ktz wrote: ↑November 26th, 2018, 4:48 am
Greta wrote: ↑November 26th, 2018, 3:48 am
Why do people assume that aliens would behave like the barbarous invaders of previous centuries? We are better than that now. Why wouldn't a species thousands of years ahead of us be less morally advanced than we are? Do you assume that humans are the pinnacle of morality in the universe, more moral than any other intelligent species is likely to be, no matter how advanced technologically?
Well, I definitely am not assuming humans are the pinnacle of morality in the universe, and quite the opposite. Do you assume that your current understanding of "more advanced morality" will be equivalent to the understanding of alien species? We believe in the sanctity of life, for example. But perhaps an alien species would be structured more like a colony of ants, with only the queens being worthy of the sanctity of life, and all workers as expendable variants.
They would not then be an intelligent species, which requires bonding between members to reach our level of cohesion and motivation.
ktz wrote: ↑November 26th, 2018, 4:48 am Or perhaps they wouldn't view death as a moral harm at all, since in their view, how could an advanced species be lacking the pheromone-based telepathy and information transfer skills that their species has? They may think, "Can't humans just reproduce and create another identical unit if we kill this one, just like we can?" Or perhaps they would treat us like entomologists do when they encounter a new species -- take some samples and dissect them for their academic and taxonomic purposes.
Nice try again but without the cigar. If the above was the case then the aliens would be stupid, even less intelligent than we are. So then how would they traverse interstellar space? Ultra nerdy ant-people with almost no emotional intelligence?
By the same token, even we relatively simple humans don't assume that a kangaroo with a gammy leg can just hop off to the 'roo doctor. We can tell that they don't have their own doctors in a second, just as aliens would be entirely aware that we don't have pheromone-based telepathy or natural information transfer abilities. They will know we aren't clones, even if they are. The level of awareness needed for sufficient cognition and cooperation to build any kind of space program, let alone an interstellar one, is simply too great for aliens to have such dramatic cognitive shortfalls. Like us, they would have to be all-rounders.
ktz wrote: ↑November 26th, 2018, 4:48 amAlso, consider another example -- what if the "true understanding" is that the universe is a cell within the body of a higher unit. Light, like ATP, is transferred into the cell through stars and out of the cell through black holes, performing biological work along the way. Humans in some respects behave, like Agent Smith's speech from the original Matrix movie, like a virus or a cancerous cell -- with an emphasis on growth, expansion and reproduction without respect to fitting in with nature or even artificial boundaries. Earth could easily be deemed to be a sick and cancerous element of this universal cell, and thus the immune system of the universe may come by -- what ought we do in this case?
I have long disputed this commonly proposed notion. In short, if viruses and cancers are creating the means by which life can reproduce, then we might be a virus or a cancer. Otherwise we are a change agent.
There's a structure in grubs called imaginal discs. They are bumps under the grub's skin which only come into action when the animal starts to pupate. During metamorphosis the imaginal discs start to liquefy the creature's internal organs. Their immune systems identify the discs as a threat and start attacking but are also liquefied by the released enzymes. In time, the pupa's insides are reduced to the discs and pure goo, and the goop is used as a resource by the imaginal discs in transforming to the adult insect's new internal organs. Thus, the insect moves from a consumptive stage to the reproductive stage.
That's exactly what humans are going - turning the rest of nature into a goop which allows humans to create structures to send Earth biota and geology to other worlds. Cancers and viruses only go as far as to turn life into goop; unlike humans they do not rebuild in ever more sophisticated forms, far more so than what came before.