it's likely that they'd share our motives, many of which are the result of our development as an anthropoid mammalian species. I can imagine scenarios in which a species evolved capable of technological progression without necessarily sharing many of our human drives.

[Surlethe]

My money is on it happening in less than 100, probably ~70 or ~80. This is assuming advances in AI, because as soon as we can start building super-intelligences, every technology we will ever discover will be discovered in a very short space of time. Sans this, it's "a few hundred" before we hit the ceiling put there by physics.

That is a correct, but incomplete description. Superintelligence alone probably isn't enough to confirm all of physics (and speculatively design all possible technology) from the experimental data we have. I wouldn't rule it out, but it's unlikely.

You're going to run up against a physical processing limit, aren't you? While an AGI will be able to design better experimental code in orders of magnitude less time than the dedicated teams of physicists who do it today, the execution of the code will still be quite a nontrivial task --- e.g., a general relativistic first-principles simulation of a neutron star collision or a simulation of a galaxy cluster's evolution requires months of processing time on supercomputer clusters, and that's not going to change whether it's an AGI or a person running the code.

3 orders of magnitude is the difference between 1 atom bomb and 1,000 atom bombs.

Better analogy: it's the difference between a big bunker-buster and Hiroshima.

[Starglider]

You're going to run up against a physical processing limit, aren't you?

Yes, but mature nanotechnology gives us soooo many more orders of magnitude per gram/watt, plus the ability to churn out computronium quickly/cheaply, that I doubt it will be the limiting factor. It's not impossible, but I doubt it.

While an AGI will be able to design better experimental code in orders of magnitude less time than the dedicated teams of physicists who do it today, the execution of the code will still be quite a nontrivial task --- e.g., a general relativistic first-principles simulation of a neutron star collision or a simulation of a galaxy cluster's evolution requires months of processing time on supercomputer clusters, and that's not going to change whether it's an AGI or a person running the code.

Actually it does. The vast majority of scientific code adopts a brute force approach; a simple algorithm is applied uniformly to massive datasets (for some number of iterations). For most simulations this is not actually required for an accurate result; analysing the causal trace of a completed simulation reveals that the impact of the accuracy of computations on the final result is highly nonuniform, which is to say fine grained control of the level of detail of the simulation could have achieved orders of magnitude efficiency gains (often, many orders of magnitude). However such fine grained level of detail control algorithms are (usually) extremely hard to write, compared to the base simulation code; actually even doing the causal analysis is hard. Simulation code written by transhuman AGIs will be extremely optimised, will have very sophisticated LoD optimisation code, and will be monitored and tweaked in real time by the AGI itself.

All that said, for this kind of (scientific, physical system) simulation I still expect nanocomputing to get us a lot more orders of magnitude improvement than AGI. The reverse is true for technology design applications.

[Patrick Degan]

What exactly is this proof that would satisfy you? We have too little information to really determine, for example, whether fusion can occur cheaply enough to allow us to produce high-acceleration torchships, or whether a Bussard ramscoop is practical (not likely, but still not resolved), or a number of other figures (such as how small we can make an ecosystem if we have a living crew, or the practicality of uploading if we go for an electronic crew). But this does not mean that it is automatically uneconomical, curiously enough. We can simply say "not enough information either way" and therefore, unless we are directly arguing about the practicality of interstellar travel, decide whether to incorporate it as practical or not in a particular thread. Of course, this is what the thread was initially predicated upon, but rather than argue about that, you decide that you would prefer to turn this into an extended debate on a ground too shaky to allow anybody to argue against your carefully-chosen position.

Really? And trade which would take decades/centuries by relativistic slowboat is economically viable... how, exactly? Because without unobtanium, that's what you're facing in any situation no matter how good the STL drive technology is. Really, this is not all that difficult to work out.

Marvelous rhetorical skills, but unfortunately, feeble powers of discussion.

Your own? Most certainly. I'd be a lot more embarrassed by the leaps of logic you so eagerly make if I were you, however.

IF we attempt to actively make contact with alien species via deliberately sending significant radio signals (such as ones that vary in specific sequences not found in nature)
THEN they have a larger chance of discovering us
WHICH MAY lead to severe consequences for us
of which we can include things like, say, disastrous attempts by the aliens to uplift us culturally, or any of a variety of scenarios. Most importantly, we will most likely be totally at the mercy of the aliens. This presupposes that aliens hear and investigate. It does not presume malice aforethought on the part of the aliens, just that the consequences of interaction between civilizations of wildly different technological capabilities doesn't tend to turn out too well when it has happened before and that our experience with intelligent species indicates that we cannot assume that the aliens will necessarily behave perfectly rationally.

It also presupposes, does it not, that we even know where to signal in the first place, that anybody would hear it, and that the mentality of an alien species is analogous to our own. Nevermind the assumption that the aliens, whomever they might be wherever they might be, would be using the same sort of principles in their communication.

Marvelous! You do have a brain within that skull! Unfortunately, you then decide to immediately move to what I call the appeal to Cthulhu. You also decide to nitpick, rather than make actual points. Considering what you've been accusing me of, it seems as though you seek to single-handedly validate Freud's defense mechanisms. But you do make two points worth actually discussing.

Firstly, the idea that aliens might be totally different from the intelligent species we are familiar with is actually supportive of my argument. Expanding the potential mindsets results in the chances of aliens approximating our system of reason becoming far, far smaller, which in turns make them far more dangerous, because now we are far less able to predict their actions.

Invoking Cthulhu and his starspawn in this case neglects the central aspect of Lovecraft's stories about Cthulhu; the only thing humanity has in common with Cthulhu is the concept of hunger. As a result, Cthulhu will wipe out humanity if he should awaken, because he is incapable of noticing us as intelligent beings, or of caring if he did. Consider carefully the parallels to any "truly alien" species.

Um, if aliens are operating on a very different mindset from anything we are familiar with, they would not have the sort of motivations you yammered your fool head off about at the beginning of this exchange. The whole "religious anathema to bipedal life" was your first of many leaps-of-logic you merrily advertised as "fact". Further, saying that the aliens think differently than we do does not automatically mean they would be Cthulhu-like. Black/White Fallacy on your part and hardly a discussion "point" supportive of your "argument". As it is, even if there are aliens with different mindsets to anything in our experience, they are still going to be forced along certain pathways of action dictated by what the laws of physics allows them to do. And any orbital civilisation is still going to be forced to choose certain imperatives to sustain that civilisation in the event they have to leave their own homesystem and find another, such as: which star is nearest in range which has sufficient luminosity and a preponderance of rocky planets/moons/asteroids to provide metals, carbon and silicon to provide for their material needs —reachable in the shortest possible time and the least expenditure of energy. We may not at all understand their philosophy, but predicting what they have to do in terms of practicalities is not that difficult an exercise.

Your next point is merely worthless. If they somehow don't use the electromagnetic spectrum or have a concept of exponentials, logarithms, or numbers, then of course we cannot communicate with them. I do not see how they could develop space travel without them, but if they exist, then we cannot talk to them, but we would not want to, because they couldn't talk to us either.

And here we go with another of your stupid strawmen. No, child, I said NOTHING about them not having concepts of mathematics, and my statement about their using different principles of communication meant that they would have moved on to either using something exotic like gravitational pulses or something as basic as the next logical development away from radio: tight-beam laser transmission. In which case the use of radio communication would fall into disuse in the same way that signaling towers or carrier pigeons or speaking tubes to convey messages has fallen into disuse. Is it really going to be necessary to have all the dots connected for you?

No, it's me highlighting that you only make use of those technological conditions that support your own argument.

Then I presume you can demonstrate for us technological principles which allow anybody to circumvent the laws of relativity and inertia to support your argument.

Oh, you're an arrogant one, aren't you?

Look who's talking.

There are principles that, while they violate your pathetic understanding of inertia and relativity, do not violate the actual principles. Now, if you wish to claim that they do, I have a request first: put up or shut up. Let's see your feeble, decaying mind run the numbers. While I cannot be so optimistic to assume that you will comply with either part of this request, I feel better having said it.

No no, child, you first: do demonstrate your superior grasp of physics and outline for the class those "principles" which will allow anybody to one day circumvent relativity limitations and the laws of inertia. I'm waiting for this one. Another claim you put forth, and now your burden of proof on that one as well. YOU put up or shut up. And I do hope you're going to be a bit more original than invoking Alcubierre.

The possibility of a closed ecosystem on a level small enough to fit in a practical spaceship. The practice of carrying reserve fuel in case of emergency maneuvers while in interstellar space. The idea of uploading simulations of a brain onto a computer and cutting your necessary mass down by an immense factor, making your starship far lighter and requiring less fuel.

The latter gets you a smaller starship, certainly. It does not erase the physical problems involved in decelerating a mass from high relativistic velocity or changing its vector while moving at said velocity. Nor does it erase the problem of fuel conservation. The former is dictated by how many persons the starship is designed to carry, which for a very large population is going to translate into a large spaceship no matter how you try to slice it.

Oh boy, here we go again with taking assumptions as fact. No doubt it is on me to prove that it is possible for a migratory civilization to maintain a fuel reserve (or solar and magnetic sails) for maneuvering in case of emergencies (like, say, a black dwarf or neutron star) or indeed that there might be such a thing as a migratory civilization after all, because in the tiny universe you store in your skull, there is only a narrow range of conditions possible for interstellar travel, conveniently the ones you are declaring as fact in this thread.

What a bullshit non-answer you give forth after declaring a number of your leaps-of-logic and assumptions as "fact". Very amusing indeed.

Stop that. Stop that right now. You do not have carte blanche to project your faults onto me. Granted, you are small-minded enough to consider this a victory, but it's more pathetic than anything else.

Empty bluster does not impress me, child. Neither do your delusions of adequacy. You gave a non-answer and now you goldplate it. That is the truly pathetic thing here.

And if you don't want to be called senile, then you better get that memory of yours working properly.

Sayeth the child who's throwing a temper-tantrum because his bullshit isn't taken seriously.

Temper tantrum? This is actually delight at being on a board where I can insult freely, and therefore do not have to suffer arrogant blowhards such as yourself.

What did I just say about not being impressed by empty bluster, child? Try to pay attention.