Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3RTB297 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but then the whole scenario is pretty anthropocentric. It's Star Trek aliens that are bipedial humanoids because they're played by humans and the story is just using aliens to explore the human condition. It's human drama, not inter-species relations.

Real aliens might look at us the way we would look at a raven using tools. It's cute and novel, but not exactly scary. It's either pure hubris, or drama for the sake of a story that doesn't end in the first 2 minutes, to assume that humans with little bottle rockets we can barely use to defend ourselves from rocks in orbit around us would stand a chance against any species advanced enough to physically cross light years of distance to show up here.

View on HN

In Star Trek all species are at an historically identical technology level. Even the Borg. There are no space faring civilisations more than 500 years ahead or behind, even the ones who have been spacefaring for millennia

The reality of a species reaching interstellar travel will be any other species will be dozens of millennia of years ahead or behind at most.

This of course doesn’t allow the allegorys that trek is famous for.

If we spread to an neighbouring star system then we can spread to 50, then I don’t see what will stop them from continuing to spread, to the point the whole galaxy is occupied by future mutations of humans, or solar systems completely drained of resources.

But I don’t see humans having the drive to actually spread beyond Earth before the end of modern human civilisation (be it war, plague, ai or technological regression)

> In Star Trek all species are at an historically identical technology level. Even the Borg. There are no space faring civilisations more than 500 years ahead or behind,

There are several instances where starfleet finds species that are vastly more technically advanced. Q are a notable example. There isn't usually much interaction with them though, sometimes the humans are told outright that they just aren't ready yet.

There are also many instances where they find species more than 500 years behind. As a matter of policy they try not to interfere with those species, but they do research and monitor them sometimes. They are species too far behind technologically to have developed warp technology, but far enough advanced to make it into space on their own and species who weren't advanced enough to make it into space on their own but ended up there anyway. Ornarans started off being a technically advanced pre-warp species, but all that knowledge was lost leaving them flying around in ships they didn't understand enough to make even basic repairs.

> then I don’t see what will stop them from continuing to spread

Speed of light/information, and physical matter.

Once you reach other star systems then you have interstellar travel, even if it takes 50 years, you have proven you can breach the gulf.

In that case you can repeat it using the resources of the next system to hop to the one after that. Might take 500 years before the next wave, might lose half of the systems to internal strife, but it only takes a couple to start growing and due to sore of light these systems would be separate civilisations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com