Danger: Humans

[Christopher]

What logical reason do we have to expect another intelligent race out there. We have zero evidence (Ufologists claims notwithstanding) that another species has developed already. We have found nothing out there. Is it so implausible that we are the ones that are going to be the pioneers? For that matter, how is anything improbably or likely without some sort of statistical data to back either claim up. The only statistical data we have at the moment is that we are the only known technology using species in the galaxy/universe. Until we get a larger sample size, all bets are off. We can make up all sorts of formula to predict something but anything we prognosticate is a shot in the dark at best.

What logical reason do we have to asume we are the first or only? Why would your think our planet/species is THAT special considering the hundred-millions of stars in our galaxy alone?

 

The automobile was an invention on Earth.  There's no guarantee it would have been developed somewhere else.  Imagine a society built around mass transit.  No cars, just railroads.  Cities would be designed around foot traffic, very high density.  No such thing as "suburbs".  You wouldn't need a car.

The first Automobiles were powered by Steam - back in 1672 or 1769. They were practically just "trains without tracks".

It is practically just much more effective to drive on tracks then to drive on roads, especially with a lot of load. Indeed it is so much more effective, tracked transportation actually predates Steam power by a few centuries! They were just powered by humans on a winch or - get that - horses!

Yep, some of the first tracked transportation was a horsecart on tracks!

 

Automobiles and Trains are two coins of the same medal. If you got one, doing the other is just figuring out how to maker Rubber/Steel wheels and tracks. Indeed literally Automobile just means "self moving". Something you could describe to any train, car, airplane and ship.

 

Now you might be saying:

"But Modern Trains are powered by Electricity, provided via a powergrid as part of the track. No way that would lead to Steam, Combustion or Electirc cars (that need electric storage)."

And you would be wrong again. Diesel-electric trains are a thing, for all those tracks without full electrification. Wich is also used for (civil) surface ships and just about any emergency Generator. So getting to combustion or effective energy storage is pretty much unavoidable too.

 

"But what if they got nothing like horses. Or Oxen? Or any of the other animals used in early stages?"

They would just use slaves or workers, like we have plenty of times.

 

You picked a realy bad example with Automobiles and Modern Medicine. Try another one.

 

 

 

Other species would have a drive to survive.  But they don't think in terms of billions of years.  They aren't worried about their sun dying.  They believe that FTL travel is impossible, so they focus on sustainable agriculture and pollution-free industry.  They build great telescopes and determine that there are no Armageddon-sized meteors headed their way.  They don't invest in FTL travel for the same reason we don't invest in wizard schools -- they think it's mumbo-jumbo.  But they don't have a romantic attachment to it like we do,

Magic has been proven to not exist.

With FTL we are only somewhat certain, as we are fully aware of our limited understanding of physics.

 

 

 

Detecting traces of fuel in the air is just a simple example.  Though I think with the right equipment you could do it.  Gas chromatography, like a breathalyzer, measure the light coming in.  On Earth, it's easier to just look up and see the damn thing.  But we don't know what visibility is like on Imaginary Planet #6.  The point is to illustrate that many of our technologies were developed in response to something someone else did.  And there's no guarantee that those circumstances are going to repeat on another world.

Looking up the traces are (relatively) easy to see for two simple reasons:

They come from civil airplanes that do not bother with stealth.

You have a single-colored backdrop. Doing the same thing when looking down is a lot harder. And do not even think about sideways.

 

If you could spot the trail of a military aircraft optically, just spotting the aircraft itself with the same optical technology is plain simpler.

If you could do it via a Sci-Fi Sensor, just scanning for the Aircrat would be simpler.

For all we know even Star Trek or Star Wars Sensor still include radar.

[Nolgroth]

What logical reason do we have to asume we are the first or only? Why would your think our planet/species is THAT special considering the hundred-millions of stars in our galaxy alone?

 

 

Do you see any evidence of others? The fact that I haven't is a pretty good indicator.

 

EDIT: All of this is supposition. All of it. Until we get an intelligent, technology using species that increases the sample size to more than one, everything is simply guesswork. Some people throw down Fermi paradoxes or some other equation but those are just a more refined application of their own supposition. So until I see something that indicates that there is more than one intelligence in the universe and that intelligence is more advanced than we are, I'll stick with my opinion that we are the most technologically advanced species known to this galaxy. At least for some stories. For others, I like a range of options. 

[bigdamnhero]

It seems as though you're assuming that there's only one path for technological development to take, and that's the path that we took.

Given that I just said the exact opposite of this...

 

Sure, not every species is going to develop things at the exact same pace and in the exact same speed we did.

All I'm saying is there are a lot more inter-dependencies between different fields than you might think.

 

I still maintain that there can be other species out there that are not as advanced as we are.

Of course some will be less advanced. I got the impression you were positing that all other species could/should/would/ be less advanced than we are. If you just mean some, then we're in violent agreement.

[Nolgroth]

Of course some will be less advanced. I got the impression you were positing that all other species could/should/would/ be less advanced than we are. If you just mean some, then we're in violent agreement.

 

I am supposing that this is for the purpose of telling stories/role playing. If not, I would have expected it in the NGD or something. To me, I am simply sick of every major science fiction story, game, sketch, whatever, automatically implying the humanity is a race of "country bumpkins" with barely enough technology to survive. It has become such an expected trope that it has transcended, IMO, to lazy storytelling. So my question is why? Why is the assumption when telling stories about alien species, humanity is almost always inferior? Even if we adapt and overcome, it is usually by luck that we come out even or on top. This is fully a "me" problem, but I am frankly sick of it. So in the literary sense, YES, I am saying that humanity should be given the prestigious position of being the absolute masters of the universe in terms of technology and science.

 

Just once I would like to see an alien invasion story that ends quickly and badly because the aliens thought we were easy prey, only to be utterly obliterated by a technologically superior humanity. Like they saw broadcasts of our technology at a certain point, calculated the odds that we had only progressed so far and planned their invasion around that calculation. When they get here, they find out that humanity has progressed much faster than they thought. All we needed was the FTL drives they so conveniently brought with their invading ships...

 

All that said, not all stories should be about humanity automatically being more powerful than all aliens. It's just a trope that has bothered me for some time.

[bigdamnhero]

Fair enough, and I'm all for busting shopworn tropes. But I do think that to some extent follows naturally from the space opera desire for 1) other spacefaring races for humanity to interact with, and 2) stories set in the relatively-near future (ie - a few centuries) to keep humans relatable. If you start with those two assumptions, it's hard to logic your way around the idea that some of those races that have been in space for hundreds or thousands of years more than us are going to be significantly more advanced than us.

[sinanju]

We don't have to be special to be the first technically-advanced sentient species, anymore than being a lottery winner makes you special. *Someone* had to be first, and as we have no evidence that anyone else is, it *could* be us.

 

On the other hand, even if the universe is filled with hundreds of thousands of advanced civilizations, there are literally millions if not billions of galaxies. If the next nearest civilization is in another galaxy, even with any reasonably plausible FTL drive, we might well never know they were there, much less interact with them.

[Old Man]

I strongly suspect that worlds that can actually support the creation of life are incredibly rare.  Exactly the right mass, exactly the right temperature, exactly the right amount of liquid water and tectonic action, sufficiently strong magnetosphere, sufficiently stable solar system, and so on.

 

And then the creation of intelligent life is going to be orders of magnitude rarer than that, and spacefaring life orders of magnitude rarer than that.  It's not as though a race of intelligent space dolphins would be likely to discover fire, and it would be pretty challenging for a species on a gas giant to develop space travel.

 

Furthermore it looks as though we are pretty early in the period when the universe could possibly create complex lifeforms (relatively speaking), owing to the lack of atomic diversity in the first few billion years after the bang.

[Christopher]

And then the creation of intelligent life is going to be orders of magnitude rarer than that, and spacefaring life orders of magnitude rarer than that.  It's not as though a race of intelligent space dolphins would be likely to discover fire, and it would be pretty challenging for a species on a gas giant to develop space travel.

Meaningfull intelligence requires the ability to manipulate Tools. Ortherwise that brain is just a giant waste of resources (we are still not certain why Doplhins are that intelligent).

[薔薇語]

Do you see any evidence of others? The fact that I haven't is a pretty good indicator....

 

...Some people throw down Fermi paradoxes...

 

 

I think some people throw out the "Fermi paradox" without fully appreciating that it is a Paradox. The basic idea was that after you input any reasonable figures into equation you would get some value. But because the universe is infinite and extremely old, we must assume that if any life could be created, nigh infinite amounts of life should have been created. And even if we assume nine out of ten are Federation like groups that avoid absolutely all contact with "lower" species, that other 10% would still amount to a nigh infinite number of civilizations. Thus as long as the creation of life is not impossible, there should be abundant evidence for it. Well, we know that life is possible yet have no proof of other life. That is the paradox. Every step along the way is perfectly reasonable yet it spits out an unacceptable answer. 

 

So, what are we missing? What piece of data about the universe and life in it is eluding us? Why are we still alone to our knowledge? Something just isn't making sense. Maybe, just maybe, as CGPGrey once put it: maybe there is something out there that doesn't take too kindly to developed civilizations - something that might not take too well to us broadcasting our presence. 

 

Soar. 

[Nolgroth]

 ...maybe there is something out there that doesn't take too kindly to developed civilizations - something that might not take too well to us broadcasting our presence. 

 

Soar. 

 

and now it's hungry.

[薔薇語]

Galactus must feed sometime. ^^

Soar. 

[Christopher]

I think some people throw out the "Fermi paradox" without fully appreciating that it is a Paradox. The basic idea was that after you input any reasonable figures into equation you would get some value. But because the universe is infinite and extremely old, we must assume that if any life could be created, nigh infinite amounts of life should have been created. And even if we assume nine out of ten are Federation like groups that avoid absolutely all contact with "lower" species, that other 10% would still amount to a nigh infinite number of civilizations. Thus as long as the creation of life is not impossible, there should be abundant evidence for it. Well, we know that life is possible yet have no proof of other life. That is the paradox. Every step along the way is perfectly reasonable yet it spits out an unacceptable answer. 

 

So, what are we missing? What piece of data about the universe and life in it is eluding us? Why are we still alone to our knowledge? Something just isn't making sense. Maybe, just maybe, as CGPGrey once put it: maybe there is something out there that doesn't take too kindly to developed civilizations - something that might not take too well to us broadcasting our presence.

Why would it not like that? I think it would be really happy about it...

 

Regarding the Fermi Paradox:

First you figure out the likelyhood of a intelligent species around a Sun about as old as ours, using the Drake equation.

Then you figure out that traversing the Univers would maybe take 1 million years using non-FTL drives.

 

The end result is:

They should have already been here.

That alien civilisation would only need to be a mere 1 million years ahead of us. The species Homo Sapiens Sapiens is 2 million years old.

 

It is getting more paradox as better insterstellar drive systems are prooven to work. Because the time of traversal shortens and thus the time a civilisation would need to stay alive to reach us would be less.

If FTL is possible and feasible, then we would have to asume we are "the first ones". Unless they contact us the moment we made our first testflight.

[Kesedrith]

Now, are we talking about life, or intelligent life? Because I'm thinking if we get out there we're going to find we're tripping all over life. There's been extremophiles found on our own planet at the bottom of the deepest drill cores, in glaciers, in nuclear reactors, in acidic and basic waters that will eat steel, in methane and brine seeps at the bottom of the oceans, and pretty much everywhere we've looked on Earth. Therefore this notion of "the right mass, temperature range, etc." is likely incorrect, as we're having to adjust that with our sample size of one. If there's liquid water, an available source of energy, and the right mix of chemicals, life's there. I may amend that as we learn more about Europa and Enceladus, but it does seem the case. (Mars may have once had life too, but it's looking increasingly unlikely that it's still "hanging on." As the list above shows, if life exists, it doesn't just hang on, it adapts and fills the environment.)

 

On the other hand, we unfortunately have a sample size of only one for intelligence, but we do know from that size of one, that complex life is less likely, and right on up the chain. It seems reasonable from the energy standpoint too, as roughly a third of your caloric intake per day goes to fueling that 3-pound lump on top of your shoulders. If it doesn't offer a pretty significant survival advantage for your environment, it's reasonable to say that that energy is going to be expended elsewhere, or simply not taken in in the first place.

 

So I think in all the space opera and everything else, that they're right in showing life everywhere, but I think it's going to be mostly bacteria/microscopic, so lots of seaweed and slime, etc., and I also believe much of it will prove anaerobic. (Oxygen really is vile stuff! Our type of life just developed means of countering its toxic effects....for awhile.) I'm just not so sure that we're going to be bumping into ruins of ancient civilizations, or have them meeting us with smiles and open arms when we kick on the first warp field.

 

Of course I've always thought it could be quite fun to run the constant threat of all the things on another planet that could think we, or our innards are delicious and with no defenses against them, even without intelligence behind it.

[Christopher]

Oxygen really is vile stuff! Our type of life just developed means of countering its toxic effects....for awhile.

While it is really reactionfriendly, I think that makes it a nessesity too. It's reactionfriendliness makes it one of the few choices for respiration.

 

The three most common elements in the Universe are:

Hydrogen

Helium

Oxygen

 

Hydrogen will just bind with Oxygen to create water. Good old "Di-hydrogen Monoxide".

Helium is plain useless for chemical reactions. Because it is chemically innert. It is the lowest and most common "noble" gas.

Basically the two can be ignored except for creating water or being the stuff you use in Natural Nuclear Fusion.

 

Now oxygen is the opposite of Innert. Wich makes it such a good thing to breath. In particular if it has contact with carbon, it is a hellishly good fuel.

Fire? that is in 99% of the cases just Oxygen+Carbon forming Carbon-Dioxyde.

Our Metabolism is practically a Exothermic Oxygen/Carbon chemical reactor. The concentrations are held so low a uncontrolled Fire does not usually take place.

While plants are endothermic reactions, using Solar Energy to make up the difference.

 

Pure Dioxygen is comparatively abundant.

Creating Carbon-Dioxide with Oxygen and Food it produces a good amount of net energy from the mass defect.

Yet it is still somewhat easy to disolve it back into Oxygen and Carbon using Photosynthesis, wich only needs solar power.

 

The respiratory fuel of intelligent life would need to be:

Abundant across a wide area.

Produce a high net yield energy if combined with another common element

Must be easily returnable to the ready state using only solar energy or have otherwise effectively unlimited supply.

 

While there is life in extreme situations using an alternative respiratory fuel, none of those fuels fits the bill for intelligent life as well as Oxygen on earth.

[bigdamnhero]

While it is really reactionfriendly, I think that makes it a nessesity too. It's reactionfriendliness makes it one of the few choices for respiration.

Yeah, inert gasses aren't great for providing energy, etc.

[Kesedrith]

While it is really reactionfriendly, I think that makes it a nessesity too. It's reactionfriendliness makes it one of the few choices for respiration.

 

I'm not disagreeing on that, but there are other means of extracting energy other than respiration. Fermentation works good, and while we don't have any evidence that complex organisms can use this method, there's nothing that would preclude it. Considering the fermentation reaction only produces 2 ATP in the reaction chain (as opposed to like 8 - if I'm remembering the cycle correctly - for the respirative chain), we could make some suppositions about what such organisms would be like. First, they would likely be much slower moving than we are. Slower in thinking, if that's an issue, also. They would also need to ingest huge quantities of complex carbohydrates to fuel that more inefficient digestive reaction. Cosmetically they would also likely stink to high heaven from our perspective (think of a giant, walking, fermentation vat). Of course oxygen would be horribly toxic to them, so that last may not come into play as one of us would have to be in environment suits the entire time.

 

There's also sulfide reactions that are known to be bufferable and can produce energy for biology, and recently some methane and ethane based reactions have been proposed to account for the lack of certain organics in the atmosphere of Titan. Again, these reaction chains are lower efficiency than the aerobic reactions that have appeared, but it is possible.

[massey]

What logical reason do we have to asume we are the first or only? Why would your think our planet/species is THAT special considering the hundred-millions of stars in our galaxy alone?

 

The first Automobiles were powered by Steam - back in 1672 or 1769. They were practically just "trains without tracks".

It is practically just much more effective to drive on tracks then to drive on roads, especially with a lot of load. Indeed it is so much more effective, tracked transportation actually predates Steam power by a few centuries! They were just powered by humans on a winch or - get that - horses!

Yep, some of the first tracked transportation was a horsecart on tracks!

 

Automobiles and Trains are two coins of the same medal. If you got one, doing the other is just figuring out how to maker Rubber/Steel wheels and tracks. Indeed literally Automobile just means "self moving". Something you could describe to any train, car, airplane and ship.

 

Now you might be saying:

"But Modern Trains are powered by Electricity, provided via a powergrid as part of the track. No way that would lead to Steam, Combustion or Electirc cars (that need electric storage)."

And you would be wrong again. Diesel-electric trains are a thing, for all those tracks without full electrification. Wich is also used for (civil) surface ships and just about any emergency Generator. So getting to combustion or effective energy storage is pretty much unavoidable too.

 

"But what if they got nothing like horses. Or Oxen? Or any of the other animals used in early stages?"

They would just use slaves or workers, like we have plenty of times.

 

You picked a realy bad example with Automobiles and Modern Medicine. Try another one.

 

 

The automobiles and medicine thing was someone else's example.  I'm just saying it isn't as crazy as you seem to think.

 

One of my non-game interests is in a type of urban planning, what is today called "New Urbanism".  Not to bore anyone with the details (my girlfriend zones out when I bring it up), but it's basically about how you should design cities to interact with pedestrians, not cars.  Some of the die hard New Urbanists argue that the development of the automobile has actually retarded our development as a civilization.  There's a group of people today saying we'd be better off if cars had never been invented.  I don't know if they're right or not, but it's easy to imagine a world that made different choices than we did.  It wouldn't just be modern Earth with horses and buggies instead of cars, the cities would be laid out differently.  The lifestyles would be different.

 

The point is, just because cars were an obvious development for us, that doesn't mean that another civilization would have gone the same way.  Imagine a planet where most of the inhabitable land was strewn about through a vast archipelago.  Hundreds of thousands of little islands would be spread all around the world, but none of them big enough to really merit a large system of roads.  Land vehicles may have never been that important.  All trade and transportation would have been based around boats and ships.

 

Or think about a world that didn't have easily accessible oil and coal deposits.  They use whale oil or its equivalent until those start to run out, and then they have to switch to some other form of fuel.  They're stuck in a pre-industrial state until they can develop hydroelectric power or something, because their planet just doesn't have enough fossil fuels.  Once they get hydroelectric, they can industrialize, but it'll be a different direction than we took because their power sources are more limited.  Powered personal vehicles might be a luxury, especially if they haven't developed sufficient battery power yet to make them useful.  Now eventually this planet gets to nuclear reactors and other things to provide ample power, but then there's no guarantee once they have it that they'll go back and build cars.  Instead they might have maglev trains that go anywhere you want.

 

Or think about a world that was heavily populated by the time they hit 20th century technology.  There is no "open road" for a society to mythologize.  You don't have the American desire for freedom and wide open spaces, pushed by heavy advertising, causing one of the most powerful nations on Earth to build huge roadways incentivizing automobile traffic. Instead you have a heavily settled area with lots of closed borders and restricted access.  Instead of a USA with a population of about 130 million (1930s), you've got 87 separate countries in the same space, with a population of 490 million.  They don't like each other and they don't have road systems that connect.  Where are you going to take a car?

 

 

Magic has been proven to not exist.

With FTL we are only somewhat certain, as we are fully aware of our limited understanding of physics.

 

Without getting into a tedious argument about the definition of "magic", people still claim to see ghosts, and there's (highly questionable) evidence of ESP and other things like that.  The CIA spent time trying to develop psychic soldiers back in the 60s.  Realistically, FTL travel is pretty dang farfetched as well.

 

The point is that what we consider "probably not possible, but still maybe worth a little research funding", another society might consider "not worth looking into at all".

 

 

Looking up the traces are (relatively) easy to see for two simple reasons:

They come from civil airplanes that do not bother with stealth.

You have a single-colored backdrop. Doing the same thing when looking down is a lot harder. And do not even think about sideways.

 

If you could spot the trail of a military aircraft optically, just spotting the aircraft itself with the same optical technology is plain simpler.

If you could do it via a Sci-Fi Sensor, just scanning for the Aircrat would be simpler.

For all we know even Star Trek or Star Wars Sensor still include radar.

 

The trace gases example was just me trying to come up with a different sensor while I was typing.  It doesn't have to actually work to be a good illustration of the concept of multiple paths for technology.  The problems you point out with it display why we haven't pursued such a technology.  But another civilization, with a different history, different resources, different values, a different cost-benefit analysis, could develop tech that we never looked at.  And the truth is, you aren't going to know how those technologies interact until you encounter them.

[massey]

If we were to develop FTL travel, my guess is that our starships would be something like the Nostromo from Alien.  You'd have a huge ship, big and ungainly and not streamlined at all.  I'm assuming an FTL engine would be really big.  There'd be no need for weapons, because we don't really expect to run into anything out there.  It would surprise the crap out of me if a Romulan Warbird decloaked in front of the ship when it got wherever it was going.

 

Since we don't know what's out there, we wouldn't know what kind of weapons to put on the ship.  Even if we were to put weapons on it, they could be incredibly overpowered or incredibly underpowered for whatever we ran into.  Do we need particle beams?  Railguns?  Lasers?  Is ship to ship combat in space a real thing?  Do our ships need to have thick hulls like a submarine, or can they be thin like the space shuttle?  You don't know until you encounter whatever is out there.

 

The more species you meet, the more prepared you'd be for other types of technology, but there's still no guarantee.

[Old Man]

Hundreds of thousands of little islands would be spread all around the world, but none of them big enough to really merit a large system of roads.  Land vehicles may have never been that important.  All trade and transportation would have been based around boats and ships.

I live on a little island. We have the worst traffic in the U.S. FWIW.

[massey]

I live on a little island. We have the worst traffic in the U.S. FWIW.

 

So you're saying that cars don't properly fulfill the needs of the people on the island?  That if the people on your island had been the ones inventing transportation tech, they'd have probably gone with something other than a car?

[L. Marcus]

Monoraaaail!

[Old Man]

So you're saying that cars don't properly fulfill the needs of the people on the island?  That if the people on your island had been the ones inventing transportation tech, they'd have probably gone with something other than a car?

Funny you should ask.

[massey]

So transportation designed for the mainland is not very cost effective on a little island.  Got it.

[Asperion]

Or think about a world that was heavily populated by the time they hit 20th century technology.  There is no "open road" for a society to mythologize.  You don't have the American desire for freedom and wide open spaces, pushed by heavy advertising, causing one of the most powerful nations on Earth to build huge roadways incentivizing automobile traffic. Instead you have a heavily settled area with lots of closed borders and restricted access.  Instead of a USA with a population of about 130 million (1930s), you've got 87 separate countries in the same space, with a population of 490 million.  They don't like each other and they don't have road systems that connect.  Where are you going to take a car?

There has been societies that were in such a state as you are stating here. They always looked for ways to have their people not feel as though there is so little space. In the past, they were always able to connect with another society and expand their territory. In this world that you are describing, there are no other places for people to go to. As a result, I envision the people making a big push for off world travel, as a method of creating new territory to spread out in. There would be lunar colonies by the middle of the twentieth century and Mars and Venus would not be that far away. Possibly by the current year, there would be colonies on all terrestrial planets, going into the asteroid belt, and moving into the outer planets, simply as a method of making space for the people to move to.

[Old Man]

So transportation designed for the mainland is not very cost effective on a little island.  Got it.

So far there are no transportation options here that are more cost effective than cars. Perhaps the island is not small enough.