this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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legs to die for (mander.xyz)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 60 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Makes me wonder if we ever do meet intelligent aliens will we instantly try to kill them not because we're a tribe based war loving species, but if it's simply because we're so absolutely and deeply repulsed by something so different than us on an instinctual level.

[–] Mr_Blott 50 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Have you ever met a Belgian? Same thing

[–] ummthatguy 30 points 8 months ago (1 children)

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There's two things I can't stand. Intolerance, and Belgians.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

But have you had Belgian beer ortheir fast food. No wonder everyone goes there for a fight.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Moules-Frites and Hoegaarden.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I prefer La Chouffe, you get to laugh at the gnome on the bottle too 😄

[–] kautau 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Or, as various sci fi stories have laid out, will they immediately try to kill us, because they are an insect based race and we are dealing with drones that only follow basic instinct, and we’d need to commune with the queen or some such to get them to understand that each of our species has a consciousness and free will, and we don’t exist in a hive mind

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It's fine, we'll train a ten year old prodigy to kill their entire race.

[–] kautau 9 points 8 months ago

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I just want to state on the record that the book is a short read and extremely better than the movie and that anyone here who hasn't read Enders Game, should do so.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

the one huge and quite funny flaw with that idea is that queens have absolutely jackshit power over a colony, if anything the queen of a colony is basically a slave that gets constantly pampered and directed by the workers with no free will whatsoever.

If we met an alien hive-mind species it'd probably be much like interacting with a military, just much more tightly integrated and profoundly devoid of corruption, imagine HAL 9000 but made up of a million people working together to run the computations.

So they'd likely work tirelessly to figure out what precisely we are, if they determine we're a threat they'd attack without mercy, and if they determine they can benefit from cooperation with us they'd be the best ally we could ever imagine albeit extremely manipulative.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Interesting deduction. After analyzing all of the data, we have decided to expend zero effort and go around.

Not our problem, sorry, fly-past planet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Have you met the Borg?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

the borg are artificial and have the goal of assimilating as many people as possible, a realistic alien hive species wouldn't particularly care about that beyond the inherent benefits of diversity and a higher population.

Their goal would, much like ours and that of any species, be to proliferate but primarily ensure they don't get wiped out, which requires a lot more nuance than "resistence is futile".

They would also inherently have a decent amount of independence, because that's specifically how hives operate: it's a large group of individuals operating on similar logic and working together to create what is effectively a superorganism. Bees and ants aren't controlled by some hive mind, every individual makes small decisions and as influenced by the other individuals, and eventually one or two decisions become the most popular and are acted upon.

Hives are basically anarchic democracy taken to its absolute extreme.

[–] TheBat 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Bold of you to assume there won't be humans trying to fuck them.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Porque no los dos?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Didn't feel the need to state the obvious lol

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

That's the plot of Starship Troopers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

nah, people work with deep sea creatures all day and just find them cool.

it'd just make international relations with them extremely difficult, honestly district 9 is probably the most realistic take on how we'd treat aliens. We'd be sufficiently unable to empathize with them that we'd treat them like shit, but there's no real reason to actively try to wipe them out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Embrace the framling, study the ramen, kill the varelse.