I'm sure that after they kill and enslave the vast majority of us, the few remaining survivors will be given crummy reservations where we can live our lives in griding poverty while our alien overlords blame us for not accepting the space zombie god Zork as our lord and saviour.
Think about technological humans coming upon and conquering, say, rain forests. We see resources like land, some top soil, lots of sunlight. So, sometmes we denude the land, chase away all native life, and install cattle (or whatever).
Then later (or simultaneously, elsewhere) we realize what a tragically, stupidly wasteful thing we've just done. The native complexity of the life ... left relatively unmolested ... was of vastly greater value than what we put up instead. A more advanced civilization would have kept a cooler head and pretty much just explored the garden unless it was absolutely necessary destroy it and change the use of the land.
Why would Earth be different to intelligent, space-faring life? Might they not be frugal and greedy and experienced enough to, if they were "here", keep out of site and interfere as little as possible?
There is nothing, nothing here on Earth that couldn't be much more easily mined in the outer solar system, or any other solar system for that matter. The idea of Earth having resources that would make it necessary (or even feasible) to go through all the trouble and mine this planet is simply not viable. In fact, it's horribly dangerous for any alien civilization to come here for this purpose. Pretty much every ounce of material on this planet is contaminated with self-replicating organisms that would wreak havoc on any foreign ecosystem.
There are still some nefarious reasons why an outside civilization may attack us, for example to bolster a slavery-based economy or for religious purposes. There are certainly other reasons we can't even think of yet. But resources? No.
Territorial reasons are also void, since we can't project any meaningful power beyond close earth orbit and we couldn't even mount a serious planetary defense come to think of it. Pretty much anyone could just strip mine the entire solar system - including the Moon - without us being able to do anything about it.
You're neglecting many reasons extra terrestrial life may pose a threat.
The most obvious is they may want our planet, they want to live here, and if they've managed to travel across the vast void of space, wiping out humanity probably won't be particularly challenging for them.
Also, your second point is invalid, territorial reasons are not void. We may pose no threat now, however a technologically superior civilization may conclude we pose a future threat, and so wipe us out now before we can become one.
Also, the old 'dangerous biology from somewhere else!' is almost entirely null and void, organisms are adapted to their environment, they usually pose negligible risk to any other environment already inhabited by biological organisms. This is why, for instance we don't treat organisms from thermal vents as 'oh noes, biohazard material'.
> You're neglecting many reasons extra terrestrial life may pose a threat.
I'm ignoring the ones that are so far in the realm of speculation with today's knowledge they could go either way. For example the argument "they may want to live here" could be valid, but there is just as much reason to believe that any space-faring civilization bent on aggressive expansion should already have significant terraforming capabilities, thereby making uninhabited worlds an easier target. The second issue with this particular argument is the probability that Earth would be a perfect environment for a given alien species: We simply don't know how many earth-like planets are out there. If there are many, the probability of compatibility would be high, but so would the number of less-problematic alternative planets to choose from. If there are few, chances are our world needs to be terraformed anyway in order to make it habitable, meaning there is no reason to choose it for colonization over many other (uninhabited) candidate planets in the first place.
> wiping out humanity probably won't be particularly challenging for them
Nobody said it would be.
> Also, your second point is invalid, territorial reasons are not void. We may pose no threat now, however a technologically superior civilization may conclude we pose a future threat, and so wipe us out now before we can become one.
That's a misunderstanding. I did categorize reasons like this one as spiritual or "other", because it's not rooted in a concrete need to eliminate us right away. Never mind the categorization: yes, that's a possibility I tried to hint at with the paragraph "There are still some nefarious reasons why an outside civilization may attack us [...] There are certainly other reasons we can't even think of yet."
> Also, the old 'dangerous biology from somewhere else!' is almost entirely null and void, organisms are adapted to their environment, they usually pose negligible risk to any other environment already inhabited by biological organisms. This is why, for instance we don't treat organisms from thermal vents as 'oh noes, biohazard material'.
I really dislike your polemic style, so let me answer in kind: the caretakers of countless pacific islands and other isolated places who are currently struggling to protect habitats from invasions of foreign species would probably like to subscribe to your newsletter. Little did they know how unfounded their concerns had been until you came along.
Another point is that once a civilization becomes advanced enough to be capable of intergalactic travel, maybe its resource needs change. The earth is great for us, but who says aliens have any need to visit here.
>>Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
>>Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
>>Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. ==============
I really hope Sagan is right, and I'm a little annoyed that these researchers didn't mention the idea.
Isn't there another possibility that is inline with #1, that Aliens could exist but that the path from them to us can not be traveled by them due to distance and life support constraints, and not knowing where we are located.
Agree, there are also an incredibly huge number of bodies out there to colonize for resources, and the possibility of Aliens coming over to colonize us while we're still stuck on this planet are incredibly remote. Honestly, I think if you do have the tech to get to earth, it's vastly easier to extract your <insert energy source> from the N number of planets out there.
If he's talking about space opera however, that _might_ be possible, but honestly I'm not even sure if we can get off the rock before we destroy ourselves, but yes, that is a possibility.
I feel like you can come up with any type of wild speculation, and if you base your reasoning on the theory of evolution (even in the most hand-wavy way) people will treat it almost like its a scientifically verified truth.
"Evolution operates predictably" do we know this because scientists have a track record of reliably predicting evolutionary outcomes, or do we think this because evolution seems like it should've been predictable standing in 2011 looking back? Don't a lot of unpredictable things look predictable in hindsight?
Furthermore, I can't think of any practical benefit of having done this study. If aliens don't exist, the study was a waste of time. If aliens exist and intend to kill us, we are probably fucked anyway and hence the study was a waste of time. If aliens exist and are nice, the study was wrong and thus a waste of time.
Charlie Stross presents an alternate explanation in the novel 'Accelerando'. Advanced civilizations may evolve at an accelerating pace, so anyone moving away from the central star (and source of energy) won't be able to catch up.
There's also the possibility that signals just merge into the background after a few light years. So they are saying that our radio signals have already travelled a few decades, but they also diffuse under the 1/r^2 law. If there were an identical to Earth, how close would it have to be for SETI to pick up the radio chatter?
It's also possible that aliens use higher-bandwidth optical or above signals in order to communicate. Already as the Earth's networks swell with bandwidth, most of it is coming from optical installations rather than radio links. Even radio is relatively low-powered, so it's unlikely a lot of it is visibly leaking into space.
theory: background radiation is actually alien messages. The sky is completely filled with it.
The reason we can't read it as a signal is not because it has diffused, but because it's compressed so effectively that, for us, it is indistinguishable from noise.
I think this article makes a fantastically gross error, the conclusion is fine, however the authors gloss over the fact that any space-faring life has a high probability of being machine-intelligence, not squishy biological life which 'evolved in the same manner as on earth'. (note, this is already the trend with our space exploration)
All told, an alien civilization that saw us would probably be millions of years ahead of us and likely not need our planet for expansion. Habitable space becomes very large if you can colonize bare bits of rock or construct your own habitats.
