Extraterrestrials: Hope or Threat

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Fluff said:
Hood said:
It could well of been climate, although there remains the puzzle that if Neanderthals and H. sapiens were living fairly closely (assuming they did interbreed) then why didn't they simply copy whatever hunting/food gathering advances H. Sapiens were making? Were they disinclined to follow an alien culture or did they lack comparable intelligence to fully understand their rivals techniques?
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Sounds like they were more British, than German - logically we should copy our alien neighbours, emotionally b**l*cks to that, im not growing weeds, lets go hunt a walking mountain.....
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I am reminded of the fact that Scandinavians settled Greenland several centuries ago, in a warmer period. When the climate become less suitable for agriculture, they simply died out - even though natives carried on living there, sustained by fishing. For some unrecorded reason, the settlers did not adopt fishing.
 
Evolution has been characterised by one biologist I know of as 'survival of the least inadequate'. I'd qualify that as 'persistence and relative prosperity of the less inadequate and somewhat luckier over the medium term, contingently', but that's not exactly catchy. Neanderthals, it appears, had shorter childhoods and higher calorific demands per individual. The former may have led to less flexibility in behaviour in response to a changing climate and less ability to adopt new behaviour from their neighbours. The latter meanwhile would have meant fewer individuals supported over a given area, and as Arjen says, a smaller genetic reservoir. Over time, the seemingly insignificant becomes very significant, as devarts points out. (Note that: high individual consumption and lack of flexibility as likely contributors to extinction...) Melodramatic visions of the struggle for supremacy among races are naive and characteristic of nineteenth century anthropology. The fact is, evolution is a catalogue of extinction and just damned bad luck - and so is human evolution. Human history itself is a catalogue of fallen civilisations and tides of migration washing back and forth - and rather more than a bit of interbreeding. This paper is pretty typical of what's been emerging lately:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001555

White nationalists have been particularly shocked, hilariously - hoping to discover that they are ethnically 'pure' they've been finding from genetic tests that they're anything but. As an old English saying has it, 'Blood's a rover'.
 
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Engineers have been asking 'what engine gives an ISP can propel a payload across many parsecs?' when the question they also have to ask is 'what kind of system has the best chance of operating in deep space for millennia?' In the light of what we are learning about what really happens over such time scales, that is essential - and all the more pressing because a starship is for much of that time an isolated system.

Freeman Dyson has suggested that hopping between the nomad planets we are discovering might be part of a solution.
 
steelpillow said:
White nationalists have been particularly shocked, hilariously - hoping to discover that they are ethnically 'pure' they've been finding from genetic tests that they're anything but. As an old English saying has it, 'Blood's a rover'.
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If any of them are accurate (you can find detractors for almost any of them). I did the 23 and me test. Apparently a Scandinavian ancestor took a sail down to the West Coast of Africa, managed to knock up a local who sailed back to France, through Scotland, and on to the US of A. (Obviously it wasn't one person but over generations.) Also Neanderthal DNA. (A tiny bit over average. They don't specify if everybody they test has it. I'd be curious to see how much Cyplenkov has.)
 

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Rhinocrates said:
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White nationalists have been particularly shocked, hilariously - hoping to discover that they are ethnically 'pure' they've been finding from genetic tests that they're anything but. As an old English saying has it, 'Blood's a rover'.
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And reminds me of the true story of an Austrian couple (whites) giving birth to a Black child.
Genetics can teach human history in correct perspective with humour ...
 
Hood said:
Were they disinclined to follow an alien culture or did they lack comparable intelligence to fully understand their rivals techniques?
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Along with visibly obvious structural differences, Neanders differed in brain structure and their throats and mouths: it is unlikely that they could speak in quite the same way modern humans could. This is not to say that they weren't capable of communicating information just as complex, but they did it *differently.* There's good reason to believe that if your means of communications were different, then your way of *thinking* would be different. For all I know, complex thoughts were transmitted between Neanders with a language of clicks and whistles rather than words. This would make Sapiens/Neander communications difficult at best and would forever lead to a cultural gulf. They would be "alien" in a truly meaningful way. It's not unlikely that they saw us in the same way that humans once thought of mythical creatures like elves and the like (and we thought of them the same... humans have certainly seen other humans as supernatural critters from time to time). And thus it might well have been that when conditions started changing, whether climate or dogs or megafauna extinctions, Neanders simply *wouldn't* adopt Sapiens practices.
 
Arjen said:
Life being life, it will throw you a curve ball. Sometimes with catastrophic effects. Contact with extraterrestrials might just be another curve ball.
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The general assumption always seems to be that when the aliens arrive next Tuesday it will be the "Europeans encountering the Native Americans" or "Europeans encountering the Australians" all over again: the less technologically advanced people will simply collapse under the weight of new diseases or new technology or new ideas and will be crushed, physically or culturally. But the possibility also exists that it'll be "Europeans encounter the Japanese." The *second* time, when the US Navy sailed up to an essentially medieval Japan and said "howdy," the Japanese, rather than collapsing, quickly adopted the tech and many of the ideas of the more advanced West. They surged ahead so quickly that within one human lifetime they were able to take on the Russian empire and lay a smackdown on it. And then they got rather arrogant about the whole thing and got bombed into radioactive gravel. So there are several important lessons there... adopt and adapt, but don't get too full of yourself.

"This is how we've always done it, and by the gods we will not change for these invaders" is a sure way to defeat. "Hey, neato, a phaser gun... how does it work and how do I make more?" is a better approach.
 
Here's FTL-drive, instantaneous communication and free access to the Galactic Library. Now, if you will just part with the recipe for West Malle tripel trappist beer...

That might work.
 
Arjen said:
Here's FTL-drive, instantaneous communication and free access to the Galactic Library. Now, if you will just part with the recipe for West Malle tripel trappist beer...

That might work.
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Hey maybe that is why it didn't work.... I tried with Corona. Must try with a Trappist Beer !
 
I tried home brew but perhaps a better bet would be a matter replicator. Cut out the middle man. Not great, much like I had strained it through two pairs of two week old socks. Oh well, better luck next time....
 
Yes, the aliens may be nice guys. But, as in life, prepare for stormy days ahead. If they don't come in the expected time, spend that money on books you want. For the military, yet another advanced weapon system to keep up with our 'other' fellow human beings who may wake up one day, decide they want our dirt/land and threaten us and so on and so forth.
 
You say Neanderthal, I say surviving live rations from the deep space Aquarium ship Octopussy IV - lost with all tentacles 2M years ago - the rescue ship should be arriving shortly.....
 
Arjen said:
Here's FTL-drive, instantaneous communication and free access to the Galactic Library. Now, if you will just part with the recipe for West Malle tripel trappist beer...

That might work.
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(Ape with AK47) Heh. Be careful with what you wish for. You might just get it.
Maybe give a brochure with the beer recipe?
 
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Fluff said:
You say Neanderthal, I say surviving live rations from the deep space Aquarium ship Octopussy IV - lost with all tentacles 2M years ago - the rescue ship should be arriving shortly.....
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The Neanderthal-Denisovan wars were something else to watch in the night sky. The Denisovans actually won, having shot down more Neanderthals. The rescue effort will be strictly for the Denisovan descendants, this is a prison planet.
 
I know where there are actual, real aliens. I cannot say who or where in case I get relocated to a prison colony, with soft, comfortable wallpaper. I do hear the bathroom paper is a bit rough though...... And shiny.
 
So here we are, the secret is finally out. This whole planet is a prison for undesirable species who have disgraced themselves. No wonder we have been deprived of the genes necessary to become intelligent enough to build interstellar drives, it is all so clear to me now.

My, the dolphins and octopus must have been real bad bunnies to be confined in the maximum-security no-fire zone.
 
The prison analogy is good, but seriously I would say that the prison is our human mind itself.

Watching the Leonard Susskind interview posted above by Sferrin, in which he says that Human mind can understand how works 3 dimensions, then the 4th (time) a bit harder, but then imagining and working with concepts of 5 or 6 dimensions become completely unintuitive to the human mind. And that is why it has to invent "tricks" as Susskind says, that is math, quantum physics and other stuff. Things that our brain is not "wired" to apprehend .
Things that go pass our 3D word that our brain and mind is made to work with.

To finally be capable of imagining thing like black holes before having the confirmation that it really exist, for example.
But it's hard to escape the "prison".

The interviewer has an interesting question: would it be possible to build a quantum computer capable of apprehending more than we do quantum physics ?…

And that joins back my idea of an hypothetical alien civ that would have that capability. I like it...

Anyways… I bought some more beers as you guessed. Still some Coronas…
But I don't like the tête de veau …
 
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I very much agree with the analogy that our greatest prison is our own minds. We will only reach our true potential when we unlock the doors of this prison. A very long time ago when I was fifteen years old and in school, I asked a science teacher if it would not be better to take the air out of an electric motor, remove the drive shaft and take the power from the motor via magnets. I was told not to be so bloody stupid, "If that was possible it would have been done years ago" and that from someone supposed to help us unlock our potential. We were however being educated down to a standard, liable to be employed as building site labourers or if we were lucky, brickies (Brick layers). I got my education after school learning by myself and got to university. Not a bad showing considering where and when I grew up.
 
@Foo Fighter : By mind ppl wrongly understand education. The "Mind" term is used to make as if our present state of evolution has reached a peak. But humans are resourceful and each generation defy the limits reached by the previous (in a normal state of things).
This is why, while dealing with those vast longterm problem, a basis would be to positively assess the fact that we, present searcher, will not be part of the solution. And instead a underlining the strategy to solve it with our present mode of thinking (the great theoricians) we should start with dealing peripheral problem at our immediate reach.

Instead of writing pompous theories that have to evolve every decade, let's scrum it a bit.
 
The electric motor tale highlights how almost all new technologies depend on advances in material science, from crack propagation in flint to pliability of cooked foods and properties of metals, through hydrocarbon fuels, composite materials and refined single-crystal silicon, to the rare earth magnets inconceivable to a certain teacher.
I wonder what inconceivable materials the aliens have/will develop(ed) to build their interstellar transports.
 
Someone once observed that science makes progress one funeral at a time. The point being that scientists famous for developing some theory will usually hang onto it for the rest of their lives, doing their best to block anything that contradicts it. Probably the best-known example of this being the astronomer Fred Hoyle, who actually had an impressive career until he tied his flag to the "steady state" theory of the universe, rather than the "big bang".
 
Apart from my school educating the students to a level where we would be locked into jobs society of the day wanted and needed us to do, my later exposure to the university system proved to me that the system is broken, badly broken. We need to clean up education in order for the species to improve. What level of eduication will the equivalent of a plumber need when employed on a Mars station for example? My experience was that each term we got new 'lecturers' and the first thing they do is sell THEIR book on whatever topic you are on. "Throw all those books away, from now on we work with MY books". This does a lot to sell books for self important oiks but nothing for education. An example which is quite simple is this, they are still teaching the same discredited account of the Battle of Hastings in our schools and will continue to do so, this is a mistake but it is also a mistake to chop and change major aspects of a topic to suit this months monkey at the lecturn. Lets have a common standard and cut the rubbish. Let's improve the species, not one small part of it.
 
Instead of waiting for a top down solution, why not be self taught? I know people with zero degrees who have founded businesses and become artists largely through their own efforts. I'd recommend the intermess/net but books are better in virtually all cases. And if a book needs to be written, write it.

Our species started out as primitives who hadn't figured out the wheel. I think all reading, regardless of age, could help things along. Those old hunter-gatherers had to learn how to cooperate.
 
I take it you read the part where I taught myself enough to get to uni?
 
I have long come to the conclusion that the quality of a school depends on the quality of its head. The governors get the head they deserve. Local authorities do not have a mindset designed for good educational governance. The National Curriculum was created because, although MPs have no better mindset for educational governance, they disagree with the local authorities. However the content of the National Curriculum was created by civil servants and slipped into the legislation signed off by the then Minister, who had just arrived in his office and had not yet even found out where the loos were. The mindset of senior civil servants is - you get the idea. Note that the words "experience" and "teacher" have not yet appeared in the tale, they make a brief cameo only in the bit where they cost money so they are cut back and squashed down. That children survive the system at all is a remarkable credit to their resilience.
 
steelpillow said:
The electric motor tale highlights how almost all new technologies depend on advances in material science, from crack propagation in flint to pliability of cooked foods and properties of metals, through hydrocarbon fuels, composite materials and refined single-crystal silicon, to the rare earth magnets inconceivable to a certain teacher.
I wonder what inconceivable materials the aliens have/will develop(ed) to build their interstellar transports.
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Even if all they've done is manage to mass-produce "bucky mesh/tubes" at will they'd be able to do some crazy things. (Don't believe the hype, we can't do that yet.)
 
edwest said:
Instead of waiting for a top down solution, why not be self taught? I know people with zero degrees who have founded businesses and become artists largely through their own efforts. I'd recommend the intermess/net but books are better in virtually all cases. And if a book needs to be written, write it.
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Depends on the topic.
 
A signal that goes back in time can only be another political speech, they are the only people I know who can do that and usually with dire results for the rest of us. Just an observation nothing nasty intended.
 
bobbymike said:

ScienceAlert : The Best in Science News And Amazing Breakthroughs

The latest science news. Publishing independent, fact-checked reporting on health, space, nature, technology, and the environment.
www.sciencealert.com www.sciencealert.com
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As an electromagnetics test and development engineer of some nine years' experience, including plasma systems, I find that sciencealert.com may be good at alerting you but it is not good at science. It gets its understanding of phase velocity wrong and consequently the bit that appears to propagate faster-than-light is not what they say. To cut a long story short, while phase velocity is a characteristic of a wave, it is distinct from the actual velocity of the wave energy itself. Nothing is actually travelling faster than light in free space or backwards in time, it just appears to be to certain observers.

This is quite distinct from quantum retrocausality, which is a real phenomenon suggested to overcome the ancient conundrums of quantum mechanics but is not expected to surface at a macroscopic or classical scale. Unless you are an alien with technology inconceivable to us, of course...
 
I don't think Myrddin slummed anywhere, being in the Royal court would have been as good as it got. Air conditioned dwellings and all the fleas he could wear.......
 
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