Comment by GMoromisato
2 hours ago
Imagine you're an alien explorer. You visit Earth 25,000 krugs ago (51,304 Earth-years ago) and see a pretty standard ecological milieu: a wide variety of species, each adapted to its own little environment, no different than it was 50 million krugs before.
You return today and see that one previously unremarkable ape-like species has spread out to all parts of the world and is even orbiting in little tin cans around the planet. Almost all wild terrestrial megafauna is gone and the megafauna that remains is raised by the "humans" in massive farms. They've converted forests and jungles into farms and cities, and they're spending vast amounts of energy to make silicon think.
The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is, I think, strong evidence that we are alone in the galaxy.
Add to that, the previous species you identified as a particularly clever pack animal formed a relationship with the monkeys and now looks like this:
https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/200...
At a bare minimum, yeah, you quarantine that whole fucking species.
Does that strike you as an unusual path for an intelligent species to become space faring? We have yet to unlock the Singularity shortcut that leaves us with replicators and free energy.
I would expect any civilization to exterminate or at least cull the creatures that pose a threat and to cultivate those that are tasty or useful.
>We have yet to unlock the Singularity shortcut that leaves us with replicators and free energy.
That leaves our successor species, the machine minds, with replicators and free energy, I think you mean.
By definition, evolution selects for species that are good at making more of themselves. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that intelligent species tend to overcome that evolutionary tendency to spread fast enough for us to be weird.
Do we really want to make contact with meat?
For anyone unaware: https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
Or the aliens did the same thing we did?
Read Children of Time for a great exploration of this theme.
And then read Children of Ruin, Children of Memory and finally Children of Strife.
Every book of the series is amazing in its own way.
More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best... and that's if anyone's looking for the faintest of faint traces.
The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.
So don't worry, maybe someone will blip us out of existence someday.
> More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best
This is the key. On interstellar scales, things move very, very slowly and you have to plan on time scales measured in millennia. IMHO we are doomed simply because we can barely think beyond the next election cycle. (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)
50,000 years ago (or so) we were a tiny species hanging out in Africa. We didn't think in terms of years, much less decades. This was before we figured out how to measure the length of the year or to predict when the winter would end.
And yet, without any central planning or coordination, we left Africa and colonized Europe, then we headed out across Asia and crossed into the Americas. Plus we sailed from Asia and colonized Polynesia.
Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly--it's going to take a thousand years to get to the southern tip of the Americas." And yet, we did.
I think the same thing will happen with space travel and ultimately the colonization of the galaxy.
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> (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)
The Chinese political system is just as short-term-oriented as <insert democracy here> on the whole, and I don't think there has ever been a politician in history who ever thought about workable century-long impacts.
"The fact that aliens have not nuked us from orbit out of sheer panic is, I think, strong evidence that we are alone in the galaxy."
Or they are cybernetic lifeforms and are applauding our current trajectory.