some sort of profit motive…study through curiosity has a profit; the satisfaction to understand something you wanted to understand.
Sorry, but you just asked if we were really interested in studying other living things for the sake of it or for exploiting them. You don’t get to pretend you meant the first as a special case of the second now.
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as a species.
Yeah, that doesn’t address what I just said. And since the answer to do humans as a species is almost always it depends on which humans, it couldn’t possibly change my answer anyway. People are really diverse.
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I really have you to ask; but do “we” as a species? as society?
Just because capitalism exists doesn’t mean that plenty of us aren’t working in earnest on any given topic. 
YOU might not care to give people doing good work credit and just assume that they are are just out for their own enrichment, but lots of people actually do give a shit about more than making money. I’m kind of sorry that you can’t see that, but insist that we’re all just driven by money.
But at the end of the day, people DO have to eat and we do live under capitalism. We all need money to exist, but that doesn’t mean all the choices we make are solely driven by profit motive.
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please…
seriously?
I wanted a direct answer, not an essay about the shittyness of capitalism; are we -as a species- more interested to study things for the sake of it or for profit in some way? your opinion, yes or no?
Check it out – there are a huge number of Homo sapiens posting there, chances are many from the same society as you. They are not somehow less representative of us than Elon Musk and David Calhoun just because they have more money. People as a species are variable.
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I’m just reading your words and your words seem to indicate that YOU believe that people are driven primarily by making money. If you don’t believe that, then maybe don’t write that?
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Whoopi rubbed my belly once, so she gets a pass from me.
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thats an assumption. and does mean some sort of profit always mean money? I dont think so.
if you didn’t mean economic, then that’s on you to define, not me.
I gave you one. It’s not my problem if you think that complexity doesn’t exist.
Profits = money-making. It doesn’t take a Ferengi to understand that. If you meant something otherwise, that’s on you for not being clear not to the people responding to your comment.
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Once again, this was the actual context:
The phrase profit motive was brought up by me to summarize that. You then supposed that curiosity could count as some sort of profit and ignored me pointing out you were originally talking about exploitation…and now you are pretending that’s where we started in the first place. But we can all see it’s not, so this dishonesty about what you are saying is not going to persuade anyone.
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I think society and species are two different things, along the line of tne “nature vs. nurture” argument.
Society is a construct we define and create for ourselves, through various methods; it tends to shift and evolve as peoples’ mindsets do, as a result of both internal and external influences. The society we’re raised in has a metric crapton of impact on us, but we have the ability to accept it or reject it, in part or in whole, as we choose… so I prefer not to consider the demands of “society” as representing any innate characteristics of humanity.
Species characteristics are harder to define, since we’re still debating “nature vs. nurture” and have found no clear result for decades, if not centuries. I’d argue that if we look over human history as we know it, our species tends to be curious and eager to experiment with our surroundings, finding ways to benefit ourselves. Calling it “profit” is a loaded term in a way, because that implies money; for some people, satisfying curiosity or feeling a sense of achievement is reward enough. We explore and experiment because we enjoy the challenge of it, period.
Back to topic:
I’ll agree that there is a certain presumption in assuming aliens will be similar to humans or motivated in the same ways humans are. Heaven knows, we don’t fully understand our fellow humans or the many lifeforms we share our own planet with yet… understanding beings outside our home planet will be at least an order of magnitude harder than that.
Mathematically, the odds are good that there is other life in the universe-- there are way too many stars and planets to rule out the possibility/probability of it. It may not be life we can recognize, and the interstellar distances make communication incredibly difficult, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, somewhere.
As much as I’d love to imagine it, I don’t expect First Contact is somewhere just around the corner. Why? Because any species intelligent enough to recognize us as living creatures, who’ve managed to decipher and comprehend the electromagnetic signals we’ve been broadcasting into space, are smart enough to stay far, far away from us. We hate each other, fight each other, kill each other for trivial reasons. We’re destroying our only habitat through and for greed and profit. We do not have out shit together, we do not know where our towel is, and I don’t think there’s any profit and/or benefit for an alien species to deal with us until we get our collective act together.
It’s a cynical point of view, and I’m sorry for that… but that’s how I see it. I think there is some cause for hope, in that many people both individually and collectively crave a better existence for ourselves, each other, and the planet as a whole. But even under the most optimistic view, we’re far from achieving that goal, and I wouldn’t blame any aliens for deciding to hang back and wait to introduce themselves until we grow up a little more.
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(baffled) o…okay? I guess my understandig about the (not?) interchangeable meaning of exploitation vs profit vs gain is somewhat lost to me as a foreign speaker.
if this counts as attack, apologies then.
Was that a sly confession?
(For those that didn’t see Time’s Arrow she’s been secretly visiting earth and passing as a human for a long time. Even used to hang out with famous authors in San Francisco.)
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This was my first thought too! I mean, she’d know. 
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Not to mention how season two of Picard established that she’d been running a bar at 10 Forward Avenue for several centuries. Apparently the writers originally wrote that setting with the idea that it would be a watering hole for aliens secretly living among humans on Earth but didn’t end up using the idea.
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