Steve3007 wrote: ↑November 29th, 2018, 6:04 pmThis topic has moved on massively since last I looked at it, but, for now, I'll pick this on which to comment:
Greta wrote:Generally, I would not judge aliens by our limitations. Firstly because they seem to only exist in our imaginations (but I would desperately like to be proved wrong). Secondly, as laboured over earlier, if aliens have interstellar skills then they will have a ton of other abilities. Thirdly, if we do encounter aliens and they turn out to be organic then I will eat someone's hat (I don't own any because, with my hair, they make me look like wicked witch).
On point three: What exactly do we classify as "organic"? With our current level of technology we have what appears to be a clear distinction between gooey, evolved, carbon and water based life and clean, clinical semiconductor based "life". But will that distinction be eroded in the future? Will it be possible to clearly tell whether any hat consumption is required?
Good point. It seems there's two ways that carbon and silicon and mix, so to speak. There's the well known cyborgism thought experiment where, if organic body parts are replaced with synthetics one by one, at what point, if any, does the person stop being human and become something else? (Really, any biologist would tell you that if the cyborg can successful mate and reproduce with a human, then he or she is still human, which just goes to show that philosophers would save themselves a lot of time in blind alleys if they paid more attention to biologists). If the cyborg cannot breed with Homo sapiens, then he/she/it is Homo machina - or would it be still in the Homo genus, Machina (hopefully) sapiens?
Another option you may alluded to, where self improving general AI might find a use for some gooey organics.
It's rather hard to imagine any of these doing mission work, though. I suspect they would, with advanced technology, just observe with enough distance to not influence the observed.
Steve3007 wrote: ↑November 29th, 2018, 6:04 pmGiven the immense distances and hostile environments involved in space travel, it seems likely to me that whatever entities make that journey, they won't be the original entities that evolved on the home planet. They'll be designed for space travel. We're already moving that way ourselves. The first Earth-origin inhabitants of Mars (the most recent of which landed last Monday, to the relief of its peanut-eating senders) are semi-intelligent creatures that were designed for the environments of the journey and the destination. We experience their experiences vicariously, just as we would if they were human; just as we did with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. It seems to me to make sense to continue on that road and send ever more intelligent designed creatures, rather than evolved creatures, as our emissaries.
Agreed. Like the geek joke: Mars is the only planet in the solar system inhabited entirely by robots. Rather than sending a mission to Mars's Yellowknife Bay to check the sedimentary rocks that look very much like structures on Earth built by diatoms and other microbes, we avoid it for fear of contamination. I can imagine intelligent aliens taking that approach with Earth.
After all, once they reveal themselves they lose the opportunity to learn how we might have developed without interference. For all we know, there could be alien political debates - those who want to explore more closely and those with a "tentacles off" policy. However, there are clearly still occasional problems with illegal human DNA poaching in the wide open spaces of the US's rural south where no one can hear you scream ...
Steve3007 wrote: ↑November 29th, 2018, 6:04 pmBasically, they would be like this :)
That was a very striking picture that hit me as I scrolled down.
What would be a good form for space travel? Small for reduced resource needs, non pigmented skin, huge scary black boogly eyes to maximise light capture in space. Like birds, they'd be nowhere near ground so they won't need a sense of smell. Not sure why they need mouths - perhaps an energy feed socket placed there because old evolutionary habits die hard? To proselytise??