Most of us, sensibly, seldom dwell on these. And those who do, tend to obsess about them -- and that, in a remarkably trivialized way, culminating in tales of alien abduction and anal probes. That meme is a sort of narcissism for retards: An elaborately advanced civilization sends its best and brightest through the vast distances and perils of space to our own small planet -- and the first thing these voyager-scientists want to do is to look up your sorry-ass bung-hole??
A moment’s contemplation shows that an actual encounter would be quite different. For indeed, the only obvious reason I can imagine for galactically advanced beings to come visiting our neck of the woods, is to see whether we have settled the Riemann Hypothesis. (On their world, this is known as the “Blorf Conjecture”, and is phrased rather differently, but a bit of analysis shows them to be logically interequivalent.)
For: Any matter of biology, or arts, or psycho/socio/economics, would be just too different to bear fruitful comparison; and as for physics, well, not to hurt anybody’s feelings, but if they’re the ones motoring over to us, we probably have little to teach them in that regard. Whereas the truths of Mathematics fill all time and all space, indwelling each phyllo-leaf of the multiverse, equally for all.
I can't imagine what we'd offer of interest to advanced aliens save for our real estate or our resources.
ReplyDeleteContacts between two cultures of vastly different technological prowess.. have without exception ended with disaster for the one on the lower end of the comparison.