Before anyone gets too cocky, remember that signal strength drops off at the square of distance. Even this tiny blip of range generally pales in comparison to the background radiation. We’re still almost invisible to our own technology at any serious distance.
For a reference, see how absolutely difficult it is to talk to the Voyager probes. The signal they receive is absolutely tiny. (20 billion times smaller than what it takes to run a digital watch, see the Deep Space Network for what does the talking).
If any aliens have heard us, their technology already outstrips ours by orders of magnitude.
what resources do we have that wouldn’t be elsewhere, in likely greater abundance/concentration?
latest estimate is there are 6 billion earth-like planets in our galaxy. and 200+ confirmed temperate rocky planets we have catalogged already out of 2000 ID’d exoplanets.
what resources do we have that wouldn’t be elsewhere, in likely greater abundance/concentration?
complex biochemistry & biodiversity
life forms intelligent enough to serve as slaves
technology*
*Yes, even if the aliens are far more advanced than us, they may still be interested in reviewing our technology. Because technological advancement is not a strictly linear process. Even if they’re far more advanced, we may have a few things that we’ve invented/refined that they haven’t. If I were to place bets, I’d wager on internal combustion engines and firearms as technologies that we may have refined to a greater degree than aliens. Neither of these would be entirely novel technologies, of course. Combusting fuel inside a cylinder to drive a reciprocating piston? Combusting mild explosives inside a barrel to impart kinetic energy into a slug to cause damage at long range? They surely would have invented such things already. But if the chemistry of their home planet is a bit different, or if they invented technologies that replaced these earlier, then they likely wouldn’t have put nearly as much time and effort into refining them over time. Our engines and guns are still probably ‘primitive’ to them on the whole, but they could still learn some things by studying how much we’ve refined and perfected these primitive technologies, as ours may be more powerful and more efficient than any of the ones they ever developed.
There’s a plethora of possibilities here, and as you say, they could be very “resource steered”. On a planet with absolutely massive reserves of easily available iron or aluminium, but basically no calcium oxide, reinforced concrete may never have been invented. Sure, based on the composition of the known universe, that’s highly unlikely, but it’s far from impossible.
I think we tend to forget how our society and technology is shaped by the materials available to us. A planet with a significantly different composition could quickly end up with drastically different technology. Regarding combustion engines: If their atmosphere has significantly less oxygen than ours, they would be so inefficient that they were abandoned early, while if their atmosphere has very high oxygen content the fuels could be regarded as too unsafe to work with, also leading to early abandonment.
If their crust, air, or water has significant acid content, they may never have gotten far with metal working (because everything just corrodes) and developed highly advanced polymers, ceramics, and glasses instead.
point is unlikely imo. Biology is messy and unreliable and beings smart enough to serve as useful slaves, are hard to deal with, especially hyper-social ones like us. And artifical sentience can easily be limited, while biological one needs eugenic efforts and still requires strict controls because of how evolution works. Robots are just easier, once you have figured them out. We are still in the infancy there.
But we have put a bonkers amount of research and development into those two technologies … technologies that are very ‘skippable’ for an alien race that may have developed better alternatives sooner.
Say … if Earth had much smaller reserves of fossil fuels, leading to the reserves running basically dry in the 1960s, then we might have moved on to electric vehicles much sooner. Which means we wouldn’t have put all the research we currently have into crazy refinements like electronically controlled ignition and valve timing, variable geometry turbochargers, oil additives, emissions control systems, etc.
If someone had invented a practical railgun in the mid-1800s, we may never have put so much scientific effort into firearms and may never have developed things like spitzer boattail projectiles, progressive twist rifling, non-corrosive primers, or even smokeless powder.
And maybe it’s just my own biases talking because those are fields I know fairly well, but I do think those are prime candidates for technologies we may have developed and refined more than advanced aliens ever did. And, no, that doesn’t reflect particularly well on us. But other technologies – like, say, polymer plastics or electronics – are things I think aliens would have developed no matter what, and probably would have developed more advanced versions than ours.
There still are other possibilities, though. Perhaps the aliens have a very cooperative and trusting society, so they never developed advanced cryptography and computer security. Perhaps they have better natural healing and self-regeneration capabilities, so they never developed medical technology and prosthetics to our degree. Perhaps they have a cultural/religious aversion to meddling with nature, so they never developed selective breeding, domestication, and gene editing. Perhaps their home planet has extremely stable and predictable weather patterns, so they never bothered with developing meteorology very much. Perhaps their planet has little or no atmospheric oxygen, making fire something they pretty much only see in laboratory settings, so our intensive development of fire detection and suppression technologies are novel.
We don’t have to be unique, we might just be the next stop that has the resources. Maybe they’re supernaturally interstellar and can move on. Maybe they’re barely interstellar and can’t afford to skip. Maybe nearly every earth-like has life and it’s all deemed lower-ranking than this interstellar society. Maybe nearly every earth-like has life but this interstellar species has no anthropomorphic mammalian qualities and they don’t care. There’s no reason to beleive we can negotiate with aliens when humans largely do not respectfully negotiate with other species now. Hell, we don’t negotiate respectfully between ourselves
Soil. Go look around for soil on any other planet. There isn’t any.
There might also be a lot of value in studying alien intelligence. We don’t know because we’ve never met any, but imagine doing so is a serious way to discover something new about how the universe can be understood at all.
Edit: by that, I mean the taxonomy on our phenomenology. There’s nothing ontological about feeling “good” or “bad,” nor “confused,” “scared,” or “horny.” Not even of those “aha” moments when you figure something out.
We have hundreds millions of years worth of systems evolution in our head, creating a damn fine survival engine. Hell, it even helps us feel a little like we understand the universe and how it works. Surely theres not just our way to do that, and aliens could be interested in our way.
(I can’t find the actual scene where they explain how the aliens used the Hitler Berlin Games broadcast because it was the first really high-power transmission, but got as close as I could.)
Before anyone gets too cocky, remember that signal strength drops off at the square of distance. Even this tiny blip of range generally pales in comparison to the background radiation. We’re still almost invisible to our own technology at any serious distance.
For a reference, see how absolutely difficult it is to talk to the Voyager probes. The signal they receive is absolutely tiny. (20 billion times smaller than what it takes to run a digital watch, see the Deep Space Network for what does the talking).
If any aliens have heard us, their technology already outstrips ours by orders of magnitude.
Thanks for the pep talk.
And if their technology outstrips us by that much, would they even notice us?
Notice? Maybe. Care? Lol, no.
If we were the first other species they’d care
Not care like an ant colony a few thousand miles away or not care like an ant colony in my kitchen?
how exactly would you get an ant colony in your kitchen?
Lots of ways
Same same.
Unless they need resources.
what resources do we have that wouldn’t be elsewhere, in likely greater abundance/concentration?
latest estimate is there are 6 billion earth-like planets in our galaxy. and 200+ confirmed temperate rocky planets we have catalogged already out of 2000 ID’d exoplanets.
Our women, duh. Do you not watch movies smh
biomass. more souls for the torment nexus.
complex biochemistry & biodiversity
life forms intelligent enough to serve as slaves
technology*
*Yes, even if the aliens are far more advanced than us, they may still be interested in reviewing our technology. Because technological advancement is not a strictly linear process. Even if they’re far more advanced, we may have a few things that we’ve invented/refined that they haven’t. If I were to place bets, I’d wager on internal combustion engines and firearms as technologies that we may have refined to a greater degree than aliens. Neither of these would be entirely novel technologies, of course. Combusting fuel inside a cylinder to drive a reciprocating piston? Combusting mild explosives inside a barrel to impart kinetic energy into a slug to cause damage at long range? They surely would have invented such things already. But if the chemistry of their home planet is a bit different, or if they invented technologies that replaced these earlier, then they likely wouldn’t have put nearly as much time and effort into refining them over time. Our engines and guns are still probably ‘primitive’ to them on the whole, but they could still learn some things by studying how much we’ve refined and perfected these primitive technologies, as ours may be more powerful and more efficient than any of the ones they ever developed.
There’s a plethora of possibilities here, and as you say, they could be very “resource steered”. On a planet with absolutely massive reserves of easily available iron or aluminium, but basically no calcium oxide, reinforced concrete may never have been invented. Sure, based on the composition of the known universe, that’s highly unlikely, but it’s far from impossible.
I think we tend to forget how our society and technology is shaped by the materials available to us. A planet with a significantly different composition could quickly end up with drastically different technology. Regarding combustion engines: If their atmosphere has significantly less oxygen than ours, they would be so inefficient that they were abandoned early, while if their atmosphere has very high oxygen content the fuels could be regarded as too unsafe to work with, also leading to early abandonment.
If their crust, air, or water has significant acid content, they may never have gotten far with metal working (because everything just corrodes) and developed highly advanced polymers, ceramics, and glasses instead.
The list goes on and on…
Spot the USian. lol.
It’s true, though. And not exactly flattering.
But we have put a bonkers amount of research and development into those two technologies … technologies that are very ‘skippable’ for an alien race that may have developed better alternatives sooner.
Say … if Earth had much smaller reserves of fossil fuels, leading to the reserves running basically dry in the 1960s, then we might have moved on to electric vehicles much sooner. Which means we wouldn’t have put all the research we currently have into crazy refinements like electronically controlled ignition and valve timing, variable geometry turbochargers, oil additives, emissions control systems, etc.
If someone had invented a practical railgun in the mid-1800s, we may never have put so much scientific effort into firearms and may never have developed things like spitzer boattail projectiles, progressive twist rifling, non-corrosive primers, or even smokeless powder.
And maybe it’s just my own biases talking because those are fields I know fairly well, but I do think those are prime candidates for technologies we may have developed and refined more than advanced aliens ever did. And, no, that doesn’t reflect particularly well on us. But other technologies – like, say, polymer plastics or electronics – are things I think aliens would have developed no matter what, and probably would have developed more advanced versions than ours.
There still are other possibilities, though. Perhaps the aliens have a very cooperative and trusting society, so they never developed advanced cryptography and computer security. Perhaps they have better natural healing and self-regeneration capabilities, so they never developed medical technology and prosthetics to our degree. Perhaps they have a cultural/religious aversion to meddling with nature, so they never developed selective breeding, domestication, and gene editing. Perhaps their home planet has extremely stable and predictable weather patterns, so they never bothered with developing meteorology very much. Perhaps their planet has little or no atmospheric oxygen, making fire something they pretty much only see in laboratory settings, so our intensive development of fire detection and suppression technologies are novel.
We don’t have to be unique, we might just be the next stop that has the resources. Maybe they’re supernaturally interstellar and can move on. Maybe they’re barely interstellar and can’t afford to skip. Maybe nearly every earth-like has life and it’s all deemed lower-ranking than this interstellar society. Maybe nearly every earth-like has life but this interstellar species has no anthropomorphic mammalian qualities and they don’t care. There’s no reason to beleive we can negotiate with aliens when humans largely do not respectfully negotiate with other species now. Hell, we don’t negotiate respectfully between ourselves
Soil. Go look around for soil on any other planet. There isn’t any.
There might also be a lot of value in studying alien intelligence. We don’t know because we’ve never met any, but imagine doing so is a serious way to discover something new about how the universe can be understood at all.
Edit: by that, I mean the taxonomy on our phenomenology. There’s nothing ontological about feeling “good” or “bad,” nor “confused,” “scared,” or “horny.” Not even of those “aha” moments when you figure something out.
We have hundreds millions of years worth of systems evolution in our head, creating a damn fine survival engine. Hell, it even helps us feel a little like we understand the universe and how it works. Surely theres not just our way to do that, and aliens could be interested in our way.
… human resources?
all our fears of aliens are just projections of what we do to each other.
hence all the raping, pillaging, and butt probing.
they probably here already.some of us might even be one.
Obligatory Contact
spoiler
(I can’t find the actual scene where they explain how the aliens used the Hitler Berlin Games broadcast because it was the first really high-power transmission, but got as close as I could.)