Realistic First Contact Scenarios
- Thread starter The Professor
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Keenir
Banned
no they wouldn't. unless you have a radically different definition of "that matter."
like, say, being tetrapods.
Someone's been reading 1930s Space Opera again
Seriously though, why do you think alien planets would follow the same route of evolution as Earth?
Or are you being humorous and forgot to be more explicit?
Someone's been reading 1930s Space Opera again
Seriously though, why do you think alien planets would follow the same route of evolution as Earth?
Or are you being humorous and forgot to be more explicit?
No, and I've honestly never heard of Space Opera until today. And yes I do. It makes more sense than saying that they will be exactly what we see in the movies. I think that the stuff portrayed in the movies is what's really ridiculous and unlikely.
None of here are saying that aliens would be exactly like the movies.
I think most of us would agree that movie-aliens are too human!
Have you considered that aliens would be less human that what we have in the movies?
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
Aside from the question of what the aliens would look like, are there any more thoughts on how first contact would go down?
how could they be less human? humans are pretty good at dehumanizing people.
initially, panic, followed by either acceptance, or war. integration and possible trade relations follow afterwards.
Why would creatures who are radically physically different from humans make sounds anything like our own, let alone have words that sound exactly the same?And they will probably have a language who have words who phonetically sound like words from many of our earth ones, even if they obviously don't meant the same thing. So be prepared to Captain Slut or bicycle (who phonetically mean almighty in alien).
You know, we've have had first contacts on Earth. They didn't go all that well, because of easy human corruption, evil, and technological imbalance.
There're theoretical grounds for believing they're likely to be similar mentally., though they'd be different physically, culturally, and average-intelligence-wise, Both animal brains and computers do the same basic Turing Machine operations, and there's an speed advantage from parallelism - that's what our brains do. They'd also almost hafta be violent to win on their home planet.
And, for extra fun, most Spaniards disapproved of what Cortes and Pizarro had done, as did the Spanish government beforehand. But, all it took was was a small minority of evil geniuses to doom the lotech natives. They were even literally doomed in the long run because those whom survived the plagues got worked mostly to death. There was a similar story in North America of corrupt local genius, except ethnic cleansing instead of slavery.
There're theoretical grounds for believing they're likely to be similar mentally., though they'd be different physically, culturally, and average-intelligence-wise, Both animal brains and computers do the same basic Turing Machine operations, and there's an speed advantage from parallelism - that's what our brains do. They'd also almost hafta be violent to win on their home planet.
And, for extra fun, most Spaniards disapproved of what Cortes and Pizarro had done, as did the Spanish government beforehand. But, all it took was was a small minority of evil geniuses to doom the lotech natives. They were even literally doomed in the long run because those whom survived the plagues got worked mostly to death. There was a similar story in North America of corrupt local genius, except ethnic cleansing instead of slavery.
I think he means physically and biologically, Kev...
So did I... why is there no emoticon for facepalm?
Why the books and media forum? :s
I find it super unlikely the aliens would be hostile.
As I've said many times before- if our modern civilization were to discover aliens we wouldn't exactly just launch an invasion would we? It'd be the greatest discovery ever. Fascinating stuff. We'd want to make paceful contact with them. Aliens will be the same- or else they'll have killed themselves before getting off their planet; just look at how close us peaceful humans came to doing that!
The idea that aliens have to be utterly alien is just something we don't know. They could equally well be very human like indeed. In fact, if they come from an earth like planet, I'd say the chances are very good indeed that they will be humanoid. Its no accident we look the way we do, its the way the evolutionary path that gave a species capable of coming up with technilogical civilization led. Might there be other shapes that work? Perhaps. But...nothing too extreme. They have to work according to the laws afterall.
I find it super unlikely the aliens would be hostile.
As I've said many times before- if our modern civilization were to discover aliens we wouldn't exactly just launch an invasion would we? It'd be the greatest discovery ever. Fascinating stuff. We'd want to make paceful contact with them. Aliens will be the same- or else they'll have killed themselves before getting off their planet; just look at how close us peaceful humans came to doing that!
Not necessarily.
The idea that aliens have to be utterly alien is just something we don't know. They could equally well be very human like indeed. In fact, if they come from an earth like planet, I'd say the chances are very good indeed that they will be humanoid. Its no accident we look the way we do, its the way the evolutionary path that gave a species capable of coming up with technilogical civilization led. Might there be other shapes that work? Perhaps. But...nothing too extreme. They have to work according to the laws afterall.
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Why?
You've yet to explain why you think aliens would be human.
Well, I started this thread to find what people thought were realistic first contact scenarios in fiction and this seemed more relevant than the ASB forum.
Kevvy2010, are you trying to troll this thread?
Jabba isn't particularly likely physically (legs and functional hands are useful for an intelligent life form): but really, there are a lot of good artists and science writers who have tried to picture genuinely alien aliens which work. Using the movies as an argument vs alien aliens is sorta like using movie pirates as an argument against the existence of actual pirates. The odds of our evolutionary development being followed is ridiculously unlikely, unless you believe that evolution follows some sort of pre-destined arrangement. We are a series of evolutionary accidents: the Earth's environment can and has sustained body plans very different indeed from ours.
Thinking that our design is the only "working model" for a tool-making intelligence is simply a failure of imagination. Oh, the _basics_ (upright position, eyes, something like hands) are useful enough that they well might be duplicated elesewhere, but that's no reason to believe the more "humanoid" aliens will look as much like us as this guy:
(Corrupt local geniuses? Props to Pizzarro and Cortez, but I'm not sure that's a good analogy: it was disease which destroyed the native Americans. We're less likely to catch something off aliens than from a carrot).
There's three ways we're likely to physically run into aliens. One, they come here before we develop interstellar travel. In that case they are going to be way advanced: there is no way interstellar travel is easy. Two, we go to another solar system and they are the primitive ones. Three, we both have interstellar travel: in that case who is more advanced is a coin-flip, but given the age of the galaxy, the odds we will just be a few decades apart is poor.
I suspect any race that has been round long enough to make interstellar travel a regular thing will have learned control over its own worst impulses. After all, we're generally less mutually brutal people in 2011 than we were in the 19th century, and we have barely started to master our own brain chemistry and haven't really developed a real science of behavioral self-training.
OTOH, getting along with _each other_ isn't necessarily the same as Playing Nicely with Others. A race might eliminate it's tendency to de-*humanize members of its own species but retain an evolutionary hostility to aliens which look like birds or upright, naked, apes. Or, in a universe where planet-killing weapons are cheap and easy to make, it might be simply the Vulcan-logical thing to make sure other species aren't wandering around out there without close supervisions. Or the aliens could be an inherently predatorial species or ominicidal Chinese Rooms (see Watts).
Still, it is probably a decent bet to make that advanced aliens and future humans won't be as inherently assholish in the face of the other as we have been in the past: the trouble will be that what they or we think of as "civilized" ways of treating less developed races may be nontheless very unpleasant to those holding the short end of the stick...(ware the alien social workers!)
A first contact with advanced aliens coming here, unshielded by the comfortable light-years of distance and slow bandwidth of interstellar communications, will be almost certainly badly disturbing: many basic assumptions (the human-centered view of God, our place at the peak of creation, the peerless nature of our creativity and intelligence, etc.) will all be fundamentally challenged. Fundamentally new concepts of life and the universe and the place of sentient beings in it will undoubtedly be encountered. Alien culture might contain things as big as art or religion which we've entirely missed. Even if they only stayed for a fortnight and left after a big party, the world would be turned upside down.
Bruce
[1] The "contact by radio" is another option, as is "contact through finding a long-buried alien artifact on Mars or whatever".
Jabba isn't particularly likely physically (legs and functional hands are useful for an intelligent life form): but really, there are a lot of good artists and science writers who have tried to picture genuinely alien aliens which work. Using the movies as an argument vs alien aliens is sorta like using movie pirates as an argument against the existence of actual pirates. The odds of our evolutionary development being followed is ridiculously unlikely, unless you believe that evolution follows some sort of pre-destined arrangement. We are a series of evolutionary accidents: the Earth's environment can and has sustained body plans very different indeed from ours.
Thinking that our design is the only "working model" for a tool-making intelligence is simply a failure of imagination. Oh, the _basics_ (upright position, eyes, something like hands) are useful enough that they well might be duplicated elesewhere, but that's no reason to believe the more "humanoid" aliens will look as much like us as this guy:
(Corrupt local geniuses? Props to Pizzarro and Cortez, but I'm not sure that's a good analogy: it was disease which destroyed the native Americans. We're less likely to catch something off aliens than from a carrot).
There's three ways we're likely to physically run into aliens. One, they come here before we develop interstellar travel. In that case they are going to be way advanced: there is no way interstellar travel is easy. Two, we go to another solar system and they are the primitive ones. Three, we both have interstellar travel: in that case who is more advanced is a coin-flip, but given the age of the galaxy, the odds we will just be a few decades apart is poor.
I suspect any race that has been round long enough to make interstellar travel a regular thing will have learned control over its own worst impulses. After all, we're generally less mutually brutal people in 2011 than we were in the 19th century, and we have barely started to master our own brain chemistry and haven't really developed a real science of behavioral self-training.
OTOH, getting along with _each other_ isn't necessarily the same as Playing Nicely with Others. A race might eliminate it's tendency to de-*humanize members of its own species but retain an evolutionary hostility to aliens which look like birds or upright, naked, apes.
Or, in a universe where planet-killing weapons are cheap and easy to make, it might be simply the Vulcan-logical thing to make sure other species aren't wandering around out there without close supervisions. Or the aliens could be an inherently predatorial species or ominicidal Chinese Rooms (see Watts).Still, it is probably a decent bet to make that advanced aliens and future humans won't be as inherently assholish in the face of the other as we have been in the past: the trouble will be that what they or we think of as "civilized" ways of treating less developed races may be nontheless very unpleasant to those holding the short end of the stick...(ware the alien social workers!)
A first contact with advanced aliens coming here, unshielded by the comfortable light-years of distance and slow bandwidth of interstellar communications, will be almost certainly badly disturbing: many basic assumptions (the human-centered view of God, our place at the peak of creation, the peerless nature of our creativity and intelligence, etc.) will all be fundamentally challenged. Fundamentally new concepts of life and the universe and the place of sentient beings in it will undoubtedly be encountered. Alien culture might contain things as big as art or religion which we've entirely missed. Even if they only stayed for a fortnight and left after a big party, the world would be turned upside down.
Bruce
[1] The "contact by radio" is another option, as is "contact through finding a long-buried alien artifact on Mars or whatever".
Trade is unlikely. To make interstellar trade worthwhile, you'd need to find a substance that can't be produced at home and is expensive and low-bulk enough to justify shipping it rather than finding a way to duplicate it. As of now, we know of no substance that exists in nearby star systems that doesn't exist in Sol system. This is not to say that we will never find one, but we currently know of no physical process that would make one system or another rich or poor in any given material.
The only trade I can see is Intellectual Trade, the sale of art and intellectual property by electromagnetic signals.
Anyway, the galaxy has been around for billions of years. Assuming that Earth is part of the First Generation of habitable worlds (big "if"), intelligent life will still have had 4.5 billion years to evolve before we did, so the odds that they will be comparable to us technologically are low.
Krall
Banned
Trade is possible provided it is profitable; that doesn't mean that we will only ship things in if we can't find any of it in our solar system. Provided a certain good, product or service is more expensive to mine/gather/extract/manufacture/operate in our solar system than it would be to import or outsource it then trade is definitely possible and profitable.