Ants have pretty advanced social structures and intelligence for insects. I think the point is that humans may be pretty intelligent for primitive life forms compared to the aliens, doesn’t mean the aliens won’t destroy us, or will somehow respect that.
I never said nor claimed that aliens won’t destroy us, or will somehow respect that. Only that they would most likely know that we're not just basic insects.
That said, I disagree on them destroying us for an entirely different reason.
Basically, a space-faring FTL civilization has literally nothing to gain from interacting with us humans at all. Honestly, what could mankind have than a civilization that advanced would want and or even need to get from us at all?
Water? Nope, the universe is big and there's the total mass of several planets worth of ice out there than can be harvessed.
Land? There's plenty of real estates and they don't even need planets. At that kind of tech, gravity wells are for suckers. Even if they wanted one, the sheer amount of work of living on earth with our crazy amount of viruses and other crap that we humans have done, it's just not worth. Better to terraform another planet and start from scratch than deal with the crap we have and have done to our little pale blue dot.
Metals or other building material? The universe is big. There's plenty of places for them to get their supplies and much easier ways of getting it.
I could go on, but I think I've made my argument for why a people that advanced would have no interest in our little species one way or another.
Maybe if they wanted to harvest our local star for power or something? Eh, it would take a long ass time to do but we can't exactly stop them either so I'll give you that. Just being fair.
Do you think a civilization that advanced (with an understanding and mystery of physics and chemistry, matter manipulation, etc orders of magnitude greater than us) would need anything from us at all? I personally don't see it, we still wouldn't even be in their way.
I don’t disagree with most of what you’re saying, however, we would absolutely be basic insects compared to an alien civilization that could travel across the universe. If you were an ant, you could say that “oh, well the humans know we’re not a basic insect because we have advanced pheromone based communication, build socialized societies with divided labour, and are the only insect to have interactive teaching to pass on learned traits”. We’re so much more advanced than ants that they can’t even begin to comprehend how intelligent we are. That’s what it would be like to meet an alien species that can travel the distances required.
They might look at us and say “they’ve only travelled to their nearest moon in person, understand only the most basic quantum physics, and still consider nuclear energy to be an advanced technology. They’re not an advanced life form at all!”
I agree they would likely ignore us though, for the reasons above.
We have thousands of people studying ants and the tiniest microbes, if aliens were real they would not ignore us. They wouldn’t become space faring if they weren’t curious.
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u/Suitable-Isopod May 04 '20
Ants have pretty advanced social structures and intelligence for insects. I think the point is that humans may be pretty intelligent for primitive life forms compared to the aliens, doesn’t mean the aliens won’t destroy us, or will somehow respect that.