Why do we assume that aliens would be far more advanced than us?

[Thaluikhain]

The speed of light is approximately 670 million miles per hour, so if you could accelerate at 1million mph, you would reach half the speed of light (335 mmph), in approximately 14 days. To get to Alpha Centuiri it would then only take about 8 years. You could in theory accelerate faster then that...but approaching the speed of light may be dangerous....probably not something to do on your first trip (better to take twice as long getting there).

Er...670 million miles per hour? That's a measure of speed, not a measure of acceleration.

Anyway, as your speed increases, the acceleration you get from a set amount of power decreases, because your mass increases.

If the alien ship decides to get a good seat, and watch from just beyond our furthest satellites (so shit doesn't bounce off their hull), its gonna take that missile (24,000 / 28,176) 51 minutes to reach their ship. Even if the instant they were detected in orbit we started firing wildly into the air, they would still have had time to launch a full volley before our weapons even physically reached them. At which point it would no longer matter whether or not our weapons were effective.

That's a point, yes, I was assuming they'd not immediately destroy everything.

 

[Glongpre]

The only movie coming out soon that might buck that trend would be The Forever War. But I highly doubt that Hollywood wont bungle it like they do every other good book.

What?! They are making a movie about the Forever War!! You lie. I'll have to look this up. That is exciting, I really enjoyed the premise of the book.

 

[wulfy42]

The speed of light is approximately 670 million miles per hour, so if you could accelerate at 1million mph, you would reach half the speed of light (335 mmph), in approximately 14 days. To get to Alpha Centuiri it would then only take about 8 years. You could in theory accelerate faster then that...but approaching the speed of light may be dangerous....probably not something to do on your first trip (better to take twice as long getting there).

Er...670 million miles per hour? That's a measure of speed, not a measure of acceleration.

Anyway, as your speed increases, the acceleration you get from a set amount of power decreases, because your mass increases.

If the alien ship decides to get a good seat, and watch from just beyond our furthest satellites (so shit doesn't bounce off their hull), its gonna take that missile (24,000 / 28,176) 51 minutes to reach their ship. Even if the instant they were detected in orbit we started firing wildly into the air, they would still have had time to launch a full volley before our weapons even physically reached them. At which point it would no longer matter whether or not our weapons were effective.

That's a point, yes, I was assuming they'd not immediately destroy everything.

I now that is a measure of speed, not acceleration. The acceleration was 1 million miles per hour, which would get you to a constant speed (relative to your starting point) of 335 million miles per hour, in about 14 days (at which time you stop accelerating). You need to factor in 14 days to decelerate as well at the end of the trip.

As far as needing more propulsion to achieve the same acceleration as you approach the speed of light, that is why I said we would stop at 1/2 the speed of light. The over all average acceleration would be 1 million miles per hour....that does not neccesarily mean it would be 1 mmph the whole way (or that it would even take only 14 days all together to achieve..it might be a bit longer. Since your talking about 8 years ....it really doesn't matter if the acceleration/deceleration time is 14 days or 28.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I now that is a measure of speed, not acceleration. The acceleration was 1 million miles per hour, which would get you to a constant speed (relative to your starting point) of 335 million miles per hour, in about 14 days (at which time you stop accelerating). You need to factor in 14 days to decelerate as well at the end of the trip.

Ah, you mean 1 million miles per hour per hour.

As far as needing more propulsion to achieve the same acceleration as you approach the speed of light, that is why I said we would stop at 1/2 the speed of light. The over all average acceleration would be 1 million miles per hour....that does not neccesarily mean it would be 1 mmph the whole way (or that it would even take only 14 days all together to achieve..it might be a bit longer. Since your talking about 8 years ....it really doesn't matter if the acceleration/deceleration time is 14 days or 28.

Fair enough.

 

[waj9876]

Because their technology would have to be so advanced to get to us, that naturally their offensive abilities would be bolstered just from the technology that's invented. Also, why the hell would a civilization with the intent to conquer our planet NOT have the best weapons they could possibly make?

If they come here to conquer us, they have hostile intentions. If they have weapons at all, and can have hostile intentions, they've fought either themselves, or other species before. Not having the best weaponry to match the rest of your technology would just...be very, very fucking stupid, if you expect to fight ever.

 

[ShiningAmber]

I'm just saying if an alien race shows up to Earth, the fact that they got to Earth should be a big, red flag They obviously know something we don't.

 

[Mr.Mattress]

First to the person who said aliens would get her themselves with wings. You do realize wings wouldn't do anything in space right?

I was being pedantic really. I mean, what if these aliens can travel through space in Non-Space Ship methods? The Wing thing I know wouldn't work on it's own, but perhaps they have some kind of propulsion system in their wings that would let them fly through space. We need to take into consideration that you don't have to have a space ship to fly through space: Simply because we need one doesn't mean other's would.

 

[Able Seaman Staines]

Personally I think that even if human beings can't travel faster than light, we can solve the problem of travelling vast distances by developing technologies that increase human lifespan to enormous lengths. We know this is possible via nanotech and better medicine because we have seen huge advances in human lifespan already.

As to why we imagine aliens to be better at warfare than humans are, well, technologies tend to be allied. E.G. A rocket engine is really a devastating flame thrower, a propeller is a set of lethal slicing blades, and even a laser communication array needs to be strong enough to cut steel over interstellar distances.

Yes the aliens might be 100% pacifists, but that doesn't mean they can't be arseholes. Just because someone is a pacifist doesn't mean they are also a pleasant person, they may not try to kill you but they may think nothing of defrauding you, or using your culture against you. For a great example of a set of horrible pacifists, look at the Puppeteers from Larry Niven's Ringworld novels.

As to other reasons aliens are imagined as being more advanced, well, call it optimism that while we have to live on a planet peopled by ape-like retards, we can dream that somewhere out there is a species that isn't as stupid and contrarian as we seem to be.

 

[EvilRoy]

If the alien ship decides to get a good seat, and watch from just beyond our furthest satellites (so shit doesn't bounce off their hull), its gonna take that missile (24,000 / 28,176) 51 minutes to reach their ship. Even if the instant they were detected in orbit we started firing wildly into the air, they would still have had time to launch a full volley before our weapons even physically reached them. At which point it would no longer matter whether or not our weapons were effective.

That's a point, yes, I was assuming they'd not immediately destroy everything.

Well, I was figuring on one of two situations. Either they show up with intent to harm and fire away on arrival or we piss them off somehow and/or fire first and they return fire before our first shots reach them.

 

[Kotaro]

Because all of the fiction we've had for decades has had them be more advanced. And that's because it makes for more interesting fiction, most likely.

I know it's a simple answer, but it's the first thing that comes to my mind.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Personally I think that even if human beings can't travel faster than light, we can solve the problem of travelling vast distances by developing technologies that increase human lifespan to enormous lengths. We know this is possible via nanotech and better medicine because we have seen huge advances in human lifespan already.

Well...maybe. There may be limits to this, some things might just not be able to be extended.

Really, we haven't seen huge increases in human lifespans, we've seen huge increase in average human lifespan. Octavius, for example, died in 14 AD in his late seventies. Nowdays that's quite normal in the western world.

Yes the aliens might be 100% pacifists, but that doesn't mean they can't be arseholes. Just because someone is a pacifist doesn't mean they are also a pleasant person, they may not try to kill you but they may think nothing of defrauding you, or using your culture against you. For a great example of a set of horrible pacifists, look at the Puppeteers from Larry Niven's Ringworld novels.

That's true...for that matter, what if they want to help humnaity, but don't bother trying to understand any of the issues and assume they automatically know best? Lots of human activists are like that, burdening others with their assistance so they can pat themselves on the back.

 

[NoeL]

Then again, it's possible they might be a 100% pacifist alien civilization, and the entire concept of battle and combat is completely foreign to them.

Not sure if someone's already pulled you up on it, but this is incredibly unlikely. Alien species would almost certainly be the product of evolution just as they are on Earth, and in order for evolution to take place there needs to be competition (otherwise they just stay the same, like sharks). So the tendency to fight each other for resources would be just as instinctually ingrained as it is in us.

That said, human technology has advanced to such a degree that we could annihilate ourselves with the push of a button (or strip the planet of all its resources and starve to death), so it's possible that any species that manages to break beyond self-annihilation is a species that have overcome their natural instincts to compete violently, so a visiting alien race might not be hostile. On the other hand, unless they have wormhole technology or something any ship that sets sail for Earth is on a one way trip, and the most likely reason for that would be for colonisation.

 

[Do4600]

Firstly, it's the odds.

The chances of a race making contact with us that is of equivalent technology is very low. This relies on a least one assumption, that life evolves at roughly equivalent pace.

If you made a million earths how many of them would develop life capable of constructing a transmitter within 110 years of each other?

For us to get a signal from a technologically equivalent species we would have to have evolved so that we achieved intelligence and technology within 25 years of each other, which has astronomically low odds considering our own evolution took 5 billion years. It also means that we would have to be within 100 light years of each other at this point because we would just be getting their signals from 1913 now.

They assume they are advanced because of a 2.2 gigawatts transmitter, for comparison the most powerful transmitter we have is about 3,000 kilowatts and would consume 10,000 Kilowatts at full power. That's 733 times as powerful and would require 7.3 gigawatts of power if the scaling was equivalent.

In movies like Independence Day it's assumed they are more advanced in weapons technology because they are a race of conquerors.

A race that visits us is assumed to be more advanced because any race capable of such travel must vastly more advanced than us technologically. Imagine how much technology is required to manage interstellar travel, communications, bureaucracy etc.

 

[Rashkavar]

A statistical point to mention: almost everything follows either bell curves or exponential curves. (Bear with me, point is coming). Our data on when sapient life developed in the universe (or a subset thereof that's larger than our solar system) is limited to a single data point (ours). Therefore, if we assume the statistics on development of sapience follow a normal distribution/bell curve, then it is most probable that exactly 50% of nonhuman sapients developed before us (actually, any distribution you choose would have to assume that when given only a single data point). Exponential would mean there are some alien sapients out there who have been around an extremely long time.

Thus, it is most probable that, assuming there are nonhuman sapients among the stars, then a significant percentage of them are more developed than us (and, let's face it, our development was far from streamlined - the dark ages, for one), or at least, have had more time to develop than us (not the same thing; society around 300 CE and 1300 CE in Italy, for instance).

Also, while Earth appears to be much more rich in resources to other planets (and earth-sized moons in the outer solar system), we really have no way of comparing the resources of another planet capable of developing sapient life. And even within the solar system, Mars is the only other planet we've done any kind of in-depth material analysis, and that's been going on for about a decade and drawing from small samples taken from surface material, as opposed to Earth having seen thousands of years of mineralogical analysis (with varying degrees of sophistication, of course), including material several kilometers deep. Our other resources, including fossil fuels (except methane), wood, and all types of food are not found on other planets in our solar system at all since all of them are derived from biological processes (or, in the case of coal and oil, processes acting on the remains of biological stuff.

And while greater understanding brings reduction in wars (at least in our case - see next paragraph), it wouldn't breed ignorance about the whole idea of the possibility of needing to defend oneself against aggressors, merely restraint from actually using such weaponry unless it was necessary (comparable to the Cold War, but hopefully a little more civil).

The US people complain about Iraq's casualties being in the thousands, while that would be considered minimal casualties back in the late 1800s), despite the fact that the weapons back then were large, cumbersome cannons and a near total lack of rapid fire weaponry. (The Gattling cannon was one of the first machine gun type firearms developed, and that was only in the 1860s (ish - the American Civil War))

Sorry for the rambling response: short form, we have no reason to assume that other sapient life forms are universally less developed than we are, hence we assume that some are more developed. (If we assume they exist at all, but we're not talking about Drake's Formula, are we?)

 

[Do4600]

I've always had the idea that if we were ever to find aliens, they would be "alien" to us. Everything they are/did/thought wouldn't make much if any sense to us. They might be made of gas, or not ever have to eat, and be fundamentally different from the stuff on Earth.

That could be very true, but we can't speculate on something we can't know, we obviously have to assume that life won't break universal rules about matter or chemistry. There is a very good reason to assume carbon and water life is probably common, because carbon has so many different ways to bond and water is a good fluid for chemical transition. DNA itself might be common, it's a system of self replicating chemical reactions. It might be as inevitable a structure in life as crystals are in snow flakes. It's the end result of that DNA that might be exotic.

 

[Troublesome Lagomorph]

Because space travel is fucking hard and you need advanced technology to do it.

 

[blalien]

There's a Brandon Sanderson short story called Defending Elysium. The premise is that all the alien races are more advanced in terms of communication and transportation, but they keep these secrets from humanity because humans are far, far more advanced in weaponry and could easily conquer the galaxy if they ever figure out FTL travel. The plot doesn't really go anywhere, but you would enjoy it regardless.

 

[spartan231490]

I was just reading the Wikipedia article on the "Wow" signal and it mentioned this:

Scientists say that if the signal came from extraterrestrials, they are likely an extremely advanced civilization, as the signal would have required a 2.2-gigawatt transmitter, vastly more powerful than any on Earth.

Now that strikes me as an odd conclusion to draw because it completely disregards the idea of sectionalized technological advancement.

I remember when the film "Battle: LA" came out, lots of people were like "that's unrealistic because if the aliens could travel through space to get here, they would be able to stomp us easily." Ditto with Independence Day, and any other alien invasion film you can think of.

I just don't get why that is such a popular assumption. I mean, sure they might be more advanced in space flight if they can travel through space, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have developed highly advanced military technology. Or with the Wiki article, just because they might have vastly more powerful radios doesn't mean they have developed computer technology to our level.

I guess what I'm saying is that because they are aliens, they will certainly have developed along different parameters than we have so their technology in one area might be far beyond ours but an area of ours might be far beyond theirs as well.

Thoughts?

Capcha: Hot sauce.

I agree. Our hot sauce technology sets the bar for everyone.

I actually share your belief to an extent, but technological advancement isn't that compartmentalized. If they're capable of interstellar flight, they would have an understanding of physics far beyond our wildest dreams, and even scientific areas they payed no attention to at all would still be far more advanced than our most heavily researched areas if only because of this greater understanding of physics.

The radio transmitter thing is a little more believable, at least that's within our knowledge of physics, it's entirely possible that they might have built a radio transmitter that powerful while only being at about our level of technology. Still, why would they? The only reason for a transmitter so powerful would be interstellar communication, which would imply they have interstellar flight.

Also, technologies aren't as distinct as they first appear. TNT has uses in construction and warfare. Perhaps a more relevant example is that a radio signal as powerful as the wow signal would be capable of shutting down communication on our entire planet, and probably fry everything with an antennae as well. For that matter, it wouldn't be unreasonable for a radio signal that powerful to cause significant damage to living entities just from the small amount of energy transfer as the signal passes through them. So while there is a small possibility that an alien species could have warfare technologies inferior to ours, it's extremely unlikely. Especially since all they would have to do is learn one of Earth's major languages and they could duplicate most of our weapons technology.

 

[SillyBear]

Trying to get into the heads of aliens and trying to discuss why and how they would react and what they would be like if they made contact is really, really funny to watch. How the hell can you know? You can't even make educated guesses. There is literally nothing you can predict about them.

Also - Mr OP is correct. Just because a species may be capable of arriving at Earth (whether through space travel as we know it or not) does not mean they would necessarily beat us in a conflict. You are all just saying that because thats what we grow up imagining - but there is nothing to be certain about at all.

Also, you cannot define intelligence in the way 99% of you are defining it. You are making huge leaps. Just because a species is capable of space travel doesn't mean they would be smarter than us. Shock, horror! But it is true. Maybe the alien travellers didn't invent the space travel they used to arrive on Earth? Maybe, for whatever reason, huge clues were on their planet about how to build amazing space travelling machines and they barely had to think about it? Maybe they have mastered space travel but have terrible medical care and 90% of their babies don't live past youth?

And this would be where someone would say "but if they are capable of space travel, wouldn't they also be competent with medicine?"

Maybe not. We just don't know. That statement is a logical assessment in regard to life as we know it here on Earth - but maybe it has little relevance in alien land?

We are using human brains to examine the motive, the technology and the society of a species that has nothing to do with us.

I would like to leave you all with a quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him".