RE: starship-design: Aliens, Why don't we see them?

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Timothy,

>Isn't there a lot of controversy about this reasoning?

The fallacy of Zeno's Paradox is that space is not infinite which he 
assumed it was. When I applied reasoning similar to his I made no 
such assumption or I would have concluded that "our sky WOULD BE 
COMPLETELY FULL OF VISIBLE TRACES AT EVERY SINGLE MOMENT"

>Ah, human values cannot be ascribed to aliens, but their (technical)
>development can be assumed to be similar? Please explain this apparent
>discrepancy.

Easy enough. One assumes that physical laws are immutable, that they 
are the same throughout our universe (there has recently been some 
reason to doubt this). Therefore, whether or not another species 
follows our exact course of technical progress doesn't matter. In 
general they MUST discover basically the same things, perhaps sooner
than we did, or later, or in a different order, but the same physical
concepts.

Social science on the other hand is not so cut and dried. You do not 
expect a group of whales to behave with human values do you? Or better 
yet, how about a bunch of lizards? And we are only talking about 
terrestrial species so far. If anything, the gap will widen for non-
terrestrial species.

Of course this whole argument is based on logic and everyone knows 
that logic is just a way of going wrong with confidence :-)

Lee Parker


                                                          (o o)
------------------------------------------------------oOO--(_)--OOo---------
"I share no man's opinions; I have my own."

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1862