Would We Recognize Extraterrestrial Technology If We Saw It?
Would We Recognize Extraterrestrial Technology If We Saw It?
hackaday.com
Would We Recognize Extraterrestrial Technology If We Saw It?
19 comments
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I can’t remember where I read it but I like the idea of comparing humanity to ants.
Imagine an ant hill, next to a bridge. The ant can’t even comprehend the bridge, what its for. To the ant it might as well just be more ground.
If we are the ant, what are we missing?
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That not about difference in intelligence it's about difference is size...
And Humans would 100% notice a spaceship with being 1,000s of times bigger than us, if only because it would block the sky and change gravity.
If aliens were the size of ants, they likely won't have the space for a brain big enough to get here.
Aliens might be real somewhere, but the universe is too huge to travel. Unless they're functionally immortal, there's no chance we see a live one.
If (and it's a big if) we see proof of extraterrestrial life, it's going to probes/drones/robots from a civilization that existed long before intelligent life on Earth started. Even if they are still around, they probably won't be by the time they get some kind of response.
The best chance is coming across some ancient version of the Voyager prove. Just enough that it proves we're not alone, but not enough to actually do anything about it
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It’s foolish to think there is t any other form of life out there just considering the size of the universe.
Whether said life is intelligent, especially space-faring intelligent, is the big question.
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I like the idea that intelligent extra terrestrial life knows we can’t be trusted, and has blocked our views of them.
Maybe that’s what dark matter is—or artificial red shift—to make us feel hopelessly far from the rest of the universe.
The asteroids and meteors in the article could be lobbed by pranksters and that was the only object they could get through the curtain.
I don’t really believe any of this but it’s fun to imagine.
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Unless they’re functionally immortal, there’s no chance we see a live one.
That's not that much of a stretch, though. The way things are going, we'll probably have indefinite lifespans before we have major colonies on other planets.
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That would be the safest and easiest potential to imagine, but have you thought that all the Doomsday alien movies indicate to us and our ecosystems supporters so to speak, the greater likelihood and potential for armed conflict when or if we were to come into contact with another intelligent alien species?
One is preferable, however unlikely, the rest of the movies and imaginary scenarios tell us that we've a greater likelihood of it not being the case.
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When I see people make comparisons like this, I often think of a paragraph from Mark Twain's, "The mysterious stranger". It's where Satan compares the intellect of an angel to that of humans.
“Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible that they should be. The difference between them and me is abysmal, immeasurable. They have no intellect.”
“No intellect?”
“Nothing that resembles it. At a future time I will examine what man calls his mind and give you the details of that chaos, then you will see and understand. Men have nothing in common with me—there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin's head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him—caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, or whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, or whether his mother is sick or well, or whether he is looked up to in society or not, or whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, or whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, or whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider—he cannot get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent. The elephant would not take the trouble to do the spider an ill turn; if he took the notion he might do him a good turn, if it came in his way and cost nothing. I have done men good service, but no ill turns.
“The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power, intellect, and dignity the one creature is separated from the other by a distance which is simply astronomical. Yet in these, as in all qualities, man is immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider below the elephant."
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19 comments
I haven't read the article. But looking at the photo, is the thesis that aliens look like space poop?
It's about Oumuamua, a somewhat mysterious object that passed through the solar system very close to Earth, before seemingly changing direction of its own accord and accelerating back out of the solar system. One of the many recent possibly-alien events that have people excited lately. Scientific theory is that it was a long, thin asteroid, similar to a turd, that expelled gases once it was close enough to the sun that propelled it away. Our sensor data indicated Oumuamua was incredibly dense and rich in heavy metals, more than we could reasonably even detect, so it had scientists intrigued.
Glad I’m not the only one who saw that and immediately thought ‘haha that looks like a turd’.
My mind instantly said “space poop” didn’t even read the words