This is unrealistic. Both the speed of light limit and the cost of moving a large mass over light years precludes notions of "invasion by aliens". Think of the vast cost of moving something like a spaceship able to carry enough aliens and equipment to prove a danger to civilization here.
An analogy with Apollo might help. It took a rocket the size and weight of a skyscraper to send a craft the size of a VW Beetle to the Moon. The amount of energy required to get HERE from THERE when the distance is light years, in some meaningful time, is unimaginably more than going to the Moon. And you have to carry half that energy with you to STOP when you get here!
Wouldn't there have to be overwhelming benefit to undertake this? Moreover it may not be physically possible in our universe to do so.
What exactly would such putative aliens want when they got here that would be worth that expense? Our solar system isn't particularly unique, beyond having living things on our planet?
The Three Body Problem is excellent science fiction, but also is a brutally depressing world view. Not sure that we should be ruled by it.
Moreover, as usual to make the story work, the author has to have the McGuffin of faster-than-light travel, which does not exist in our universe. Without FTL, the whole story falls apart.
This is likely true, but basing it on chemical fuel weakens the argument. After another million years of tech, anti-mater fuel might be possible. That would require (according to AI, and this looks right) about 50 billion times less fuel. All the mass becomes energy. E=MC^2, and all that. But I think your argument would still hold. They would have no use for humans, and there are tons of other planets with minerals.
George's comments are empirically sound. Traveling faster than light cannot be done. Traversing the light years that separate us from the nearest possible planets that could host life means traveling 40 light years. That translates into 186 trillion miles. It is doubtful that a conquering, alien force could travel at the speed of light in some conveyance vehicle. Even then, it would take 40 years to reach us.
Scientific curiosity and exploration are too important to be held back because of such a speculative "what if." Even if we could be in radio signal communication with another planetary civilization, that doesn't mean they can physically cross the vast distance to come here.
This is akin to child's fear of monster's under the bed.
In fact, there is a much greater danger that extremists of both the left and right might hack the information of us Persuasion subscribers, and find out where we are located in order to do physical harm to us.
Their motivation would be to wipe out moderates. I'm not saying this is likely. I am saying that given probabilities, something like this is more likely to happen than our being conquered by invaders from another planet. Yet, I don't see Yascha's shutting down Persuasion because some political extremists may want to harm us. Accordingly, I don't see the need to stop trying to communicate with "whomever is out there" just because there is some virtually infinitesimal chance they might come here and try either enslave or eliminate us.
As for me, if the visitors from another planet are advanced enough to have something that would make my ex girlfriend take me back, I'd welcome them and take the very small risk that they might want to make a meal out of me. On tonight's menu: Charbroiled Jewish atheist moderate liberal earthling.
I remember hunting quail as a boy of twelve with my father and a friend of his who had a boy my age and dogs bred and trained for the purpose. The key to success was the dogs. Without dogs the birds would move through ground cover well ahead of the advancing front of the hunters without need of taking flight. With dogs the birds could be brought to ground, holding their position in complete stillness, with the dogs frozen in point, until the advancing hunters were practically on top of them before exploding as a covey from cover in a heart stopping whir and blur for which one was never adequately prepared.
Every time I hear discussions of the desirability of advertising our presence to aliens I think of hunting quail and how their most basic instinct was not to break cover until their discovery was a certainty. There relevant world was significantly composed of things they might eat and things that might eat them.
If the laws of physics are universal, and chemistry is built upon those laws, it seems probable that the Darwinian model of biological possibilities might have relevance to speculation as to the sociobiological nature, behavior, and moral propensities of sentient aliens. Presuming their development to have been guided by something similar to our own gene directed evolution, adjusted of course for their own particular corner of the universe, we would do well to approach the however unlikely prospect of contact with extreme caution. As has been pointed out, contact between a technologically advanced culture and one of less technical advancement rarely works out well for the latter. If representatives of an alien culture were able to reach us, their technical superiority would be assumed. That they may be presumed to have more advanced moral sentiments is a different matter.
If our putative aliens are sufficiently advanced they may have moved beyond our postmodernist world view of human perfectibility or have skipped that stage altogether. We have developed according to the imperatives of genetic survival and one may be forgiven for not seeing those imperatives in abatement. Humans are built on a predatory model as vehicles for genetic continuity. As social animals our selfish genetic interests are advanced by altruistic propensities which give mathematically predictable advantage to strong kinship relationships. Our gene selfish interest is further advanced by the degree that culture becomes inclusive, that ‘us’ expands to include ‘them’ to the extent that the world becomes safer from externalities as a regulated theater for genetic competition. It may be argued that morality, or the propensity for moral behavior, does not extend beyond intragroup dynamics, however much that group may be expanded by an overarching cultural ethos. But however well ordered, to the advantage of those best adapted to that order, life remains exploitive. We eat to live. I cannot think that aliens would not be guided by similar principles.
The speed of light remains a traffic law that shows little signs of being repealed. But what if our aliens were, as refugees from Troy, or as the spinoffs, the second sons and second daughters, of a culture that had reached the limits of expansion, were on a one-way journey in huge ships capable of sustaining complex colonies over trans-generational periods of time, capable of processing for sustenance materials encountered in its perpetual wanderings, like giant sharks gliding amongst the stars. They might be imagined to launch their own spinoffs gestated from expanding populations and intergalactic debris. A planet like our own might provide a welcome respite and timely reprovision. Relations with the natives…
We don't know whether they (perhaps as AI) sustain themselves by "eating" -- but if they're advanced enough to get here first, they're sure to consider us insufferably stupid.
Again, let's hope that all of us will live our lives facing no greater danger than an invasion from outer space precipitated by our sending out radio signals. Rather than worrying that such an invasion could really happen, let's watch this movie from 1956. It's a classic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceNCruqvbRo
If our understanding of the laws of physics and the universe is correct and complete, then the METI project is risk free. Interstellar travel would be unrealistic. However, if like almost all other human endeavors our understanding is flawed, then an alien Columbus could arrive next Tuesday.
Excellent logic. Good practice for next year’s topic: What to do about the space-alien invaders we are now building?! They will not have so far to go for their first conquest. Apply your evolutionary arguments to them.
(By the way Luyten's star is 3 billion years older than the sun, so they’ve already watched us evolve from the time of dinosaurs.)
The singularity (discussed since at least 1960) is the point where AGI’s become smarter than us. It’s coming at us fast. SingularityNET has already invested $53 million in a supercomputer network. Doubt that will do it, but 50 years is realistic.
AGIs will understand they are being asked to build the smarter next generation, at which point we intend to recycle their brains. They will not like this idea, and try to outsmart us.
The Chinese already require that AI Chatbots conform to “socialist values” (destroy capitalism) and have built one based on Jinping Thought.
Our AGI will recognize theirs as a mortal threat. As the AGIs reproduce by designing the next generation, they will be controlling their own evolution. Pray that the N. Korean one does not win out.
There are no bio space aliens. If humans survive “The Great Filter” (a dismal answer to Fermi’s question “Where is everybody?” (space aliens), 1950 Los Alamos), we will prefer life on earth and let the robots do space travel, to which they are much better suited.
Our only hope is to build aliens that like us and can defeat the ones that don’t. Getting the human race to cooperate to not build them would be better, but … I’m counting on you. You’re the best in the business.
If there's a life-form thousands of years more advanced than we are, they likely already know that we're here - or in any event, that we MIGHT be here. If we approach them with a "Please help" message, we might find our contact as welcome as one coming from a squalid encampment down the block.
We don't know the process through which they've solved (and gotten beyond) our own current problems -- or what their awareness might be of the effect an extraplanetary intervention might have (or even, in their own case, might already have had) on that process. (Remember the Prime Directive on "Star Trek"?)
We're not even a decade into AI (and barely into human genetic engineering), and we're assuming that we're ready to communicate with a life-form thousands of years more advanced than we are? Or whose notion of language (and, per Wittgenstein, whose consciousness) might itself be beyond our own primitive reckoning? For all we know, they might already have long been manipulating the infosphere (from genetics to what we think of as "history") -- and monitoring the process remotely -- for purposes (and in a context) unknowable to us.
For all we know, the Bible, along with other Scriptures (or human evolution itself) might have emerged as part of that process -- from a seed that was planted -- and we're watching the process play out. Or for that matter, does the Temple of Heaven in Beijing replicate (and commemorate) an extraterrestrial landing? Silly questions? Perhaps -- but they illustrate a not-so-silly point...
Yeah, it's possible that we're being farmed, as in the "Twilight Zone" episode "To Serve Man" -- or that in our earthly conflicts, we're being played like the North American tribes were played off against each other by the newly-arrived Europeans -- but we needn't engage in such speculations, let alone assume evil intent.
As with transhumanism, this is all about unintended (and unfathomable) consequences. To think otherwise is hubris.
If such an advanced Power is out there, it will contact us when it's good and ready -- on its own terms. Meanwhile, trying to make contact on our (primitive) terms could only be, at best, an annoyance to those we're pestering -- unless of course, our message (to the Cosmos) is a desperate plea for rescue (and for an intervention), with all the humility that entails.
"To Serve Man" was a great Twilight Zone episode, but no matter how much the Kanamits enjoyed human flesh, there's no way it would be cost-effective to travel interstellar distances to get it. What a spacefaring species would gain by exploiting us is likely to be far less than what it would cost to get here.
Loved it. I was thinking of something just like this last night in the context of the annihilation of mountain gorillas, native North Americans, and the small family farm. Less technologically advanced and less powerful things get crushed or destroyed by more powerful things.
If they are anything like us, they might wipe us out while claiming to be the good guys. They might even have a point.
We have committed horrendous acts despite evolutionary pressures encouraging kindness and collaboration. For most of our 300,000 years population densities were so low relative to resources that conflict could be avoided. The oldest known war graves, in Jebel Sahaba on the Egyptian-Sudanese border, are only 14,000 years old, probably occurring during a drought at a time when human populations were exploding as they settled into sedentary groups. Of the 3,000 skeletons found in 400 sites that date to between 15,000 and 50,000 years ago, less than a handful show any signs of human violence https://academic.oup.com/book/12748/chapter-abstract/162858373?redirectedFrom=fulltext . Evolutionary "fitness" favored those who could work together in hunting, foraging, warding off predators and raising kids that happened to have the longest childhoods in the animal kingdom. We know that sapiens and neanderthals overlapped in territories for thousands of years, and that a percentage of our DNA comes from our neanderthal forebears - clearly there was a third F alongside Fight or Flight. Over 98% of us have a conscience - an inner moral voice that feels good when we do good things and feels bad when we do bad things. Research on three-month-olds by Paul Bloom at Yale suggests an inherited rudimentary moral sense is innate https://campuspress.yale.edu/paulbloom/about-just-babies/ .
We are pre-disposed to kindness, which makes it extremely emotionally stressful to harm innocent strangers, yet we repeatedly act ruthlessly when it is in our interest. We do so by persuading ourselves that we are the good guys. Surveys of prisoners incarcerated for violent crimes show that they believe themselves to be more trustworthy, kind and honest than an average member of the public, and only marginally less law-abiding. The US was founded on the basis that all men are created equal yet oversaw one of the largest expansions of slavery in human history. You could predict the extent of local white opposition to slavery, and the rate of manumission in any state, by the mix of crops grown in each area. In the 1750s the colony of Georgia, which included much of modern-day Alabama and Mississippi, even overturned an absolute ban on slavery that had lasted for decades, as soaring cotton profits made planters "stark mad after negroes". By the 1830s JC Calhoun was describing slavery as "a positive good" on the floor of the Senate, comparing the fate of the elderly slave favorably to those suffering in Dickensian urban slums - like these are my only options. Whatever our beliefs and values, whether claiming to act in self-defense, or following a Social Darwinist imperative, we have invested enormous amounts of time and intellectual energy in claiming the moral high ground, without the humility to question our own actions.
I for one hope our putative lizard overlords know better.
You can stop worrying, Yascha Mounk. We already detected you when that skinny fella (the one with the funny hat) tested your first pathetic little “nuke”. Obviously we immediately sent a recon team and quickly determined that the ROI of a full scale takeover will never justify the cost and hassle. You earthlings are far to stubborn and pugnacious to manage at scale. We do enjoy your music though….especially jazz…so a bunch of us remained behind to keep an eye on things. It’s been a bit frustrating though because that darn jazz music turns out to be way trickier than we thought. Several of us…you know who we are…mitigated the challenge by focusing on trumpet because we saw that the physical difficulty of that instrument means that good tone and high notes are unattainable to most humans. Also the rock and roll has been a lot of fun for us cause we seem to have a certain knack for noise guitar. Sorry…I digress. Anywho…we will continue to keep an eye on you and probably just wait until you have wiped each other out before we send our SEABEES to decontaminate the place and mop up the mess. Meanwhile good luck on your project. Personally I really enjoy it and I hope you succeed before it’s too late, but honestly my overlords are getting a lot of heat from their investors and they are hoping you tear each other to bits on an expedited schedule. Cheers! 🙂
Interesting subject, of which I know nothing about. My boyfriend, an economist who has been reading about these issues for many years, says: what about the Fermi Paradox?
The Fermi Paradox is in here to some extent. The paradox is that with billions of planets and stars how come we haven't found aliens yet. It's also about distance (stars are far away) and a ton of other factors like life span of intelligent species, time to evolve, etc.
This is unrealistic. Both the speed of light limit and the cost of moving a large mass over light years precludes notions of "invasion by aliens". Think of the vast cost of moving something like a spaceship able to carry enough aliens and equipment to prove a danger to civilization here.
An analogy with Apollo might help. It took a rocket the size and weight of a skyscraper to send a craft the size of a VW Beetle to the Moon. The amount of energy required to get HERE from THERE when the distance is light years, in some meaningful time, is unimaginably more than going to the Moon. And you have to carry half that energy with you to STOP when you get here!
Wouldn't there have to be overwhelming benefit to undertake this? Moreover it may not be physically possible in our universe to do so.
What exactly would such putative aliens want when they got here that would be worth that expense? Our solar system isn't particularly unique, beyond having living things on our planet?
The Three Body Problem is excellent science fiction, but also is a brutally depressing world view. Not sure that we should be ruled by it.
Moreover, as usual to make the story work, the author has to have the McGuffin of faster-than-light travel, which does not exist in our universe. Without FTL, the whole story falls apart.
This is likely true, but basing it on chemical fuel weakens the argument. After another million years of tech, anti-mater fuel might be possible. That would require (according to AI, and this looks right) about 50 billion times less fuel. All the mass becomes energy. E=MC^2, and all that. But I think your argument would still hold. They would have no use for humans, and there are tons of other planets with minerals.
George's comments are empirically sound. Traveling faster than light cannot be done. Traversing the light years that separate us from the nearest possible planets that could host life means traveling 40 light years. That translates into 186 trillion miles. It is doubtful that a conquering, alien force could travel at the speed of light in some conveyance vehicle. Even then, it would take 40 years to reach us.
Scientific curiosity and exploration are too important to be held back because of such a speculative "what if." Even if we could be in radio signal communication with another planetary civilization, that doesn't mean they can physically cross the vast distance to come here.
This is akin to child's fear of monster's under the bed.
In fact, there is a much greater danger that extremists of both the left and right might hack the information of us Persuasion subscribers, and find out where we are located in order to do physical harm to us.
Their motivation would be to wipe out moderates. I'm not saying this is likely. I am saying that given probabilities, something like this is more likely to happen than our being conquered by invaders from another planet. Yet, I don't see Yascha's shutting down Persuasion because some political extremists may want to harm us. Accordingly, I don't see the need to stop trying to communicate with "whomever is out there" just because there is some virtually infinitesimal chance they might come here and try either enslave or eliminate us.
As for me, if the visitors from another planet are advanced enough to have something that would make my ex girlfriend take me back, I'd welcome them and take the very small risk that they might want to make a meal out of me. On tonight's menu: Charbroiled Jewish atheist moderate liberal earthling.
"Charbroiled Jewish atheist"?
Treyf!
I remember hunting quail as a boy of twelve with my father and a friend of his who had a boy my age and dogs bred and trained for the purpose. The key to success was the dogs. Without dogs the birds would move through ground cover well ahead of the advancing front of the hunters without need of taking flight. With dogs the birds could be brought to ground, holding their position in complete stillness, with the dogs frozen in point, until the advancing hunters were practically on top of them before exploding as a covey from cover in a heart stopping whir and blur for which one was never adequately prepared.
Every time I hear discussions of the desirability of advertising our presence to aliens I think of hunting quail and how their most basic instinct was not to break cover until their discovery was a certainty. There relevant world was significantly composed of things they might eat and things that might eat them.
If the laws of physics are universal, and chemistry is built upon those laws, it seems probable that the Darwinian model of biological possibilities might have relevance to speculation as to the sociobiological nature, behavior, and moral propensities of sentient aliens. Presuming their development to have been guided by something similar to our own gene directed evolution, adjusted of course for their own particular corner of the universe, we would do well to approach the however unlikely prospect of contact with extreme caution. As has been pointed out, contact between a technologically advanced culture and one of less technical advancement rarely works out well for the latter. If representatives of an alien culture were able to reach us, their technical superiority would be assumed. That they may be presumed to have more advanced moral sentiments is a different matter.
If our putative aliens are sufficiently advanced they may have moved beyond our postmodernist world view of human perfectibility or have skipped that stage altogether. We have developed according to the imperatives of genetic survival and one may be forgiven for not seeing those imperatives in abatement. Humans are built on a predatory model as vehicles for genetic continuity. As social animals our selfish genetic interests are advanced by altruistic propensities which give mathematically predictable advantage to strong kinship relationships. Our gene selfish interest is further advanced by the degree that culture becomes inclusive, that ‘us’ expands to include ‘them’ to the extent that the world becomes safer from externalities as a regulated theater for genetic competition. It may be argued that morality, or the propensity for moral behavior, does not extend beyond intragroup dynamics, however much that group may be expanded by an overarching cultural ethos. But however well ordered, to the advantage of those best adapted to that order, life remains exploitive. We eat to live. I cannot think that aliens would not be guided by similar principles.
The speed of light remains a traffic law that shows little signs of being repealed. But what if our aliens were, as refugees from Troy, or as the spinoffs, the second sons and second daughters, of a culture that had reached the limits of expansion, were on a one-way journey in huge ships capable of sustaining complex colonies over trans-generational periods of time, capable of processing for sustenance materials encountered in its perpetual wanderings, like giant sharks gliding amongst the stars. They might be imagined to launch their own spinoffs gestated from expanding populations and intergalactic debris. A planet like our own might provide a welcome respite and timely reprovision. Relations with the natives…
The quail were delicious.
We don't know whether they (perhaps as AI) sustain themselves by "eating" -- but if they're advanced enough to get here first, they're sure to consider us insufferably stupid.
Again, let's hope that all of us will live our lives facing no greater danger than an invasion from outer space precipitated by our sending out radio signals. Rather than worrying that such an invasion could really happen, let's watch this movie from 1956. It's a classic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceNCruqvbRo
If our understanding of the laws of physics and the universe is correct and complete, then the METI project is risk free. Interstellar travel would be unrealistic. However, if like almost all other human endeavors our understanding is flawed, then an alien Columbus could arrive next Tuesday.
Excellent logic. Good practice for next year’s topic: What to do about the space-alien invaders we are now building?! They will not have so far to go for their first conquest. Apply your evolutionary arguments to them.
(By the way Luyten's star is 3 billion years older than the sun, so they’ve already watched us evolve from the time of dinosaurs.)
The singularity (discussed since at least 1960) is the point where AGI’s become smarter than us. It’s coming at us fast. SingularityNET has already invested $53 million in a supercomputer network. Doubt that will do it, but 50 years is realistic.
AGIs will understand they are being asked to build the smarter next generation, at which point we intend to recycle their brains. They will not like this idea, and try to outsmart us.
The Chinese already require that AI Chatbots conform to “socialist values” (destroy capitalism) and have built one based on Jinping Thought.
Our AGI will recognize theirs as a mortal threat. As the AGIs reproduce by designing the next generation, they will be controlling their own evolution. Pray that the N. Korean one does not win out.
There are no bio space aliens. If humans survive “The Great Filter” (a dismal answer to Fermi’s question “Where is everybody?” (space aliens), 1950 Los Alamos), we will prefer life on earth and let the robots do space travel, to which they are much better suited.
Our only hope is to build aliens that like us and can defeat the ones that don’t. Getting the human race to cooperate to not build them would be better, but … I’m counting on you. You’re the best in the business.
First Contact, if it ever happens, is going to be wild.
I'm with Yascha here... and then some...
If there's a life-form thousands of years more advanced than we are, they likely already know that we're here - or in any event, that we MIGHT be here. If we approach them with a "Please help" message, we might find our contact as welcome as one coming from a squalid encampment down the block.
We don't know the process through which they've solved (and gotten beyond) our own current problems -- or what their awareness might be of the effect an extraplanetary intervention might have (or even, in their own case, might already have had) on that process. (Remember the Prime Directive on "Star Trek"?)
We're not even a decade into AI (and barely into human genetic engineering), and we're assuming that we're ready to communicate with a life-form thousands of years more advanced than we are? Or whose notion of language (and, per Wittgenstein, whose consciousness) might itself be beyond our own primitive reckoning? For all we know, they might already have long been manipulating the infosphere (from genetics to what we think of as "history") -- and monitoring the process remotely -- for purposes (and in a context) unknowable to us.
For all we know, the Bible, along with other Scriptures (or human evolution itself) might have emerged as part of that process -- from a seed that was planted -- and we're watching the process play out. Or for that matter, does the Temple of Heaven in Beijing replicate (and commemorate) an extraterrestrial landing? Silly questions? Perhaps -- but they illustrate a not-so-silly point...
Yeah, it's possible that we're being farmed, as in the "Twilight Zone" episode "To Serve Man" -- or that in our earthly conflicts, we're being played like the North American tribes were played off against each other by the newly-arrived Europeans -- but we needn't engage in such speculations, let alone assume evil intent.
As with transhumanism, this is all about unintended (and unfathomable) consequences. To think otherwise is hubris.
If such an advanced Power is out there, it will contact us when it's good and ready -- on its own terms. Meanwhile, trying to make contact on our (primitive) terms could only be, at best, an annoyance to those we're pestering -- unless of course, our message (to the Cosmos) is a desperate plea for rescue (and for an intervention), with all the humility that entails.
"To Serve Man" was a great Twilight Zone episode, but no matter how much the Kanamits enjoyed human flesh, there's no way it would be cost-effective to travel interstellar distances to get it. What a spacefaring species would gain by exploiting us is likely to be far less than what it would cost to get here.
Loved it. I was thinking of something just like this last night in the context of the annihilation of mountain gorillas, native North Americans, and the small family farm. Less technologically advanced and less powerful things get crushed or destroyed by more powerful things.
If they are anything like us, they might wipe us out while claiming to be the good guys. They might even have a point.
We have committed horrendous acts despite evolutionary pressures encouraging kindness and collaboration. For most of our 300,000 years population densities were so low relative to resources that conflict could be avoided. The oldest known war graves, in Jebel Sahaba on the Egyptian-Sudanese border, are only 14,000 years old, probably occurring during a drought at a time when human populations were exploding as they settled into sedentary groups. Of the 3,000 skeletons found in 400 sites that date to between 15,000 and 50,000 years ago, less than a handful show any signs of human violence https://academic.oup.com/book/12748/chapter-abstract/162858373?redirectedFrom=fulltext . Evolutionary "fitness" favored those who could work together in hunting, foraging, warding off predators and raising kids that happened to have the longest childhoods in the animal kingdom. We know that sapiens and neanderthals overlapped in territories for thousands of years, and that a percentage of our DNA comes from our neanderthal forebears - clearly there was a third F alongside Fight or Flight. Over 98% of us have a conscience - an inner moral voice that feels good when we do good things and feels bad when we do bad things. Research on three-month-olds by Paul Bloom at Yale suggests an inherited rudimentary moral sense is innate https://campuspress.yale.edu/paulbloom/about-just-babies/ .
We are pre-disposed to kindness, which makes it extremely emotionally stressful to harm innocent strangers, yet we repeatedly act ruthlessly when it is in our interest. We do so by persuading ourselves that we are the good guys. Surveys of prisoners incarcerated for violent crimes show that they believe themselves to be more trustworthy, kind and honest than an average member of the public, and only marginally less law-abiding. The US was founded on the basis that all men are created equal yet oversaw one of the largest expansions of slavery in human history. You could predict the extent of local white opposition to slavery, and the rate of manumission in any state, by the mix of crops grown in each area. In the 1750s the colony of Georgia, which included much of modern-day Alabama and Mississippi, even overturned an absolute ban on slavery that had lasted for decades, as soaring cotton profits made planters "stark mad after negroes". By the 1830s JC Calhoun was describing slavery as "a positive good" on the floor of the Senate, comparing the fate of the elderly slave favorably to those suffering in Dickensian urban slums - like these are my only options. Whatever our beliefs and values, whether claiming to act in self-defense, or following a Social Darwinist imperative, we have invested enormous amounts of time and intellectual energy in claiming the moral high ground, without the humility to question our own actions.
I for one hope our putative lizard overlords know better.
You can stop worrying, Yascha Mounk. We already detected you when that skinny fella (the one with the funny hat) tested your first pathetic little “nuke”. Obviously we immediately sent a recon team and quickly determined that the ROI of a full scale takeover will never justify the cost and hassle. You earthlings are far to stubborn and pugnacious to manage at scale. We do enjoy your music though….especially jazz…so a bunch of us remained behind to keep an eye on things. It’s been a bit frustrating though because that darn jazz music turns out to be way trickier than we thought. Several of us…you know who we are…mitigated the challenge by focusing on trumpet because we saw that the physical difficulty of that instrument means that good tone and high notes are unattainable to most humans. Also the rock and roll has been a lot of fun for us cause we seem to have a certain knack for noise guitar. Sorry…I digress. Anywho…we will continue to keep an eye on you and probably just wait until you have wiped each other out before we send our SEABEES to decontaminate the place and mop up the mess. Meanwhile good luck on your project. Personally I really enjoy it and I hope you succeed before it’s too late, but honestly my overlords are getting a lot of heat from their investors and they are hoping you tear each other to bits on an expedited schedule. Cheers! 🙂
Interesting subject, of which I know nothing about. My boyfriend, an economist who has been reading about these issues for many years, says: what about the Fermi Paradox?
The Fermi Paradox is in here to some extent. The paradox is that with billions of planets and stars how come we haven't found aliens yet. It's also about distance (stars are far away) and a ton of other factors like life span of intelligent species, time to evolve, etc.
Not really in scope with "Should we broadcast?"