Re: starship-design: It's a bad, bad world out there

["Kyle R. Mcallister" <stk@sunherald.infi.net>]

L. Parker wrote:
> 
> I just read a book yesterday that many of you might find interesting. It is
> a work of science fiction written by a scientist (Charles Pellegrino)
> called "The Killing Star".
> 
> It covers several philosophical matters that we have recently discussed in
> this group and he and his co-author George Zebrowski do a much better job
> of elucidating the arguments than we did. It includes a lot of REAL quotes
> from several think tank sessions by various physicists, researchers, and
> authors including Isaac Asimov.
> 
> Here is one especially relevant section from pages 114-115:
> 
> "...all that we knew boiled down to three simple laws of alien behavior:
> 
> 1) THEIR SURVIVAL WILL BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR SURVIVAL. If an alien
> species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. I t is
> hard to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self
> sacrificing.

True.

> 
> 2) WIMPS DON'T BECOME TOP DOGS. No species makes it to the top by being
> passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly
> intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.

No species makes it to the top by being overly aggresive. Nuclear war or
such would wipe them out quickly. Other, more 'sentient' civilizations
might be considerably more peaceful. If you are that advanced, war
becomes unnecessary. You simply come to someone else's system and say
"obey". But they could also colonize uninhabited systems with
non-"earth?" like planets, which would expand their 'empire'. If they
are that advanced, why would they want to crush other peoples when they
could become greater by learning knowledge from other civilizations?
> 
> 3) THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THE FIRST TWO LAWS APPLY TO US."
> 
> They came to pretty much the same conclusion as I did regarding the
> proximity of other intelligent species, there are no intelligent space
> faring species currently within our detection range, 

Unproven. There may be no MID-level civilizations here. Tribal
civilizations have no radio noise. Mid-civs  like us emit everything.
High-tech civs might not use radio for much communication. And if they
weren't aiming at us, we might not hear them anyways. Besides, do you
really think if they'd been detected we'd hear about it? Probably not.

> but they did inject a
> new idea. We automatically ASSUME because of our own built in prejudices
> that an intelligent, tool using, space faring species must come from a
> terrestrial type planet in a liquid water zone. They point out that it is
> quite feasible for them to come from an aquatic planet which may be OUTSIDE
> the liquid water zone as we currently define it. A large moon orbiting an
> outer jovian planet for instance. And these planets probably outnumber the
> terrestrial planets two or three to one....

They might not even need water.

> 
> Pick up a copy if you have the chance.

I will. Sounds interesting.

Kyle Mcallister