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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[–] 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.