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Comment by scj | Hacker News Reader

Scientists thinking like scientists!

I'd presume an advanced culture that can traverse the galaxy has many resources. Like humanity, I'd assume that with abundance, entertainment would be prioritized.

We might be nothing more than a new source of fashion and novelty to them! They may like Rock & Roll, our food, our clothing, or even pogs.

We might even be boring to them for the moment, but they're hoping for a future payoff.

Or they could just look at us as a future source of diversity in their society. The different methods of creating sentient beings might be of great importance to a post-biological society (maybe there's charm in our resource inefficiency).

Determining the motivations of a post-singularity society is a difficult task. It's fun because it forces you to think beyond your current means. But I wouldn't consider it a productive endeavor.

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It's possible they can simulate many trillions of species realistically, so they wouldn't need to examine us individually. Many of the other trillion would have interesting music or interesting pog slammers. Their machine learning might pick up on it and surface it for them to review.

It's possible we are one of those trillion species being simulated, and our pogs are currently being scrutinized.

Rather presupposes that alien life is similar enough to humanity for culture and art to be more-or-less mutually intelligible.

Would extraterrestrials who communicate with pheremones, or touch, or don't communicate at all (ala "Blindsight") have any concept of music? If they can "hear", does their sensory range overlap ours? Is it compatible with our notion of musical scales? Does whatever passes for a nervous system operate at a similar timescale to ours?

Food and clothing seem like more of a stretch- even within earth's biosphere many substances humans can eat are poisonous to other animals, and vice versa. Vast differences in bodyplan would almost certainly make our clothing useless to an alien race, and the materials we use could easily be incompatible with their biology.

Even if aliens were substantially similar psychologically, minor changes in biology could result in completely different societies. What would our world look like with humans who reproduced asexually, or in triads? Where we produce our own food via photosynthesis or symbiosis? Where we didn't sleep, or different populations hibernated in their own cycles?

Overall I'm inclined to believe that cultural exchange with an intelligent extraterrestrial species would be harder and less productive than cultural exchange with parrots.

We are beginning to approach a point in our technological development where we can beam information into our brains to be perceived as sensory input. Maybe someday we will be able to subjectively experience things not provided by our natural senses. At that point, alien art may become a lot more interesting.

It also could be as entertaining as watching paint dry for them.

i think the reason people assume aliens would want to visit us is because they are vaguely aware of human history, which is characterized by more advanced societies, driven by a need to expand, subjugating or destroying less advanced societies. the very idea that aliens might exist and that they might be more advanced than us leads directly to the question, "would they do us like, say, europe did the americas?"

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