• WasteWizard@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    Aliens capable of FTL travel might not even take note of us. Like we pass an ant hill on the side of the road. Too small, mundane, uninteresting, unimportant.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 days ago

      i see this a lot and like, i feel like this just completely misses how many people look at ants and go “what the fuck these insects are smart as fuck, do they have feelings? maybe we should be nicer toward them. hey ant can you understand me? here’s a couple grains of rice. i wonder if i can like, get some ant pheromones to talk to them…”

    • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      can you imagine that they eventually appear, and it’s not even diplomatic contact, but a rescue mission?

      “You guys are absolutely fucked, we’re here on a charity mission to educate and help you maintain your environment and stay alive. Petrol and plastics are bad, you can use xyblorps instead. Xyblorps are actually quite simple to make, here’s someone to help…”

      • Carvex@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        I prefer the zoo theory, they’re letting us figure it out until we can show them we’ve evolved beyond killing each other and making up gods to worship.

      • WasteWizard@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        I would assume we would just keep ruining the planet, but faster, with weaponized xyblorps, and the aliens would get caught in the crossfire. Our predicament is a symptom of human nature/society. Striving for power and dominance, even in a post-scarcity society. They’d have to remake us, stamp out the traits that bring these conflicts. But then we wouldn’t be us anymore.

    • Million@lemmy.zip
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      18 days ago

      Like some kind of a roadside picnic.

      Its how the S.T.A.L.K.E.R universe came to be iirc. Aliens passing by, throwing their trash on earth, like we humans litter our roadsides…

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      If aliens capable of FTL existed, they’d have basically taken over the universe by now and would be very hard to miss, probably.

      I recommend taking a peek at Orion’s Arm for what civilization without FTL extrapolated out to a mere few thousand years looks like: https://www.orionsarm.com/

      It’s quite different than what I or pretty much anyone would picture with most sci fi, but… makes a lot of sense. And if you give a civilization like that FTL, well, the current state of the universe doesn’t make much sense, as they’d basically be everywhere and omniscient gods in a very short time.