Everyone assumes that if aliens reach us first, they must be vastly more intelligent or morally superior. But what if they’re not?
What if their technological advancement is mostly geological luck , like being born on a planet with natural access to some exotic element that makes faster-than-light travel trivial?
Intelligence might be evenly distributed across the universe, but access to warp-enabling isotopes, natural wormhole stabilizers, or quantum-negative-mass matter probably isn’t.
Maybe they’re not galactic geniuses. Maybe they’re just… geologically privileged.
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I can give my toddler a hammer, nail gun, and all the other tools and resources needed to make a birdhouse but she still couldn’t do it.
It’s not about having the right resources, you need the intelligence on how to use them and the math and science navigate all things space, time, and gravity.
Materials are worthless without the knowledge to use them. If aliens have FTL travel then their model of physics is in all likelihood better than ours.
You might be confusing sci-fi with real life right now, there’s no such thing as an exotic material that enables FTL.
If you want to have an overview of the elements, check the period table.
Yes because as we can see here on earth every country that sits on a vastly rich deposit of natural resources is rich (*cough* Russia *cough* Congo *cough* Nigeria) and every country that isn’t is poor (*cough* Singapore *cough* Taiwan).
We’re actually in an absolutely fantastic place, resource wise. I don’t think people realize just how unusual having a moon the size and nearness of ours is. It’s massive for a planet so small, and relatively nearby. For more extensive interplanetary travel, or even interstellar, having a goldmine of Helium-3 that close is invaluable. It’s practically an interstellar fuel depot just parked on our doorstep.
Whatever you have taken today, please share it around.
If it was about resources alone why didn’t humans have computers in 500 BC, the human brain hasn’t grown
No matter how good the materials are, if you got no knowledge of how to use them, then they are useless.
So if they have figured out how to travel across the stars, then they are smarter than us, it’s as simple as that really.
I think you have a neat point.
I for example have wondered this: many new inventions from the last 100 or so years use electricity. If we were an aquatic species, we may have never discovered it or took to long to develop it, as we would live in a medium that causes short circuits, instead of our air that is an insulator until very high voltages.
I mean, possibly. Some things can aid advancement, but there is still the struggle of becoming the dominant species on a planet, and getting to the point of figuring out how to use what is around them. I don’t think there is a miracle element though.
Chances are, if something crawled out of a soup somewhere else, avoided our tragic trait of constant infighting, and traversed the stars to get here, they are smarter than us. Maybe they’re just nepo babies and their ancestors were the smart ones, but I doubt it.
We know what the elements are and there is no evidence to suggest they change across the solar system. Earth is a pretty incredible spawn point, incredibly diverse minerals near to the surface due to they dynamic plate techtonics and base makeup of the earth, a near perfect satellite to assist in any space development, multiple other solid planets to build to and avoid planetary extinction meaning species extinction, and he’ll we are even here pretty damn early in the universe as far as we can measure. If any aliens are more developed than us it’s because they either came first or are smarter. We are not limited by the materials available.
The scientific issues are how to combine these elements confined by the laws of physics to achieve progress. We have every element and every law they would have it just matters what you do with it and how long.
This is assuming that alien life is uber advanced
The most likely thing is that we’re the most advanced life forms, by a long shot, in this and tons of surrounding galaxies
Aliens could well just be little amoeba
We have uranium on earth but still haven’t figured out how to make clean energy and harness its power.
Unless the material is aladdin’s lamp, it won’t change much.
Given the fact that some people think that aliens have invented faster than light drives, can navigate the infinite reaches of time and space, then get to earth and crash. And die. Like they have all this technology but forgot sat nav and seatbelts this sounds feasible.
Oh man, there’s a short story out there, I’ll have to see if I can find it, but it’s about this alien race that comes and invades earth with black Powder and musket kind of weapons because – turns out figuring FTL is super easy! So we beat back the invasion and the surviving aliens get to realize they unleashed humans on the galaxy by giving them FTL tech.
Pretty fun little story
In our periodic table, we can’t really have 0.5 proton or anything like that, so it’s mostly filled. And the heavier atoms are just too unstable(most of it is created artifically infact). Even if there are newer heavier ones, it’s likely gonna be too unstable to really do anything. So i don’t really see what kind of wonder element you’re referring to, at max it will be some unique mixture of current existing materials, which could be allowed to exist due to different conditions/pressure/temperature in other worlds but it’s not going to be something like aladdin’s lamp
As others have said it would really depend on “smarter”. Better materials would enable feats sooner or even skip some steps sure but if they are here at us, then they fully understand the science and math to navigate space. It’s not like pointing and going at the speeds needed and the capabilities.
Even if we do full scifi warp holes. They would still need a way to accurately and precisely measure and map the destination and everything in between.
If aliens are ever here there is no doubt their technology and understanding of space would vastly surpass our own
We aren’t fundamentally more intelligent than people living 500 years ago, we just have more cumulative knowledge to work from, more advanced materials and technology. We use technology we don’t personally understand every single day, aliens would be the same most likely.
Or they could have just been a few decades or centuries ahead of us.
Or they somehow managed to avoid destroying each other periodically.
Or they could have been handed some advanced knowledge or technology or a small but key insight, like in Clark’s novel 2001.
I’m still astounded that we haven’t found evidence of prior advanced human civilization on the moon or spent nuclear fuel on the earth from millennia ago.
Naquadah enters the chat.
What if they stole it from a more technologically advanced culture that landed on their planet?
Or maybe they are slimy cows that exhale methane and smell like fish
I feel like op watches those shows and movies that are like fantasy or sci fi and someone puts their usb key into an alien computer (of course has the same input and output!) and hacks the entire alien pornhub server.
Don’t confuse intelligence with knowledge. Any aliens that find our way to use aren’t necessary more intelligent. But they absolutely have significantly more knowledge. They could have existed hundreds of thousands or millions of years longer than us to get that knowledge.
We also have no evidence these aliens exist, so this is all wild speculation.
ScienceAlert – “Superconductivity Has Been Discovered In Meteorites For The First Time”
https://www.sciencealert.com/superconductivity-has-been-discovered-in-meteorites-for-the-first-time
— Άρθρο που αναφέρεται στην πρώτη ανακάλυψη υπεραγωγιμότητας σε φυσικά δείγματα μετεωριτών.
Phys.org – “Superconductivity discovered in meteorites for the first time”
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-superconductivity-meteorites.html
— Ανακοίνωση επιστημονικής ομάδας που βρήκε φυσική υπεραγωγιμότητα σε μετεωρίτες.
Research Paper (arXiv preprint): “Discovery of Superconductivity in Meteoritic Material”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.02254
Alright, here’s a kilogram of pure dark matter and infinite money. Make me an FTL drive by the end of the year.
What if there are just other humans?