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Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

Again the concept of sport imposes human concepts on a hypothetical alien culture.

There's no reason to assume their society would have developed along similar lines. I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.

I don't think we'll ever meet any though as our lifespan is just so short on a universal scale. And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.

Of course according to our current physics understanding it is also impossible but I don't think humanity is very smart yet. But this thing might be right.

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>the concept of sport imposes human concepts on a hypothetical alien culture.

Many animals like cats do it. Its not a human concept but one from superior smarter predators which should occur regardless from what planet they are. The greater the differences in intelligence and power the easier it is to justify cruelty.

I do think it's less likely because to actually travel space they would need to be so technologically advanced that we simply wouldn't be worth fighting or destroying. Maybe studying which could be cruel in its own way.

> And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.

What signs? Projects like LIGO that measure gravitational waves are still measuring cataclysmic collisions of ultra massive bodies. Maybe once the detector is good enough to detect exoplanets and smaller objects we can start drawing some conclusions.

I don’t believe FTL is possible, but on the off chance that it is, we’d be so deep into technology-as-magic territory that any speculation on detectability is totally pointless.

> I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.

What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? What is the maximum amount of aggression in an interstellar space-faring species? Where is humanity on that scale?

A super-aggressive species would likely self-annihilate before possessing sufficient energy to travel interstellar distances... So the jury's still out on us.

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