Really hope information like this regarding our meat-industrial complex disappears into obscurity before the aliens visit, or that they at least don't judge us by the biblical "sins of your forefathers"
From the POV of the rest of the galaxy we seem like the xenomorphs in the "Alien" movies.
- Obviously kind of sentient or intelligent, but
- Totally uninterested in communication.
- Recognize others only as resources to consume for reproduction.
- No other goals, just blind reproduction/consumption
- Remake the environment into our own image, no other life forms can live there. (our cities look like scabs or disease crust from orbit.)
- Violent, invasive, destructive, pointless.
So why don't they "take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?" Because that's human-thinking, it literally wouldn't occur to non-human sentients because they're not sick. Instead we're just quarantined (that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox) and they study us and hope for the best. The Martians evacuated Mars when they realized Sir Percival Lowell could see them.
You should read (if you haven't) The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks, particularly the eponymous novella. Summary from the wikipedia page:
"The State of the Art"
At 100 pages long, the title novella makes up the bulk of the book. The novella chronicles a Culture mission to Earth in the late 1970s, and also serves as a prequel of sorts to Use of Weapons by featuring two of that novel's characters, Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Here, Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try to fix the mess the human species has made of it; another Culture citizen, Linter, goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li, who is a Star Trek fan, argues that the whole "incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species" should be eradicated with a micro black hole. The ship Arbitrary has ideas, and a sense of humour, of its own.
'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request
on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for
'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship
Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine
that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic
spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere
beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The
ship thought this was hilarious.'[2]
It's just a thought that occurred to me one day and haunted me ever since.
I've read a couple of Iain Banks' books but he doesn't quite gel for me somehow. These days I don't read fiction because it can't compete with reality. ;-)
Assuming universal ethics onto a human is the subject of whole fields of study. Doing so onto something that isn't even from the same evolutionary tree seems silly. An alien evolved from predators might find vegetarians merely dinner and not worthy of talking to.
Same as the problem with Pascal's Wager: if you don't know the motivations and values of the entity you're trying to please and can't even really narrow the possibilities down much, you might find the "wrong" behavior/belief is actually the one that pleases them, and the "right" one pisses them off.
I disagree, Pascal's Wager deals with the situation where you don't know whether the (omnipotent) entity you're trying to please exists or not.
This comment thread assumes the omnipotent entity (aliens) exists, and so you'd be taking a coin flip as to what behaviour they find pleasing. Pascal's Wager resolves to:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) > (finite gain * non-zero probability of failure)
While this situation is more like:
(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) ~= (infinite gain * non-zero probability of failure).
Pascal's Wager hits precisely the same problem because it's not knowable what might make one eligible for "infinite gain", including not believing in gods. There's no way to differentiate between "finite gain" behavior and "infinite gain" behavior.
Good point of course, however irrational it might be, I can only imagine the scenario where there's a really awkward confrontation between us and the ETs over one of these articles. Will take the bravest of us to start throwing bacon jokes.
- Obviously kind of sentient or intelligent, but
- Totally uninterested in communication.
- Recognize others only as resources to consume for reproduction.
- No other goals, just blind reproduction/consumption
- Remake the environment into our own image, no other life forms can live there. (our cities look like scabs or disease crust from orbit.)
- Violent, invasive, destructive, pointless.
So why don't they "take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?" Because that's human-thinking, it literally wouldn't occur to non-human sentients because they're not sick. Instead we're just quarantined (that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox) and they study us and hope for the best. The Martians evacuated Mars when they realized Sir Percival Lowell could see them.