Feo2: Hawkings Warning
Posted by Feo Amante on Jan 23, 2004 at 08:58
(24.130.231.153)Re: Feo: Hawkings Warning (danno might)
Looking at your issues one at a time:
You associate aggressive with invasive while at the same time making a case for an intelligence with the technology and resources to cross great distances of space and time. No matter how you look at this endeavor, regardless of culture, such technology comes from the accumulation of a considerable amount of time and resource.
Aggressive does not equal Invasive and you showed no examples of scientific endeavors and pursuits of knowledge, that support your relation of those two words.
Now consider resources. In our solar system alone (and if our assumption is correct that all solar systems are created in the same relative way), then we are discussing a life form so advanced, and so old in space travel, that to even want to cross such incredible differences due to an aggressive intelligence, requires an enormous expenditure of time and resource, as well as creating craft suited to the purpose.
Any ancient space faring nation would have no use for biological slaves. Think about it. It takes 9 months and an incredible amount of food to produce a single new slave, which won't be usable for another14 years at least (I'm guessing here that any slave worth having is one that can actually perform a burdensome task). Now imagine an ancient space faring race with no computers to guide their FTL craft.
They don't have FTL? These folks want to actualy spend thousands of years travelling to a distant solar system to enslave a bunch ofhigh maintenance slaves? No. Regardless of culture, to expend such time and energy would require a purpose that makes it worthwhile. I submit that no life form so disorganized would ever get it together enough to create such a technological civilization. Furthermore, a society that existed in say, a state of decay, living on the back of an ancient technology that had been static for centuries (like in the alien creatures in the movie, Battlefield Earth) would still have some form of computers and advanced machinery. Being that they have both, and they feel the need for slaves. They would create their own, not travel enormous distances to capture, create a livable environement for them, and breed them.
I say this because, even at our infant stage of technological development, we are so close to manufacturing thinking slaves (robots in this case), that it is not even worth talking about it. If you have machines that can calculate the math for travelling vast distances, then whether you call it a car, a space ship, or a robot, you are creating slaves. And since such creation would already exist in your infrastructure (how could it not?), it is far more convenient than travelling thousands of light years - by whatever means you use, to enslave a lifeform inferior for the purpose.
Your next point:
>"Domination can mean destruction, would you not agree?"
I agree that it can in the same way I agree that it can't. It's a possibility; a maybe. For example. When we create a refuge for a species we are granting them an area of land that they live on anyway. But by the very act of creating that refuge, we have dominated that life form. We have set limits to where it can go unharmed by our society.
In the same way, for a space faring nation, such a refuge for another life form could mean just their solar system or their quadrant (borrowing Star Trek terminology to illustrate this point).
A dangerous annoyance to a life form so advanced? In the same way someone in New York might consider pygmies, living in the outlands of Africa, a dangerous annoyance. The differences in tech between the supposed alien life form and us are just too great. And the tech differences between a human living in an industrial nation and one living off of the land are insignificant compared to the type of technological variance that you speak of.
The boogeyman of Capitalism rears its head in your debate, making no historical sense. Unlike past imperialist planned economies and communist ones, Capitalists are on the low end of the scale regarding the destruction of the environment. While not inclusive of every corporation, the ones that intend to last do their best to ensure the continnuation of their business, not just wipe it out.
In many capitalist countries, and in regards to fishinig for example, the industry has its seasons in order to maintain their prices and their livlihood. They even try fsih frams to ensure a steady balance (doesn't always work, but it seemed a good ecological idea at one time).
The Soviet Union on the other hand, did irrepreable environmental damage on the largest scale ever seen in human history. This was going on at the very same time when U.S. corporate capitalism was running nearly unchecked both in and without the regulations of the U.S. and other industrial nations.
Global warming is a boogyman attributed to the idea of Capitalism as a monster. But the truth is, the evidence to support the idea that humans are destroying the environment on such a global scale as to cause global warming is still in the probable guess stage.
On the other hand, the forest fires in California had an immediate and long term adverse effect on the environment and it was caused due to the terribly poor science (read no science) of the environmental regulatory standards of California, which are the "Greenest" in the nation.
Hmmm. I guess that actually covers my point pretty well. Okay, your turn.