Aliens: Good or Bad?

[NorCal Dave]

The possible nature of alien life came up in a thread about AARO, and while I wanted to chime in and hear other people's thoughts, it seemed way off topic. So, I thought it would make a fun thread for discussion, though it might end up in chitchat.

The premise is obviously flawed from the beginning, as we're anthropomorphizing aliens and then applying some sort of moral arrangement to them. Even good or bad is relative to the us or the aliens, but I'll get rolling with the really bad aliens. They're not coming to be friends, they're out to destroy all intelligent life in the universe.

I'm taking about the Dark Forest theory. Some considered it an answer to the Fermi Paradox:

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.[1][2] As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."[3]

Content from External Source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

The notion being that the universe is so vast other intelligent life must have evolved like we did and if so, why haven't we heard from them? The Dark Forest theory suggests there are other Intelligent civilizations out there, they're just keeping quite.

Astronomer David Brin first suggested this idea in 1983 and SciFi author Greg Bear worked a version of it into his 1987 novel The Forge of God. It was Chinese SciFi author Liu Cixin that coined the phrase The Dark Forest in his 2008 novel of the same name and follow up to The 3 Body Problem.

The basic concept is that the universe is ultimately finite assuming FTL travel or finite in one's reachable corner of the universe with sub-light speed travel. Therefore, there is a finite number of resources available to any intelligent civilization in the universe. If there are other intelligent civilizations, they are now in competition for those finite resources. If there are lots of intelligent civilizations, the problem gets worse. So, the logical solution if you're an intelligent civilization, is to wipe out any other civilization you become aware of, preferably before they achieve a technological level that gives them the ability to wipe you out. Staying quite doesn't let the others find you.

In Bear's The Forge of God, an automated spaceship arrives in Earth orbit and proceeds to set about destroying the Earth for no apparent reason. Bear doesn't dive to deeply into the theory, but does offer this:

"There once was an infant lost in the woods, crying its heart out, wondering why no one answered, drawing down the wolves."[17] One of the characters explains, "We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why. Planetisms that don't know enough to keep quiet, get eaten."[18]

Content from External Source

Bear hints that whatever civilization made the planet destroying robot ship, may be long gone and they may have never heard signals from Earth, but their automated killer robot ship did. Better safe than sorry.

Cixin takes the theory to the next level with an explanation of sorts:

1. "Suppose a vast number of civilizations distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of observable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society."[19] (based on the Drake equation)[16]
2. Suppose that survival is the primary need of a civilization.
3. Suppose that civilizations continuously expand over time, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.

The only logical conclusion from the acceptance of these axioms, Ye says, is that any intelligent life in the universe will be pitted against all other life in the struggle for survival.[19][8]

Content from External Source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

It's a pretty bleak idea, but one can see the logic in it. Cixin even has the humans resorting to it after nearly being annihilated. After a disastrous first encounter with the aliens a few Earth starships get away ala Battlestar Galactica, and they immediately start trying to eliminate their fellow human crew members so they can take the resources.

Of course, this is projecting the worst of human tribalism and resource competition onto unknown alien intelligence, but as humans were stuck imagining aliens in somewhat human terms that we can understand. Including hopefully, benevolent space brothers.

I'm not saying the theory is right, but it is one possible way to look at aliens.

 

[RTM]

There seems to be a bit of “quiet aliens of the gaps” about it. Not saying it’s impossible but to me it’s like when people extrapolate from very little evidence of paranormal phenomena into a wider “myhtos”, it seems more based on lack of evidence than evidence.

 

[Mendel]

Societies that think like "bad aliens" are liable to have so many internal problems arising from this mindset that they're going to have a hard time executing a galaxy-wide project.

 

[AllTheQuestionsToday]

(Before anyone asks, I couldn't begin to dig up links for all this--just my aggregate memories from a lot of reading and interviews.)

Given that various actors 'in the know' with claimed leaks have asserted at different points (and with surprising consistency over time) that both "local" to our universe NHI are a thing (e.g. aliens from another planet) as well as "ones from outside of our universe" in different forms, there could very well be a multitude of things happening.

Interstellar or intergalactic or interdimensional or interuniversal societies. Rogue actors. All sorts of things. One of the more persistent 'leaked' things is the implied alliance, union, federation or whatever it may be. Claims the USA knows of more than 50+ unique species, but that could mean any number of things. One single species could have as many branches or cultures as we have nations. We could have the equivalents of the Trek Federation, a benevolent and helpful space society out there, as well things like the Star Wars Republic where it's just a loose political alliance of individual actor cultures. There could be lone "good" groups by our moral and ethical point of view, and total piece of shit evil ones by our same standards.

If you go with multiversal stuff (e.g. many words, alternate branching realities, whatever) that some imply is a factor beyond "incomprehensible" weird dimensional/higher dimensional aliens, there well may be "humans" from divergent evolutionary/reality histories or timelines (who knows how it would even be properly categorized) dropping in for good or ill. If the "grays" are friendly that are indigenous to our universe, are all the "grays" everywhere, or everywhen? Who knows. Maybe there's evil ones.

We don't know shit yet, beyond definitively because the DOD was forced to admit it in 2022 to Congress, that some UFO/UAP are utter mysteries to us, are physical, have EM signatures, and we don't know who controls or owns them. That's all we know 100%: some level of this is 100% real, unless we want to be irrationally paranoid assume multiple senior military leaders like Moultrie are lying under oath to Congress in open session about something so, so particular. The DOD does not go before Congress and say "we don't know shit, and we can't contain this thing in certain scenarios," but that's literally what they did in 2022's Congressional hearing.

Logically I agree with Mendel. Good ones, by our reckoning, would be most common because to get to that level of contact and travel you have to have conquered a ton of precursor cultural and scientific problems (at least again by our reckoning). The Bad ones would be likely the minority, but again... who knows yet. All we can do is infer, game theory it, and apply against what we know historically and culturally for frames of reference.

 

[DavidB66]

A while ago Richard Dawkins coined the term 'universal Darwinism' to express the concept that if complex life has emerged anywhere in the universe, it must have evolved in accordance with the same principles of natural selection which he believes have applied on Earth. This does not imply that ET organisms would physically resemble earth organisms: e.g. they would not necessarily have replication based on a double helix, let alone the specific chemistry of DNA. Nor of course would they necessarily have bodies resembling those of humans. There are plenty of advanced organisms on earth, such as cephalopods and social insects, which don't look much like humans. We might even imagine that advanced, intelligent ET organisms might be immobile autotrophs, like plants (though I don't wholly buy into the fashionable concept of the 'wood-wide-web'!)

However, universal Darwinism does suggest some constraints on ET evolution. On earth, evolution by natural selection is consistent with some degree of apparent altruism, for example soldier ants sacrificing themselves 'for the good of the swarm', but this is not an easy, obvious consequence of natural selection. The main achievement of Dawkins and other modern evolutionists (George Williams, W. D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, John Maynard Smith and others) is to present plausible mechanisms such as kin selection and evolutionary game theory to account for seemingly altruistic behaviour. But there are limits. I think Darwin himself said somewhere that his theory would be absolutely destroyed if it could be shown that any species shows adaptations which have evolved exclusively for the benefit of another species. (Artificial selection in domesticated animals is not an exception, because humans enable the selected strains to reproduce better than the unselected. Domestic chickens are said to be the most common bird on earth. They are exploiting us!) In the case of ET organisms, humans are not part of their evolutionary history, so we should not expect them to be nice to us.

As a staunch Darwinist myself, I like Dawkins's concept of universal Darwinism, but in applying it to possible ET advanced civilizations I think it should not be stretched too far. The underlying assumption is that advanced life must have evolved by natural selection (I emphasise the past tense), but Dawkins himself believes that to some extent we have the power to escape 'the tyranny of the genes'. [Apologies in advance for any misrepresentation, as I am writing from memory without checking sources.] Arguably there is an evolutionary 'singularity' whenever an intelligent species understands the processes by which it has evolved and acquires the ability to control them. Any species capable of interstellar travel and exploration must have reached this stage. It would follow that the principles of universal Darwinism may no longer apply. Notably, such species may be capable of a development of altruism beyond that consistent with strict natural selection. There are some signs that even humans may have got this far in our attitudes to other species, e.g. the 'meat is murder' doctrine, though I note that humans who are very sympathetic to animals are not always very nice about other humans.

So it is not safe to extrapolate universal Darwinism to any species which has reached its 'singularity'. Unfortunately, this leaves us without any obvious basis for predicting how they will behave.

 

[AllTheQuestionsToday]

As a staunch Darwinist myself, I like Dawkins's concept of universal Darwinism, but in applying it to possible ET advanced civilizations I think it should not be stretched too far. The underlying assumption is that advanced life must have evolved by natural selection (I emphasise the past tense), but Dawkins himself believes that to some extent we have the power to escape 'the tyranny of the genes'.

We can only speculate and again, use our own cultural and historical framework until the government and/or NHI themselves tell us "what's up", but at least in fiction I can think of one example that crosses the hybrid implied here: the "Asguard" from the Stargate fiction franchise.

In case anyone doesn't know the broad strokes story, ancient aliens are real, our 'gods' were all either what we called aliens and cargo culted them, or aliens took on the cultural persona of our existing 'gods' to exploit or help us. They've all been visiting Earth for millions of years and we finally figure out how to use "Stargates" to let us instantly travel anywhere in the galaxy.

The Asguard are "gray aliens". The main character the heroes know is quite literally the Thor of mythology, but he's simply the admiral/leader of their cultures space military. In the franchise lore, they evolved naturally millions and millions of years ago, but so thoroughly conquered cloning and genetic modification for themselves that over all that time they basically redesigned their own species. They're so advanced that (echoing odder corners of UFO lore) they can simply transfer themselves with continuity of consciousness into a new cloned container body when the old one wears out.

The basically gave the middle finger to natural evolution and Darwinism, and redefined themselves instead deliberately.

Even if some unusual to us alien species evolved naturally somewhere long ago in a galaxy far, far away, what we meet today may not even be their equivalent of "todays humans". They could be vastly re-engineered.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

"Are there Aliens out there"? "What are they like"?

I think the only sensible answer is...

 

[RTM]

I read Rendezvous with Rama a few years ago:

Spoiler: spoiler

I liked the idea of it that's almost like cosmic insignificance and the aliens just simply went on their way. So maybe another option instead of good or bad is indifferent.

 

[Bob Jase]

I read Rendezvous with Rama a few years ago:

Spoiler: spoiler

I liked the idea of it that's almost like cosmic insignificance and the aliens just simply went on their way. So maybe another option instead of good or bad is indifferent.

Check with the Mexican 'aliens' they're from Rendezvous with Llama

 

[Ann K]

"Are there Aliens out there"? "What are they like"?

I think the only sensible answer is...

I think the only sensible answer is that we are as far away from them as they are from us. The enormous distance of interstellar space is a problem that they can't get around any more than we can.

 

[MapperGuy]

Societies that think like "bad aliens" are liable to have so many internal problems arising from this mindset that they're going to have a hard time executing a galaxy-wide project.

The real problem with "bad aliens", who are aggressive to all other sentient species, is they have to be right every time.

Remember the Star Trek (original series) episode with the Organians? The Federation and Klingons are preparing to fight over a planet inhabited by what appear to be a primitive race. After efforts to settle things peacefully fail the Organians take their masks off and reveal that they are in fact far more powerful than the Federation and the Klingons combined, and settle the issue themselves through superior 'firepower'.

Any race that just attacks those they encounter takes the very real risk of attacking someone vastly more powerful than themselves. Who, after defeating them, hunt down all members of the species that attacked first and "pacifies" them.

 

[MapperGuy]

And with respect to the Fermi Paradox I wrote this up long ago.

There is one flaw in the Fermi Paradox that always seems to be overlooked, Fermi was a man of his times. Ever read a science fiction story from the first half of the 20th Century? One thing that was always assumed in the space travel stories being written then was that to know what is at a distant star system you HAD TO GO THERE. Because there was no way to detect and study planets from over such vast distances, or so they assumed based on the science of their time.

Today astronomers are characterizing the atmospheres of planets a hundred light years away. In coming decades we will know as much about planets around nearby stars as we do about the outer planets in our own solar system. And in a hundred we will know far more, long before we actually have the technology to travel to those stars.

So “Where are they”? The answer is simple: They looked at our solar system and its planets from hundreds of light years away and said to themselves “That planet is already occupied, let’s not expend the time and resources required to go there”!

Fermi’s paradox ASSUMES that interstellar travelers will spread out from their home world in a wave, visiting every star system in an ever expanding sphere. They would do this because they could only discover what was at that next star system by actually traveling there. We now know that this idea is false. You CAN look across the void and decide whether or not a star system is one you would want to visit BEFORE making the trip.

Instead of a space faring civilization expanding in a sphere it would expand in a dendritic fashion, from the nearby “nice places to live” to the next nearby “nice places to live”. This would lead to a large number of the stars in that theoretical sphere that the space faring civilization COULD reach that they would never actually travel too.

Space farers who must visit ALL stars, because that is the only way they have to find out what is there, would encounter all life harboring planets, this is what Fermi assumed. But this is not the case. Those who are journeying to a star will already know there are planets they wish to inhabit around that star. The many star systems without them they would leave forever unvisited.

 

[John J.]

On earth, evolution by natural selection is consistent with some degree of apparent altruism, for example soldier ants sacrificing themselves 'for the good of the swarm'

Soldier ants can't reproduce. Their actions are directed by their genes, to protect the members of the hive (their mother and genetic relatives) that can reproduce.

Like their equivalents amongst other social insects, they will engage anything that passes some threshold to be registered as a threat (I almost put "...engage anything that's perceived as a threat", but I feel that implies individual judgement, where none exists. Their responses are hard-wired, and they have no concerns about their own mortality vs. the effectiveness of their actions in responding to a threat). Soldier ants could be described as part of the immune system of a multi-corporeal organism, an evolutionary adaption that helps protect the genetic heritage of the hive.
Soldier ants have no choice, hence, no altruism.
They certainly don't demonstrate trans-species altruism; quite the opposite.

Their "altruism" is actually a pretty good example of Dawkin's much-misunderstood "selfish gene" in action.
Dawkins wasn't saying that individual selfishness is inherited, or that nature selects for selfishness; merely that a successful set of genes, by definition, must ensure its own propagation. What "tactics" different species use to achieve this end- which of course the individual organisms are not aware of- vary enormously. Humans generally show much co-operation; some species demonstrate marked inter-individual competition (such as cannibalism). But these different tactics benefit the survival of that species' genes.

Wikipedia, "The Selfish Gene" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

Some studies have claimed to find altruism in species that are much closer to us (than ants).
Famously, in Reciprocal altruism in Papio anubis, Packer, C. (1977), Nature 265, Packer describes how adolescent male olive baboons (including non-sibling pairs) have been observed to form co-operative duos. When a female in the harem of a dominant male is in oestrus, a young male from a cooperating pair will sometimes challenge the dominant male- with risk of injury to himself- while his partner attempts to mate with the temporarily unguarded female.

https://www.nature.com/articles/265441a0 -Abstract only,
also see Reciprocal altruism in primates http://brembs.net/ipd/primats.html in the online thesis
Chaos, cheating and cooperation: potential solutions to the Prisoner's Dilemma, Björn Brembs.

Packer interpreted this as altruistic behaviour on the part of the adolescent male baboon challenging the senior male.
(How "altruistic" this behaviour is to the female baboon is a moot point. Consent isn't a large feature of baboon society).
However, Packer also describes how the young male pairs reciprocate; they swap roles so that the male who previously had the mating opportunity challenges a dominant male while the earlier challenger- if he's still around- has his wicked way.

On each occasion, a young male who would not have had the chance to mate by solo efforts gets that chance, the price being the requirement to challenge a senior male (and probably getting hurt) at a different time.
Packer was aware that this "altruism" might be seen as a purely reproductive strategy- and implicitly poses the question, by analogy, whether human altruism is in fact a mechanism to acquire future reward, albeit often through more indirect means:
An extreme (but not massively rare) example might be someone who remains celibate but spends their life doing charity work for others, believing that they will be rewarded in an afterlife. They might, though, be benefiting the human gene pool as a whole. Similarly, a fearless young explorer or heroic soldier might risk their life for abstractions such as recognition, national interest or political beliefs, but their potential sacrifice might bring advantages to their kinsfolk.
(It might not be a coincidence that, historically, such examples have been disproportionately male: Even if a large number of human males are lost, it's not too difficult for the remainder to sire the next generation. This is not the case with females).

All in all, even if extraterrestrial beings have a sense of altruism, I'm not sure that there are evolutionary arguments that mean we can be confident that they will extend that altruism to us.
In the event of contact, I feel that immense discretion on our part should be prioritised over trust.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Domestic chickens are said to be the most common bird on earth. They are exploiting us!

"We are deeply gratified to have made contact with you humans.
Together, we stand on the threshold of a new era.

We will help representatives of the human species visit every settled world, every outpost that our species has established.
As long as our civilisation endures, the human species shall endure.

Because you are very, very tasty".

 

[Eburacum]

We don't know shit yet, beyond definitively because the DOD was forced to admit it in 2022 to Congress, that some UFO/UAP are utter mysteries to us, are physical, have EM signatures, and we don't know who controls or owns them.

This still assumes that the sightings are not all mistakes, misidentifications and data from the Low Information Zone. Being 'forced to admit' that the US defence department can't identify a fraction of the reported sightings does not mean that these objects are anything other than unidentified.

Consider this; there will always be unidentified sightings, no matter how well we improve our sensors. If and when we finally meet intelligent alien beings, probably in the relatively distant future, I suspect that two things will turn out to be true; firstly, that they have not been responsible for any of the reported UAPs we have seen in the past, and secondly, they also have reports of UAPs of their own, from their own equivalent of a LIZ.

 

[Eburacum]

What these aliens might be like when we finally meet them is another matter. I suspect (but obviously can't prove) that aliens with violent tendencies would be fairly quickly eliminated, probably by other members of their own species. This is because of something I call Light Speed Paranoia. If an advanced civilisation establishes a colony several light years away in another star system, it will be separated from that location by several years of light travel time; that means that all information exchanged by the different locations will be years, or decades, out of date. No-one on star A will ever be able to know exactly what is happening on Star B at this exact moment, and vice versa. All political and military information will be years out of date. A paranoid species would tend to assume that the colony was building up its military capabilities, and act accordingly. This would lead to an arms race; interstellar warfare is very tricky, but it is (probably) not impossible, and because of the distances involved it is difficult to stop a conflict once the ball is rolling.

Only a truly peaceful civilisation would be able to expand without causing paranoia amongst its own daughter colonies, so we probably would only ever meet the stable ones.

 

[Mendel]

(Before anyone asks, I couldn't begin to dig up links for all this--just my aggregate memories from a lot of reading and interviews.)

Without sources, I'll consider everything you wrote as fiction.

 

[Mendel]

Domestic chickens are said to be the most common bird on earth. They are exploiting us!

Article:

The domestic chicken is the most common bird species in the world with an estimated population of 22.67 billion. The chicken has managed to attain a significant level of cultural and culinary dominance in the human world.

Source: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-populous-bird-species-in-the-world.html

Spoiler: Gary Larson

 

[Eburacum]

The answer is simple: They looked at our solar system and its planets from hundreds of light years away and said to themselves “That planet is already occupied, let’s not expend the time and resources required to go there”!

That may well be the strategy of a large fraction of expansive alien civilisations. Targeting unoccupied systems makes a lot of sense. However, some or many alien civs might prefer to make contact, and would actively reach out to stars with existing biospheres and occupants. Their motives may be entirely benevolent, or they may act simply out of curiosity.

Biologically-active planets may be the rarest of all kinds of world in the universe, so they may be attractive targets (for a wide range of reasons).

 

[DavidB66]

Only a truly peaceful civilisation would be able to expand without causing paranoia amongst its own daughter colonies, so we probably would only ever meet the stable ones

That's an encouraging thought, but to play Devil's Advocate for a moment, human history suggests that we shouldn't be too optimistic. It is true that historical empires have all (so far) tended to collapse, for a variety of internal and external reasons, but they may do a great deal of damage first. In some cases (North America, Australia, Mesopotamia in the Mongol invasions) existing indigenous populations are almost wiped out. In other cases (e.g. the Romans), the colonists may bring many benefits (as Monty Python knew), but they also ruthlessly exploit the colonies and suppress rebellions with extreme prejudice. And if the colonists are convinced of their own racial superiority and destiny, things can get very nasty indeed. It's a close call whether the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese were more brutal towards their subject populations.

As for non-human species on earth, the social insects show that organisms may show a great deal of co-operation within a genetically cohesive group, while being far from 'peaceful' towards outsiders. It may be argued that ants, bees, etc, have very limited intelligence, so they are not a good model for hypothetical ET colonists, but we don't really know whether high intelligence would be compatible with an ant-like type of social organisation. I recommend 'Quatermass and the Pit' for a positive answer to that question!

 

[JMartJr]

Fun to speculate v

Remember the Star Trek (original series) episode with the Organians?

An interesting solution to the Fermi Paradox. Organians are out there and have observed that when us lesser species interact, bad things happen, so block us from ever noticing each other

 

[John J.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis

It's a pretty bleak idea, but one can see the logic in it.

I think the dark forest theory deserves some consideration.
It might have troubling implications if we think that a civilisation might get to the point where it can build near-lightspeed "starships", of a size capable of accommodating human-sized passengers (or at least a few tens of kilograms of payload) whose drive is compliant with currently-known physics (e.g. no warp drives, "hyperspace", nullification of mass/ inertia etc.)

An interstellar vehicle of substantial mass, capable of acceleration (no matter how slowly) up to relativistic speeds, has the capability to be used as a kinetic energy weapon:

A 1 kg mass traveling at 99% of the speed of light would have a kinetic energy of 5.47×1017 joules. In explosive terms, it would be equal to 132 megatons of TNT or approximately 32 megatons more than the theoretical max yield of the tsar bomb, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. 1 kg of mass-energy is 8.99×1016 joules or about 21.5 megatons of TNT.

Content from External Source

-From Fandom.com wiki, Military, Relativistic kill vehicle- I won't pretend to have checked the maths!
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle

A thousand 1 kg impactors (total weight 1 metric ton, a bit less than a baseline BMW Mini hatchback) could ruin our whole day. Ten tons of 1 kg impactors- allowing a few thousand for isolated areas such as small populated islands- might be more than enough to finish the job, and wreck the biosphere.

(The substantial difficulties of getting large masses up to relativistic speeds have been discussed elsewhere on this forum).

Just as we can speculate about humans building near-lightspeed starships in the future, maybe other technological societies will think along similar lines- -and realise that any other society that can build even one such craft can, in effect, build a planet-killer.

Every other technological species becomes a potential existential threat.
What would another species have to offer that outweighs this risk?

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

Not going to mince words. I think that all speculation on this subject is Midnight Dorm Room Blather. We're too dumb and have too little data. Whatever the truth, it would either be hugely surprising... or we wouldn't even understand it if we were told.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

That's best case scenario. I think the UFO Believer scenarios are Fairy stories, in the original meaning of the term. As in folk stories about Fairies. That's not meant to be humorous or degrading, but a serious and literal reading of the situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy

A fairy (also fay, fae, fey, fair folk, or faerie) is a type of mythical being or legendary creature found in the folklore of multiple European cultures (including Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, and French folklore), a form of spirit, often described as metaphysical, supernatural, or preternatural.

Describing folklore in Europe, yes. But all cultures have equivalents. They don't obey the same physical laws. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic. Poor Arthur Clarke.

If UAPs do things that seem to be inconsistent - evade radar, show up on radar - well, you just don't understand the magic.

Myths and stories about fairies do not have a single origin, but are rather a collection of folk beliefs from disparate sources. Various folk theories about the origins of fairies include casting them as either demoted angels or demons in a Christian tradition, as deities in Pagan belief systems, as spirits of the dead, as prehistoric precursors to humans, or as spirits of nature.

A group effort and not all sources agree.

The label of fairy has at times applied only to specific magical creatures with human appearance, magical powers, and a penchant for trickery. At other times it has been used to describe any magical creature, such as goblins and gnomes. Fairy has at times been used as an adjective, with a meaning equivalent to "enchanted" or "magical". It is also used as a name for the place these beings come from, the land of Fairy.

Are Aliens: Space Creatures, Time Traveling Humans from the future, Inter-Dimensional Beings, Earth Creatures from an unknown ancient civilization? All of/some of the above?

Aliens play tricks? Aliens are helpful? Aliens are malignant? Aliens are indifferent?

Fairies play tricks? Fairies are helpful? Fairies are malignant? Fairies are indifferent?

A recurring motif of legends about fairies is the need to ward off fairies using protective charms. Common examples of such charms include church bells, wearing clothing inside out, four-leaf clover, and food. Fairies were also sometimes thought to haunt specific locations, and to lead travelers astray using will-o'-the-wisps. Before the advent of modern medicine, fairies were often blamed for sickness, particularly tuberculosis and birth deformities.

Not children's bedtime stories. Serious stuff with real world consequences. We need a Congressional Hearing about these UAP Creatures and what they're up to.


According to Jacques Vallee this is literally true. Fairies are real. Have always been real. Some people call them Space Aliens now. But they really aren't. They're Inter-Dimensional Beings. Or whatever he calls them at this specific moment... as opposed to two minutes from now.

 

[John J.]

Not going to mince words. I think that all speculation on this subject is Midnight Dorm Room Blather. We're too dumb and have too little data. Whatever the truth, it would either be hugely surprising... or we wouldn't even understand it if we were told.

Admittedly it's not a debunking thread.
I think it's interesting to consider whether contact with ETI's would be beneficial or not.
Maybe the thread should be in Chitchat?

Edited to add:
I don't think the OP (@NorCal Dave ) was basing his original question on the premise that a hypothetical ETI would be connected in some way with UFO reports, or any of the noise and nonsense that goes with them- which, I agree, have parallels with folkloric (non-existent) beings and experiences.

 

[Slow Joe]

And with respect to the Fermi Paradox I wrote this up long ago.

There is one flaw in the Fermi Paradox that always seems to be overlooked, Fermi was a man of his times. Ever read a science fiction story from the first half of the 20th Century? One thing that was always assumed in the space travel stories being written then was that to know what is at a distant star system you HAD TO GO THERE. Because there was no way to detect and study planets from over such vast distances, or so they assumed based on the science of their time.

Today astronomers are characterizing the atmospheres of planets a hundred light years away. In coming decades we will know as much about planets around nearby stars as we do about the outer planets in our own solar system. And in a hundred we will know far more, long before we actually have the technology to travel to those stars.

So “Where are they”? The answer is simple: They looked at our solar system and its planets from hundreds of light years away and said to themselves “That planet is already occupied, let’s not expend the time and resources required to go there”!

Fermi’s paradox ASSUMES that interstellar travelers will spread out from their home world in a wave, visiting every star system in an ever expanding sphere. They would do this because they could only discover what was at that next star system by actually traveling there. We now know that this idea is false. You CAN look across the void and decide whether or not a star system is one you would want to visit BEFORE making the trip.

Instead of a space faring civilization expanding in a sphere it would expand in a dendritic fashion, from the nearby “nice places to live” to the next nearby “nice places to live”. This would lead to a large number of the stars in that theoretical sphere that the space faring civilization COULD reach that they would never actually travel too.

Space farers who must visit ALL stars, because that is the only way they have to find out what is there, would encounter all life harboring planets, this is what Fermi assumed. But this is not the case. Those who are journeying to a star will already know there are planets they wish to inhabit around that star. The many star systems without them they would leave forever unvisited.

Excellent point.
However, you are assuming this civilization is expanding through colonization, looking for habitable planets.
That might not be the case. A post-scarcity civilization that can transform matter into anything they might need and that have merged with AI might not be interested in colonization. Such civilization might be more interested in exploration than expansion.
With advanced AI, they could explore space in nanoscale or smaller spacecraft and survey space without anyone ever noticing aliens are passing by and dropping recording nano cameras or some similar technology.

I don’t think is a given that advanced civilizations remain biological for the duration of their civilizational lifespan.

 

[JWrightBrain]

Probably a bit off the path. But I've always had a criticism about how we homogenize alien civilizations, like each planet has it's own worldwide civilization. It's nowhere near like that on Earth. So back to the topic whether Aliens are "Good or Bad" is a complicated question, but they could probably be BOTH depending upon what space faring civilizationS evolve on each planet. There might be three or four depending on their resources and competing goals.

 

[Mendel]

Humans: Good or Bad?​

Discuss.

(We know more about humans than we do about aliens, so this should be easy, right? It's ontopic because we're the aliens for everyone else.)

 

[JMartJr]

Most of us are alright, I guess...

If Aliens are no better than us, that would be too bad... if they are no worse than us, that's probably the best we can hope for...

 

[JWrightBrain]

Most of us are alright, I guess...

If Aliens are no better than us, that would be too bad... if they are no worse than us, that's probably the best we can hope for...

I'd have to think that if humans weren't generally social creatures, we wouldn't have survived as long as we have as a species. Of course now with power consolidated to a few we are currently in a situation where the minority of the citizens on the planet, might actually make life harder if not impossible for the vast majority of the people living here. And, I'm not even speaking of primary color vs primary color. I mean in general.

 

[Ravi]

We discussed the "bad", how about "good" but just not detectable? "Detectable" in the sense that "they" are not so much hiding, but we just don't have the tech to detect them (yet)?

 

[NorCal Dave]

Admittedly it's not a debunking thread.
I think it's interesting to consider whether contact with ETI's would be beneficial or not.
Maybe the thread should be in Chitchat?

Edited to add:
I don't think the OP (@NorCal Dave ) was basing his original question on the premise that a hypothetical ETI would be connected in some way with UFO reports, or any of the noise and nonsense that goes with them- which, I agree, have parallels with folkloric (non-existent) beings and experiences.

Agreed. The subject came up in the thread about Kirkpatrick leaving AARO and a number of people, including Mick, commented. I thought it might be a fun topic, for those that found it interesting. It's not intended to debunk anything, just that as I've said before, this is a forum full of intelligent and interesting people and I find some of their takes thought provoking. I thought maybe a few others would as well.

 

[Alexandria Nick]

With all the usual caveats that we only have Earth to go from:

There are some mechanisms that I think are universal. One of them is the predator-prey relationship. Predation emerged so early and so many times that it seems likely that any other system is going to see the emergence of the same dynamic. Prey species must have a set of active and passive defenses to predation, which in a way limits their need to select for intelligence. Passive defenses don't require intelligence. Being a predator, on the other hand, requires going all in on active offense. There's not much utility for passive offense. Even a filter feeder has to be able to identify where to hunt. Predators must select for intelligence and we do see that on Earth. We also see that predators better obtain the nutrients required for energy hungry brains, but that one gets harder to apply to an unknown system than a "you have to be smarter to ambush something" idea.

The smarter you get, the better you can steal from other predators or predate on predators. Look at good old humans. We're the apex of apex predators that can arbitrarily do whatever we want to whatever we want. We're not very fast. Can't see so good. Not that strong. Can't smell anything. No claws or anything. Can't spit venom. But boy can we think. We can tie a pointy rock to a stick, then trick another predator into helping us hunt! Thanks for the help, wolves.

So my suspicion is that any intelligent spacefaring civilization is a species that grew out of a apex predator. That's where intelligence and technology is going to emerge from: hunters. I firmly believe that you can't trick biology and no amount of technology or society will ever completely undo that voice in the back of your head that makes you a predator.

Does that make aliens good or bad? There's no answer to that without assigning definitions to the term. But do I think that hippy aliens like the Raelian kind are the default or do I think there's more Klingons? I think there's more Klingons.

 

[Slow Joe]

Probably a bit off the path. But I've always had a criticism about how we homogenize alien civilizations, like each planet has it's own worldwide civilization. It's nowhere near like that on Earth. So back to the topic whether Aliens are "Good or Bad" is a complicated question, but they could probably be BOTH depending upon what space faring civilizationS evolve on each planet. There might be three or four depending on their resources and competing goals.

I think that from an external perspective they would be planetary civilizations, in the sense that they would have evolved together in the same biosphere and would seem indistinguishable from each other to an external observer. They might not even be tied to a planet anymore, but their biology would be make them a single species and they would have evolved a unique culture within the constraints of their environment. Their internal differences might pass unnoticed to external observers.

An example from our past would be ancient Greece. The Greek civilization was wildly diverse, with government types ranging from monarchy to democracy with many types of oligarchies in between. Each poleis had their own constitution and laws, and when they expanded founding colonies across the Mediterranean and Black Seas during the Archaic period, their colonies were completely independent with only nominal cultural ties to the home city-state.
Yet to us they were all Greeks, because of the common culture and language, even though Ancient Greeks identified themselves with their city-state, not the entirety of Greece.

 

[JMartJr]

Even a filter feeder has to be able to identify where to hunt.

Sponges seem to provide at least one exception to this. Of course, sponges also didn't develop anything obvious on the way of intellect, either...

 

[JWrightBrain]

Their internal differences might pass unnoticed to external observers.

Um. Are you saying all aliens look alike?

 

[Ann K]

I think that from an external perspective they would be planetary civilizations, in the sense that they would have evolved together in the same biosphere and would seem indistinguishable from each other to an external observer. They might not even be tied to a planet anymore, but their biology would be make them a single species and they would have evolved a unique culture within the constraints of their environment. Their internal differences might pass unnoticed to external observers.

Back to the comparison with humans: an alternative to "evolving together" might be those who travel with various other species, either as co-equals or as assistants, like the hunter-with-dog example. One might expect that any planet with an intelligent life form comes with a good many other species as well, and there is no reason that our putative visitors be a single dominant species, or even that they came from a single source location, as they might be cooperating with ones from a different planet they visited on the way. (Cue the Star Wars interstellar canteen scene.) And if we're to continue the human analogy even further, each species might be expected to have its own personal biota in their equivalent of head lice, eyelash mites, or gut flora. All of those might make it inadvisable to interact with even a benign species.

 

[nmarsollier]

I wonder why humans are so fascinanted with aliens, personally I believe that we are not mature enough to contact, and I hope we don't, we are dangerous.

 

[JMartJr]

personally I believe that we are not mature enough to contact, and I hope we don't, we are dangerous.

I have a hard time envisioning how we'd be dangerous to aliens.

If we make contact "long distance," detecting signals and stuff, I think they're safe from us.

If they somehow have tech to come here, we have no way to get to them and do anything offensive, while they have the ability to stand off and drop ricks on our heads* while we lack the capability to do anything about it. (Ask the late Cretaceous dinosaurs about how a rock dropping on your head can ruin your day... if you can find one...)

Other than dissecting an occasional pilot when they keep crashing their saucers all over the planet, I don't think we're much of a threat to them.

*I'm assuming anybody who can fly between stars can accelerate medium sized asteroids and put them into an orbit that we'd prefer they were not traveling.

 

[Mendel]

If they somehow have tech to come here, we have no way to get to them and do anything offensive, while they have the ability to stand off and drop ricks on our heads* while we lack the capability to do anything about it. (Ask the late Cretaceous dinosaurs about how a rock dropping on your head can ruin your day... if you can find one...)

I hear some time-traveling aliens took out a violent apex predator species that was about to evolve intelligence in the late Cretaceous

... and the fact that they're not doing it to us means we're going to kill our civilisation ourselves

 

[FatPhil]

So my suspicion is that any intelligent spacefaring civilization is a species that grew out of a apex predator. That's where intelligence and technology is going to emerge from: hunters. I firmly believe that you can't trick biology and no amount of technology or society will ever completely undo that voice in the back of your head that makes you a predator.

Whilst I broadly agree with your whole post, with tens or hundreds or thousands of generations in an unthreatened interstellar voyage with no sapient adversaries, and lower stress hormones running around our system, I see no reason why we wouldn't end up all Starship Axiom (from WALL-E), and making phasers out of corn dollies because we've forgotten how the real things should work. The reason the forward evolution towards apex predator worked in the first place was because it was being continually selected for. Remove that pressure, and there's no way of telling what traits will be preserved. We've domesticated other predatory species, incredibly quickly (c.f. the Russian silver fox experiment, for example), I see no biological reason why we can't breed the same traits out of ourselves.

I also agree with Z.W.Wolf, and hope that this post reaches at least some of you at midnight.