Stephen Hawking; Aliens Likely to be Hostile.

[DGuller]

Machines don't reproduce with genetic algorithms.  They are built.

Right now they're not.  It's possible that in the future they would be able to make replicas of themselves all on their own.

[jimmy olsen]

Maybe. What I am saying is that in our core we are a pushy competitive race, and this is exactly what built our civilization. This recipe seems to be far the most likely to result in a space-faring civilization, making peaceful coexistent with them highly unlikely.

Name a species which isn't competitive though. Competition is the natural order of things.
Peace is what made our civilization- rather than just playing by the same old rules of throwing pointy sticks around someone thought longer term about farming.
A species which remains as violent as cavemen would destroy itself long before it gets anywhere near space (if indeed if ever does get anywhere to begin with. And its likely they wouldn;t)

Also, don't underestimate just how damn big space is.

The transition to farming likely lead to more violence not less.

[Josephus]

Seriously. Let's assume a couple of things:
1. No matter the race, the cost of exploring out of galaxy would be extremely expensive, so
2. The Aliens are only doing it for profit (to find new resources, new living space, etc etc.); ergo. Assuming also,
3. That the aliens find anything they need here (other than slave labour though, I don't think we have much left to offer anybody, then,
4. Assuming they are more technologically advanced than us, then they will probably fight us to get what they want.

The Star Trek notion that they are just exploring around hoping to find other peaceful races and form a Federation is hogwash.

The other thing is, I don't think this will ever happen anyways. The closest thing I imagine happening is us stumbling on a primitive, aggressive, Alien Movie type alien someday , somewhere.

[Tamas]

[Solmyr]

I find it very bizzare that someone so smart can come to such an unlikely conclusion.

I think its quite a given that the opposite is true. Any aliens we encounter will be peaceful.
Just imagine if somehow we are out exploring space today (impossible but...yeah) and we stumble across a alien civilization. Are we going to go all Independance Day? Of course not. The press is bad enough when the military kills a few Arabs let alone wiping out an entire civilization.
It would be an amazing discovery which changes the way we look at the universe. We aren't going to destroy them just for the hell of it.
And thats our far from perfect modern civilization which still has a lot of the violent animal in us. Starflight is a few hundred years of development out of our reach at least- either we continue to become less violent or we destroy ourselves before we get anywhere.
Just imagine if spaceships were freely available today. There would be bound to be some nutter who decides to smash into earth at relativistic speeds.

This assumes that aliens have the same thought processes as humans, which may not necessarily be the case. Imagine your example, except that we stumble across a colony of space ants on some remote planet. Now there's a lot less stigma attached to destroying them. And if sufficiently advanced aliens stumble upon us right now, they might see that we can build shit and have social structures just like ants, but they won't necessarily see us as their equals.

[Monoriu]

It all depends on who finds who first.  Whichever race finds the other first will probably have a vast technological edge.  If aliens find us first, we're screwed.  A meeting between the strong and the weak seldom ends well for the weak.

[jimmy olsen]

I find it very bizzare that someone so smart can come to such an unlikely conclusion.

I think its quite a given that the opposite is true. Any aliens we encounter will be peaceful.
Just imagine if somehow we are out exploring space today (impossible but...yeah) and we stumble across a alien civilization. Are we going to go all Independance Day? Of course not. The press is bad enough when the military kills a few Arabs let alone wiping out an entire civilization.
It would be an amazing discovery which changes the way we look at the universe. We aren't going to destroy them just for the hell of it.
And thats our far from perfect modern civilization which still has a lot of the violent animal in us. Starflight is a few hundred years of development out of our reach at least- either we continue to become less violent or we destroy ourselves before we get anywhere.
Just imagine if spaceships were freely available today. There would be bound to be some nutter who decides to smash into earth at relativistic speeds.

This assumes that aliens have the same thought processes as humans, which may not necessarily be the case. Imagine your example, except that we stumble across a colony of space ants on some remote planet. Now there's a lot less stigma attached to destroying them. And if sufficiently advanced aliens stumble upon us right now, they might see that we can build shit and have social structures just like ants, but they won't necessarily see us as their equals.

Some ants have fungus farms, domesticated aphids, wars, slaves. If we ran into a neolithic, insectoid species that could do all that (and were obviously sentient unlike ants) on another planet with something we wanted, would we be nice to them? Doubtful.

[Berkut]

I am watching V right now, so I don't get how people think that humans are naive about this shit. We would totally know that they were up to something.

No need to park their big ass ships right on top of every single city otherwise!

[Ed Anger]

I am watching V right now, so I don't get how people think that humans are naive about this shit. We would totally know that they were up to something.

No need to park their big ass ships right on top of every single city otherwise!

Old V or the shitty new V?

[Neil]

Machines don't reproduce with genetic algorithms.  They are built.

Right now they're not.  It's possible that in the future they would be able to make replicas of themselves all on their own.

Even so, they'd still be building each other.  Why bring genetic algorithms into it at all?

[Josquius]

The transition to farming likely lead to more violence not less.

Doubtful.
The entire point of it is you don't have to run out and kill a deer every other day.

This assumes that aliens have the same thought processes as humans, which may not necessarily be the case.

Which is sort of the problem with the idea of hostile aliens.
Too many ifs and maybes.
It could be that the aliens find the way we look very offensive and so decide to blast us out of existance.
It could be.
But in lieu of anything else we have to work with what we've got and the odds of that are very remote.

Imagine your example, except that we stumble across a colony of space ants on some remote planet. Now there's a lot less stigma attached to destroying them. And if sufficiently advanced aliens stumble upon us right now, they might see that we can build shit and have social structures just like ants, but they won't necessarily see us as their equals.

Ah the old ants at the picnic thing.
Intelligant life is probally rare.
Sure, we've only got one solar system to go off with certainty but as far as we know there's only existed intelligant life on one planet for a fraction of its lifetime- including a large chunk of that with life.
And if we lived in the Star Trek galaxy where are the radio transmissions from Tau Ceti?
No it seems intelligant life at the least is rare (I would say life in general too but we won't know that for a while so its just guessing on my part)

So. Lets use the ants analogy properly. Or realistically anyway. Ants at a picnic is dumb. So, scientists discover a bunch of ants on a pacific island. They would just destroy them without a second thought, plonk down their equipment on top of their ant hills, etc...
....well....no....but...anyway. Assume yes.
Except these ants aren't just any ants on a remote pacific island. They're a entirely new and unique species of ant. A species of ant which lives in ant cities, has a ant library, throws ant spears and is experimenting with crude ant boats.
Clearly they're primitive ants. They're our inferior. We could smash them without a second thought if we wanted to. But would we?
No. This is an amazing discovery. Sure, they're nothing to us but they're quite amazing nonetheless. They're showing potential. A very interesting and very unique thing to study.
For scientists to wipe out a new species of normal ant would get them in major hot water. To harm these ones...they ought to be shot.

Seriously. Let's assume a couple of things:
1. No matter the race, the cost of exploring out of galaxy would be extremely expensive, so
2. The Aliens are only doing it for profit (to find new resources, new living space, etc etc.); ergo. Assuming also,
3. That the aliens find anything they need here (other than slave labour though, I don't think we have much left to offer anybody, then,
4. Assuming they are more technologically advanced than us, then they will probably fight us to get what they want.

The Star Trek notion that they are just exploring around hoping to find other peaceful races and form a Federation is hogwash.

Well....
Firstly- I think that aliens would just be exploring around. A species that has mastered inter-stellar flight is post-scarcity. Its members probally live for millenia and want something exciting to do. Why not explore?
Assuming though somehow they remain freakishly un socially advanced....There's nothing they could possibly want on Earth. Even in our solar system there's far more resources out there in the asteroid belt which they can get at far easier. And there's a bunch of other solar systems out there without needing to care about this one.
If they did turn out to be mega dicks who decide to wipe us out for no reason though then I doubt they'd bother fighting. They'd just wave their magic want and watch us vanish in a puff of smoke.

The other thing is, I don't think this will ever happen anyways. The closest thing I imagine happening is us stumbling on a primitive, aggressive, Alien Movie type alien someday , somewhere.

Agreed.
Aliens are Gods or Cavemen.
If they were Gods they'd have been here already or we would see stars being thrown about the galaxy in a clearly artifical way and all sorts of crazyness.
So...yeah. Aliens are likely to be violent. But only because they're cavemen (or cave squid or whatever).

[Neil]

Your point about agriculture supports my point about greed. As for laziness, I thought of various inventions, even in agriculture.

Not really.  My point about agriculture and yours about greed are unrelated.  And while there have been significant advances in agriculture, the fact of the matter is that it is a 24-hour job, whereas a family of hunter-gatherers in fertile land can easily feed themselves with an hour or two of labour every day.  If humans were truly, fundamentally lazy, agriculture would never have happened.

[Solmyr]

They would still be subjects of observation and experiments to be used at our whim, not considered in any way our equals.

[Neil]

The transition to farming likely lead to more violence not less.

Doubtful.
The entire point of it is you don't have to run out and kill a deer every other day.

Indeed.  You had to kill animals constantly, to keep them from eating your crops.  And then, when your population grew too large for the area, you had to kill your neighbor to take his fields.

[DGuller]

Even so, they'd still be building each other.  Why bring genetic algorithms into it at all?

Genetic diversity could be a deliberate design feature.  If you're going to build robots that could replicate themselves, then you're probably doing it because they're going to be left in a remote environment.  In that case, you may also design some diversity with a random component into it, as part of the adaptive algorithm.