Nothing good will come of this. Stay dark in the forest.
From De Casas: Destruction of the Indies
The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention'd, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv'd, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher'd and harass'd with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred. Nay the Isle of Cuba, which extends as far, as Valledolid in Spain is distant from Rome, lies now uncultivated, like a Desert, and intomb'd in its own Ruins. You may also find the Isles of St. John, and Jamaica, both large and fruitful places, unpeopled and desolate. The Lucayan Islands on the North Side, adjacent to Hispaniola and Cuba, which are Sixty in number, or thereabout, together with with those, vulgarly known by the name of the Gigantic Isles, and others, the most infertile whereof, exceeds the Royal Garden of Sevil in fruitfulness, a most Healthful and pleasant Climat, is now laid waste and uninhabited; and whereas, when the Spaniards first arriv'd here, about Five Hundred Thousand Men dwelt in it, they are now cut off, some by slaughter, and others ravished away by Force and Violence, to work in the Mines of Hispanioloa, which was destitute of Native Inhabitants
Whenever "explorers" from distant parts have "discovered" new areas, throughout history the indigenous peoples get badly screwed over. See the history of post-Columbus native Americans. Look at India and China to see what even very advanced civilizations with large populations still get screwed by the invaders.
Assuming that the resources of the universe are vast, earth will be more valuable as a DNA resource than for gold and slaves. Up until the industrial revolution, the rapidly growing populations of Europe were straining against their resources and were always looking for new gold and slaves plunder to sustain themselves.
But those diseases went through evolution in an environment that's similar to America -- it had the same atmosphere, similar soil, plant life, etc. Even the hosts were similar.
But an alien virus would have none of those things. Chances are it would find earth inhospitable and be completely unable to survive much less spread.
It would be truly remarkable if an alien virus found earth/humans compatible.
The vast majority was caused by an ill-timed native viral hemorrhagic fever, not European diseases.
I don’t know what native virus you are referring to (citation?), but it is estimated that in many parts of the Americas population collapsed by about 90% in the course of a century or two (sometimes faster), and the scholarly consensus is that this was largely due to Eurasian diseases to which people had no immunity.
The societal collapse brought on by disease also led to internecine war, helping depopulation along. And obviously the numerous instances of genocidal slaughter by Europeans and forced migration later contributed to the final native depopulation of many areas.
The universe has been around for billions of years. Humans are a flash in the pan. We're gnats. Pond scum. Fungus. We're no more interesting than your average gas cloud. We're like tree bark.
I really love a good sci-fi movie about aliens, but the vast majority of them have humans and earth as being something special. To me that looks preposterously unlikely.
It's all speculative, of course, but I tend to think we vastly overestimate how special, unique, important, intelligent, and so forth we actually are. The numbers just don't look like they support it.
An ant is objectively an inferior lifeform compared to us. Smaller, weaker, less intelligent.
But there are still human beings that dedicate their life to study them. And we find unique and interesting features in them. I don't think this would be different if a more developed life form would study.
Supposing, that this life form still has some curiosity left. But if they lived so long that everything is boring to them, it's not our fault that they wouldn't find us interesting. :-)
Doesn't tell you much at all about how much we value rocks.
I disagreed and said that even in the eye of much more powerful or advanced species, we would still be considered a curiosity.
At least to some. It's entirely possible that we could be blown away by the next being. But at least some members of the same species would regret that.
Where else would we be sentient?
Uh, no. I'm pretty sure we qualify as sentient.
Why do we need so much land? Don't we have enough? But our numbers have grown exponentially. And even though we don't need that much land at the moment, there's still some small positive economic value to more land. And so the natives lose.
A similar thing applies to civilizations. The universe only seems big until you factor in exponential growth. Even if humanity could travel a fraction of the speed of light. Give us a few hundred thousand years, and we would settle and overpopulate every planet in this galaxy. And be on our way to the next one.
There are other reasons aliens would want to stop us. If they value human life at all, they might have completely alien moral systems and want to impose them on us. Human society is pretty awful with lots of suffering. No moral aliens would leave us alone to our own devices. But do we really want to get stuck being ruled over by them forever with no autonomy?
If they don't value human life, we are really screwed. In the future we could expand and advance and become a threat to them. It costs them nothing to exterminate us and prevents any future conflicts or costs we might cause them. So why not?
Also good point to remember is maybe the aliens are nothing like we imagine they are, maybe they are already here and we just as a agreed collective don't yet have the capacity to sense this. There are many stories of people communicating with ETs already, if people did some research and had the capacity to understand more of the spiritual nature of things we would already see this on a global scale I believe.
Why "must?" That just sounds like an assumption based on what you want to be true. It is just as likely that a civilization you describe exists but has the exact same type and frequency of internal squabbles that humans do.
I mean, a human could spend their entire life locating and exterminating ant colonies, and ants would fear that about us if they could conceive it, but we generally have better things to do with our time. (Of course if we're in the way...)
Nothing costs nothing. Interstellar travel has to be expensive in any kind of form, whether resources or time. There's no free lunch for anyone.
Things that overcome and eat other things stay alive to reproduce and propagate. Those that can't, cease to exist. This very fundamental aspect of nature implies that there will always exist some selection bias towards aggressive predatory behavior among the most successful products of evolution. It's interesting to consider that the 'morality' of herbivore vs carnivore is an entirely human conception. Go back far enough and humans and grass share a common ancestor. We just evolved in different directions.
In any case the development of higher intelligence enables us to overcome and suppress or evolutionary instincts. But I imagine these instincts will always be a part of us. I see no reasonable way a highly advanced species could have ever evolved without them. And while the media and other players sensationalize violence, the reality is we live in what is likely the single most peaceful era of civilization - ever.
Try to imagine that in WW2 around 70 million people died from a world population of 2.3 billion. That's more than 3% of the entire world's population killed. Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed. Since we suck at understanding such huge numbers. Let's convert that in 9/11s. That would be more than 77,000 9/11 scale events. In other words imagine we had a 9/11 scale event every single day for 211 years. That's how many people died in WW2. Today we in the developed western world freak out about 60 people dying, and a single 9/11 is a world shaking event. And go back to things like the Mongol invasions - they were on the order of 300% more deadly the world's population than WW2 was. One can only imagine the actions within prehistory among isolated populations. Perspective.
Keyword being Western - if the killings don't happen there they somehow don't count. Around 400,000 people died in Syrian war - that's 2% dead count out of 20 million of pre-war population; pretty close to what you mentioned is WW2 level.
>Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed
The fact that we by random chance managed to avoid a global war in the last 70 years doesn't mean that when it finally hits the death tally won't be 231,000,000. In fact, I'd say it's going to be much higher.
It is our assumption that all "life" has to "eat" and "reproduce."
Life could get energy from stars or other ambient sources.
Life could be an entire "species" consisting of just a single individual.
Life could be an species whose members are spontaneously "born" or "created" at a single source, without requiring any action from each other.
Life could come in the form of a ..thing.. that converts other unrelated living creatures to become a part of it. Say, something like a virus, that imparts intelligence and a common goal to any organism it "infects."
But your comment sounds like you are concerned about broadcasting. The chinese (like SETI) are just listening. Of course, we're all broadcasting all the time but, so what? What do we have to fear from being heard?
Massive spoilers of the second and first books: https://books.google.com/books?id=ThKrDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT163&lpg=...
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/18127/dark-fo...
What are you basing this on? I'd like to see your Drake equation variables.
It's not likely that any civilization will reach such a technological level. If one does, it's not likely that spreading around the galaxy colonizing planets will be a priority. If one does that anyway, it's not likely that they will use unencrypted radio signals for communications.
But, no, not impossible.
Even arguably less aggressive and more successful (in terms of longevity) entities such as the British or the Spanish Empire weren't particularly long-lived on a large timescale.
The universe is a big place. Looking around, it seems that the endless-exponential-expansion route hasn’t proven popular with anyone yet. There may just be enough to go around.
It doesn't need to be rational. All it takes is one sufficiently powerful species to decide "better safe than sorry" and lobbing suitable planet killers at any new upstarts they notice.
Now that you know it's there, don't you feel like expending the time, energy, and resources necessary to travel there so you can step on it?
With our current rate of population growth, I think about one or two percent per year if I remember correctly, we would only make it a few percent across the Milkyway before running out of resources even if we could travel at the speed of light. You can search my comment history, there is somewhere a more detailed comment with all the numbers and assumptions.
Bottom line is, if you want to colonialize the universe, you either need a population growth rate very close to zero and a lot of patience or you have to beat Einstein.
EDIT: Here [1] is the mentioned comment.
For others who like this sort of thing, I highly recommend Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel:
Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but assuming the current rate of population growth is relatively meaningless seeing as no reasonable model assumes current growth rates will continue (as it's been steadily changing).
Unfortunately that is still way too large, to colonialize the Milky Way before hitting resource limits you need it down at one one-thousandth of a percent or so, for the entire universe you need to decrease it several orders of magnitude more. At least on average, if you could use something like cryostasis while travelling through the vast emptiness between stars you could afford times with higher growth rates.
The first drop basically comes because we have a massive population bulge in the post-war years. The growth the resumes because the drop in population growth worldwide is not yet enough to offset the steady growth in life expectancy in the third world.
But longer term that is likely to end up as another bulge.
In terms of developed countries, most have birth rates below replacement.
Once life expectancy growth worldwide has flattened out enough, and birth rates have declined to e.g. European levels, we can expect the bigger problem to be preventing terminal decline. This map [1] is quite interesting. The blue/light blue parts represents birth rates below replacement. In 2015 France too was below replacement.
About half of the worlds population lived in countries with sub-replacement birth rates as of 2010, and despite the fact that the population growth tilts that towards high population growth countries on a continuous basis, the birth rates of those countries is dropping pretty much across the board, meaning it is likely that the proportion of the worlds population living in sub-replacement countries will actually increase.
E.g. India is expected to drop below replacement this century too, and actually experience population decline (decline lags birth rates, of course, because you need to wait for the generation that's dying off to be larger than the one being born).
So I don't think population growth is a realistic concern when it comes to interstellar exploration. On the contrary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med...
Our population isn't expanding exponentially. World population grew at 2%/yr in 1960, 1.55% in 1995, 1.25% in 2005, 1.18% in 2015, 1.14% in 2016, and 1.12% this year.
Soon every person we send off the planet will just reduce earth population by 1. We'll be lucky if people reproduce enough to keep the population steady.
But current projections is a population in the region of 10bn first by the end of the century, with some projections suggesting population decline from as early as 2040 (though that's an outlier). More scenarios predict a peak in the 2070-2100 timeframe; some predict continued, but much reduced growth beyond 2100. As far as I'm aware, though, all reasonable scenarios suggest that the rate of growth will at the very least continue to slow for a long time.
That looks pretty exponential to me. If it no longer looks exponential when looking at the last few years perhaps it's because we're running into resource limits.
It's true that animal populations peak (s-curve) when they hit resource limits (ie: carrying capacity of the environment). But our population has slowed because of education (in particular, education of women)... it's an effect thats been repeated all over the world.
If it were resource limits, we would see things like famine (killing the excess members of the population), rampant disease (which becomes easier to spread when people are closer to each other), etc. We're definitely not there in the developed world; and the 3rd world isnt there either, since they have some of the highest reproductive rates.
If we could harness all the resources available around the solar system and beyond, we wouldn't have an energy crisis at all. The problem is actually getting those resources transported. If an alien had means to mine and transport resources, they'd probably have found plenty of other richer resources besides Earth.
It is very unlikely that there is anything out there that is capable of actually coming here, for the same reason it's very unlikely we can ever leave the solar system. A radio "conversation" over many generations - if that's even possible - would be the high point of our civilisation.
I think you're over-extrapolating. One obvious difference is that colonizers have been exposed to other humans of all kinds, even before colonization. There was nothing about (e.g.) Native American society that you couldn't find in Eurasia + Africa that's even remotely on the same scale as the differences between us and a theoretical alien civilization.
Even if we had been broadcasting a very strong signal from the first radio experiment in all directions into space, that would still be less than 0.1% of the galaxy.
We're fine. Aliens aren't watching The Honeymooners.