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by ph0rque 6619 days ago
I think there's another possibility: advanced civilizations exist, but since they're not malevolent (if they were, we wouldn't exist by now), their ethics prohibit "disturbing" us in the slightest bit, including via the knowledge that there are others out there. So they take care to camouflage themselves when they visit.
1 comments
sdurkin 6619 days ago
Why? What possible reason could a benevolent race have for not helping us?
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rms 6619 days ago
They are so far above us that they don't notice our existence.
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sdurkin 6619 days ago
That's absurd. We would notice any intelligent society, no matter how primitive.
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rms 6619 days ago
I guess what I'm trying to say is that advanced civilizations aren't necessarily intelligent or conscious, at least how we define it. Something could be self-replicating on an energy level much beyond us without being particularly observant.
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sdurkin 6618 days ago
Benevolence seems to be something our species is trending toward, and is in someway required as part of the foundation for civilization. As such, I think its reasonable to believe that conscious or any derivatives thereof would be concerned with the welfare of less advanced beings.
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rms 6618 days ago
>Benevolence seems to be something our species is trending toward

Definitely

>and is in someway required as part of the foundation for civilization

I disagree. The foundation of a civilization is energy and how much energy a civilization can use. See the Kardashev scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

I'm trying to say that something could exist that is so fundamentally different from us that it really doesn't care about our existence. Right now, the biggest organisms on earth are fungi. There are some truly enormous fungi. Imagine a fungus or set of fungi that start converting radiation directly to mass for itself to grow. It could expand to surround its local sun. In certain ways, this fungus is more advanced than us, but it would eat us alive without noticing it was doing anything wrong, because it isn't capable of having the thought required to have morality.

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ph0rque 6619 days ago
They've observed how we treat each other, and don't want to give us enough power to somehow destroy or harm them?
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