ET Friend, Foe or doesnt matter

zen said:
Hmmmm.....self annihilation
The obviously one is the dreaded grey goo of nanotechnology and it's natural parallel in viruses and diseases.
As if that wasn't a frightening prospect, we have AI, which means such things are dominant in the galaxy.
And then we get into either prosaic things like running out of certain resources or things like DNA failure and the terrifyingly extreme prospects of them having meddled with quantum entanglement and wiping their world lines from existence. Literally making themselves never have existed.
That latter is probably in efforts to go FTL or.....

Well there is another option.....

At a certain level and faced with the reality of the Universe having an end, either one tries to find ways to preserve said universe.....or you find ways to leave.
Click to expand...

I look at it more broadly than that. Likely the majority of alien intelligences are extinguished because they simply have no way to manipulate their environment in any meaningful way. Self-annihilation is indistinguishable from inability to adapt to changing circumstances.
 
Dilandu said:
uk 75 said:
Others have suggested that we had better hide ourselves because any spacefaring civilisation is likely to treat Earth like Europeans treated natives or domestic animals.
Click to expand...

It make no sense. Europeans were interested in native's lands, resources, ect. Why would spacefaring civilization be interested in Earth?
Click to expand...
DNA recolection of terrestrial lifefroms
 
Dilandu said:
Which is much simpler to obtain by exchanging scientific data with Earth population. Even if aliens did not want to give technical information to Earthmen, the exchange of biological data is perfectly safe & practical.
Click to expand...
That remind me of a nasty short story from 2000AD

Earth is discover by Humanoids Aliens, like Krypton only, that they all have Superpowers like Superman.
Mankind and Aliens exchange biological data on DNA
While the Aliens push for Uplift program to make humans more like them,
Make Earth scientist with help Alien DNA a Virus that exterminate the entire Alien population and take over there empty homeworld...

Here it's arrogant naive Aliens that are Victims.
 
Michel Van said:
Earth is discover by Humanoids Aliens, like Krypton only, that they all have Superpowers like Superman.
Mankind and Aliens exchange biological data on DNA
While the Aliens push for Uplift program to make humans more like them,
Make Earth scientist with help Alien DNA a Virus that exterminate the entire Alien population and take over there empty homeworld...

Here it's arrogant naive Aliens that are Victims.
Click to expand...

To put it simply - impossible. There is no way one alien could knew biology of other better than it itself)
 
Dilandu said:
Michel Van said:
Earth is discover by Humanoids Aliens, like Krypton only, that they all have Superpowers like Superman.
Mankind and Aliens exchange biological data on DNA
While the Aliens push for Uplift program to make humans more like them,
Make Earth scientist with help Alien DNA a Virus that exterminate the entire Alien population and take over there empty homeworld...

Here it's arrogant naive Aliens that are Victims.
Click to expand...

To put it simply - impossible. There is no way one alien could knew biology of other better than it itself)
Click to expand...
Clandestine DNA recolection of terrestrial lifefroms
 
Dilandu said:
Er... no. For thrill they have tournaments & other competition - with specific rules & specific armor (much heavier than combat one) to reduce risk.
Click to expand...
Those were much later medieval developments.

The endemic raiding of the period was a much a function of the satisfaction it brought the mounted bully boys as
anything else. There is no discernible economic, military or other function.
And they commissioned prose, poetry and song on their love of it.

Imputing economic or political motivations for warfare in pre-modern societies is often times
anachronistic and ahistorical. It's clear that the thrill of warfare was a major attraction and motivator.
 
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marauder2048 said:
Imputing economic or political motivations for warfare in pre-modern societies is often times
anachronistic and ahistorical. It's clear that the thrill of warfare was a major attraction and motivator.
Click to expand...

No. The economic of warfare is always first and foremost. Everything else is subjected to the economic. Yes, it could be simplified down to "let's take their cattle and women!", but it's always economic interests first.
 
Here's my possibilities:
1- Religion, its so good they need to put us to the sword or we adopt said religion, and get FLT, and get to give it to the non-believers!!
2 - Holiday resort, we become the waiting on staff.
3 - Trade, in rare items, coffee, Heroine, syrup...they give us trinkets, like better microwaves...
4 - Bored kids, on a gap year. Why did you stand on that ant hill Jonny - 'I dont know mom'......
 
Meh. I doubt we'll find evidence in our lifetime. The distances are too great. Between EM radiation fading into noise over astronomically short distances and the low probability of life reaching a technological state, the odds of having two that are close enough to detect each other, both in distance and in time, are effectively zero.
 
IIRC, there are some indications that life on Earth is really, really weird & varied due to the Moon's tide. Which was a lot higher and more frequent back then. Not 'million monkeys accidentally writing great prose' scenario, but a zillion tidal pools 'ringing the changes', rinse & repeat, rinse & repeat, twice a shorter day...

( ~12 hrs when first evidence of life, stuck at ~21 hrs for much of Pre-Cambrian due atmospheric resonance... )

Per multicellularity: Protists, ranging from slime-mould to mega-seaweed, show what can be done without going full-on Eukaryotic...

Tangential, the disconcerting discovery of mega-viruses, some larger and more complex than bacteria, mean definitions of 'Life, even as we know it', gets kinda fuzzy. Once 'obligate parasites' such as, yes, Covid are classed as 'Alive, sorta', they're better seen as honed-down 'spore-kin'...

Here's food for thought:
phys.org

Discovery boosts theory that life on Earth arose from RNA-DNA mix

Chemists at Scripps Research have made a discovery that supports a surprising new view of how life originated on our planet.
phys.org phys.org

fair-use quote:
Discovery boosts theory that life on Earth arose from RNA-DNA mix
by The Scripps Research Institute

In a study published in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, they demonstrated that a simple compound called diamidophosphate (DAP), which was plausibly present on Earth before life arose, could have chemically knitted together tiny DNA building blocks called deoxynucleosides into strands of primordial DNA.

The finding is the latest in a series of discoveries, over the past several years, pointing to the possibility that DNA and its close chemical cousin RNA arose together as products of similar chemical reactions, and that the first self-replicating molecules—the first life forms on Earth—were mixes of the two.
/
If I've understood it, they reckon chimeral RNA+DNA combinations hit the 'sweet spot' between function and stability...

This suggests that RNA+DNA+DAP offer a fast-track to recognisable biology. I remember just enough chemistry to not rule out exotica such as sulphur / ammonia / silicon etc, but I reckon they're rare by comparison...

Doppler and transit surveys suggest there are many 'super-earths' and 'sub-neptunians' in what we call the 'habitable zone' (HZ), while orbital spacing suggests terrestrial-sized planets are far fewer. Given tidal-pool scenario, I'd suggest a plausible common cradle for life would be tidal-stirred mega-moons.

Corollary may be that our solar system does not appear to tick the necessary boxes for life emergence. Our disproportionately large Moon represents a 'limiting case' of such algorithms...

I follow http://www.recons.org/ as they study local stars, both 'because they're there' and as a population guide to further stuff currently below detection thresholds.

Beyond immediate neighbourhood, 'there is a lot missing'. Not 'Dark-Matter' per-se, just too dim or un-resolved or Sin(i) thwarts doppler.

That aside, I reckon the nearest candidate for tidal-pool life may be tau Ceti. There's a big planet in the HZ, but mass uncertain due poorly constrained Sin(i).

Beyond that ? For every star with a transiting HZ planet, there'll be a dozen without. And of those, most will lack a 'tight' Sin(i) doppler...

Roll on decades of doppler data to figure orbital interactions and progressively constrain masses, until direct-imaging 'Planet Finder' mega-instruments come on-line...
---
I'll not dip even a toe into FTL beyond obligate mention of Alcubierre's possible, yet apparently impracticable loop-hole...
---
How far to nearest 'life' if none at tau Ceti ?
I reckon 30 ~~ 50 LY.
ET ? 100 ~~ 200 LY, perhaps much, much more...
 
Fluff said:
1- Religion, its so good they need to put us to the sword or we adopt said religion, and get FLT, and get to give it to the non-believers!!
Click to expand...

Nah, too many assumptions. First that aliens even have a religion, then that they are stupid enough to be religious zealots even in interstellar age (which is essentially a contradiction; if we assume human history as example, then such fundamentalist regimes as Saudi Arabia could exist only as parasites on the body of mostly agnostic civilization)... Improbable.
 
Dilandu said:
marauder2048 said:
Imputing economic or political motivations for warfare in pre-modern societies is often times
anachronistic and ahistorical. It's clear that the thrill of warfare was a major attraction and motivator.
Click to expand...

No. The economic of warfare is always first and foremost. Everything else is subjected to the economic. Yes, it could be simplified down to "let's take their cattle and women!", but it's always economic interests first.
Click to expand...
A claim completely devoid of evidentiary support for medieval warfare.
Very little medieval raiding (in the West at least) was about slave raiding or livestock plundering.

The Crusades sure as hell were not about economic gain. More about the Church trying to redirect
the thrill seeking combat impulses of the mounted bully boys away from fellow Christians.
 
Viking raids on most of the North Sea coast come to mind. The Vikings colonized large parts of current Russia, Ukraine and Belarus as well. Centuries of opportunistic mayhem, driven by economics of the crudest kind.
I could scan Johan Huizinga's Herfsttij Der Middeleeuwen for other examples of economics driven warfare, but it is getting late.
 
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Arjen said:
Viking raids on most of the North Sea coast come to mind. The Vikings colonized large parts of current Russia, Ukraine and Belarus as well. Centuries of opportunistic mayhem, driven by economics of the crudest kind.
Click to expand...
Being mostly illiterate we can't really hope to know their actual motivations.

That most of the plundered bling seems to be in women's graves has led to the suggestion that
it was sexual competition that drove raiding at least initially.
 
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So. A stag party gone fantastically awry?
Riiiiight.
 
Arjen said:
So. A stag party gone fantastically awry?
Riiiiight.
Click to expand...
Says the guy who threatened to hit us with a book on warfare from 1919.
I mean it's only slightly better than the discredited Marxist theories of warfare.

In dark age Germanic and Scandinavian tribes a whole lot of legitimacy and social status came from war leading.
It's wasn't necessarily about booty.
 
Dear marauder2048,
If you read Professor Brian Fagan's books, you will understand his theory that climate drove human migrations. For example, Dr. Fagan describes the grassy steppes as the "lungs of Central Asia." Every time drought threatened the herds of animals that Mongols, Turks, Huns, Uzbeks, etc. depended upon, they struck Westwards to rustle sheep and horses and cattle from Slavic and Germanic tribes in what is now Eastern Europe. These repeated invasions forced Germanic tribes so far West that they conquered the Western Roman Empire as far as Spain and along the coast of North Africa (modern-day Libya).

A cold snap around 800 A.D. drove Vikings down out of the Scandinavian Mountains to pillage and plunder the coasts of Western Europe. Some Vikings migrated as far as Newfoundland while others seized control of Kiev, Normandy and London (1066 A.D.).

Dr. Fagan's theories are based upon ice cores, tree rings, sediment, etc. and his own research as an oceanographer.
 
riggerrob said:
Dear marauder2048,
If you read Professor Brian Fagan's books, you will understand his theory that climate drove human migrations. For example, Dr. Fagan describes the grassy steppes as the "lungs of Central Asia." Every time drought threatened the herds of animals that Mongols, Turks, Huns, Uzbeks, etc. depended upon, they struck Westwards to rustle sheep and horses and cattle from Slavic and Germanic tribes in what is now Eastern Europe. These repeated invasions forced Germanic tribes so far West that they conquered the Western Roman Empire as far as Spain and along the coast of North Africa (modern-day Libya).

A cold snap around 800 A.D. drove Vikings down out of the Scandinavian Mountains to pillage and plunder the coasts of Western Europe. Some Vikings migrated as far as Newfoundland while others seized control of Kiev, Normandy and London (1066 A.D.).

Dr. Fagan's theories are based upon ice cores, tree rings, sediment, etc. and his own research as an oceanographer.
Click to expand...
Hard to reconcile any of the above with massive expansion in agricultural production in the late Roman and sub-Roman periods.

What you'll find is the nomadic people were in pretty much constant trade with settled agriculturists which is evident
in the fact that loanwords related to settled agriculture start showing up in Hunnish, Turkish, Magyar
and other nomadic languages during this period of agricultural expansion.

Which makes no sense if there's a systems collapse due to climate change.

These "climate change" theories are hardly new and I've seen equally unconvincing theories advanced for the collapse
of the Bronze Age. But they are fashionable particularly in academic circles because...that's what the funders are funding.
 
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Dilandu said:
marauder2048 said:
A claim completely devoid of evidentiary support for medieval warfare.
Very little medieval raiding (in the West at least) was about slave raiding or livestock plundering.
Click to expand...

Ok, let's look at the list of medieval wars:

List of wars: before 1000 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

List of wars: 1000–1499 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

And the absolutely majority of causes are always money/territorial gains/dynasty clashes.
Click to expand...

Battles were not especially common during the Medieval period in question in the West given the inherent risks
of fighting with fragile composite armies; Richard I, the greatest general of the age, fought all of three battles.

The vast majority of warfare that occurred during this period was endemic ravaging/raiding/siege/counterseige.
It's not going to show up in wikipedia; according to your list Angevin expansion never happened.
 
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marauder2048 said:
Battles were not especially common during the Medieval period in question in the West given the inherent risks
of fighting with fragile composite armies; Richard I, the greatest general of the age, fought all of three battles.
Click to expand...

It's a list of WARS, not just battles. Battles fought for a reason.

marauder2048 said:
The vast majority of warfare that occurred during this period was endemic ravaging/raiding/siege/counterseige.
Click to expand...
You just contradicted yourself:

marauder2048 said:
Very little medieval raiding (in the West at least) was about slave raiding or livestock plundering.
Click to expand...
marauder2048 said:
It's clear that the thrill of warfare was a major attraction and motivator.
Click to expand...

What "trill of warfare" could be achieved in SIEGE? The most non-trilling, tedious, and boring method of warfare ever? Unless you claim that digging trenches around enemy walls was an utter joy for medieval warriors, of course :)
 
Dilandu said:
It's a list of WARS, not just battles. Battles fought for a reason.
Click to expand...
It's almost strictly a battle history. Which is the anachronistic, amateur approach to understanding
medieval warfare.

Dilandu said:
You just contradicted yourself:
Click to expand...
How? Ravaging/raiding doesn't imply anything about slave taking or livestock plunder.
Especially since those items tended to hinder the mobility that cavalry relies on.


Dilandu said:
What "trill of warfare" could be achieved in SIEGE?
Click to expand...
Sorties against attempts by the garrison to breakout/defeat the besiegers in detail or defeat of the relief forces.
That's what cavalry was especially useful for.

Look at the Siege of Antioch or Acre for example. Kinda how the Crusader commanders
made a name for themselves.

Sieges in the west also tended to result when coup-de-main by cavalry failed.
And if a defended position couldn't secure quick relief it would tend to surrender in pretty quickly.
 
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Arjen said:
So. A stag party gone fantastically awry?
Riiiiight.
Click to expand...

There is another possible reason for the rise of Viking raids:

Religion.

In this case, though, it's not that the Vikings were trying to spread their faith. Instead, the timing of things is interesting. Basically nobody every heard from the Norse until after 782, when Charlemagne ordered the Massacre of Verden, where 4800 Saxon pagans were executed and their holy site was destroyed. Ol' Chuck wanted to Christianize the Germanic pagans at the point of a sword and *may* have resulted in the Norse/teutonic pagans fighting back. Since only one side's story really got recorded (or at least only one sides records survived), we can't really know; it may well be that a lot of the tales of Norse barbarism were overblown or outright lies, propaganda to excuse the Christians starting the fight in the first place. A few years after the massacre the Vikings showed up at the abbey of Lindisfarne and the "Viking Era" began.
 
Dilandu said:
First that aliens even have a religion, then that they are stupid enough to be religious zealots even in interstellar age
Click to expand...

First: aliens might well have something *akin* to religion without beign quite what we'd call religion. Alines by definiton would think alienly to our way; their "religion" might be entirely rational, or it might be graven into their DNA. They might be animists, pantheists, polytheist or monotheists, or something we've never even considered. For all we know, the nearest starfaring civilization to us might well have a religion that mirrors the 40K worship of the Emperor of Man.

Ain't nuthin' sez that advanced technology will necessarily preclude religious zealotry.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Basically nobody every heard from the Norse until after 782, when Charlemagne ordered the Massacre of Verden
Click to expand...
The problem is the rather extensive pre-Viking deposits of Scandinavian trade goods in Kent and other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

The Viking raids on England were especially disruptive precisely because they seem to have very intimate knowledge of the trade
network and where/how to attack it.

That seaborne traders can quickly convert to piracy/raiding is a pretty recurrent theme in North Sea, Baltic and
Mediterranean naval history.

But I do find the theory of the Viking-age-as-pagan-Scandinavian response to Anglo-Saxon and Caroligian missionary work
to be one of the more interesting ones.
 
marauder2048 said:
Orionblamblam said:
Basically nobody every heard from the Norse until after 782, when Charlemagne ordered the Massacre of Verden
Click to expand...
The problem is the rather extensive pre-Viking deposits of Scandinavian trade goods in Kent and other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
Click to expand...
OK, let me rephrase for improved accuracy: nobody had much heard of the *Vikings* until Charlemagne murdered a bunch of them for their religion. "Norse" were the ethnic/cultural group; "Viking" was the job description.

In a ham-fisted and rather desperate attempt to bring things sorta back to topic, an attempt to draw a hypothetical parallel:
1: The Aliens under their leader Charlemagne decide to convert the pagan humans by massacring a whole bunch of them and torching their holy sites like Jerusalem and Mecca and Las Vegas and Weehauken.
2: The Alien Vikings were massacred by Alien Charlemagne and are lashing out and the dumbass humans just happen to be in their way.
 
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Dilandu said:


marauder2048 said:
Very little medieval raiding (in the West at least) was about slave raiding or livestock plundering.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

Cattle rustling is often a sign of starvation at home. When your tribe starves, you rustle a few cattle/sheep/goats/horses from a neighboring tribe. This got so bad during the 400 ADs that entire Germanic tribes fled ahead of "rustling" Mongols. Large cattle raids may have been the start of modern warfare.
 
riggerrob said:
Dilandu said:


marauder2048 said:
Very little medieval raiding (in the West at least) was about slave raiding or livestock plundering.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

Cattle rustling is often a sign of starvation at home. When your tribe starves, you rustle a few cattle/sheep/goats/horses from a neighboring tribe. This got so bad during the 400 ADs that entire Germanic tribes fled ahead of "rustling" Mongols. Large cattle raids may have been the start of modern warfare.
Click to expand...
Hi Folks

To my knowledge, the Mongol elite were literate people. Did THEY ever say why the Westward expansion began? Any other non-European mention about this?

Regards, harry
 
This has been a very interesting thread and stimulated sometime on t'interweb reading. I think my sloppy language may have sent us down an interesting rabbit hole. Rather than religion I would have been better saying belief system. Such a system appears ,based on one ecology, to be common and not necessarily external. Your dog doesn't believe in God (probably) but it certainly believes that by doing something it'll get a treat. It also understands hierarchy, is it too much to believe that another race decided that performing a certain ceremony to get a good crop was less about that happening, and more about a group wanting an easy life. In a harsh environment there would be much greater pressure on resources and co-operation may have become paramount in ensuring that the group survived. If twenty children are born together they'll all starve but there may be enough surplus for five to survive.
We have a generally clement climate so that pressure is much less, we could afford religion, ships to go exploring and all the rest. Now in the 21st Century we are seeing long-term plans being delayed every year, as domestic issues take up more and more of what's available, be honest, where do you see mankind in a hundred years? We're going to fade away either quickly with a life killer asteroid or slowly as resources are unable to support the current population let alone have anything spare. That's already here BTW often referred to as economic migration.
Why are so many civilizations extinct? Something happened at home and they had nowhere else to go. That's because they've fallen to the same pressures we are doing right now, the very few who take a different route will be the ones with starships.
 
There is the widespread belief that such an extraterrestrial technologically advanced civilization should not be aggressive, but even so they can do us a lot of harm.

It would be unbearable for us to feel we are treated with the same patronizing attitude we deploy towards dolphins and chimpanzees. Just that feeling could destroy our societies, and their opinions on racism, democracy, religion or monarchy might encourage sympathizers and imitators to end the system.
 
Justo Miranda said:
It would be unbearable for us to feel we are treated with the same patronizing attitude we deploy towards dolphins and chimpanzees. Just that feeling could destroy our societies, and their opinions on racism, democracy, religion or monarchy might encourage sympathizers and imitators to end the system.
Click to expand...

Given past history with things like cargo cults, it's reasonable to assume that if humanity was exposed to truly powerful aliens who paid us no attention whatsoever, there'd be major shifts in culture. Such shifts rarely work out well.

Say some Bloody Great Space God comes along and tears Jupiter to bits, stripping it of deuterium and leaving the rest in a slowly condensing cloud, the moons all now orbiting the sun freely. Turns Saturn into a blinking traffic signal, a light easily visible over substantial interstellar distances. Dumps some fabulously radioactive trash out beyond Nepture and then moves on. Doesn't physically harm us, doesn't communicate with us, just refuels on a scale we can't quite deal with. Expect cultural hijinks on Earth.
 
riggerrob said:
Cattle rustling is often a sign of starvation at home. When your tribe starves, you rustle a few cattle/sheep/goats/horses from a neighboring tribe. This got so bad during the 400 ADs that entire Germanic tribes fled ahead of "rustling" Mongols. Large cattle raids may have been the start of modern warfare.
Click to expand...

Leaving aside the fact that this wasn't during the Medieval Period, the preponderance of evidence shows that you didn't have
large migrations of entire tribes but rather you had warrior bands on campaign during this period.


Their native land shows no evidence of disruption to settled sites or any real loss of population density until well after this period.
So that doesn't really suggest that Hun/Mongol/Slavic predations were a strong motivator.

Much like the later Viking period, the motivation for Germanic Tribe expansion during this period is still pretty hotly debated
because the Germanic Tribes were also illiterate.

But IMHO it's reasonable to attribute a common ideological motive to both: prestige, legitimacy and status derived from success
on campaign.
 
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riggerrob said:
Dilandu said:


marauder2048 said:
Very little medieval raiding (in the West at least) was about slave raiding or livestock plundering.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

Cattle rustling is often a sign of starvation at home. When your tribe starves, you rustle a few cattle/sheep/goats/horses from a neighboring tribe. This got so bad during the 400 ADs that entire Germanic tribes fled ahead of "rustling" Mongols. Large cattle raids may have been the start of modern warfare.
Click to expand...
Cattle were/are exchanged as part of marriage. Raising cattle was thus a means to afford a wife, if yours weren't productive enough.
Which makes a cattle raid a part of survival through reproduction.
 

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