Of course it's certainly disappointing that it isn't an alien spacecraft, but would have been doubly so if it were and we missed our window of opportunity.
I do also have faith in the "humanity" of any interstellar life that may exist out there, after all a society based on oppression tends to be rife with conflict, and societies rife with instability and conflict don't tend to last. And in my view it would be very unsustainable for any life to maintain that sort of conflict, and at the same time hope to extend a society out into the universe.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I think it's worth the risk.
I am not a native speaker, so the dichotomy between the sense of this word and our most common behaviors as a species has always felt unsettling to me.
I kind of like this word, I would love to live in a world where this is a perfect descriptor for our species.
Back to the topic at hand, while it would indeed be marvelous to find benefactors from the stars, all the other possibilities are chilling. From cosmic horror to simple warmongering, there are so many ways it could go irremediably wrong.
Imagine we came across anew form of intelligent life on Mars, would we exploit and enslave it? I'd like to think living in a global society would prevent such atrocities, at least in the modern era, and hopefully beyond. And I think any society in an interstellar context would behave the same
A planet where you can set up a city and not have to worry about micrometeoroids, radiation, atmospheric composition? Just sleep out under the stars without a suit repair kit handy?
That’s worth killing for!
Ironically it’s not far off what was done to the Americas.
War is only an option when the sides are more or less evenly matched. We would not be anywhere near evenly matched with an interstellar civilisation.
In space you'd be able to move arbitrarily large objects with just an accelerator, map of the solar system and a transponder. In a gravity well you need a lot more and way more $$$ if you want to get it up the well.
Then again I have no training in the subject.
Every large war in our history has caused leaps in technology. Even on a smaller scale we treat conflict and competition as a good thing that promotes innovation.
Life as we know it "craves" and thrives on conflict. And if that's a universal truth, then any other civilizations we meet could as well.
And I think you are very wrong. Aliens don't need to be anything like us. Don't anthropomorphize them. They might have nothing like our morality or care for other sentient life forms. And just see us as a pest and potential future competition to snuff out.
Or if they do have morals, they could be completely alien. When the Europeans discovered the New World, one of the first things they did is try to forcibly convert the natives to their religion. They justified conquering and ruling over the natives to stop their savagery and impose their values and laws on them.
(I tend to share your optimism about the odds of other intelligent life being good-natured; we've come a long way in the last 2,000 years, by the time we're out in the stars, I'd like to think we'd all be Bodhisattvas).
1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sagan%27s_number
2: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/12/01/131730552...
Edit: wow, downvoted within a minute for not liking the same sci fi books. That’s a new low in HN groupthink.
Personally, in very different styles, I found pretty much everything written by Iain M Banks excellent (start with Excession or Player of Games), I enjoy John Scalzi’s humourous sci fi space operas a fair bit too, Peter F Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction trilogy was pretty decent... I’ve loved most of what I’ve read from Charles Stross but particularly Accelerando, Greg Egan’s Diaspora was awesome, like a modern day Childhood’s End (read that too if you haven’t, though it’s aged badly). Cloud Atlas is sorta science fiction and amazing. I’ve yet to not enjoy any book by Cory Doctorow - start with Pirate Cinema. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi was excellent.
This should be enough to get you started!
It's not Quantum Thief, but it ain't have bad either :D
Whaaat! Come on. Surely you'd gladly take the disappointment of missed opportunity for the absolute earth shattering wonder of proof that we are not alone.
It won't leave the solar system (Oort cloud) for 20,000 years. I'd hope our technology improves enough to be able to catch up in that time.