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



Lee,

>>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"

Sorry, I'm a bit confused by the grammar. Are you or are you not concluding
that the sky should be full of visible traces at every single moments?

>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.

Social science is for the biggest part based on survival, which is rather
straightforward.

- If a species doesn't work together, they are not likely to be able to
  develop anything complex.
- Thus an important need to get a technical civilization is to cooperate
  in some way.
- Once having a technical civilization, you have two options when finding
  a similar advanced species: Kill or be friends.
- Killing will risk all you care for. (And you do care, since you are a
  cooperative species.)
  So you will only kill if you have nothing to loose.
- Thus the only option left is to be friends.

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

Yes, the sentence right above, proofs what it says :p

If you find errors in my logic, I'd like to hear about it, so that I will be
enabled to increase confidence.

Timothy