Aliens Would Visit for Knowledge, Not Resources | Hacker News Reader

Aliens Would Visit for Knowledge, Not Resources

nav.al

29 pointstodsacerdoti40 comments

My only experience with Naval is from listening to his 2 hour long Joe Rogan appearance.

This text matches up with what I learned about him then: he has clearly mastered storytelling and memorizing fact(oid)s. It was a fascinating and charming two hours.

Any kind of deep analysis of anything at all? No.

Danger doesn't require an active desire to exploit resources. I mean, let's be honest, if a species possesses the resources to cross interstellar space, we are not going to pose a threat to them.

To me the bigger concern with regard to intelligent extraterrestrial life would be that it could be unintentionally dangerous even if their intentions were entirely benign. For instance, a species that exhaled a poisonous gas like cyanide or carbon monoxide would be very dangerous to individual people.

We tend to anthropomorphize alien life, believing that it would be somewhat like us. A head, a torso, limbs, breathes oxygen, same mental functioning, etc. The final reality could be far different depending on the environment it evolved in.

Well assuming no FTL, if they cross 50k years of space to get to us to check us out, they might be in for a big surprise next time they check in. Thus the dark forest theory.

> I mean, let's be honest, if a species possesses the resources to cross interstellar space, we are not going to pose a threat to them.

There's a short story, "The Road Not Taken", by Harry Turtledove from 1985 that turns that around.

It turns out that gravity manipulation is absurdly easy. Most civilizations discover it before they have developed any sophisticated technology, and then most of their creativity goes toward further developing their gravity manipulation technology.

Earth is the odd one out, somehow failing to discover gravity manipulation. So all our creativity went into other technologies.

So when the aliens invade Earth, their ships are way more maneuverable than our planes and it looks like we have no chance. But when it comes to actual fighting their matchlock rifles and gunpowder bombs are no match for our machine guns and missiles. We easily defeat them.

This puts so many weird and obviously unproven assumptions on other intelligence that it's hard to take seriously.

It's not obvious that morals at all are necessary for intelligence.

It's not obvious that another intelligence encountered would come from a society rather than being a single evolved entity and as such would have had any reason to develop empathy.

It's not obvious that another intelligence would see us as an earlier state of itself.

It's possible that other intelligence is so different than us that it wouldn't recognize us as being alive in the way that it is.

There are just so many unknowns that it's very difficult to reason about. If any of these statements seems suspect, keep in mind that humans held these to be true of chimpanzees just a few decades ago, and other humans a few centuries ago, and we're literally as close as it gets.

> from a society rather than being a single evolved entity

Evolution happens to populations, not entities. I think this is one assumption that's pretty firmly grounded.

It does here; there's nothing that guarantees that it would elsewhere. Taking our biology as a starting point, imagine that red blood cells reproduced independently, and could compete and be upgraded within the organism with no loss of consciousness. There are a bajillion other mechanisms the same thing could happen.

You mean if blood cells were selected by the environment, and thus experienced evolution within their population? I cannot see how 'evolution' is a concept that makes sense outside of populations, is what I'm saying, so I don't think we have any plausible mechanisms whereby complex lifeforms can exist without this process. So I'd rank the epistemic status of "single lifeform that evolved outside of any population of similar" about equal with Russell's teapot.

To some extent, yes, I could imagine external intelligence arising in something that approximates a colony rather than a single organism. There are a bunch of (much simpler) examples of that on Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(biology)

It's not a giant stretch from that to imagine evolution happening within the components of the colony.

yeah, all these pundits have no idea about anything regarding aliens...what do they really know? It's all pure speculation, mostly nonsense..

There is no reason to believe that "Knowledge is a unified whole" and that advancements in technology would parallel advancements in morality. Human history has plenty of examples of technological superiority wiping out relatively peaceful groups.

This blog seems to spew all kinds of over-confident snippets:

"To have a maximally creative society, you have to have freedom, you have to have liberty, and therefore you will have a non-violent society."

Freedom and liberty lead inexorably to... non-violence? That is at least naive. The boundary of individual liberty is where conflict happens. If everyone has unbounded liberty you can expect unbounded conflict.

Then there is this post which does some nearly-worthless math to conclude that life is extremely rare: nav.al/existence. Maybe wrong, maybe right, but a very shallow thought.

My personal favorite take on this is the Dark Forest concept (probably because I just finished reading the book).

It makes sense to me that unless there were some way of ensuring mutually assured destruction, any advanced alien race would simply eliminate any sentient species they became aware of that could possibly become a threat in the future (whether that's hundreds, thousands, or millions of years).

Dunno, say a species starts to inhabit say 10% of a galaxy. They aren't particularly susceptible to losing a single planet and are smart (and advanced enough) to mitigate problems with the pesky upstarts.

Without FTL communications it's likely to be more of an organization than a single government, think NATO for space. Agreements for unified defense for a small fraction of the GNP or similar.

They might for instance require all ships have transponders (like ships and planes do today). Have a self replicating robot sensor that maintains the ideal density of sensors for say 1000 light years around their space (much like the current submarine sensor networks and sats monitors earth and it's oceans). Said sensors would track all ships within range, and any energy expenditures capable of accelerating mass up near the speed of light.

They would of course track their competition, but it would be far from easy for a small upstart to seriously annoy such a civilization. Even for two civilizations that each have 10% of the galaxy it wouldn't make particularly sense for them to go to war, much like today's MAD uses nukes to prevent (so far) WW3.

Not to mention hitting a planet isn't that easy unless it's on a pretty short timescale, any civilization that can launch ships at a decent fraction of light speed could likely change their planets orbital speed by 0.01% if they thought there was likely a extinction level event was heading their way in the next few decades.

Given this, it's also possible that it would take such minimal effort for such an advanced civilization to destroy upstarts, that they would automate it and be done with it.

They could, but it's not a good fit for the dark forest model. Sure occasionally a colony on the edge of your civilization is lost, but that happens. There's much more to be gained by not going to war and the upstarts aren't these lethal unstoppable machines.

I keep telling everyone: those aliens will be looking for fresh jokes. We need to broadcast some memes into the outer space to draw their attention. Broadcast that “Where banana” meme and they will come in flocks

Does Earth even have any resources that are particularly unique? No point in traveling light years (and spending enormous amounts of energy to do so) to pick up stuff you can already get from the closest asteroid belt.

Earth is the only place where humans are.

Well are humans particularly unique/useful on the cosmic scale?

Hello, Torchwood season 3!

And squirrels too, I would imagine.

> "To have a maximally creative society, you have to have freedom, you have to have liberty, and therefore you will have a non-violent society. You’ll have a society that values creativity as an end in itself. ...They can gather all the matter, they can create anything they want, and they can have any reality in VR space that they want."

The post turns a very narrow Whig conception of Earth history into a law of sapient development. I am not sure how to read it except that it is predicated on the galaxy being gene-seeded by a species of Francis Fukuyamas.

Very well put, but Whig historiography seems popular on HN.

I've seen enough of Naval's tweets to know it's not a problem if I don't click further.

  > To have a maximally creative society,
  > you have to have freedom, you have to have
  > liberty, and therefore you will have
  > a non-violent society.

Assuming that in some years (dozens or hundreds, depending on whom you'd ask) the creative work at the frontier of science will be done by AIs, none of the above is required.

It could be the first despot who lays their hand of sufficiently powerful AI, and it's a game over - scientific progress will happen with no regard for "morality" (however defined).

As some say: it's hard speculate on alien sociology, because data is sparse on that.

Someone who grew up living in a tiny case might say those same things about a mythical race of beings who live in a city and drive cars. Assumptions are just that, assumptions.

Well, I don't know. It is really hard to speculate on something you don't know nothing about. There is no data to extrapolate from.

On the other hand: I was watching Foundation on A+ the other day and there humans have colonized the galaxy (and probably killed any aliens). I thought that prospect matched perfectly well with our own history!

>On the other hand: I was watching Foundation on A+ the other day and there humans have colonized the galaxy (and probably killed any aliens).

In Asimov's original stories, humans are the only sapient species in the galaxy, with only one exception (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Alley>).

I wonder if the indigenous peoples of the Americas told themselves the same thing? Or the aboriginal Australians? Or the people of pre-contact Easter Island? I think the fact that those places are now known by the names given to them by their Western European 'discoverers' is a clue to how things went for them.

The core of the argument seems to be that any aliens that have advanced so much in their scientific/technological knowledge that they can travel to visit us will necessarily have also advanced in their moral knowledge such that they will consider it immoral to harm us (and not just consider it immoral, but be able to prevent all parties from doing the immoral things).

It’s an appealing idea, but I don’t see any reason to believe it. The actual conquistadors had more advanced technology (at least military technology) than the people they massacred and conquered. Some Spanish people even wrote at the time that what the conquistadors were doing was immoral, so the lack of moral knowledge didn’t seem to be a problem. What’s special about space travel that requires a civilization to have also acquired the knowledge to both consider genocide bad and prevent all capable parties from committing it?

IMO, it goes a step further than that, though. The motivations for most of the conquistadors was wealth— in the form of gold and new trade routes.

What would an alien civilization who has built the necessary capabilities to get to us want with our resources? Especially when all of them can be mined in far greater quantities along the way.

Did conquistadors ever encounter any indigenous people with no immediate access to valuable resources, and if so, did the conquistadors behave in the way this article predicts aliens to behave? Did they simply desire to teach those indigenous people? I'm no expert, but I tend to doubt it. Conquistadors slaughtered children on some occasions, which doesn't strike me as something motivated entirely by wealth.

One of the primary official motivations in terms of the entire conquest (taking a step back from individual desires of wealth and prosperity) was the Catholicization of the settled lands.

The Conquistadors as a whole were people. People can be good, people can be shitty. And the same can certainly be said for any potential aliens.

But I am not aware of any official campaign which included slaughtering children, or anyone else for that matter. In fact, one of the earliest laws drafted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Burgos) includes an explicit article forbidding it and other forms of maltreatment:

> 24: The Indians are not to be physically or verbally abused for any reason.

And the laws were even expanded to further protect women and children.

Where to even start? How about this declaration, one year after those very nice sounding Laws of Burgos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513

Aliens would visit for entertainment not lame diplomatic tours.

Maybe they crave cat food. Or they crave cats for food.

Maybe they taste like chicken. Like Plarrq Tschapp...

Once we expose our alien conquerers to social media then we'll win.

Is that a given? Maybe they'd prefer a certain wriggling of tentacles instead of thumbs up or down. Or oscillating color patterns and shapes?

knowledge?

i doubt it, we are worse than ants for whoever able to reach us

and if they ever do, they'd do it from home, just like we look at bacterias from the lens of a microscope

Freedom, yeah, right.

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