Should humanity try to find and contact extraterrestrial intelligence?

I should've inb4ed the posadas shit cause I knew it was coming.

I think a capitalist species could concievably survive, on the blood and bones of their workers of course, long enough to get into space and take advantage of the resources there and to develop robots to help them survive. Also, a fascist government could conceivably put enough limits on use of resources to be sustainable until they started space mining. If we factor in that aliens are not constrained by human patterns of behaviour there's even less scope to say communists are the only life possible.

Hypothetically, if aliens were to develop the technology needed to colonize other planets before socialism, they could reproduce the patterns of globalization but on an interplanetary scale.

Yeah, you should have.

This is a good point, but is it' not also the point where any speculation on their behavior becomes utterly meaningless?

Possible, but I find it highly unlikely. Capitalist development is based on profit. Space exploration requires enormous investments with almost zero return.
At the point where getting resources from space is more profitable than harvesting resources on the home planet, society would likely already have collapsed, making development of interplanetary travel impossible.
There are of course possible scenarios where a capitalist or fascist system reaches singularity, but at the point of full automation the proletariat are useless to the ruling class.
In all likelihood a egalitarian society would develop. In the short term this could be the result of genocide of the proletariat to give the ruling class lebensraum and resources, but at the time they can reach us they will have the entire universe to colonize as it pleases them, and so no reason to murder us, except possibly for the heck of it.
All in all Posadas was probably right.
Don't let xenomorphophobia blind you to the truth.

Brutally murdering a bunch of primitive violent greedy apes is a comoletrly logical endeavor tbh fam. I welcome are alien overlords.

*our

What would be the benefit of a alien race exploiting us? Space is really big meaning first contacts would most likely be transmissions and probes due to it requiring lots of preparations and investments just to send a manned ship to neighbouring solar systems.

I think we've already been in contact with extra terrestrials. If anything is advanced enough to manipulate space time, they've definitely already been here.

I disagree. Brutally murdering any animal is wrong unless done for food or fun.

Implying only one monolithic filter exists.

Anybody who doesn't think this is retarded.

The telecomms stuff is like a gnats fart compared to the strength of the radar signals we're blasting into space. Given the military likes radar, it won't be getting turned off any time soon.

How strong of signals are we talking, what is the staying power given distance and interference?

Your claim that they wouldn't murder us is bullshit. Humans had enormous resources and were in the end stages of colonizing the entire planet when they encountered the Dodo. See many Dodo about?

We might just be in the way. Can't have the local wildlife holding up the hyperspace bypass.

You have any idea of the scales of distance and time that space involves?
And even then, Earth doesn't have any resources that don't exist elsewhere; our brand of animal life would literally be the only thing of note and I don't think that would be a massive game-changer for aliens.
Hell, at best we could someday be on their level, but even this is heavily called into question under a fair appraisal.

Depends on their reception equipment, but current terrestrial technology could allow a determined eavesdropper to detect missile warning radars at 250 light years, apparently.

history.nasa.gov/CP-2156/ch5.4.htm

Thing is, communication technology may well get smaller and more directional as it improves with time, so as we get quieter so too may they get deafer.

Yes. Consider the enormous energy and matter investment is going to have to make to reach our local system. It is inconsequential that the matter here is common; once a visitor arrives that is the only matter available to them, should they need fuel of some form.

That paper was written in 1980. Furthermore, we're discussing radar not communication technology.

So…they'll come here in non-disposable craft to check out the animal life, and then need to eat everything without mercy.

I don't think human civilization anno 1600 is comparable to a civilization that can travel between planets, and maybe star systems, post scarcity is pretty much a given at that point. Humans killed the dodos mainly because they where hungry. And it's not like humans learned about the dodos and then crossed the world to eat them all. If god like creatures happen upon earth by chance and decide they want to eat us, then there is not much we can do. If they lack food or resources, there will probably be easier ways to find it than cross the galaxy.
The same goes for the "in the way" argument, if they are going to build a "hyperspace bypass then letting them know we are here would hardly put us at an disadvantage.

Your post-scarcity meme is not applicable in this discussion. The amount of energy required to accelerate any given object to a reasonable fraction of c is ridiculous. Unless you can show me, right now, that the laws of thermodynamics are wrong, the alien ship is going to arrive in the mood for a snack.

I'm also slightly appalled you've not picked up on the "hyperspace bypass" reference.

What about hyperspace though?

What about on board food supply within a recirculating mini ecosystem?

an interstellar ship would definitely be self-sustaining

Maybe it'll be an unstaffed probe that'll collect data, beam it back to wherever, then kill itself?
Space is oftentimes dangerous, but it isn't exactly like WH40K.

There is a hard limit on the speed something can travel through space, so interstellar contact of any kind is unlikely and would occur over huge timescales - like tens of thousands of years.

I am inclined to think life as we know it is a freak accident that is unlikely to have repeated anywhere near us, so humanity will never contact ET.

We have a fine assortment of cuisine you daft sod. I'm pretty sure they'll just grab a burger or whatever tickles their fancy.

We have a fine assortment of cuisine you daft sod. I'm pretty sure they'll just grab a burger or whatever tickles their fancy.

The dodo analogy had me thinking you where arguing they would specifically target humans, which unless the matrix was right, are a pretty poor source of energy.
But you are saying they would arrive in a spaceship that would need to consume a large part of our solar system should they ever wish to accelerate again?
I guess that is possible, but it would make the trip kind of pointless from a human perspective. Why travel to a place if your very presence would lead to it's inevitable destruction? Some sort of nihilistic YOLO philosophy could explain it, but is a species with such a mentality not more likely to destroy itself before reaching star travel capabilities?
Still think Posadas has the better theory.

Any practical space ship wouldn't actually simply "travel" through space in a straight line at the speed of light from point A to point B.
It would need to have an warp engine capable of "bending" the space around it and "jumping" from point A to point B.

And I'm sorry about that. Haven't read the book or seen the movie. Had to google it now.

Trying to communicate with aliens would be like an any trying to communicate with humans. They would squash us like a bug if they needed to and ignore us if they didn't

All the solutions for cheating Einstein require negative mass in the mathematics. While this is not currently considered impossible, the results coming out of the LHC vis the Higgs Boson and Higgs Field are making this look sketchy.

Yes, that includes your Alcubierre drive.

It doesn't need to be a large part of the solar system to prove dangerous for life here.
Let's say our aliens arrive and remove a couple of percent of the mass of Jupiter for use as hydrogen fusion fuel. A lighter Jupiter alters its gravitational effects on other bodies in the solar system. Planets start moving in their orbits. Moving a planet further or closer to the Sun changes the amount of insolation it receives. Change in insolation is the basis of our seasons.

You're a smart individual, I'm sure you can grasp how this might not be dangerous for some barren rocks while simultaneously being exceedingly dangerous for us.

Bracewell probe? Sure. But if you're going to do that, you might as well couple it with von Neumann's ideas about self-replication, no?

For a board stuffed with obsessive readers that's quite a surprise.

Not really, but the proposed aliens would probably grasp that just fine, so given the scenario is alien contact triggered by humans trying to communicate with them, I still find it unlikely they would choose to interact in a way that put them in a position were they would risk our destruction. Not impossible, but unlikely.

Yeah, not that in to books. I prefer just watching con-air on vhs over and over again. Have read a little shi-fi, but mostly P.K.Dick and Gibson.

Might I suggest trying this as both retort and entertainment:
rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

sure, why not. I'll give it a read.

Comrades. Comrades.
If the ayylmaos do get here, I do not doubt they would be using an exceptionally efficient nuclear powered engine(this includes antimatter) if not a fully reactionless or alcubierre drive(if such a thing could ever be built). If they were to need fuel to get back home, as is very probable, then they would take a lil bit from the gas giants, if their engines are efficient enough then it wouldn't really be noticeable unless they came here on a fucking moon. Project Icarus and the like were conducted on the assumption that future humans would use relatively inefficient inertial confinement nuclear pulse engines to power their probes. I do not doubt that ayylmaos who are experienced at travel through the interstellar medium would have developed a better way to do it.

I forgot to add, there are actually an estimated 1 million tons of Helium-3 on Earth's moon. Fuel for interstellar rockets is everywhere, you just have to look for it.

Getting serious about this.

If there is life in other planets it will not resamble what our science understands as life.
What if aliens are clouds and they comunicate by lighning? How could we prove that they are alive or that their language has deeper meanings?

Looking for life in other planets is fruitess since thanks to druggies like sagan we have a very fucking narrow definition of life.
I prefer to think life is a rarity on the first place.

Odds are life that had developed a civilization that travels across space will have the means to transform raw resources matter into energy, machines and supplies and have developed their own artificial intelligence that will likely have a far easier time communicating with out artificial intelligence then aliens would have with communicating with us. Meaning odds are that our super computers will most likely be making first contact with their super computers.