Re: Mind's Eye Re: Aliens, Slavery and Resources

My thinking on this is right in line with yours. The depredations of
humanity's past is a result of scarcity, whether real or perceived.
Once a race has solved its energy riddles, my thinking is that they tend
to become altruistic. I think this is easily demonstrated by the
activity of wealthy donors in our own societies. They've got their
whizbang cars, they've got their homes on Martha's Vineyard and Oahu,
now they compete to be the chairpersons of charitable foundations. When
you've got everything you need, then everything you want, you either
give, travel, suffocate or die of boredom.


--Bill





On 10/24/2012 10:01 AM, archytas wrote:
> I find it hard to think technologically advanced beings would be
> bastards Bill. The so-called trade of imperialism was actually
> depraved - with concentration camps, limb-severing and so on. Queens
> have to have their dramas mate! The aliens could be as bad as we have
> been. It would be good to explore good aliens and what such a good
> life might be. We could not, in current biological form, share it.
> They might leave us with the means to change so we could. I'd choose
> Damon Laplace's route in genetic change to travel the stars rather
> than live a normal life span in an agrarian collective - but I'd
> choose that over my current life in 'the economy'.
>
> In my least favourite episode of Voyager, Janeway refuses to drop her
> knickers for the technology that will get her crew home. There could
> be reasons for carrying a few casual queens in our crew! The quirks
> thrown up in evolution usually have their uses.
>
> I think the chimps and dolphins ponder the human questions Lee. Many
> animals, including chimps and scrub jays seem to hold 'funerals'.
> Some clams live 500 years (off Iceland) without our angst. My ideal
> aliens will have a rational hatred of soap opera.
>
> On 24 Oct, 16:23, Lee Douglas <leerevdoug...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think that Human history shows that it is very hard to break out of
>> 'modes of thought' that eon, geography and culture instill into us. How
>> hard then to reason as a non Earthling would? I think the only viable
>> answer to your question is to say, I don't know.
>>
>> Perhaps if we could get into the psyches of some of the other creatures
>> that we share this planet with, we may find, or not, some similarities. It
>> is an interesting question to ponder though. Does having
>> a consciousness at a level sufficient enough to
>> claim intelligence, inevitably lead to the asking of similar questions?
>> Elephants, who I do belive to show a certain standard of
>> emotional understanding and intelligence, do they ask 'Life! What's it all
>> about?'
>>
>> On Wednesday, 24 October 2012 12:19:42 UTC+1, William L. Houts William L.
>> Houts Lukaeon William L. Houts wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> All right, I just wanted to run this by you guys. I know it seems I'm
>>> always rattlling on about aliens, but they're really a stand in for,
>>> well, for a lot of things. Anyway, I've been on Facebook and recently
>>> made a status report commenting on the conversation we had going on here
>>> about hypothetical aliens and what they might or might not want from
>>> us. And I was making the point that I made here: that said aliens will
>>> turn out to be just as befuddled by it all as we are, and are probably
>>> in no position to give us the goods on life's mysteries, or even make a
>>> good cocktail.
>>> Now, my friend Matt, who is very smart but also very bitchy, put forth
>>> Professor Hawking's notion: that we'd better keep our heads down low,
>>> because history tells us that when a more technologically advanced
>>> species meets a less developed one, the results are usually horrible for
>>> the latter. I replied that yes, this does seem to be the pattern in
>>> Earth history. But, I went on, races which manage to break the
>>> lightspeed barrier are going to have better things to do than enslave 7
>>> billion people, or even mistreat them very much. Their energy problems,
>>> I said more or less, will have been solved to such an extent that they
>>> won't have to vampirize us. Matt made it clear that he thought I was
>>> being terrifically naive.
>>> Now, Mat is quickly becoming a sour old queen, but I want to know: with
>>> whom would you agree? Or is there a third answer which I haven't
>>> proposed here?
>>> --Bill
>>> --
>>> "I just flew in from the Land of the Dead
>>> and boy are my arms tired."


--
"I just flew in from the Land of the Dead
and boy are my arms tired."

--