And apart from the science, the sociological factor
Hi all,
KneD: I think interstellar travel is possible, and we do have the technology for it. There's only one problem: cash. (Quote from the Right Stuff: "You know what this bird makes go up ? Money... No bucks, no Buck Rogers").
John Wheeler, a famous physicist in the 70's, has once said the following: "You can go anywhere!". He based his quote on the combined effect of time dilatation and Lorentz contraction when going at high speeds: if you go fast enough, the distance you have to travel becomes small enough to cross in a human lifetime. The only drawback is that you have to build a giant engine to accelerate to speeds where the relativistic effects become noticeable. And this is exactly where the cash comes in: there is no country willing to cough up the billions of dollars/euros needed to build such a spaceship, and then you'd have to find volunteers that want to pilot the ship (since these people will return at a point where the earth has evolved hundreds of years after they departed). The technology is here, the will is not... Ever wondered why we haven't gone to Mars yet ? Cash (there are some small technical problems, but none of them is not within our technological reach).
Spadge: The reason I personally don't believe in aliens visiting us is the following: here on our planet, every higher evolved species seems to have a tendency to conquer: humans are ofcourse an excellent example, but just look at dogs (setting and defending their territory) or tigers, lions, ... In every group of animals there seems to be a leader, and the group as an entity seems to have an urge to move to new territories and conquer them. For humans the reasons are often dubious (mostly... cash... the irony), for animals it's usually the instinct to survive.
I believe that if aliens would have visited earth, that they probably would enslaved or exterminated us all for their own profit. Does anybody care if they accidently step on a colony of ants, wiping out an entire society ? Would a higher evolved species bother to have pity with our own society (basically a sociological experiment gone horribly wrong) ? Please don't use the classical counterargument "aliens would be friendly, have an higher evolved society that is not out to conquer" or even worse, StarTrek Prime Directive like rules that alien civilizations might have set, since those arguments are completely without ground: only an individual or scientists (in the broad meaning of the word) would be able to distance themselves from personal gain and would merely study a new society for the higher cause of knowledge. But just look at what influence an individual or a scientist has in our own society (*), and you'll probably agree that their cry for knowledge is overwhelmed by the needs of the group. There have been hundreds of sociological experiments studying group behavior of "intelligent" and less intelligent species, and eventually they all come down to this: individuality is lost, a group of individuals acts as an entity ("a group is not the superposition of its individuals"), under the seeing eye of a leader.
(*) Sidenote: by "our society" I mean the dozens of different sociological structures we have on our planet. Even on earth we have very different societies: you have the Eastern, African, ..., Western lifestyle, which can be subdivided into an American (continent) and European lifestyle, and these can all be subdivided into local societies with alot of differences, but some things in common: one being the need to conquer.
You could perhaps use the following counterargument to these claims, for example that aliens would have absolutely no gain from enslaving us or exterminating us (since there's absolutely nothing on this planet that could possibly interest them)... Well, why would they "contact" us in the first place then (as many UFO related sites try to convince us of, usually with the required government conspiracy) ?
You could also argue that our planet or our soup of societies (human and animal) is not a good starting point for discussing alien societies... Well, over here we have a saying that, roughly translated, goes like "Selfknowledge is the beginning of all wisdom". And to be completely honest, our planet is the only reference we have, so any other sociological models would almost certainly be hypothetical.
Anyway, I don't want to sound pessimistic - I do believe there's intelligent life out there - but just sit down one moment and think what exactly the world is all about... I didn't find many good things that would stop us from enslaving a technologically inferior species.
Bye!
Crisp