“Riiiiiiiight there”, it said, and touched you in a place you wish didn’t exist. In a place that can never be un-touched. It wasn’t unpleasant, exactly, but it brought a sense of knowing, like Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Life (or was it Knowledge, you’re just a bit hazy on that).
The little furry blue thing that showed you exactly where consciousness resides never told you where it was from, nor where it was going when it left, but you long to have gone with it, to escape this place. For now, no matter what you wear, you feel, no, you know, that you are naked and that everyone around you knows it too.
The telegraph sent messages further and faster than the Pony Express ever could, but not until we built the infrastructure.
In all likelihood, you can only send those instantaneous messages across a distance that you’ve already traveled. The receiver is unlikely to just exist, awaiting our transmission.
At least two evolutions of some form of intelligence on a single world seems pretty common to me, on a cosmic scale. And that only includes extant species - there may well have been others in the past.
@Brainspore: “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, damn it! All three of our species have empathy, we have
sympathy, we have a sense of fairness - the Babyeaters even tell stories like we do, they have art. Shouldn’t that be enough? Wasn’t that supposed to be enough? But all it does is put us into enough of the same reference frame that we can be horrible by each others’ standards.”
@newliminted: I completely agree. That’s why I wrote “(1) [the speed of light] would only limit the expansion rate of a civilization.”
You’re missing my point a bit. The difference between elephants and humans is only large at this moment in time.
Remove the humans, and the time required for elephants to develop more intelligence is… really not large, compared to the evolutionary history of the Earth. Or even just of elephants.
In intelligence terms, the difference between us isn’t astronomical. It’s not even large. (Compare to the difference between, say, a beetle and either an elephant or human.)
Sorry if it was aggressive and came off assholish. I’m told all day what I can and can’t be, do or understand by religious people (you don’t believe in god? Then you can’t possibly be a decent and caring human being who doesn’t eat babies.), and I was a little put out by seeing that kind of “can’t” here.
I wish I could find the reference where I first encountered the idea - but perhaps the majority of alien civilisations have been killed off due to paranoia?
The theory is that when an alien civilisation detects another, it is in its best interests to destroy it as quickly as possible to prevent that civilisation from becoming a threat. So, you send a giant world-destroying asteroid or something their way, and eventually, they won’t be a problem.
Then you sit there, quietly, hoping no one detects your civilisation and does the same.
It’s a bleak idea. But, who knows? Maybe there are a bunch of world-ending rocks headed our way?
None of them are particularly… optimistic… but we have a long way to go as a species to get to where we need to go. The good news is, progress is speeding up over time.
