Messages

Ok, if I'm an irritating prick who'd probably do the movement more harm than good, is it better if I join the nazis?

No, it's better if you spend your time annoying the shit out of the nazis. Call them a bunch of cousin fuckers and ask if their helmets keep out the messages from the government.

Nevertheless, if an alien civilization contacts us, why not give it a go?

[deciphering]

I guess I did not express my meaning clearly.  I meant contact in the sense of them sending a message we are capable of receiving, or in visiting this planet, not in the sense of establishing some sort of meaningful two-way communication.  Any message they sent would be intended for species they believed to be their equals, and I doubt we would qualify.

I have personally made contact with ants, and I still considered them to be ants afterward.  I do not think this contact was a positive experience from the ants point-of-view (if they can be said to have such a thing).

Why do you doubt that we would qualify? If we were capable of receiving, deciphering, and responding to their message, not only are we roughly their technological equals, but they're also thinking like us.

It's the "deciphering" and "responding" parts that I have doubts about.  In Stanislaw Lem's "His Master's Voice", humans receive a message of alien origin.  However, they are unable to make much sense of it; the protagonist hypothesizes that the message was intended for a civilization at a much higher level of development, and that it was intentionally encoded such that unintended recipients would be unable to use the information in the message to harm themselves.

Responding to it was out of the question; we'd need to harness the entire power output of a star to do it.

I have my doubts that two alien civilizations would be able to decipher each other's signals even if they are of roughly equal technological development, and That's because outside of science and math, they're going to have no common frame of reference. It's like that thing where if a lion could speak you still wouldn't understand it

One of the many things that I find fascinating about humans is the weird idea that we must be savages compared to alien civilizations, when we might very well be the most advanced species in the galaxy and that's why we haven't heard anything yet.

If we buy the argument made by that copernican method guy in the next thread over, half the alien civilizations should be ahead of us, and the other half behind.

But matters of probability aside, fantasizing about aliens that are more advanced than us is simply more interesting than the alternative.  We've already met aliens that were less advanced than us.  We generally kill a bunch of them, take their stuff, colonize their land, and then civilize them.  Been there, done that.

That depends on the scale difference. Nowadays we tend to protect the miniscule amount of space tribes still inhabit. Aliens who could colonize us have probably no interest to.

They're probably unable to do so, since they didn't evolve here. Microbes are wrong, food web is wrong, gravity is almost certainly wrong, as is atmospheric composition and pressure, unites they have technologies to mitigate pretty much everything

[especially in your signs]

Show up for events organized by unions, immigrants, LGBTQ+ activists, women's groups, anti-racism organizers, and others. Listen to the organizers and stay on topic, especially in your signs

SO MUCH THIS.

In 2003 - 2005, you'd show up to an antiwar rally, and half the signs would be about PETA.  It was pathetic.

That's what turned me off about Occupy Boston. Once you see a save the whales sign at an anticapitalist rally in the 21st century you're like, ok, this is a shitshow.

Well, there's a certain margin thats acceptable and maybe that example is bad. Like of all the things one can protest about that dont get in the way or distract from each other is ecologism and anti-capitalism.

But besides that ultra specific example, I agree in general.

It's not staying on point, and was the most memorable example. Even for environmentalism, it's way too specific. He could well have made a sign connecting capitalism with environmental degradation and that would at least have been related to the point. The general assemblies were trying to take position on too many issues, there were other signs up that didn't have anything to do with economic reform

One of the many things that I find fascinating about humans is the weird idea that we must be savages compared to alien civilizations, when we might very well be the most advanced species in the galaxy and that's why we haven't heard anything yet.

Yeah.  WE are the Ancient Ones, and when they dig us up, they will develop theories about what noble beings we had to have been.

I want to haunt their bathrooms forever.

It would be a fitting tribute to our kind

Expanding on option 3:  Twilight Zone episode-ish.  We send them cordial invitations to visit, but then it goes all The Hills Have Eyes on them when they do.  Or maybe we just invite them in and describe our history in a really positive tone, like we're all proud of it.  Send them home with a complex.

Expanding on option 3 some more (this is pretty much repost):

"Come on down 'galactic space brothers', Doktor Howl has something for ya."

I seem to remember writing something here once describing humans in a way that would be terrifying to aliens, among which were things like, "they intentionally consume disinfectant for fun" and "they speak to entities that you cannot perceive" with the sense that humans are so convinced of their gods and ghosts that they *must* exist and it's the aliens' deficiency that they can't see or hear them

I just tripped across that thread.  I shall try to dig it up this week.

Nice!

[especially in your signs]

Show up for events organized by unions, immigrants, LGBTQ+ activists, women's groups, anti-racism organizers, and others. Listen to the organizers and stay on topic, especially in your signs

SO MUCH THIS.

In 2003 - 2005, you'd show up to an antiwar rally, and half the signs would be about PETA.  It was pathetic.

That's what turned me off about Occupy Boston. Once you see a save the whales sign at an anticapitalist rally in the 21st century you're like, ok, this is a shitshow.

One of the many things that I find fascinating about humans is the weird idea that we must be savages compared to alien civilizations, when we might very well be the most advanced species in the galaxy and that's why we haven't heard anything yet.

The ants analogy is somewhat of an inept one, I think. Aliens aren't necessarily going to be more advanced than us, especially if they can't manage interstellar travel, and if they're less advanced than us, we're not going to hear from them anyway

This thought experiment is predicated on the aliens contacting us.  I think that, compared to a species that can communicate and/or travel across interstellar distances, we would likely be little more than ants.  And even if they aren't very different from us in terms of intellectual capacity, they would likely view us as a primitive people purely because of the technology gap.  (And interstellar technology is a hell of a gap, compared to where we are now.  Larger than the gap from a stone hammer to a smartphone, I think).

Aliens that can't contact us aren't really in the scope of this thread.

The thought experiment has them contacting us which means they don't consider us like ants

I guess I did not express my meaning clearly.  I meant contact in the sense of them sending a message we are capable of receiving, or in visiting this planet, not in the sense of establishing some sort of meaningful two-way communication.  Any message they sent would be intended for species they believed to be their equals, and I doubt we would qualify.

I have personally made contact with ants, and I still considered them to be ants afterward.  I do not think this contact was a positive experience from the ants point-of-view (if they can be said to have such a thing).

Why do you doubt that we would qualify? If we were capable of receiving, deciphering, and responding to their message, not only are we roughly their technological equals, but they're also thinking like us.

Expanding on option 3:  Twilight Zone episode-ish.  We send them cordial invitations to visit, but then it goes all The Hills Have Eyes on them when they do.  Or maybe we just invite them in and describe our history in a really positive tone, like we're all proud of it.  Send them home with a complex.

Expanding on option 3 some more (this is pretty much repost):

"Come on down 'galactic space brothers', Doktor Howl has something for ya."

I seem to remember writing something here once describing humans in a way that would be terrifying to aliens, among which were things like, "they intentionally consume disinfectant for fun" and "they speak to entities that you cannot perceive" with the sense that humans are so convinced of their gods and ghosts that they *must* exist and it's the aliens' deficiency that they can't see or hear them

The ants analogy is somewhat of an inept one, I think. Aliens aren't necessarily going to be more advanced than us, especially if they can't manage interstellar travel, and if they're less advanced than us, we're not going to hear from them anyway

This thought experiment is predicated on the aliens contacting us.  I think that, compared to a species that can communicate and/or travel across interstellar distances, we would likely be little more than ants.  And even if they aren't very different from us in terms of intellectual capacity, they would likely view us as a primitive people purely because of the technology gap.  (And interstellar technology is a hell of a gap, compared to where we are now.  Larger than the gap from a stone hammer to a smartphone, I think).

Aliens that can't contact us aren't really in the scope of this thread.

The thought experiment has them contacting us which means they don't consider us like ants

Answer.

It's not like they're actually going to come here, what with the vastness of space. If somehow they have managed getting around the speed of light using physics we don't understand yet, they don't have any idea with how they will be able to tolerate Earth's millions of microbial species, since their immune systems didn't evolve to keep Earth microbes in check.

The ants analogy is somewhat of an inept one, I think. Aliens aren't necessarily going to be more advanced than us, especially if they can't manage interstellar travel, and if they're less advanced than us, we're not going to hear from them anyway

That's a rather optimistic estimate

I'm probably going to revisit this thread a few times to assess what I can do