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Quote :

"He has said something like this before for a show I saw on the Science Channel. Basically, if visited by an advanced race they'd see how immature humans are as a species after witnessing how we treat each other and the world around us."

Quote :

"McDanger: The assumption that aliens will be "more mature" than humans is totally bogus. Humanity is the best evidence we have that technological advancement has nothing to do with maturity. All you need to go to another planet is a really awesome spaceship."

Agree with McDanger. For some reason, it always gets under my skin when I see a sci-fi flick featuring Ghandi-like aliens that are appalled by how cruel, brutal and selfish human beings are. Cruelty, brutality and selfishness are just offshoots of the survival instinct, and I don't see any reason to suppose that aliens would be any different than us in these respects.

4/26/2010 8:23:39 PM

As long as they don't try to take er jerbs.

4/26/2010 9:00:38 PM

We've only made it to the moon, and look at how our own world is fucked up? By the time we could figure out how to get anywhere outside of our solar system, we'll all have killed each other. Look how primitive and uncontrollable people all over the world act. Hell, it happens in our backyard. As the world keeps getting more crowded, and people are pulled more and more to fundamentalism, we stand no chance at assimilating/getting along/etc. long enough to figure out any way to use manned-spacecraft to explore anywhere outside of Mars.

Hell, I'd bet AI will turn on us before we figure out how to get out of our own solar system in a reasonable time.

So, it's reasonable to believe that any no race of lifeforms with any kind of brain can advance fast enough and accomplish space travel of any length before they self-implode like we eventually will.

Kurzweil has some interesting things to say about this stuff.

I'm not worried about aliens, even if I do believe that there are undoubtedly some sort of organism(s) running around somewhere on one of the billions of planets circling one of the billions of stars.

[Edited on April 27, 2010 at 10:52 PM. Reason : maybe we should spend less time on space travel and a little time curing people with ALS...]

4/27/2010 10:49:01 PM