I think that's the point. When you don't know anything about the motivations of an alien race that can easily wipe out our species, why would you take any chances?
Pretend for a moment that I have a Button. The owner of that Button can push it and eliminate every person on the planet besides the people that owner didn't want to kill (friends, family, city, state, country, whatever)
Would you be an advocate of giving that Button to any random person on Earth?
Any race of aliens capable of interstellar travel probably has that Button. So while (I assume) that you wouldn't be okay with giving that Button to any person on Earth -- you'd be okay with having an alien race that we don't understand even a little bit in possession of such a thing.
Well I don't think I said I'd purposefully give such a killer switch to an alien race, I just said we don't know.
We are all aware of the reasons to be pessimist, because of all the books and movies, but there are reasons to be optimist too: advanced technology may come with advanced ethics, for instance.
Oh yeah it's a totally safe assumption that if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and made it all the way to Mars that they won't find us... you know... one planet over, with a century of RF radiating away from our home.
Unless of course you believe they're hiding inside Europa...
Which message are you even responding to? Maybe you should read the thread in order to understand what was being discussed. It had nothing to do with your response.
Hawking has said that we need only look at the history of inter-species relationships on our planet (let alone race relationships) to get a hint of what exopolitics might look like. He goes on to mention that in terms of the search for alien life, we'd do best to keep our heads low.
The strong assumption here is that the is no divide between intelligent and non intelligent life forms. I don't think it is the only view.
I'd rather compare alien encounter with something like Marco Polo going to China: he didn't wish to kill them all, was impressed by some achievement and inventions but was also disgusted by the Chinese diet. Came back and wrote a book, and it was so foreign most readers didn't believe him.
History up until... when? The last 60 years has seen considerable advances in inter-race politics, and it's improving all the time. Why wouldn't exopolitics be an advanced form of this?
I would not deny the possible that, for reasons I don't understand, any species advanced enough to be capable of interstellar travel behaves like a cross between Bono and Peter Singer. But I would not stake the survival of my species on it.
And there is a reason to believe that they probably won't be - they will be the product of Darwinian evolution, just like us, which is really not a very nice thing.
I completely agree on not staking the survival of the species on it, I just think that it's an overly cynical view. Same as I think most people are good people, but I still lock my car because a very few of them are thieves.
except of course, when the "advanced" species wants something that the "lower" species has. What if liquid water is a rarity, and the earth happens to have a lot of it?
It's too late for keeping our heads low. There's a sphere of EM radiation travelling at 3x10^8 m/s that started expanding out from Earth about the time that we turned on the first radio set. It announces our presence to anything capable listening.
After a few light years non focused radio/tv transmissions will drop off into background noise.
Active SETI is what's needed to send a signal to other planets
Any alien lifeform that can reproduce would be subject to Darwinian natural selection. It would tend to grow exponentially, if the resources were available, and if you do the math, the universe ain't big enough for more than one exponentially reproducing species.
If aliens decided to use our resources, they would probably do something like build a Dyson Sphere around the sun, which would mean there would be nothing left for us. It wouldn't matter how big they were, because they would use the resources we need. Look at it this way - we don't notice or mind the presence of insects or flowers, but that doesn't help them when we pave or plow their habitats. A lot of wild things escape us because we aren't that good at harvesting every possible resource, so there's a lot left over, but presumably aliens would be more efficient.
Because of the properties of exponential growth, there would be nothing left over for us. If two organisms double their numbers 250 times, their numbers would roughly equal the number of atoms in the observable universe, which means there would be none left for anyone else.
The only hope would be that they either don't reproduce, which seems unlikely since they would be the survivors of a process of Darwinian evolution just like any other critter, or that they're Space Vegans with a moral code against exterminating other species. We really don't know how they would think.
