Benevolent Intelligent ET Lifeforms Are A Pipedream

Originally posted by putnamcrab

Originally posted by mysterioustranger
So by your own thread wording...youre insisting ET Lifeforms are "malevolent" mean and harmful...and NOT intelligent-instead, stupid, dumb and lacking intelligence.

This thread is "malevolent" and not very "intelligent.

Put your pipe down..leave it alone....

Obviously you don't know the definition of Malevolent... just cause their mean doesn't mean their stupid

Originally posted by putnamcrab

Originally posted by mysterioustranger
So by your own thread wording...youre insisting ET Lifeforms are "malevolent" mean and harmful...and NOT intelligent-instead, stupid, dumb and lacking intelligence.

This thread is "malevolent" and not very "intelligent.

Put your pipe down..leave it alone....

Obviously you don't know the definition of Malevolent... just cause their mean doesn't mean their stupid

Originally posted by ShiningBeneath
I think you assume FAR too much.
Who is to say other non-Earth ecosystems and food-chains exist in the form ours do? What if other planets lack for predator and prey, and instead survive through entirely different means? Who is to say at some point in the future our species will not turn over a new leaf and prosper in a non-toxic way as opposed to the BS we have now. Who is to say you are intelligent enough to determine what can and can't be regarded as benevolence? Perhaps it's a case of 'you have to be cruel to be kind', and we are being allowed to near destroy ourselves in order to learn not to play with fire by getting burnt.

I think all of your points are valid. Of course, we can't know. But we can use the earth for a model and come up with some ideas. As far as turning over a new leaf. I have my doubts...

Thanks for the post.

reply to post by mysterioustranger


YOU said that: "Obviously you don't know the definition of Malevolent... just cause their mean doesn't mean their stupid"

When you get back in class after summer...look into it...but use a d-i-c-t-i-o-n-a-r-y....its something called a BOOK of Reference.

Your thread/point states they cant be benevolent nor intellegent and certainly not at the same time (just a "pipedream")......and that they have to be MAL-evolent and UN-intellegent (also a pipedream)

...obviously you dont know the definition...

Originally posted by Corporate Providence
of course we are predators, our eyes are on the front of our faces aren't they? however, the fact is we don't have to be weak, but we can control our instincts so as to live in some level of peace with each other.

Are you sure about that? I would point out that much of our lives is controlled by instinctual animal behavior that we barely even recognize in ourselves, especially social driven behavior.

Originally posted by stolski21
It is human ignorance to believe that we are the MOST advanced and MOST intelligent life-form in the universe.

I hope you're not insintuating that I ever suggested such a thing anywhere in my arguments.

Our milky-way is far greater than our minds, at their current stage, could even begin to process

An interesting assumption. It could very well be true that our brains are not capable of processing certain information. It may also not be true. There may also be a ceiling of knowledge and it may not take as long as previously thought to get there. We assume some alien civs may be zillions of years more advanced than we are, when in truth they may have hit that ceiling. We may not be so far away from that sort of advancement as we think. I would point out how tech seems to speed up the process and what we accomplished in a short time.

Of course, with how big that gulf is out there... I find it hard to imagine a ceiling. But then I do have a human brain, as you mentioned.

Originally posted by R3KR
What will we look like in thousands of years ? I'm guessing we will be some sort of hybrid/mechanical indestructible fusion powered beings. We wont need food, we wont need water or anything like that. Our soul purpose will probably be to find and help other lifeforms and explore to find out what the universe is and why its here

Our known purpose is to reproduce and to survive. I find it amusing that people use the term evolving when it comes to your argument. That soul evolving stuff. I believe the only purpose of evolution is to adapt to the environment. I've mentioned there could be an evolutionary device to leave the planet (didn't McKenna suggest this because he couldn't figure out why we do we do the planet? something about a birthing process). As predators, I have my doubts that evolution had this purpose in mind for helping other forms of life. I'm glad your so optimistic. I don't see anything in human history that would suggest we ever collectively wanted to help anything else but ourselves.

I mean what else would we do, just roam around the galaxy and pointlessly destroy other life forms because we are better?

Isn't that what we do on our own planet?

If we had the technology that would make us live forever and never be hungry I think our priorities would change. My point is, we will not always be this apish, we will have more advanced technology that will enable us to change. Whats the point of going to war or fighting someone that cant feel pain, cant die, and cant be injured ? The machines will literally be smarter then us in only a hundred years, can you imagine all they will accomplish then ? I don't believe we will be the same race in a couple thousand years, and if we can do it, then so can they. I think that the majority of intelligent life forms in space are benevolent.

Sorry, but using the examples of social heirarchies in social animals I posted yesterday, I still believe there would undoubtably be wars, social strife, power struggles...etc. Perhaps we would be less aggressive. Someone suggested when you take away needs a creature becomes less aggressive. I looked around and only found examples in chickens. It still doesn't completely eradicate the aggression or the social instincts from the animal.
I do agree that with genetic tech we will probably be able to change our temperament, and I fully expect this to become an issue in the very near future. Again, the question becomes, will we? And even then, we will still have social heirarchy instincts.

Originally posted by openminded2011
When you think that there has been life on Earth for 3.5 billion years, and out of all that time only ONE species became sentient, It stands to reason that intelligent life is very rare.

Homo neanderthalis. Also, new studies are coming up all the time now that prove once and for all that some animals have self awareness. Intelligent life besides ourselves already exists on our own planet, with some creatures able to intelligently think in ways better than even human beings. As the article I posted earlier states: we are just not as special as we think we are. Predator ego? I think it is.

the chances that there will be a planet close enough to detect intelligent beings for the brief time they exist before blowing themselves to kingdom come are probably too small to even think about.

Good point, but I wouldn't go so far as to say an advanced intelligence hasn't mastered space travel.

BUT..... since we dont have any sample of what is really out there among the billions of galaxies, its totally possible that a number of species are long lived and have solved the problem of travel between the stars.

Again, we are assuming it takes a long time to 'advance'. I would argue that it's possible that once you reach a certain level of tech, it may not take so long as we think to make huge advances in science. Again, look at what we did in hundred years, and what we took from that and did in the last just twenty with the Info Age.

Even so, an alien invasion is not likely because any starfaring race will have engineering on a level that will allow them to easily gather resources from asteroids and comets, and terraform planets, maybe even make planets, no need to come down here and kick our little primate bottoms. Unless they just want to capture us as pets.

And again, I would argue that it doesn't matter (much) if our needs are met, we are still social animals that still have natural instincts that are as much as part of us as breathing. Does it mean we will go off into space like Klingons looking to conquer? I'm not so sure we wouldn't. But I would bet we would still have wars, social strife/power struggles...etc, etc and all the other behavior that is natural to us.

Originally posted by extraterrestrialentity
For a civilization to evolve and advance so much that they can travel interstellar distances within a feasible amount of time, means that a civilization has to move past racism, hatred, slavery etc.

As I've pointed out several times, we did not need to 'advance' (if that's what you want to call it) one iota in the ways you suggested to develop tech to take us into space, send probes to Mars, land a man on the moon...etc, etc.

I find the argument that to develop interstellar tech, we need to move past our behaviors to be ludicrous.

Originally posted by extraterrestrialentity
reply to post by Serraphina

 

But you see, if hate, racism etc. continues, and with our civilization having some pretty good technology, we will most likely kill ourselves with this technology, most likely before we have technology to take us to the stars.

We may be full of hate, racism, and all that other nasty stuff you mentioned, but we still managed to develop the tech we have with it firmly in place and right now it's supporting more people on the planet than may have ever walked the earth at one time.

Originally posted by ezwip
What if the ET are totally hot?

Like Paris Hilton? No thanks.

reply to post by Balkan

The more technology we develop the more chance there is that humanity will be destroyed. Take nuclear technology for example, if we don't use that nuclear technology for benevolent purposes then our whole civilization might be eradicated. With less technology, you don't have the power to destroy a whole civilization. The reason for why we're still alive is because we just discovered such technology, and already our government wants to throw nuclear bombs everywhere.

Personal experience has shown me that it is rediculous to paste human concepts onto non-human lifeforms.

Lets start w/the term "alien" itself- what does this mean? basically it mean something entirely foriegn, w/many unknowns, & possibly many unknowables from where we stand today.

Eg: the movie "Paul"- this is a classic example of humanizing "alien" concepts. The same w/every single TV show or Movie in the SF genre- Full to the brim w/humanistic assumptions & behaviors. This includes the giant, clunky "nuts & bolts" spaceships that almost creak & moan in their primitive "alien spaceships" concepts (I can never take any SF movie seriously anymore-they are just too stupid! ) . After everything I've been through, I can say whole heartedly, that:

1) All speculation is entirely useless & irrelevent.
2) They are incredibly advanced- to the point of mastery of the mind-body connections (which are mostly unknowns & speculations at this point), & mastery of trans-dimensional travel- they don't need to travel "through" space over huge distances for long periods of time: they can go around space-time enterely.

3) Michael Shirmer-noted ufo skeptic: " I would like to immodestly propose Shermer's Last Law (I don't believe in naming laws after oneself, so as the good book warns, the last shall be first and the first shall be last): Any sufficiently advanced ETI is indistinguishable from God.

God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Since we are far from the mark on these traits, how could we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely, from an ETI who has them in relatively (to us) copious amounts? Thus, we would be unable to distinguish between absolute and relative omniscience and omnipotence. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than us, then by definition it would be an ETI! Consider two observations and one deduction:

1. Biological evolution operates at a snail's pace compared to technological evolution (the former is Darwinian and requires generations of differential reproductive success, the latter is Lamarckian and can be implemented within a single generation). 2. The cosmos is very big and space is very empty (Voyager I, our most distant spacecraft hurtling along at over 38,000 mph, will not reach the distance of even our sun's nearest neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system that it is not even headed toward, for over 75,000 years). Ergo, the probability of an ETI who is only slightly more advanced than us and also makes contact is virtually nil. If we ever do find ETI it will be as if a million-year-old Homo erectus were dropped into the middle of Manhattan, given a computer and cell phone and instructed to communicate with us. ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid--godlike.

Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries. It took 10,000 years to get from the cart to the airplane, but only 66 years to get from powered flight to a lunar landing. Moore's Law of computer power doubling every eighteen months continues unabated and is now down to about a year. Ray Kurzweil, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, calculates that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II, and that the Singularity point may be upon us as early as 2030. The Singularity (as in the center of a black hole where matter is so dense that its gravity is infinite) is the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything that we can imagine that they will appear near infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience (note the suffix!).

When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades. Extrapolate that out a hundred thousand years, or a million years (an eye blink on an evolutionary time scale and thus a realistic estimate of how far advanced ETI will be, unless we happen to be the first space-faring species, which is unlikely), and we get a gut-wrenching, mind-warping feel for just how godlike these creatures would seem. "

It's truly ironic that the most famous UFO skeptic in the world seems to understand the concept very well. THIS is what we are dealing with.

I have have personal experience that shows me that we cannot understand what they are, hardly at all. Far too many assumptions & currently unknowables exist.

The only real thing we can do is observe & learn.

All ridicule on one side, & fanaticism on the other, is purely based on ignorance- what is on one hand mind-bendingly advanced, can be seen at the same time, to be utterly rediculous- no point of reference exists.

reply to post by Balkan


I'm with you on tthis one OP, why do people believe that ete's are benevolent to be able to get that far advanced? Because from where I'm standing it looks like most of the technological advances we have made have been directly due to war and aggression, we hit hardship, we adapt, we get smarter, so when we are at war or faced with aggressors we step up, most of the tech these days have originally come from military applications. So why not the same for extra terrestrial entities? All that new age "oh the benevolent aliens are here to show us the way in peace, love and harmony!" crap really makes me gag, I actually feel embarrassed for the people spouting thats stuff!! Reminds me of the 60's summerr of love crap all over again!! LOL!! (probably gonna get flamed by GFL followers on here for this now!! but frankly....I dont give a damn!)

And when it comes to the intelligence in other creatures it all boils down to one thing, self awareness, they dont have it. Put a babboon in front of a mirror and it wont recognise itself, in fact it will try to attack it's reflection, especially as a lot of the creatures you mentioned are extremely territorial. Are they aware of themselves? If not, then it doesnt matter if they can write complicated equasions, like E=mc2, they are nothing like us.

reply to post by InternetGremlin


I wish my iPhone always had caller id, I like to know who those weirdos calling me are before I answer.

Basically all I want to say Balkan is you are wrong.

There is more good then bad in the Universe and you have no clue .....you just have no clue