What if we're the North Sentinel Island ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island ) of the universe? The universe is a really really big place and there are probably plenty of habitable planets, especially with terraforming. We're probably just a little remote violent oddity. The most interesting thing about the earth is probably our DNA. They can get that easily without destroying us.
North Senetinel Island is a anachronism. Much more likely to happen is Hispaniola.
From De Casas: Destruction of the Indies
The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention'd, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv'd, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher'd and harass'd with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred. Nay the Isle of Cuba, which extends as far, as Valledolid in Spain is distant from Rome, lies now uncultivated, like a Desert, and intomb'd in its own Ruins. You may also find the Isles of St. John, and Jamaica, both large and fruitful places, unpeopled and desolate. The Lucayan Islands on the North Side, adjacent to Hispaniola and Cuba, which are Sixty in number, or thereabout, together with with those, vulgarly known by the name of the Gigantic Isles, and others, the most infertile whereof, exceeds the Royal Garden of Sevil in fruitfulness, a most Healthful and pleasant Climat, is now laid waste and uninhabited; and whereas, when the Spaniards first arriv'd here, about Five Hundred Thousand Men dwelt in it, they are now cut off, some by slaughter, and others ravished away by Force and Violence, to work in the Mines of Hispanioloa, which was destitute of Native Inhabitants
Whenever "explorers" from distant parts have "discovered" new areas, throughout history the indigenous peoples get badly screwed over. See the history of post-Columbus native Americans. Look at India and China to see what even very advanced civilizations with large populations still get screwed by the invaders.
Well obviously the Indian government could exterminate the entire indigenous population of North Sentinel Island in an afternoon if they decided that was a good idea. They don't though because we live in an era of enormous plenty and the resources of the island are relatively modest vs the value of just leaving the place alone as a tourist oddity.
Assuming that the resources of the universe are vast, earth will be more valuable as a DNA resource than for gold and slaves. Up until the industrial revolution, the rapidly growing populations of Europe were straining against their resources and were always looking for new gold and slaves plunder to sustain themselves.
A large portion of that population loss in the Americas was due to diseases brought from Europe.
But those diseases went through evolution in an environment that's similar to America -- it had the same atmosphere, similar soil, plant life, etc. Even the hosts were similar.
But an alien virus would have none of those things. Chances are it would find earth inhospitable and be completely unable to survive much less spread.
It would be truly remarkable if an alien virus found earth/humans compatible.
Or, we find out that DNA has a common base among the galaxy thanks to panspermia, and that the equation for life is somewhat common, and those galactic viruses work just fine among the flora or fauna of Earth.
There were several waves of smallpox, influenza, measles, mumps, typhus, cholera, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, yellow fever, whooping cough, etc., which ran rampant through the Americas, often simultaneously ripping through the same communities.
I don’t know what native virus you are referring to (citation?), but it is estimated that in many parts of the Americas population collapsed by about 90% in the course of a century or two (sometimes faster), and the scholarly consensus is that this was largely due to Eurasian diseases to which people had no immunity.
The societal collapse brought on by disease also led to internecine war, helping depopulation along. And obviously the numerous instances of genocidal slaughter by Europeans and forced migration later contributed to the final native depopulation of many areas.
The universe has been around for billions of years. Humans are a flash in the pan. We're gnats. Pond scum. Fungus. We're no more interesting than your average gas cloud. We're like tree bark.
I really love a good sci-fi movie about aliens, but the vast majority of them have humans and earth as being something special. To me that looks preposterously unlikely.
Think so? My guess is that we are only sentient in our minds. Compared to a species still around that reached our level a billion years ago, I don't think we would even register as conscious.
It's all speculative, of course, but I tend to think we vastly overestimate how special, unique, important, intelligent, and so forth we actually are. The numbers just don't look like they support it.
An ant is objectively an inferior lifeform compared to us. Smaller, weaker, less intelligent.
But there are still human beings that dedicate their life to study them. And we find unique and interesting features in them. I don't think this would be different if a more developed life form would study.
Supposing, that this life form still has some curiosity left. But if they lived so long that everything is boring to them, it's not our fault that they wouldn't find us interesting. :-)
Inferiority is an inherently subjective notion. That it is inferior to be smaller, weaker and less intelligent reflects your values, not some sort of universal score sheet.
No, but valuation wasn't what OP and I were getting at. OP said "We're no more interesting than your average gas cloud." and that we are nothing special.
I disagreed and said that even in the eye of much more powerful or advanced species, we would still be considered a curiosity.
At least to some. It's entirely possible that we could be blown away by the next being. But at least some members of the same species would regret that.
Do you know that the Sentinel Islanders aren't as crazy as they seem? The vast majority of hunter-gatherer societies are quickly wiped out when agricultural ones show up. This isn't even something that only happened in the distant past. Even today, in Brazil, farmers massacre natives for their land.
Why do we need so much land? Don't we have enough? But our numbers have grown exponentially. And even though we don't need that much land at the moment, there's still some small positive economic value to more land. And so the natives lose.
A similar thing applies to civilizations. The universe only seems big until you factor in exponential growth. Even if humanity could travel a fraction of the speed of light. Give us a few hundred thousand years, and we would settle and overpopulate every planet in this galaxy. And be on our way to the next one.
There are other reasons aliens would want to stop us. If they value human life at all, they might have completely alien moral systems and want to impose them on us. Human society is pretty awful with lots of suffering. No moral aliens would leave us alone to our own devices. But do we really want to get stuck being ruled over by them forever with no autonomy?
If they don't value human life, we are really screwed. In the future we could expand and advance and become a threat to them. It costs them nothing to exterminate us and prevents any future conflicts or costs we might cause them. So why not?
If ETs are able to travel around the Galaxy at faster than light speed that means that they have have the ability to harness absolutely enormous amounts of energy. Probably each Extra Terrestrial ship has multiple Tsar bombs worth of energy at their disposal. Their society must have developed some sort of maturity to make war and violence obsolete, much like World War has become less prevalent with the advent of the atomic age or they would have annihilated themselves early on.
Totally agree on this point. I mean, if we could as humans as a race come together and figure out how to live on this planet together, imagine what we could do.
Also good point to remember is maybe the aliens are nothing like we imagine they are, maybe they are already here and we just as a agreed collective don't yet have the capacity to sense this. There are many stories of people communicating with ETs already, if people did some research and had the capacity to understand more of the spiritual nature of things we would already see this on a global scale I believe.
> Their society must have developed some sort of maturity to make war and violence obsolete
Why "must?" That just sounds like an assumption based on what you want to be true. It is just as likely that a civilization you describe exists but has the exact same type and frequency of internal squabbles that humans do.
With that much power, "internal squabbles" equals mutual annihilation. Just imagine if terrorists could easily make their own thermonuclear weapon etc.
Humans would do all of those things. Maybe aliens would, too, because they respond to the same incentives and threats, but perhaps a prerequisite for cosmic fecundity is a more mature outlook.
I mean, a human could spend their entire life locating and exterminating ant colonies, and ants would fear that about us if they could conceive it, but we generally have better things to do with our time. (Of course if we're in the way...)
There is 0 reason to believe that evolution is in any way whatsoever unique to Earth based species. And if it's not then it's an extremely safe assumption that every other species that's developed, or will develop, is going to have a similar background.
Things that overcome and eat other things stay alive to reproduce and propagate. Those that can't, cease to exist. This very fundamental aspect of nature implies that there will always exist some selection bias towards aggressive predatory behavior among the most successful products of evolution. It's interesting to consider that the 'morality' of herbivore vs carnivore is an entirely human conception. Go back far enough and humans and grass share a common ancestor. We just evolved in different directions.
In any case the development of higher intelligence enables us to overcome and suppress or evolutionary instincts. But I imagine these instincts will always be a part of us. I see no reasonable way a highly advanced species could have ever evolved without them. And while the media and other players sensationalize violence, the reality is we live in what is likely the single most peaceful era of civilization - ever.
Try to imagine that in WW2 around 70 million people died from a world population of 2.3 billion. That's more than 3% of the entire world's population killed. Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed. Since we suck at understanding such huge numbers. Let's convert that in 9/11s. That would be more than 77,000 9/11 scale events. In other words imagine we had a 9/11 scale event every single day for 211 years. That's how many people died in WW2. Today we in the developed western world freak out about 60 people dying, and a single 9/11 is a world shaking event. And go back to things like the Mongol invasions - they were on the order of 300% more deadly the world's population than WW2 was. One can only imagine the actions within prehistory among isolated populations. Perspective.
>Today we in the developed western world freak out about 60 people dying, and a single 9/11 is a world shaking event.
Keyword being Western - if the killings don't happen there they somehow don't count. Around 400,000 people died in Syrian war - that's 2% dead count out of 20 million of pre-war population; pretty close to what you mentioned is WW2 level.
>Scaled up to present day population that would be more than 231,000,000 killed
The fact that we by random chance managed to avoid a global war in the last 70 years doesn't mean that when it finally hits the death tally won't be 231,000,000. In fact, I'd say it's going to be much higher.
> Things that overcome and eat other things stay alive to reproduce and propagate.
It is our assumption that all "life" has to "eat" and "reproduce."
Life could get energy from stars or other ambient sources.
Life could be an entire "species" consisting of just a single individual.
Life could be an species whose members are spontaneously "born" or "created" at a single source, without requiring any action from each other.
Life could come in the form of a ..thing.. that converts other unrelated living creatures to become a part of it. Say, something like a virus, that imparts intelligence and a common goal to any organism it "infects."
Nothing at all will come of this. There is practically zero chance of ever detecting a signal from the one or two other intelligent species that might be in our galaxy.
But your comment sounds like you are concerned about broadcasting. The chinese (like SETI) are just listening. Of course, we're all broadcasting all the time but, so what? What do we have to fear from being heard?
Let's say 200 billion (suitable) stars. Let's say 20% of them have planets around them. If our own system is in any way typical, we can say that about 2 of those planets can sustain life. Let's say life develops maybe 30% of the time and 'intelligence' 5% of that (I think this is extremely generous). Then let's say technology (meaning they can broadcast radio signals) develops out of 10% of those. The last part is pretty crucial, the "lifetime" of these civilizations. What it means for this discussion is the amount of time they are broadcasting unencrypted radio signals. Let's give them 500 years (again, I think this is really generous). That should give us 6 civilizations in the galaxy at any given time. Sorry but you're just not going to find them.
What if one of these civilizations is an outlier that manages to hang around longer and spread out around the galaxy. Or are you saying that is simply not possible?
What if monkeys fly out of my butt? Anything is possible. I'm saying it's not likely.
It's not likely that any civilization will reach such a technological level.
If one does, it's not likely that spreading around the galaxy colonizing planets will be a priority.
If one does that anyway, it's not likely that they will use unencrypted radio signals for communications.
I suspect that any theoretical aliens which would have hostile intentions towards us and could get here to inflict them is going to be able to find us even if we don't go out of our way to make our presence known.
Why would any aliens have any intentions toward us? Why should they care at all? The only resources we have on earth that aren't more easily acquired in space are sitcoms and reality shows.
Anthropomorphising ET is a guess at best. Becoming interstellar likely requires putting your differences aside as a species. You can hardly pour the majority of your resources into survival (space-faring) when you are instead pouring them into extinction (war and pollution).
One could've argued that making seafaring voyages in the 1600s requires putting your differences aside. But instead we had a bunch of barbarians going around extinguishing and enslaving the world =P
Just playing devils advocate, but another scenario might be if one side of a warring species annihilates the other, and then takes off into space. What if the Nazis won WW2, and started a space program in the 60s? There could be an alien equivalent of the Third Reich out there colonizing worlds.
War and annihilation is not a sustainable endeavour. Without an enemy and without constant war the Third Reich would likely have fallen apart pretty quickly. It wasn't exactly a utopia and their economy mostly was a large Ponzi scheme predicated on constant war.
Even arguably less aggressive and more successful (in terms of longevity) entities such as the British or the Spanish Empire weren't particularly long-lived on a large timescale.
Except that the same logic works the other way- what do they have that we would want to mess with them over?
The universe is a big place. Looking around, it seems that the endless-exponential-expansion route hasn’t proven popular with anyone yet. There may just be enough to go around.
It doesn't need to be rational. All it takes is one sufficiently powerful species to decide "better safe than sorry" and lobbing suitable planet killers at any new upstarts they notice.
Colonization has ruined quite a few people's days, as have poaching, and there have been literal zoos with humans as attractions. An alien species could also have motives that are entirely unrelatable, or even simply cause us harm due to carelessness or mistake. Besides, we don't need to conclusively enumerate each and every reason that someone might have for ruining our party to recognize that it's possible.
Populations expand exponentially. To keep growing the population will eventually need resources in space. This leads to more exponential growth and then we are competing for the same space resources as the aliens in a few centuries time. If the aliens sent a medium sized asteroid to impact earth now they would hinder our progress significantly, allowing them the opportunity to get the resources first.
Populations can not grow exponentially for a long time, the volume of space you can colonize only grows with the third power of time given that you are limited to the speed of light. And within galaxies it's more like the second power due to the flat shape of galaxies.
With our current rate of population growth, I think about one or two percent per year if I remember correctly, we would only make it a few percent across the Milkyway before running out of resources even if we could travel at the speed of light. You can search my comment history, there is somewhere a more detailed comment with all the numbers and assumptions.
Bottom line is, if you want to colonialize the universe, you either need a population growth rate very close to zero and a lot of patience or you have to beat Einstein.
This is an amazing observation. It's not terribly difficult to work out the numbers once it's been pointed out, but I'm not sure if I'd have come up with it on my own.
For others who like this sort of thing, I highly recommend Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel:
Or growth and then collapses all over the place. If humans colonize the galaxy (universe is really hard), it will likely look like a growing amoeba than an expanding sphere.
Our current rate of population growth is declining, and projected to become negative (for a while) towards the end of this century, before resuming growth at a much slower pace.
Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but assuming the current rate of population growth is relatively meaningless seeing as no reasonable model assumes current growth rates will continue (as it's been steadily changing).
I only used our current population growth rate not because I expect it to remain unchanged but because it is on the order of one percent which is towards the lower end of growth rates one will encounter when looking at all kinds of different things and systems. The important point is that this relatively small growth rate is already way too large. I don't know what you were exactly thinking of when you wrote »[...] before resuming growth at a much slower pace [...]« but maybe one-tenth of a percent?
Unfortunately that is still way too large, to colonialize the Milky Way before hitting resource limits you need it down at one one-thousandth of a percent or so, for the entire universe you need to decrease it several orders of magnitude more. At least on average, if you could use something like cryostasis while travelling through the vast emptiness between stars you could afford times with higher growth rates.
We'll resume growth, at least for some time, largely because it will take longer for everyone to get down below reproductive levels, and for life expectancy to level off.
The first drop basically comes because we have a massive population bulge in the post-war years. The growth the resumes because the drop in population growth worldwide is not yet enough to offset the steady growth in life expectancy in the third world.
But longer term that is likely to end up as another bulge.
In terms of developed countries, most have birth rates below replacement.
Once life expectancy growth worldwide has flattened out enough, and birth rates have declined to e.g. European levels, we can expect the bigger problem to be preventing terminal decline. This map [1] is quite interesting. The blue/light blue parts represents birth rates below replacement. In 2015 France too was below replacement.
About half of the worlds population lived in countries with sub-replacement birth rates as of 2010, and despite the fact that the population growth tilts that towards high population growth countries on a continuous basis, the birth rates of those countries is dropping pretty much across the board, meaning it is likely that the proportion of the worlds population living in sub-replacement countries will actually increase.
E.g. India is expected to drop below replacement this century too, and actually experience population decline (decline lags birth rates, of course, because you need to wait for the generation that's dying off to be larger than the one being born).
So I don't think population growth is a realistic concern when it comes to interstellar exploration. On the contrary.
Our population isn't expanding exponentially. World population grew at 2%/yr in 1960, 1.55% in 1995, 1.25% in 2005, 1.18% in 2015, 1.14% in 2016, and 1.12% this year.
Soon every person we send off the planet will just reduce earth population by 1. We'll be lucky if people reproduce enough to keep the population steady.
It's very interesting actually to see how perceptions lag reality in this respect. People are still largely holding on to the idea that we're headed towards massive overpopulation thanks to exponential growth.
But current projections is a population in the region of 10bn first by the end of the century, with some projections suggesting population decline from as early as 2040 (though that's an outlier). More scenarios predict a peak in the 2070-2100 timeframe; some predict continued, but much reduced growth beyond 2100. As far as I'm aware, though, all reasonable scenarios suggest that the rate of growth will at the very least continue to slow for a long time.
That looks pretty exponential to me. If it no longer looks exponential when looking at the last few years perhaps it's because we're running into resource limits.
s-curves look exponential when you're in the middle of the curve.
It's true that animal populations peak (s-curve) when they hit resource limits (ie: carrying capacity of the environment). But our population has slowed because of education (in particular, education of women)... it's an effect thats been repeated all over the world.
If it were resource limits, we would see things like famine (killing the excess members of the population), rampant disease (which becomes easier to spread when people are closer to each other), etc. We're definitely not there in the developed world; and the 3rd world isnt there either, since they have some of the highest reproductive rates.
We aren't anywhere near anything resembling competition for space resources.
If we could harness all the resources available around the solar system and beyond, we wouldn't have an energy crisis at all. The problem is actually getting those resources transported. If an alien had means to mine and transport resources, they'd probably have found plenty of other richer resources besides Earth.
More seriously, although those stories are a lot of fun, (and also check out his short stories which I felt are better):
It is very unlikely that there is anything out there that is capable of actually coming here, for the same reason it's very unlikely we can ever leave the solar system. A radio "conversation" over many generations - if that's even possible - would be the high point of our civilisation.
Agreed, unless we haven't gotten a hold of all the physics necessary for trips on that scale. That said, I do think it's overly pessimistic to think that aliens would mistreat us as a matter of course - obviously we've done a lot of that to each other in the past, but I'd like to think that most modern societies (say, Norway, to pick a random example) wouldn't just casually enslave and kill a new tribe. We're at a point in our history where even the idea of colonizing is anathema (not that there isn't plenty of fallout from before that was true...). So I don't have a hard time imagining a species that's thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years ahead of us would have a very different take on interacting with other sentient beings (assuming we make that cut for them).
To add to that point, most colonisation has been about resource capture.If you have technology for inter galactic travel I imagine resource access of the universe becomes abundant. But who knows, maybe we make good pets.
> To add to that point, most colonisation has been about resource capture.
I think you're over-extrapolating. One obvious difference is that colonizers have been exposed to other humans of all kinds, even before colonization. There was nothing about (e.g.) Native American society that you couldn't find in Eurasia + Africa that's even remotely on the same scale as the differences between us and a theoretical alien civilization.
Look no further than the current political climate of the United States, no matter how noble a society there will always be a segment that will act irrationally out of fear and ignorance. That same segment of a superior alien race could easily act to destroy us.
Well, that's certainly about interfering with and exploiting, but not what you'd traditionally call 'colonization' - that is, there aren't masses of US citizens moving in to displace Afghans or Iraqis.
Is there any literature that digs deeply into this subject? Ideally by someone far smarter than the average smart person? I've been meaning to read up on this subject...
Well the original post refers to the Three Body Problem series which is a rather interesting take on the topic. The English translations have now been available for a couple of years.
Isn't it primarily for receiving signals rather than sending them? Of course if we ever do receive a convincing signal that appears to come from extraterrestrials, it is nearly unthinkable that no one would send anything back in that direction, so I see your point.
No, we haven't been. Of the signals that escape the ionosphere, all are indistinguishable from background noise by the time they reach Alpha Centauri. We're only really broadcasting within the solar system and a little beyond.
Even if we had been broadcasting a very strong signal from the first radio experiment in all directions into space, that would still be less than 0.1% of the galaxy.
We're fine. Aliens aren't watching The Honeymooners.
